The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century 9780292771802

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century William J. Scheick

University of Texas Press Austin

Copyright © 1994 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

First edition, 1994 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions University of Texas Press Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819. Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint material previously published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 24 (1978): 72-76; English Literature in Transition 34 (1991): 19-20; Studies in Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 1—6; and The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990), pp. 86-97· © The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scheick, William J. The ethos of romance at the turn of the century / William J. Scheick. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 0-292-77673-x 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Romances— Adaptations—History and criticism. 3. Popular literature—Great Britain—History and criticism. 4. Popular literature—United States—History and criticism. 5. American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 6. Ethics in literature. 7. Narration (Rhetoric) 8. Fiction—Technique. I. Tide. PR878.R7S34 1994 823'.0850908—dc20 93-30633

for Catherine and for Jessica and Nathan

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Contents

Introduction 1 1 Beautiful Circuit and Subterfuge II

Romance 2

The School of a Great Master Hawthorne

31

S Eventuary Romance Haggard 42 4 Aesthetic Romance James 57 6 Ethical Romance

Hyne, Wells, Bangs,

6

and Chesterton 75

The Ethos of Storytelling

I09

Davis, Crane, and

Austin

London,

Cholmondeley,

7 The Art of Life

Stevenson,

Notes 165 Index 189

and

Kipling

135

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

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Introduction

As characterized by its practitioners and reviewers, the genre of romance is essentially an "extravagance." It heightens, exceeds, or transcends the ordinary, the quotidian. It ostensibly exhibits all manner of imaginative play seemingly unrestricted by social conventions, political structures, economic circumstances, or even natural laws. Although romance, like any other example of artistic expression, inadvertently reflects an authorial or cultural ethos beyond what its fashioners and its readers might tend to note, the genre gives an impression of unbounded freedom, of exhilarating potentiality for creative expression, of "wild irresponsibility," as one nineteenthcentury reviewer observed without the slightest alarm.1 No high moral or social purpose appears to be requisite; the capacity of the genre to reflect and evoke ineffable human desires appears to be its cardinal feature. H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon'sMines,accordingly, strikes a reviewer for the usually staid Spectator as a stunningly exciting work precisely because it appeals to a fundamental human desire: that "the best of wonder should be fully and honesdy satisfied."2 Contingent Definitions The recognition of the extravagance of romance, however, has never led to agreement on anything else concerning the genre, including whether its various freedoms and its allure are fundamentally positive, neutral, or negative social phenomena. As a category, furthermore, romance encompasses such a diversity of narrative that it resists clear definition as a genre. Ro1

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

mance accommodates historical fiction (reenactments of or transportations to the past), supernatural tales (chronicles of witchcraft, alchemy, magic, or ghosts), adventure narratives (exciting experiences in exotic territories, either nominally real or completely imaginary), mysteries (accounts of murder, mayhem, or suspense), science fiction (reports of experimentation, mutation, invasion, subterranean or extraterrestrial exploration), and holiday farces (logic-defying haphazard episodes defined by improbable coincidences). All of these varieties of romance have a long history of popularity, but at the turn of the nineteenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 1, they received special attention. A consideration of all of the peculiar complexities of romance—what it is as a genre or what it is as a social phenomenon—is not the goal of my investigation. This book is an outgrowth of my Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-of-the-Century English Novel. In that study I attempt to demonstrate that in fiction, as a polymorphous form, characterization and structure engage in a dialectical dynamic in which each vies for dominance. Although neither characterization nor structure is superior to the other in the aesthetics of fiction, a number of serious fin de siècle authors rejected the ambiguities of in-depth characterization and, instead, featured structure in order to communicate ethical concerns—an example that has survived in the twentieth century. In the present book I am not primarily concerned with how these authors managed structure, but with how they managed one particular mode of fiction—the romance genre. These British and American authors often knew each other personally, visited each other's countries (sometimes for extended stays), and often shared, apparently without any significant sense of national difference, a sensitivity to the place of journalism in their day and to the tradition of romance as a genre. The transatlantic writers at the center of my study mutually considered romance particularly suitable to their concern with the ethos of art. Although I do not consider historical romances of the Walter Scott variety,3 I do present the other kinds. Some of the stories I discuss actually exhibit features of more than one type of romance. However, if we classify them in terms of their dominant generic matter, the tales reviewed in this study include supernatural tales by Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Austin, John Kendrick Bangs, Mary Cholmondeley, and Henry James; adventure narratives by H. Rider Haggard, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, and Rudyard Kipling; mysteries by Stephen Crane, Gilbert K. Chesterton, and Richard Harding Davis; science fiction by Jack London; and a farce by H. G. Wells. Most of these examples participate in the Hawthorne tradition of ethical

Introduction

3

romance, the subject of Chapter 2, which can be distinguished from at least two other kinds of romance—eventuary (typified by the Haggard selection) and aesthetic (typified by the James selection). I approach these three types of romance primarily in terms of implications about their prospective audience. Given the interest of their authors in sales, eventuary romances certainly reflect an awareness of audience. But their replication of the conventions of the genre suggests the passivity of the reader. Authors of eventuary romance, the focus of Chapter 3, principally aim at one response from their audience: the self-gratifying, thoughtless consumption of the reassuring text as a transient and renewable pleasure. Authors of aesthetic romance at best begrudgingly acknowledge an audience. Their productions tend to indicate the reader's inability to comprehend the attainment of true art. Aesthetic romances, the concern of Chapter 4, manifest strategies of exclusion that dismiss the reader's response—however inevitable such a response may be—as utterly irrelevant to art. (Whether ultimately such strategies of exclusion ever succeed is moot.) Ethical romance, in contrast to the eventuary and aesthetic versions, is profoundly reader-directed. Its narrative manner, discussed in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, ranges from simple dialogism to intricate strategies of openendedness that transgress the boundary between reader and text. Admittedly, the application of the term ethical here is problematic insofar as writings in whatever mode, including romance, inherently reflect ethos in one way or another. I appropriate the term, however, to refer to romances that engage ethical issues in a very special manner. These works narratively elicit their reader's reflection upon some ethical conundrum, in contrast to the aesthetic and eventuary variety, which pretends indifference toward or exemption from ethical issues. Ethical romances unearth complexities at the core of human options, issues buried beneath an audience's consciousness or everyday experience. Aesthetic and eventuary romances in effect keep such vexing questions interred, hidden from ordinary view, by evasively appealing, respectively, to a rarefied ideal or a current hegemony. Romancers, in short, are very aware of their prospective readers and anticipate how these readers will respond to their work. Nevertheless, their management of the conventions of the genre does not reflect a common attitude among romancers toward their anticipated audience. In differentiating between three modes of romance I do not mean to suggest that turn-of-the-century authors necessarily had a systematic understanding of the distinction among these modes. I do mean to suggest, on the other hand, that a general, unformulated taxonomy of the genre, in

4

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

terms of actual practice at least, was available to these writers. I also suggest that our appreciation of the nature of romance can be enhanced by using this taxonomy as an enabler of critical reevaluation; for certain constitutional principles of each of the modes of romance differ to some degree, even though these three modes share the conventional matter of the genre. If the definitional boundaries between the three hypothetical modes of the genre remain fluid, as I believe they do in important ways, several differences nonetheless seem to emerge. These differences can be reckoned particularly in terms of authorial attitudes toward and aesthetic implications about the role of the reader of romance. So, the taxonomy presented here is not offered as a "scientific" or structuralist paradigm of the sort that might be provided by, say, Tzvetan Todorov. 4 It is designed as an approach, one means of shaping a perspective on the genre, rather than as a definitive or exhaustive authority. In other words, my taxonomy is a suggestive outline, sketched in the spirit of the caricaturistic drawings so prevalent during the turn of the century. Accordingly, I do not think of my study as the last word on the subject. In presenting my observations I have kept in mind, though I know I have hardly met, the recommendation for a critical practice—the very practice of the romances at the heart of my study—that acknowledges its "lack of finality" and "leaves its own undecidable margins of indeterminacy visible, readable on the surface of the newly-contoured landscape."5 The Spectrum of Ethical Romance I would be content if this book served as a preliminary report that eventually contributes to a renewed appreciation of turn-of-the-century romance as a respectable medium for sophisticated artistry. With the notable exception of such early nineteenth-century American romancers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, the genre has fallen into general disrepute. Often it has been designated as at best suitable for a juvenile audience, including the alleged puerile tastes of the working class. In 1927, Chesterton humorously addressed this attitude in a parody of James's manner: It really did seem preposterous to many that a serious literary artist of the age of Pater should devote himself to rewriting Penny Dreadfuls. It was just as if George Meredith had chosen to put all hisfinefeminine psychology into writing the sort of twopenny novelettes that were read by housemaids. . . . It was as if Henry James had been heard to say or, so to speak, to suggest, that there was,

Introduction

6

after all, and in a way quite annoyingly overlooked, something—something that really should have been better evaluated and re-expressed, as it were, in all that really questionable productiveness of AllySloper'sHalf-Holiday.6 Chesterton's satirization of this attitude toward romance responds to the hegemony bequeathed by early twentieth-century authors like James. These authors, especially subsequent to James's death (1916) and World War I, specifically repudiated the genre as an inauthentic artistic form and, in reaction to it, advocated in-depth, psychological characterization as the only legitimate interest of serious fiction. This privileging or hierarchizing claim, my book suggests, is contestable. It leaves, in Chesterton's words, something overlooked: the presence of equally serious literary artists who were "rewriting," revising, the popular forms of romance. Since I argue for the capacity of the genre at the turn of the century to embody sophisticated artistic expression, the differentiation of romances by theme, plot, or convention (formulas) would be inadequate to my discussion.7 There were, for example, a substantial number of Utopian romances published from 1880 to 1920. Many of these works unquestionably evidence an authorial concern with ethos, specifically by drawing attention to perceived social problems. But in trying to enlighten their readers, most of the authors of these works rely on theme, plot, and subject matter alone, as if romance were an extension of the genre of hortatory sermons. There were, as well, many romances with allegorical implications. "The Mystery Within" (1900) by Pauline E. Hopkins, for instance, implies that the production of "The Ethics of Life," as a therapeutic text, requires a communal collaboration that redeems the past for the present. Relatedly, "An Unscientific Story" (1903) by Louise J. Strong can be read as an admonition against male scientists' perverse appropriation of female generative powers, an appropriation that not only rejects the human community but also may beget monstrous results. Likewise, "A Dead Finger" (1904) by Sabine Baring-Gould warns of the "horror" of human discontent (expressed by anarchists, nihilists, socialists, and Levellers) as a lethal form of communal and personal self-decomposition. Such narratives are indeed ethical romances. At the very least, they present their audience with a critique of some social experience or imply alternative possibilities for human existence.8 But this dialectical feature is not special to these works; it is an intrinsic feature of the genre.9 Accordingly, although the authors of Utopian or allegorical romances put this dialogism to ethical use, the monovalence, the restriction of narrative energy to theme and subject matter, places these works at the low end of the spectrum of

6

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

ethical romance. They do not advance very far any case for the aesthetic potentialities or attainments of the genre. As a result, they and similarly theme-bound works are not central to my discussion in this book. I emphasize sophisticated examples of ethical romance that artistically engage their moral concerns, that energize their subject matter by means of ingenious and complex narrative maneuvers designed to implicate the reader in special ways. A Utopian novel such as Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), for example, does more than insist on an incidental dialogism between some ideal condition and the status quo. Julian West, the protagonist in this romance, can be seen as a surrogate for the reader who encounters a network of invitations to respond to an experience—the narrative itself, finally—that is never quite resolved.10 Bellamy's "To Whom This May Come" (1889), a Utopian short story, similarly transcends the limits of mere thematic concern; its various narrative strategies potentially sensitize the reader to the need for a mode of understanding beyond the limited capacity of language.11 These two stories exhibit special narrative devices, especially a generic reflexivity apparently designed to transgress the boundary between the story and the reader. Since, therefore, these two narratives raise ethical concerns artistically as well as thematically, they would both be eligible for inclusion in my discussion. These two stories by Bellamy evidence an aesthetic manner that, as it were, actuates and dimensionalizes the ethical concerns of their plots. Specifically, their generic reflexivity includes, as part of their narrative performance, the implied reader's elicited prospective thought. In other words, the theater of such ethical romances becomes a heuristic spectacle, indeed also a speculum, in which, ideally, an audience might perceive and in some sense experience better their own options in the drama of life. By potentially stimulating a deeper ethical consideration of humanity's options—whether that consideration be optimistic, pessimistic, or inconclusive—this performative integration of thematics and narrative aesthetics provides (in semiotic terms) a logonomic coalescence of the world of the author's text and the text of the reader's world. The identification of this advanced form of ethical romance is the central concern of my book. Engaging the Reader That some turn-of-the-century authors were especially concerned with an art that engages their prospective readers in unusual ways is apdy suggested in Jack London's 'These Bones Shall Rise Again" (1901), which provides a

Introduction

7

contextual authorization for my approach in this book. In this essay London dismisses critical complaints against Kipling's fiction for its lack of any "touch of pity." "Are we men and women," London asks, "able to read between the lines what Kipling intended we should read between the lines?" London refers to a gap or silence which is supposed to provoke the ideal reader into thought or feeling—that is, to engage the implied "excited" reader in the further production of the narrative. "Is there not here," London continues, "all the excitation in the world for our sorrow, our pity, our indignation? And what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed?"12 London's comments here urge an acknowledgment of Kipling's readeroriented aesthetics. This notion of an implied reader figures particularly, though not exclusively, in my suggestive taxonomic outline distinguishing between eventuary, aesthetic, and ethical romances. Although my concern with audience belongs to no particular school of reader-response critical theory, my discussion conforms generally to the principles established by Wolfgang Iser. Iser has argued (as we heard London likewise indicate) that "texts" involve readers in the production of meaning in such a way that these readers in effect complete a "work." Narratives evince "gaps" (akin to London's "between the lines") which, Iser explains, the readerfillsby "formulating something that is unformulated in the text and yet represents its 'intention.'" The process whereby a "network of response-inviting structures" in the text stimulate (whether or not by authorial design) an operation of completion in its audience, Iser explains, is 'Virtually hermeneutic." In this process—a process London refers to as "excite[d] states of consciousness"—the audience will "draw . . . new boundaries": "Every text we read draws a different boundary within our personality, so that the virtual background (the real 'me') will take on a different form."13 Iser refers to the implied meanings of a text. Technically, the issue of authorial intention is moot. Michael Riffaterre speaks similarly: "What explains the genesis of narrative is irrelevant to what explains its production, that is, its reading, its hermeneutic actualization by the reader."14 Although I appreciate the thinking behind this devaluation of authorial and historical context, I find that both considerations, when ascertainable within reason,15 are helpful. Such contextualization is useful if only perhaps as a kind of circumstantial evidence reassuring me in some way about the conclusions I have derived concerning the implied meanings of the texts I consider. Whatever its ultimate status, such contingent evidence about the provenance of a text helps at times to bound my description of this text's "production" of effects.

(9

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

My discussion therefore includes a consideration of authorial intention and historical context, both of which London insists upon in his assessment of the implied reader in Kipling's work. But my commentary also tries to identify the codelike structures in the text as potentially experienced by a reader. These cues sometimes emerge within the context of certain expectations in the reader concerning the narrative16—its type of story or its genre, say. Such pretextual conceptions can provide a background for the emergence of an audience's encounter with the structural gaps identified by Iser. This audience, as Iser indicates, is an implied or ideal reader (not necessarily an actual reader) who fills in narrative spaces as an author may have intended. When I speak of the reader in my study, therefore, I always mean the implied, ideal, prospective, or anticipated reader apparently suggested by the narrative implications, the suggestive codes, of the text, at least as I have been able to detect them. The degree to which the narrative strategies of these works did or did not actually produce the effects they appear to foster is a fascinating question I defer for now. I agree fully with Iser and Riffaterre, however, that every work evokes some response in its audience. As my Fictional Structure and Ethics indicates, I also share Wayne Booth's belief that such responses involve ethical judgments, however diffuse or vague. Such judgments are a natural and an inevitable act for an audience17—and, we should add, authors can be particularly sensitive to this behavior. But in light of recent New Historicist concerns, I acknowledge—as in my discussions of Haggard and Wells—that an author's intention and a reader's response, ethical in one way or another, may possibly not range beyond the ethos of their cultural paradigms.18 Thus, an audience's reaction may be conscious or unconscious, and it may be deliberately provoked or accidentally instigated by an author's artistry or replication of cultural patterns. These complexities—a Gordian knot, to be sure—invariably surface from time to time in my subsequent discussion. On the one hand, I try primarily to describe the reader-text performance, but I also try to connect the codes of this performance to authorial intention and context, when surmisable on the basis of extant information. On the other hand, in lieu of actual reader responses—whatever they may have been, beyond the few I cite, or are likely to be—I focus primarily on how certain modes of the romance genre seem to acknowledge, seem to situate themselves in relation to, their prospective readers. The most significant ethical romances, those at the high end of the spectrum of this generic type, urge the active involvement of their audience. In presenting the conventions of the genre in this special way these romances

Introduction

J?

in effect display what Umberto Eco has generally described as "a purposeful strategy of openness" inviting the audience's participation.19 The achievement of ethical romance, as we shall see, includes other aesthetic features as well, but the most advanced representatives of this mode of the genre, the narratives at the heart of my study, reflexively direct their narrative artistry toward the active participation of their readers. In this way, ethical romance participates fully in what J. Hillis Miller has characterized as an abiding conflict in literary discourse: "the tension between seeing literature as selfsufficient and detached, the object of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, and, on the contrary, seeing it as capable and indeed obliged to exert political and moral force on the reality of history."20 Small portions of this study have appeared in earlier versions and are identified in the Notes. Having edited Texas Studies in Literature and Language for seventeen years, I appreciate what editors June M. Frazer, Robert Langenfeld, Robert C. McLean, C. Ross Roy, G. R. Thompson, and Ronald G. Walker have contributed to the furthering of my undertaking here. I acknowledge my indebtedness to Janet Gabler-Hover (Georgia State University), whose sympathetic and meticulous attention to my argument enriched this book. I am especially grateful to Catherine Rainwater (St. Edward's University), who took precious time from her own writing to review mine. "A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

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1

Beautiful Circuit and Subterfuge Romance

When should we take a writer at his or her word? When Gilbert K. Chesterton remarks in his autobiography (1936) that he never took his "novels or short stories very seriously, or imagined that [he] had any particular status in anything so serious as a novel,"1 should we believe him? Chesterton's remark is by no means unique. H. G. Wells, for example, disagreed with Chesterton on countless issues of their day, but he spoke of his own work in terms remarkably similar to Chesterton's self-assessment. Chesterton further notes, "Among many more abject reasons for not being able to be a novelist, is the fact that I always have been and presumably always shall be a journalist." Wells likewise comments, on but one of several occasions, that his fictional writings may be "literature, but. . . they are not Works of Art. It is far truer to call them Journalism than Art."2 Late in life, too, Rudyard Kipling readily conceded that he could not "write a 'real novel.'" This admission at the end of his posthumously published Something ofMyself (1937) is followed by a montage of memories recalling both his early renunciation of such an "ambition" and his early practices in newspaper "reporting."3 He then ignored reviews of his work, Kipling also claims. These reviews certainly were sometimes inclined to drub his fiction as "tainted with the flippancy of journalism" and as unworthily smacking of the "savour of newspaperese."4 John Kendrick Bangs, who seems to have been perfecdy comfortable with his own journalistic practice, specifically lampoons this kind of criticism. Bangs has a snooty (and unreliable) narrator say in a mock interview with Kipling, "One naturally credits you with more heart and spontaneity 11

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

than thought and care.5'5 Sometimes Bangs, like Kipling, found himself backhanded by the literati for "the distressing smartness of trans-Atlantic buffoonery,5'6 for never quite abandoning his journalistic background. Similarly, Richard Harding Davis identified himself and Stephen Crane as reporters, and he described their best work as journalistic in manner.7 In 1888 Robert Louis Stevenson, basking in the sudden popularity of The Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), responded to Davis's request for advice on a literary career by admonishing him precisely about this manner:"Theswiftly done work of the journalist and the cheap finish and ready made methods to which it leads, you must try to counteract in private by writing with the most considerate slowness and on the most ambitious models."8 In letters to Henry James, Stevenson makes a similar observation about Kipling in 1890 and about J. M. Barrie in 1892. What bothered him about Barrie, the author of the popular novel The Little Minister (1891) and (later) the well-received play Peter Pan (1904), was what bothered him about Davis and Kipling: that "there's a journalist at his elbow—there's the risk."9 When in a letter about Kipling he said, "so the critics have been saying to me,"10 he revealed a source of his particular sensitivity to this risk: that in his own method the journalistic spirit was too close to home for comfort. James doubtless read these letters on Kipling and Barrie, and read Stevenson's confessional moment, with unequivocal agreement. In his tribute to Stevenson in 1914, he positions the journalistic essays above the fiction of his predecessor:"Thefinest papers in 'Across the Plains,' in 'Memories and Portraits,' in 'Virginibus Puerisque,' . . . have both a nobleness and a nearness that place them, for perfection and roundness, above his fictions, and that also may well remind a vulgarised generation of what, even under its nose, English prose can be."11 In faintly recognizing these essays as superior to the fiction principally for being "silver of speech," and only nearly perfect examples at that, James seems indeed to have come not to praise but to bury Stevenson. Like Chesterton, Wells, and Davis, Stevenson's application of the term journalism participated in a prevalent conception in the literary discussions of the late nineteenth century, discussions which, as he anxiously suggested, sometimes approached his fiction as a form of journalism. If Stevenson, as the eldest member and sometimes mentor of this group, was uncomfortable with this designation, his younger admirers claimed (whatever the truth) to be less disturbed by it. So we might conclude from Kipling's, Chesterton's, and Wells's late comments, as we have seen. But how should we interpret

Beautiful Circuit and Subterfuge

13

this application of the term journalism by reviewers and by authors themselves to describe a certain kind of fiction? Journalistic Context When turn-of-the-century reviewers use the designation journalistic, they generally intend to disparage or, at least, to equivocate the achievement of an author's work. In contrast, when authors, specifically those whose fiction has been thusly designated, adopt this term, they tend to be more difficult to understand. In one sense, these authors seem to sound a defensive note, as if their apologetic embrace of this particular criticism might somehow lessen the charge of deficiency lodged against them by reviewers. They in effect appear to say that a form of journalism is indeed what they intended to achieve. In another sense, however, these authors seem to be genuinely proud of the classification of their fiction as a form of journalism. In fact, in the instances of Kipling, Chesterton, Wells, as three particularly notable examples, this self-declared description of their stories appears to be a daundess counterattack on those who denigrate journalistic art. This double sense of journalistic fiction is an important element in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary dialogue. Although the intermixture of journalism and fiction has been recognized as a characteristic of the origins of the novel12 and of certain contemporary writings,13 the preoccupation of some fin de siècle authors and critics with the junction of these two media remains a virtually unexplored site in the history of the novel. This disregard is odd, especially since a variety of tales by these authors provides one link between seventeenth-century and twentieth-century experiments with journalistic fiction. Even more important, an awareness of this late nineteenth-century form contributes to the recovery of something we have lost: an appreciation of a particular kind of turn-of-thecentury art, a type of belles lettres that has fallen into disfavor in our time for reasons we have not much considered. Journalism was at the forefront of cultural consciousness as the nineteenth century approached its end and the next century commenced. During this time William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer built their newspaper "empires." Ever since the invention of the cylinder press earlier in the century, newspapers and magazines proliferated, and, marketed cheaply, their sales grew enormously, especially among the working class. Even well into the twentieth century, Ada Woodruff Anderson's Rim of the Desert (1915) records, "there were so many of these new magazines. It was hard to

14

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

choose."14 The press, moreover, was suspected of, and in fact gave evidence of, wielding a powerful force in molding public opinion. As Jack London observed in 1908, "Journalism has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is on the rampage the only thing to do is to climb a tree and let the cataclysm go by."15 A journalist as well as storyteller, London had firsthand experience with this power of the press. When in 1895, for instance, the New York World published a special Christmas issue promoting peace and goodwill with Britain, which was on the brink of war with the United States over disputed Latin American territorial control, it so defused enthusiasm for the pending conflict that the secretary of state (Richard Olney) and the New York City police commissioner (Theodore Roosevelt) urged the arrest of its editors for treason. Earlier in the year, Sarah Orne Jewett published a holiday romance dramatizing the unexpected consequences of a cynical journalist's false news story; the fantasy of her "Fame5s Little Day" (1895) emphasizes the power of the press, for good or ill, to influence the lives of its readers. The place of the press in matters of state and in daily life hardly seemed ephemeral to writers like Jewett or to fin de siècle editors like fellow journalist/romancer Jerome K. Jerome.16 And the reputation of the journalist, as a social identity, was also undergoing a change. By the end of the century journalists were shedding, at least in the minds of their working-class and middle-class readers, the stereotype of plebeian gambler, carouser, and misfit. Even with the rise of yellow journalism in America, the social identity of journalists as emergent professionals improved despite the often truculent sensationalism of their accounts. Journalists became, as Davis's immensely popular "Gallegher" (1890) celebrated, cultural heroes who would put their lives on the line in order to expose corruption and to protect the common good. Often jingoistic and populist in their angle of vision, these reporters (as a group) became an influential cultural presence, not only in legend but also in fact. They were not genteel, and most of them were proud of this fact. They frequently presented themselves as virtual political representatives of "the people," and they correspondingly practiced a "journalism that acts."17 That is to say, their accounts were not only sensationally dramatic, often involving the author in the action reported; they were also often activist, associating the reporter with a position, frequendy in support of some inadequately represented or unjustly oppressed group. The very infelicity of their expression "journalism that acts" conveys the identification of these advocacy journalists with the middle-class readership of magazines and the working-class (substantially immigrant) readership of newspapers.

Beautiful Circuit and Subterfuge

15

Some of these reporters who understood the connection between their journalism and their fiction may nonetheless have longed for acceptance outside of the social class of their usual readers. Possibly Wells and Davis harbored such a desire; for the awkwardness of their social self-presentation may have been symptomatic of an insecure bid to cross class boundaries. Whatever the truth of this matter, Davis and Wells sometimes seemed somewhat oudandish to their contemporaries, and their writings tend to reflect a profound ambivalence toward the upper classes. Indeed, when authors like Wells described their fiction as a form of journalism, they registered, to some degree, a discomfort with any personal association with high culture. Perhaps, too, they truly had personal doubts concerning the merit of their work. We cannot rule out altogether this possibility. But we need, as well, to consider two major questions. Against what were they measuring their fiction? What might have made their narratives seem less accomplished or, at least, categorically different? Journalism and Art One answer to such questions can be found in the conception of art inherited by these authors. In their time art referred to a high-flown undertaking. Art, they had learned, was an elevated, even privileged form of imaginative expression relatively inaccessible to the average person—the general readers of popular magazines and newspapers, for example. This abiding perception of art included, as Chesterton put it, something "so serious as a novel," something that several of his outspoken contemporaries had insisted should possess a complex design and manner constructed primarily in terms of the refined principles of art. As James said in a Paterian moment, art should "offer us another world," should provide an "experience that . . . muffles the ache of the actual."18 Writers as different in manner, if not always in poetics, as Henry James and Oscar Wilde appeared to defend "high art," art not obliged to acknowledge a social conscience, art heeding only its own aesthetic integrity. As we shall consider in Chapter 4, truth in such art, it seemed, had much more to do with an internal consistency within a set of aesthetic principles than with an external (journalistic) applicability to social concerns or conditions. However, there were writers of fiction who wanted to convey messages to their readers. Affecting their audience would press as a primary consideration in determining the shape of their art. In their eyes such messagebearing narration must thus be journalistic fiction because it certainly was not fine art, "anything so serious as a novel," in Chesterton's words. In their

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

time these authors heard literary spokesmen to say that real art shows no interest in social concerns. This perception is evident in "Ethics and Literature" (1897), Julia Wedgwood's reactionary complaint against "a point of view remote alike from sympathy and antipathy" in the fiction of her time, an indifference to "the subject of morality" that disfranchises us from the "human."19 She, like other authors of her day, would have endorsed Wittgenstein's belief that "ethics and aesthetics are one."20 So in matter, manner, and aim, the work of writers in the journalistic mode did not seem to meet the definition of art pronounced by those, like James and Wilde, who were rather outspoken on the subject when the careers of these other authors were developing. These writers, more concerned with an art sensitive to audience than to aesthetic principles, embraced—at times ambivalently—the critically derogatory term journalism to differentiate their work from the high model. The term provided an identity for their own work. As a designation, it could be used to reply to the charge of the artistic deficiency of their writings. In appropriating the term, furthermore, these authors in the journalistic mode could upon occasion even assert the superiority of their social aesthetics in comparison to elite models of fictional expression. In one sense, when these authors designated their work as journalistic they valorized their authorial beginnings. With the exception of Mary Cholmondeley, the other authors most central to this study—Stevenson, Kipling, Chesterton, Wells, Bangs, London, Crane, Davis, and Mary Austin—practiced journalism professionally at the start, throughout, or at some point in their career. Several had been war correspondents, most had written social or travel commentaries, and one was a naturalist. The fact of this apprenticeship or concurrent practice was not the only reason these authors adopted the idea of journalistic fiction from their debunking critics. These authors were also valorizing, ambivalently in some cases, their sense of social class. With the exception of Cholmondeley, these writers did not emerge from genteel social origins, nor did they enjoy incomes independent from work. They had, in one way or another, precariously edged themselves toward social recognition by the hard labor of their scribbling hands. With varying degrees of success, they lived on the income they earned through work for hire. In a metaphoric sense, they were literary soldiers of fortune nominally serving the popular demands of their laboring class and bourgeoisie audience while simultaneously achieving their personal artistic objectives. These authors were, as their contemporaries would describe the pattern of such a social rise, self-made men and women. Given their origins, expe-

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rience, and audience, it is not surprising that these writers opposed what they sensed, righdy or wrongly, to be elitist notions of art. Nor is it surprising that they confiscated, anxiously sometimes, the abusive notion of journalistic fiction to extol their alternative kind of belles lettres. If these authors defined themselves against the supreme pronouncements of what they perceived as the elite literary establishment, they also identified themselves against the banal productions of popular fiction, such as the stories of H. Rider Haggard or Arthur Conan Doyle. Their allusions to the journalistic features of their craftfinallyindicated a difference between their manner and the examples both of elite art and of popular fiction. They situated themselves between these two extremes, as they saw them, by accommodating the demands of their audience for the familiar forms of narrative and at the same time pursuing their personal artistic objectives. These authors certainly made use of various popular genres to reach the laboring and middle classes with whom they personally identified. They nested their own social artistry, as if it were a cuckoo's egg, in these otherwise tainted models of fiction. And they ensconced in these forms a provocative artistry—nothing less than an ingenious aesthetic manner—designed to communicate serious social considerations unobtrusively, even liminally, to their audience. In the Introduction we heard London make precisely this point about Kipling's manner. Some of these écrivain saw themselves as fashioning a hybrid form offictionthat would possess at once the appeal of low art and the aesthetic integrity of high art, as they understood the difference. Consider Wells's description of his method: "I did not worry much about finish. The fastidious critic might object, but the general reader to whom I addressed myself cared no more for finish and fundamental veracity about the secondary things of behaviour than I. I did not want to sweep under the mat for crumbs of characterization, nor did he want me to do so. What we wanted was a ventilation of the point at issue."21 The collapse of J (the author) and he (the reader) into we is worth noting in Wells's comment; this manner implies a collusion between him and his audience against "the fastidious critic." One such critic was Mrs. Humphry Ward, who claimed that Wells's fiction was competent (if charmless and crude) journalism, not art.22 Indeed, throughout his career Wells particularly points to fastidious art as the model from which he departs, art like James's in particular. Although the disagreements between Wells and James are now familiar,23 the broader implications of their debate concerning the properties and audience of a particular type of fiction have not been adequately observed. Chesterton sheds some light on these implications. In his portrait of Ste-

18

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

venson, who was a very important exemplar for many turn-of-the-century authors, Chesterton speaks for himself and others writing fiction in the journalistic mode. He wittily refers to aestheticist antecedents when he speaks of Stevenson as "one of the decadents who refused to decay." This remark distinguishes his subject's work from elite art while intimating that it is, nonetheless, serious art. Chesterton summarizes the position of the journalistic novelists when he reports that Stevenson "was one of the crowd of artists who showed mutinous signs of deserting art for life." What Stevenson deserted, in Chesterton's version, was art for art's sake, not only as defined by aestheticism but also by literary realism, as he and his generation understood these fictional vectors. Instead, Chesterton concludes, Stevenson fashioned another sort of narrative, one certainly worthy of "a serious novelist."24 The use of such expressions as aestheticism (including decadence), literary realism (including naturalism), and subjectivism (including modernism) by Chesterton's generation may trouble us today. Although these words were employed time and again at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century to refer to various modes of fiction, they fail to reveal much to us now about the diversity of the fiction they once seemed to describe and contain. In our time these categorizing terms have been exposed as inadequate signifiers because fiction is so polymorphous as a form that it always exceeds any reductional poetics.25 Nevertheless, viewed historically, these terms proved to be very serviceable to turn-of-the-century authors as a means of situating their own practice. So, while not subscribing to them ourselves, we might find in these turn-of-the-century designations, loose as they are, necessary clues to the thinking behind the artistry of those writers who invoked them at that time. In describing Stevenson as a nondecaying decadent who deserted art for life, for example, Chesterton finds an authoritative ally for his own selfconscious antiaestheticist manner. Consider, too, Wells's proclaimed goal in 1912. Then Wells said that since "problems of adjustment [are] the essential matter for novel-writing," "we [novelists] arc going to deal with political questions and religious questions and social questions."26 Twelve years later Wells reiterated this point when describing his writings as "essentially comments and enhancements of the interest of life itself."27 In short, despite their extensive differences concerning specific social agendas, Wells and Chesterton share a social conscience. Their art heeds societal as well as aesthetic concerns, and their audience is (as Wells declares) "the general reader" or (as London observes of Kipling) "the dominant bourgeoisie."28 Their practice, in other words, was journalistic belles lettres with working-class

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and middle-class roots, an artistry designed, possibly therapeutically, for the masses. It was not high art, at least as they understood fine art as defined by the cultural elite. These authors, perhaps by necessity as much as by choice, opposed the examples of what they perceived to be high art. They rejected, in terms of the classification system available to them, the elevated forms of the literary realists, of the aesthetes, and of the rising subjectivists. Someone like Wells could recognize the talent of such a "subjectivist" as James Joyce for creating perceiving intelligences, even as Wilde and James could awkwardly remark upon, as it seemed to them, the peculiar achievement of Kipling's oeuvre. But as an informal group, turn-of-the-century authors in the journalistic mode basically clung to their Victorian roots when resisting the rising literary fashion that favored relativism. Many could not endorse the apparent open-ended drift of their time, when it seemed that "modern thought [was] distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the 'relative5 spirit in place of the 'absolute.' "29 In contrast to spokesmen like Walter Pater, who evidendy approved of this direction in 1889, authors in the journalistic mode urged an emergent communal viewpoint. They revised the Victorian concern with a balance between the individual and society.30 As suggested by Chesterton5s remark that Stevenson was a nondecaying decadent, these authors associated this perceived drift toward "the 'relative5 spirit" with what they understood to be the extremes of aestheticism, literary realism, and (eventually) subjectivism. And their journalistic art often flaunted their resistance to these models, as they understood them. This challenge to such models, accordingly, became a feature of their celebration of the journalistic heritage of fiction. If from its inception the form of the novel was associated with newspaper reportage, at the turn of the nineteenth century this connection was not acknowledged by the practitioners of literary realism or, in Chesterton5s phrase, by writers of "anything so serious as a novel." In fact, as we noted, the designation of afictionalwork as a form of journalism was for fin de siècle spokesmen of high culture an expression of opprobrium. For, as we also remarked, much of the newspaper reporting of their day, most blatandy in yellow journalism, was not stricdy factual reportage at all; it often tended (like its seventeenth-century prototype) to obscure the distinction between fact and fantasy. That writers in the journalistic mode of fiction found this amalgamation of the quotidian and the imaginative very congenial to their aims is suggested by Frank Swinnerton5s instructive observation that Kipling was "the first journalist, since Defoe, to bring a sense of news to the service of fic-

20

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

tion."31 Storytellers like Kipling fashioned, as it were, a eugenic hybrid art form that, they hoped, might prove to be a vigorous type especially adaptive to the needs of the times, as they assessed them. They were apparently insensitive to novels, like Mary Cholmondeley's popular Red Pottage (1899), that "journalistically" revised the conventions of "the realistic school" of fiction to include ethical considerations;32 and only inconsistendy did they occasionally acknowledge narratives, like Edith Wharton's "Journey" (1899), that blended the manner and the concerns of romance and verisimilitudinous fiction.33 On the whole, they tended to reject literary realism categorically as an ideal or even adequate mode for the expression of "moral" concerns. If literary realism, as defined by what they perceived to be a rigorous set of aesthetic principles, seemed inadequate as a pure form, nevertheless features of it were borrowed by novelists in the journalistic school. And they likewise exploited features of popular fiction, which their generation understood to be tainted by cheap sensationalism. Whatever hybrid form they fashioned, however, they often disguised within it an underlying determinative moral consideration, sometimes a grand ethical meditation. In this way, it could be said, they gave true expression to the often merely proclaimed moral earnestness that masked the commercial appeal of so much of the sensationalistic journalism of their day. In yellow journalism, for example, the social interest ostensibly generating news from exotic lands was frequently a form of irresponsible entertainment, a journalistically licensed blend of fact and fiction. But in the narratives of the practitioners of the journalistic school of fiction, this genetically licensed blend of fact and fiction was governed by a sincere engagement of, not by a commercially determined pretense of, social conscience. This generic license also existed in the narrative precedent of romance as afictionalform. In the genre of romance these authors found a hardy reinforcement of their journalistic heritage and experience. For romance, like the journalism of their day, allowed for a conflation of fact and fantasy so that some large truth or insight might be glimpsed by the reader. From Journalism to Romance The genre favored by these writers is suggested in Bangs's "Mystery of My Grandmother's Hair Sofa" (1898). Charged "by critics that [he is] a romancer of the wildest sort," Bangs's persona replies: "In the setting forth of these episodes [of "strange incidents"] I have narrated them as faithfully as the most conscientious realist could wish, and am therefore myself a true

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and faithful follower of the realistic school."34 This tongue-in-cheek comment amounts to a confiscation of legitimacy. A contest for authority is evident here, however congenially undertaken. By asserting that fantastic tales are realistic, Bangs's spokesman appropriates whatever authority "the realistic school" is accorded by critics and, paradoxically, at the same time obliterates a distinction insisted upon by that school as a feature of its identity. If fantastic and realistic fiction are thusly interchangeable, as Bangs's narrator suggests, then what sense finally inheres in "realistic school" as a designation? At the heart of this simultaneous acknowledgment and repudiation lurks a subversive question. This question challenges not only the concept of literary realism, as Bangs's generation understood it, but also the propriety of the commonplace deprecation of romance for not being "conscientious." It is, as Wells indicated, precisely the "established literary standards," the "uncongenial limitations of the novel proper," especially the "real through and through and absolutely true treatment of people more living than life," that he and other romancers "breached." Despite "Henry James's standards," Wells argued as a spokesman for fellow romancers, fiction "might be more and less than" this thorough treatment, "and still be a novel." A "novel of completely consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velásquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture." In short, Wells opined, "realism and exhaustive presentation [are] not its [fiction's] only objectives."35 Stevenson had put the matter earlier in a succinct proclamation. Writers like him, he explained in 1887, were not interested in "the novel of society," in the novel of character, but in "the romance of man."36 By "novel of society" Stevenson meant "the realistic school." Chesterton agreed, not only in his book on Stevenson, but also in The Club of Queer Trades (1905) and Charles Dickens (1906). In all three of these works he likewise vigorously rejected "realistic" and "naturalistic" modes of writing. Chesterton's defense of Stevenson's work, as we noted previously, applied to his own writing: "His sort of romanticism, as compared with realism, is not more superficial, but on the contrary more fundamental." Chesterton admired Stevenson's rejection of "the secondary things of behaviour" (to recall Wells's phrase) and his literary emphasis on something "more fundamental." As if annotating Stevenson's notion of "the romance of man," Chesterton explained that their mutual type of romance was more fundamental insofar as it insinuated "a return and resolution into elemental things."37 Bangs's narrator humorously resists the charge that he is "a romancer of

22

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

the wildest sort" by seizing the term realist to enhance, not disparage, the designation of his stories as a form of "conscientious" romance. He claims to be a romancer who journalistically reports "the plain, unvarnished truth."38 He writes, in short, a Stevensonian "romance of man" concerning, as Chesterton apdy declares, "elemental things." And this "cosmic quality" of "the vital facts of our existence" pressed "into enduring art-forms" is also what Jack London praises in Kipling5s rendition of "the romance of the nineteenth-century man."39 As Stevenson's, Chesterton's, Bangs5s, London's, and Wells's comments testify, many turn-of-the-century authors saw themselves as writing in a journalistic mode that (contrary to what we might expect) opposed "the realistic school," as they understood it. And (also contrary to what we might expect) they allied this mode with the genre of romance. This peculiar amalgamation enabled romance to oppose literary realism or (in Fredric Jameson's phrase) to resist "oppressive representation."40 These authors turned to romance as if it could provide a hybrid literary form where the matter of journalism and the manner of art might coalesce, where fact and fiction might merge harmoniously to reflect the union of humanity's societal and aesthetic interests. In fashioning romances many of these authors knew what the cost had been for others before them and what it might be for them as well. In the critical discourse of their day, romance was not generally perceived by the literary establishment as providing a respectable form wherein to represent the crucial concerns of the time. It was mainly regarded as the antithesis of "anything so serious as a novel." In his review of James's book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, William Dean Howells chided: "No one better than Mr. James knows the radical difference between a romance and a novel, but he speaks now of Hawthorne's novels, and now of his romances, throughout, as if the terms were convertible."41 And as James's equivocal evaluation of romance in Hawthorne (1879) suggests, to be designated as a romancer in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was virtually, when it was not explicidy, to be subject to censure. Like a journalist at that time, a romancer might be dismissed by the literati as a pretender and yet be granted his or her talent as a mere craftsman or, at best, a mere stylist. Stevenson and Kipling experienced this response to their writings, at least when reviewers did not overly sniff at their alleged journalistic "taint." But, as their experience also indicated, a romancer might just as likely be thoroughly scorned as either a producer of useless trivialities or, much worse, a subverter of higher social values.

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The Perception of Romance Romance is a term that has endured for centuries. William Penn provides a catalogue of the perennial thematic features of romance: strange adventures,. . . passionate amours, unkind refusals, grand impediments, importunate addresses, miserable disappointments, wonderful surprises, unexpected encounters, castles surprised, imprisoned lovers rescued, and meetings of supposed dead ones; bloody duels, languishing voices echoing from solitary groves, overheard mournful complaints, deep-fetched sighs sent from wild deserts, intrigues managed with unheard-of subtlety; and whilst all things seem at the greatest distance, then are dead people alive, enemies friends, despair turned to enjoyment, and all their impossibilities reconciled: things that never were, nor are, nor ever shall be or can be, they all come to pass.42 As this early description suggests, the term romance has been applied to a surprisingly wide variety of work. And over the centuries this truly heterogeneous genre has consistendy been subjected to critical censure. Although invective against romance was particularly keen during the seventeenth century, when Penn made his comment (1669), most of the aspersions cast on the genre at that time surface as a virtual refrain throughout the criticism of the next two centuries. It is not surprising that romance should elicit seventeenth-century religious invective. As a Quaker at the fringe of Puritan sentiment, Penn enumerated a catalogue of the features of the genre as part of a broadside articulating the traditional complaints against romance. Penn dismissed the form as "mere phantasms" that bilk their readers by "consum[ing] their time" and "debas[ing] their reason." Romances "not only express lies, but utter impossibilities to very nature, on purpose to excite their minds to those idle passions, and to intoxicate their giddy fancies with swelling nothings but airy fictions."43 The key words in Penn's assault on romance are idle, intoxicate, lies, and fictions. These words imply what the antagonists of romance would eventually make even more explicit: that the genre is potentially subversive to personal and social order. It encourages idleness rather than work. It intoxicates rather than encourages clear-headed rationality. It does not tell the truth about the laws of nature or the laws of society, but seduces (like Satan in the Garden) through an appeal to fancy, the corrupt imagination. Penn also anticipates the tradition of moral sanction against romance by hinting at its sensual, even sexual, undercurrent. This intimation lurks in his use of the words excite, passions, and swelling, all of which resonate with his refer-

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

ence to "passionate amours." For Penn, the genre is potentially subversive to social and personal order, finally, because it incites fleshly feelings to run riot against the restraints of divine reason as expressed in moral and civil law. English Puritan sympathizer Andrew Marvell further assails the form by sounding a chauvinistic note: the English fear of Gallic contamination. He refers to "vain French romance[s]" as representative of anything deceitful.44 And Congregationalist Theophilus Gale summarizes Puritan clerical sentiment during the second half of the seventeenth century: "Romances . . . so much please the wanton wits and humours of this corrupt Age."45 Gale's comment targets the Restoration court, but in fact it is of a piece with Puritan sentiment earlier in the century. Even during the Restoration, when a revival of romance was in full bloom, and through the Glorious Revolution, not only clerical voices express concern over the genre. At the turn of the seventeenth century, for example, William Congreve, a former playwright of upper-class society supported by generous government pensions, notes that although romances "delight us with accidents and odd events," they are dismissible as "all a lye."46 Nothing in this upper-class reaction changed during the eighteenth century, by which time, it has been alleged, a profound rupture may have occurred between romance and the novel.47 In 1740, for example, Philip Dormer, an aristocratic patron of Samuel Johnson, wrote to his son: "The reading of romances is a most frivolous occupation, and time merely thrown away. The old romances, written two or three hundred years ago, such as Amadis of Gaul, Orlando the Furious, and others, were stuffed with enchantments, magicians, giants, and such sort of impossibilities."48 By the end of the Age of Reason, that empiricist century, romance was thoroughly suspect for promoting the pleasures of the imagination over the proper satisfactions of rational thought. At the turn of the eighteenth century, "'Romance5 implied a seductive delusion, pathetic or ludicrous."49 And this sentiment prevailed, among elite spokesmen at least, during the following century, even while Romantic writers were reviving the genre. Romance was, as before, faulted by various voices for its truthlessness, its seductiveness, and its subversiveness to personal and social order. It was within this long tradition of hostility toward romance that such nineteenthcentury authors as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne undertook various experiments in the genre,50 experiments designed to test (among other matters) commonplace notions of convention and deviance. Several of these writers, especially Hawthorne, were favorite, even formative models for the authors at the center of this study.

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Nevertheless, if by the end of the nineteenth century the relish for romance was stronger than ever among "general reader[s]," as Wells identified them, this taste was, as we shall particularly observe in Chapter 6, still thoroughly scorned by upper-class commentators. Indicative of this censure is Henry James's reduction of romance, in the interests of some higher definition, to stories "of boats, or of caravans, or of tigers, or of 'historical characters,5 or of ghosts, or of forgers, or of detectives, or of beautiful wicked women, or of pistols and knives . .. [all] for the most part reducible to the idea of the facing of danger."51 Some of the remarks concerning Wells's so-called sensationalistic romance The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) especially reveal the endurance of this tradition of disapproval and censure of the genre. Wells's book—an amalgamation of the adventure, suspense, and sciencefiction subgenres of romance—is typically charged by one anonymous reviewer as evidence of a waste of its author's talent in degradation and as an achievement of originality at the expense of decency.52 Other reviewers indict the book as unprofitable, or as transgressive of good taste, or as scientifically dubious.53 Few critics sense something deeper in the story. Some, however, wonder if perhaps the romance satirizes the presumptions of science or if it parodies the performance of divine providence. At least three reviewers explicidy complain that the purpose of the book, if any, is not clear.54 For a vituperative critic of the London Times, however, Wells's economic, more journalistic than literary incentive behind the book is too crudely manifest; this reviewer declares that Wells's romance "is the strongest example we have met of the perverse quest after anything in any shape that is freshly sensational."55 This round of social and economic criticism notwithstanding, several critics are quick to assert that Wells's romance fails as well on artistic grounds both in manner and matter. Whereas the conservative Athenaeum declares that Wells's "nauseating" romance cannot be justified artistically, the Manchester Guardian ventures that the subject matter of the book simply may not be legitimate for any artistic undertaking.56 All of this commentary, as an especially apt illustration of the attitude of certain fin de siècle reviewers toward romance as a form, sounds once again the age-old objections to the genre on personal, social, and artistic grounds. It certainly is easy to understand why, in response to a question concerning the critical reception of The Island ofDr. Moreau, Wells replied: "It has been stupidly dealt with—a mere shocker—by people who ought to have known better."57 To be sure, there were other, more approving voices, as we shall see when (in Chapter 3) we consider the reception of Haggard's fiction. But even then

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

there were those who sniped at Haggard's manner: 'There is a kind of boy who may tolerate these adventures, but even for him there is a good deal of better literature extant"; "the bloody and ghastly story of the improbable . . . reeks with brutality and suffering, and is enough to make the reader as haggard as its author."58 None of this disapproval had much effect on Haggard's or Wells5s turnof-the-century "general reader," any more than similar comments during the two previous centuries affected the common reception of romance. The genre was in fact popular at all levels of society, and from the middle through the turn of the nineteenth century there was a virtual saturation of the marketplace with various kinds of romance:fictionalizedhistories, adventure narratives, westerns, suspense tales, mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, fantasies. During that period, various technological and societal changes had occurred that facilitated the indulgence of the pervasive popular appreciation of the genre. During the nineteenth century popular fiction reached a wide audience because of industrialized mass printing, increased literacy, and numerous magazines featuring serials.59 Typical of these changes, in 1896 Frank A. Munsey converted The Argosy from a classy children's magazine into an inexpensive adult short-story periodical printed on coarse pulp paper stock. And the audience for such productions had sufficient expendable capital to purchase cheaply produced and cheaply marketed works. Romance was prominent among these productions. To the horror of the guardians of the status quo, there was no stopping romance from getting into the hands of not only the increasingly literate working class but also the presumably vulnerable younger generation ("a kind of boy") at all social levels. In fact during the early twentieth century, romance became steadily identified with this young audience. During the previous century, youth had always been one of the covert markets for romance and had always been one of its critics5 greatest concerns. Moreover, in reaction to their predecessors, those early twentieth-century novelists who experimented with a subjectivist mode of narration (as it was dubbed at the time) particularly encouraged this identification of romance as juvenilia, as an improper form for mature fictional artistry.60 In effect, the subversive capacity of romance waned as an issue during most of the twentieth century, only to surface once again in the critical debates of our own time.61 The genre was increasingly dismissed less on social or moral grounds than on artistic ones—the ones heard in the questions raised about the artistic legitimacy of Wells5s Island ofDr. Moreau. If the form was shunted aside as juvenile in its matter, it was also dismissed as artistically unsophisticated in its manner. Mary Aus-

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tin, as we shall see in Chapter 6, fully understood both charges; in response, she approached romance as an opportunity for directing a "mythic" literary artistry toward the education of children, who as adults might continue to embrace the genre as a vital and healthy mode of aesthetic expression. Turn-of-the-century authors had felt the tremors of this eventual change, and some of them apparendy recognized them for what they were. Those romancers who survived into the second and third decades of the twentieth century would get a very clear sense of the unfirm ground on which they had pitched their literary talent. In 1912, for example, Kipling was designated as "one of those who never grow up, " even "far more than Barrie."62 At the time of his death in 1916, Richard Harding Davis was likewise said to be "at his best" when "he was in heart and mind a boy grown tall." Davis's work, which during the turn of the century had enjoyed a wide reception among adult readers, was now declared "safe stuff to give a young fellow."63 Similarly, in 1927, Chesterton spoke of Robert Louis Stevenson as "a lost child," whose work amounts to "a sort of runaway romantic evasion for the purpose of escaping."64 Given the nature of Stevenson's influence on Chesterton and given the nature of the sort of comments Chesterton's fiction received from critics during his lifetime, this remark amounts to something similar to the pot calling the kettle black. Evident here, nonetheless, is the peculiar change that occurred in the status of romance during the twentieth century. With the onset and the aftermath of World War I, in particular, romance increasingly seemed to some at best naive, at worst evidence of "a botched civilization," as Ezra Pound remarked in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Romance had gone, and gone rather suddenly, from a genre suspected for its social and moral subversiveness, and repudiated as a legitimate vehicle of art, to a genre still denigrated as art but now considered particularly suitable for unsophisticated readers, especially children. Many latter-day critics of British literature have repeated this abiding denunciation of the genre as art. They have mainly internalized the assault on romance by the rising generation of novelists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Critics of American literature, however, have tended to be more open to the defense of the genre, at least as practiced during the first half of the nineteenth century, when a number of significant writers availed themselves of this form as a critical defense of the kind of work they wrote. Today no one—no one in his or her right mind—thinks that the literary attainment of such American romancers as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville is slight. Specialists in American literature have explored the nature of romance as a form; although they do not agree on whether romance as a form

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

resists or legitimates the status quo, they have collectively acknowledged that this genre was used by these authors to communicate profound meanings through complex artistic strategies. Yet the very mode of romance elevated in these considerations of certain early nineteenth-century American authors is usually slighted, subjected to apology, or berated in commentaries on both American and British turn-of-the-century authors.65 It is as if an invisible and undeclared line has been drawn through the century. On one side of the line, the early nineteenth-century authors are said to have used romance deeply; on the other side, the turn-of-the-century authors are said to have used it shallowly. Why, one might wonder, have the romances of these earlier authors been granted, as it were, a reprieve from the literary establishment's traditional disapproval of the genre while the romances of authors closest in time to the "subjectivist" generation, the generation who railed at their predecessors for not knowing better than to devote themselves to such a puerile genre, are still unquestionably dismissed? These turn-of-the-century writers are principally indicted for not having divined, as Virginia Woolf succincdy noted in 1924, that "it is to express character . . . that the form of the novel. . . has been evolved"; "the Edwardians were never interested in character itself."66 In fact, characterization is only one feature of fiction; structure is another, and apparendy structure and characterization do not abide peacefully together in fiction, as the troubled practice of the Victorian novelists readily exemplifies.67 Romancers tend to emphasize structure over characterization, as suited their desire to communicate a message; for message is frequently less ambiguously rendered through structure than through deep characterization. In making this choice they simplified the problem of their Victorian predecessors, who wrestled valiantly with the problem of the dialectic between characterization and structure. This prioritizing, however, is as defensible on artistic grounds as is that of their early twentieth-century successors who emphasized characterization over structure. Even Woolf, one of those successors, admitted that the form of the novel was inclusive—"clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive."68 And Wells indeed agreed, asserting accordingly as late as 1940, that "a novel. . . could be any sort of honest treatment of the realities of human behaviour in narrative form."69 Wells's reply of course included romance. Not only did he and related writers view it as a legitimate medium for sophisticated artistic experiments, but they sometimes claimed that it surpassed other types of fiction because it included an advocacy journalist's concern with the community of general

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readers. Certain fin de siècle authors put romance, as a form, to special use in opposition to the requirements associated with other modes of fiction, especially the "realistic," "naturalistic," "aesthetic," "decadent," and (later) "subjectivist" modes that they identified as uncongenial to their purposes. Understanding the intentions and achievements of these romancers uncovers a veiled episode in the history of the novel and particularly reveals the often obscured artistic capacity of the romance genre. The Province of Romance The world of commonplace experience and the world of exotic dream merge in romance. The romance medium blends the fantastic and the commonplace, art and life, so that any sense of the separation between the two is obliterated. Like much of turn-of-the-century journalism, with which it shares these features, romance is flagrandy extravagant. It is a genre that defies boundaries through excess, that "threatens to expose 'reality5 as a constructed referent rather than as a 'natural5 state of existence to which we all naturally, textually, refer."70 At the core of romance, as Chesterton reports, is a sense of "existence . . . [as] a strange thing," as "a mystery."71 Since, like dream, it combines the fantastic and the factual, romance potentially intimates the mystery of life better than any other mode of fiction—at least in the opinion of turnof-the-century authors like Chesterton. Chesterton's disavowal of writing "anything so serious as a novel" sounds like an echo of Hawthorne's claim that an author's appeal to the genre of romance provides "a certain latitude, both to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entided to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel."72 Hawthorne, an influence on Chesterton and other fin de siècle writers (as we shall see in the next chapter), pertinendy argued that romance provided "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other."73 In Orthodoxy (1908), Chesterton likewise spoke of romance as a matrix of "wonder" comprised of the "mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar," the "combination of something that is secure with something that is insecure."74 Oddly, James has given us a remarkable insight into romance. James may have been identified by many romancers as a representative of the opposing camp of literary realists, but in fact he occasionally worked in the medium (the subject of Chapter 4) and was distincdy ambivalent toward it, especially as defined by Hawthorne. James indicated that the intersection of the real

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(secure, familiar) and the imaginary (insecure, unfamiliar) in this genre adverts to the mystery of life "through the beautifiil circuit and subterfuge of our thought."75 James's combination of these terms, circuit and subterfuge, means that in some sense romance can serve as a mirror. Under the direction of a sophisticated artist, romance can reflect our thought back to us even as, paradoxically, this reflection remains indirect, elusive, and possibly deceptive. In other words, romance has the capacity to intimate the most profound truths (the thought of our minds) while at the same time its verbal expression (its spectacle) tends to disguise this revelation. This paradox can emerge, Chesterton explains in The Club of Queer Trades, because even though "fiction is the creation of the human mind," and reflects it like a mirror, "truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction."76 This dialectical feature of romance, as at once intimater and concealer, conveys what writers as very different as James and Chesterton understood was the fundamental enigma of existence. They further agreed that the pursuit of this "eternal mystery," as James put it in 1897, can prove to be ultimately disruptive to commonplace human ontological and epistemological concepts.77 Mary Austin summarized this point when lauding Kipling's artistry as the model she had tried to imitate in her own fiction. She then emphasized romance's presentation of the "strange," a presentation that "implies a criticism of the familiar of which we lack any criterion of authenticity other than it is ours."78

2 The School of a Great Master Hawthorne

The fiction of Hawthorne provides many remarkable examples of the extravagance of romance—extravagance seems the word most often applied to the genre and to yellow journalism during the nineteenth century. It is particularly apt for us to consider Hawthorne's fiction at this point because, as we noted in passing in the previous chapter, many turn-of-the-century writers were keenly sensitive to the legacy of his narratives. In fact, one contemporary spoke in 1887 of "the school of that great master."1 Hawthorne's Ghost In referring to the school of Hawthorne or to the Hawthorne tradition in this study, however, I do not mean that the authors I consider necessarily thought of themselves as the disciples of their predecessor or that they understood his work in all of its substantial complexity. Nor do I mean to imply that their romances are pure descendants of the Hawthorne model. The authors at the center of this study were also influenced by other literary figures, including various French writers and the French reclamation of Poe's romances.2 I do mean that Hawthorne's example, as a romancer with a social conscience, was still an abiding "imaginative" presence in fin de siècle literary culture. Consider, for example, an apologetic comment by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1906: "Nathaniel Hawthorne never appealed in the highest degree to me. The fault, I am sure, is my own, but I always seemed to crave stronger fare than he gave one. It was too subtle, too elusive, for effect. . . 31

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though I can quite understand [his] high artistic claims . . . and the delicate charm of his style."3 In short, whether or not specifically recognized at any given moment by any given author or reviewer, Hawthorne's example haunted the romance tradition at the turn of the century. As James's ambivalent book on his predecessor suggests, Hawthorne's ghost was indeed by no means always an undetected presence. Writers as different as Edward Bellamy and Joseph Conrad were aware of their participation in the Hawthornean heritage of romance.4 Reading Hawthorne specifically led Wells to worry about his ability as a writer, and early in his career, as he reports, he "began a romance, very much under the influence of Hawthorne."5 Austin's father introduced her to Hawthorne'sfiction,and Davis's mother shared with him at an early age her intense enthusiasm for Hawthorne's fiction. Both Austin and Davis were as much influenced by this exposure as they were by their later admiration of Stevenson's and Kipling's writings.6 One critic understandably expresses surprise that Kipling seems never to have mentioned Hawthorne,7 but Kipling's contemporary reviewers frequendy compared his work to his predecessor's.8 Moreover, if there is any truth to the observation that Stevenson "was always near the surface of [Kipling's] mind,"9 then the Hawthorne tradition came to Kipling, at the very least, through Stevenson. Stevenson's transmission of the Hawthorne tradition doubtless also affected Crane and London, both of whom apparently do not mention Hawthorne while their reviewers and critics do.10 Both, however, attended to Stevenson and Kipling. In his eulogy on Kipling (1901), which we noted previously, London specifically praised Stevenson.11 Some similar recognition lurks beneath Crane's disapproval of the Stevenson model; for Crane not only appropriated at times Stevenson's romance formula but also, relatedly, admitted in 1892 to having employed the "clever Rudyard Kipling style."12 Davis, Austin, and Wells, on the other hand, indicate direct admiration for Stevenson's work.13 It is important to note in this virtual daisy chain of associations that Hawthorne's romances were a formative model for Stevenson,14 as his reviewers noted time and again.15 In other words, in some cases the example of Hawthorne's stories exerted an influence on the journalistic school of romancers directly; in other cases it exerted this influence indirecdy as a palimpsest beneath the exemplary productions of writers like Stevenson and Kipling. In the act of writing, authors as fond of Hawthorne as was Stevenson, and authors as fond of Stevenson as was Kipling, could not help but reinscribe—consciously or unconsciously—in their own fiction features of their predecessor's work. In reading these "reinscribing" authors, other

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writers necessarily recovered—consciously or unconsciously—this intertext through acts of memory stimulated by textual cues as part of the literary language or culture of their time. As Michael Riffaterre observes,"Theintertext of the narrative acts as the unconscious of fiction and . . . readers recover or discover that intertext because the narrative itself contains clues leading back to it."16 This is not to suggest, however, that the authority of Hawthorne's example exerted a monolithic influence on subsequent practice. The substantial difference between James's and Chesterton's romances resists such a conclusion. The possibility of such a monolithic influence was contravened by the achievement of other writers, by the creative proclivities for revising tradition, and by the intrinsic ambiguous nature of romance, as Hawthorne understood it. For him, the genre was a polymorphous medium, and at its best it simultaneously intimates and obscures some profound truth. Hawthorne pertinently wrote, "When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one."17 Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial" Even its plot, narratively integrating commonplace and dream matter (such as mysterious forces and disembodied voices), suggests that "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832) is an enigmatic account. After an equivocal prelude, this tale opens with an exchange between elderly Roger Malvin, who has been wounded in a battle with Native Americans, and Reuben Bourne, who is engaged to Malvin's daughter, Dorcas. Malvin insists that he is going to die and that Bourne might as well abandon him and save himself. Although Bourne can determine neither Malvin's true intention nor his own feelings, he leaves with the promise that he will one day return to bury his prospective father-in-law. Bourne is rescued and eventually marries Dorcas, whom he allows to believe that he had left the forest only after her father had died and was interred. Bourne's social existence does not fare well, however, and in search of a new start he unconsciously leads his family (wife and son) to the very wilderness site where the tale opened. Thinking he is shooting an animal, Bourne in fact kills his adolescent son beside the same gigantic rock where he had left Malvin to die. With this event the tale ends, as Bourne apparently feels some personal sort of expiation. Critics fail to agree on virtually everything in this strange story, which Hawthorne passed over in compiling the first and the expanded edition of his Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842) before including it in Mossesfroman Old

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Manse (1846). They disagree on what constitutes Reuben Bourne's transgression and how or whether hefinallyexpiates some alleged offense;18 and they even disagree on whether the story is successful or mismanaged as a narrative.19 As one sensitive reader has apdy observed of this critical history: "The 'morality' of the tale seems somehow to get out of hand, leaving the reader as baffled as Reuben himself about the exact place where something went wrong."20 This confusion may be the result of Hawthorne's intention, especially given his notion of romance as a double-faced genre. For, as we shall see, in an important sense "Roger Malvin's Burial" reflexively addresses itself as romance. Perhaps the rock in this story offers a somewhat stable site from which to gain a perspective on everything else in the tale. Although the rock has attracted some critical attention, particularly concerning its dual function as sacrificial altar and memorial gravestone,21 it has not received close attention. This oversight is surprising not only because of the size and the central position of this rock in the account, but also because it is referred to nineteen times in such a short work. Moreover, the two most extended passages mentioning the rock are peculiarly identical in language, a nearly word-forword repetition calling attention to the rock at the beginning and at the end of the story. If the rock provides a center around which the circular drama of the tale occurs, it also virtually provides a narrative frame for the reader. The two extended, reiterated passages describe the rock as a gigantic object "upon which the veins seemed to form an inscription in forgotten characters."22 This allusion suggests mysterious ancient writing, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics that received enormous attention in America during the early nineteenth century. Interest in hieroglyphics is evident in the writings of such diverse authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Poe, Melville, and even Hawthorne himself.23 Hieroglyphics comprise a writing system based on picture symbols, a system said to inform the emblem tradition.24 In the nineteenth century, it was commonly believed that hieroglyphic symbols were designed to convey deep mysteries to initiates. In contrast to the untutored perceiver of merely the phenomenal shape of the depicted object, these initiates were to penetrate the surface context of the picture to detect submerged layers of mystical significance pertaining to the mystery of existence. Although the initiates, depending on their spiritual condition and learning, were to be engaged by the multidimensionality of the hieroglyph, they would necessarily fail—as everyone must finally—to discover the significance, the ultimate sign-value, of any particular sacred symbol. This concept of the hieroglyph as a mode of secret writing, or some simi-

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lar notion, informs Hawthorne's management of the image of the rock in "Roger Malvin's Burial." Seemingly inscribed "in forgotten characters," this rock symbolically represents the mystery inherent in (1) nature, (2) the human heart, (3) language, and (4) narrative. Nature The rock is, in terms of its primary identity, a manifestation of nature. But that it seems—Hawthorne carefully repeats this word—to convey some message in a dead and lost language is an impression resulting from the human tendency (in Hawthorne's opinion) to read meaning into nature, to imagine in nature a reflection of divine instruction or of human purposes.25 Two of Hawthorne's contemporaries, Emerson and Thoreau, included this religious tradition in their works. Emerson claimed, for example, that the world provides "a grammar of hieroglyphs" and that the poet "shall use Nature as his hieroglyphic."26 Thoreau similarly wondered, "What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last?"27 For Hawthorne, however, nature might indeed be as mysterious as a hieroglyph, but its enigma does not necessarily conceal some ultimate truth, design, or purpose informing life. Nature, as synecdochically represented by the rock in Hawthorne's narrative, only seems to convey some message in a forgotten language. The tendency to sense some obscure message in nature (here represented by the rock) suggests that the human mind appropriates the phenomenal world in an effort to ferret out the secret of its own existence. For Hawthorne, the human attraction to the mutual enigma of nature and the self tends to result collectively in the subjective, possibly delusive assumptions: that there is truly something to be disclosed and that this something is meaningful in human terms, especially human desires and expectations. The Human Heart This impulse to read nature is generated by "the heart," Hawthorne's usual metonymy for the source of the mind's motives. In his fiction Hawthorne frequently correlates the experience of wilderness (nature) and of compulsion (mind) to suggest that human motives are as mysterious in their design as are natural phenomena. If nature seems to communicate some obscure message, so too does the human mind. Accordingly, Reuben represents all mankind in being "unable to penetrate to the secret place of his heart where his motives lay hidden" (p. 356).28 In Hawthorne's fiction the heart of the

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The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

wilderness routinely stands for both a natural and a psychological terrain. This conflation is implied, for instance, in the reference to "the desolate heart of Nature" (p. 357) in "Roger Malvin's Burial."29 As this metaphor suggests, Hawthorne does not share Emerson's and Thoreau's belief in an alleged benign interaction between nature and the mind. The connection between nature and the mind is one of a mutual ambiguity that always ultimately eludes human decoding. The connection between the metonymic heart (mind) and the synecdochic rock (nature) is implied by the designation of the inscriptions as veins, which connote more than geological formations. As critics have noted, the rock represents Reuben's hardened heart, which also mutually serves as the sacrificial altar for his son's death as well as his father-in-law's tombstone and sepulcher (p. 356). The connection between the rock and the heart is perhaps most pronounced at the conclusion of the story. Then tears are said to gush out of Reuben's stricken heart "like water from a rock" (p. 360).

Language Confronted by incomprehensible motives and impenetrable natural phenomena—by a moral and physical wilderness—the human mind (Hawthorne suggests) creates various belief systems, such as the notion that nature and the mind evidence supernatural directives (p. 356). In all likelihood, Hawthorne indicates, these beliefs are merely projections of the human heart, which "naturalizes" its encounter with phenomena. For Hawthorne, the impulse behind these projections of belief seems also to account for language. Since in "Roger Malvin's Burial" language is grounded on the encounter of the inscrutable mind with cryptic nature, words too are mystifying in spite of their presumed function to elucidate. The speech of the characters in the story, accordingly, is highly ambiguous. The intention and meaning of this speech are always as uncertain as are those of human motives and natural phenomena in the tale. The very first dialogue in the story, the exchange between Roger Malvin and Reuben Bourne, is typically fraught with ambiguity and ambivalence for speaker and hearer alike. Neither can fathom his own motives or those of the other person. Although Malvin is said to try, "with generous art, to wile [Bourne] to his own good" (p. 341), his aim remains complex, directed severally at Reuben (to save the young man), at Dorcas (to preserve her joy by letting her fiancé return alive), and at himself (to act honorably). And

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Bourne, whose youth renders him even less self-aware than the elder Malvin, cannot decipher Malvin's words or the "change both in [Malvin's] countenance and voice" (p. 343); for countenance is also a form of communication in the story, especially when it reveals "deep lines" (p. 338) similar to the hieroglyphic veining of the heart and of the rock. Later, Dorcas similarly reads Reuben's face. It is a "change in her lover's countenance" (p. 347) that she interprets to substantiate what she wishes to believe concerning Reuben's role in the fate of her father. The failure of expression (in the double sense of language and appearance) is also implied by Malvin's "broken accents" and Reuben's "broken voice" (pp. 346, 355). In both intention and effect, expression of every kind by Reuben and by all of the other characters in this story is obscured. Their language is not capable "of returning definite answers" even as it struggles to convey some "incommunicable thought" (pp. 347, 349). Human acts of communication try to reveal something to others or to oneself, but inevitably seem only to conceal some elusive mystery. Narrative At one point in the story Dorcas sings a song, which "work[s] magic" by making "the walls of her forsaken home seem . . . to encircle her" (p. 358). Not only in songs or verse does the artistic use of language deceive, but also in histories, which Hawthorne's early nineteenth-century audience tended to trust as reliable conveyers of facts.30 Hawthorne suggests that historical accounts are only imaginative constructions of language. They, too, deceptively conceal human motives and providential natural designs even while seeming to disclose them. This is the point of Reuben's daydream of posterity: "enveloped by tradition in mysterious attributes, the men of future generations would call him godlike" (p. 352; emphasis added). Nor is the versified providential history of the Bible, that cornerstone of Hawthorne's American culture, exempt from the deceptive nature of language. Hawthorne is very oblique in making this suggestion at the end of his tale.31 In the last paragraph, as a withered branch falls and strikes the strange rock, "Reuben's heart is [similarly] stricken, and the tears gushed out like water from a rock" (p. 360). He utters a prayer, words that he thinks express his expiation but that may only be a form of self-deception. Highly problematical here is the requirement for Reuben's apparent expiation: the sacrificial death of an innocent son by his father's hands. This ending inverts the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, and recapitulates the New Testament story of the Father and Son. Which paradigm

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ought we to apply? If we choose the New Testament model as an "antitype" fulfilling the Old Testament "type," what does it mean to suggest that the death of the Son of God was insufficiently efficacious so as to require, as in young Cyrus's case, further sacrifices of a similar, albeit thoroughly earthly kind? Such ambiguity, centered on two conflicting biblical models in Hawthorne's tale, is compounded by the allusion to water gushing from a rock. Most readers of Hawthorne's time probably interpreted this allusion to refer to Isaiah 48:21: "And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts: he caused the waters toflowout of the rock for them: he clave the rock also, and the waters gushed out." This passage, recalling Moses's act on behalf of the deity, has usually been read as prophetic of the redeeming action of Christ. It provided a ready metaphor for countless ministers to suggest the breaking of the stony heart by the flow of saving grace. However, Hawthorne's allusion remains as problematical as does his use of the paradigm of the sacrificed son. A problem emerges in the allusion to this passagefromIsaiah. The allusion may echo Isaiah's prophecy, but it also recalls a specific instance when Moses disobeyed a divine instruction. Moses had been directed, "Speak ye unto the rock before their eyes . . . and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock" (Num. 20:8). But Moses "smote the rock twice" with his rod, "and the water came out abundantly" (Num. 20:11). As a result of this unfaithfulness and disobedience, Moses was punished: "Because ye believed me not . . . therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them" (Num. 20:12). These passages provide the background of the Isaiah passage, which is nonetheless usually read to forecast the positive effect of Christian faith. Nevertheless, this background stresses the failure of faith, a devastating doubt that denies Moses his entry into the promised land. The double biblical allusion of thefinalscene of Hawthorne's story, then, leaves the alert reader with questions, not answers. Was Reuben's act, a matter of striking rather than of speaking, indicative of a genuine redemption—thefiilfillmentof the Isaiah prophecy—or of only a misperception of redemption—the recapitulation of Moses' disobedience? The palimpsest of the aborted sacrifice of Isaac and the abetted sacrifice of Jesus only complicates matters for the reader. Finally, Hawthorne's tale not only does not determine whether or not Reuben is deceived in thinking that his transgression is expiated by the bizarre sacrifice of his son; the story also unsettles the conventional view of the Bible as a stable rock of factfirmenough for a

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system of belief.32 Hawthorne's story suggests that the Bible is constructed of language, and like all other verse and history, provides only ambiguity. Apparently, readers impose their own desires and expectations on scripture even as they routinely do on natural phenomena and human motives. The ending of Hawthorne's story is troublesome in other ways as well. Throughout the narrative it is not clear whether Reuben's guilt does or does not have a genuine cause. On the whole, critics agree that he has committed no crime but simply errs, probably, in the matter of concealment. Mere concealment seems a rather trivial offense to require atonement by the death of a child. The sheer disproportion of uncertain cause and a bizarre outcome ought not to elude us as readers. Moreover, if anything has been clear in the narrative, it is, as we have seen, that concealment appears to be a condition of existence, including the meaning and origin of language, mind, and nature. Everything comprising human experience, the story suggests, remains (to human perception at least) utterly ambiguous. Everything in this experience seems to hint at, even while it seems to hide, some unknowable and incommunicable mystery. If the ending of Hawthorne's story suggests this ambiguity in several ways, so likewise does its opening. What is one to make of the narrator's assertion that his "tale is not of love" (p. 349) when the word love appears frequently in the narrative and when varieties of love, including self-love, define the interaction between the characters? And what is one to make of the prologue when it vacillates between praise and condemnation of the combatants and, as well, of the nature of romance, the genre of the tale itself? The knotted ambiguity of the ending of the story—whether any expiation has, necessarily or unnecessarily, occurred—is in fact adumbrated in the prologue by the narrator. The narrator says that "imagination, by casting certain circumstances judiciously into the shade, may see much to admire in the heroism of a little band, who gave battle to twice their number" (p. 337; emphasis added). This equivocal comment conveys a strong impression of the general deceptiveness of the imagination, particularly when expressed in "the moonlight of romance" (p. 337). Hawthornean Romance In what sense does the strange illumination of romance deceive? Since romance deceives, why should we continue to read "Roger Malvin's Burial," which we presumably have just begun in search of some insight? Or, perhaps the question is: How should we read this story and all other romances?

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As the image of moonlight suggests, romance does not provide direct or full illumination. Romance necessarily conceals certain elusive truths about existence even as it tries or pretends to reveal them. When romance behaves in this fashion, Hawthorne implies, it is as ethically responsible as it can be. It then emancipates the reader's mind from various kinds of authority so that it may experience a sense of greater freedom concerning human options—uncertain options, to be sure, given the possibility that creation may be no more than a moral blank. This kind of romance provides a mirror circularly reflecting the reader's thought back to him- or herself in a way which invites a reseeing of the seemingly authoritative given of everyday experience. Made up of language, set in nature, and concerned with the human heart, romance only reflexively mirrors life and its own nature as a reflector. In this way, however, it "truthfully" acknowledges some ever-elusive, ever-undisclosed secret of existence, including the human mind. In this special sense, Hawthorne implies, romance is expressed in broken accents hinting at some forgotten language, a language that is an undifferentiated amalgamation (like that of verse, history, and scripture) of fact and fiction, the experiential and the imaginative. The artistic configurations of "Roger Malvin's Burial," as Hawthorne's romance about romance, comprise a mysterious hieroglyphic suggesting a hidden secret, which may or may not actually exist and which may or may not actually conceal some ontological verity. That any such ontological truth exists is also certainly uncertain. The one truth romance seems capable of, in Hawthorne's terms, is the circular reflection of the human experience of concealment in nature and in the mind. This experience itself, however, may or may not be an accurate perception, for possibly (as with Reuben's guilt) there may be nothing to hide. As readers we share in Reuben's compulsive confrontation with the ambiguities of life.33 Like him, we circle and recircle some elusive mystery that is the undisclosed meaning of existence and of his representational, seemingly "allegorical" story. In the tale, as in the life it represents (it is implied), we are left in a world that appears simultaneously to invite and resist knowing. Unmoored from various customary sources of authority, we are abandoned by the narrator, the author, and the deity (it is implied) to try again and again to penetrate to some core of revealed truth (which may be nothing at all) as it ever recedes in the moonlight of human experience from our ability to see and our capacity to understand. As the artistry in "Roger Malvin's Burial" demonstrates, romance can be a sophisticated medium, one that possibly provokes the reader into enter-

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taining epistemological and even ontological questions—a "revolution of the mind," in the words of one Hawthorne critic.34 Whereas this capacity of Hawthorne's fiction proved "too subtle, too elusive" for romancers like Doyle, it became exemplary, either directly or indirectly (as transmitted through Stevenson), for a number of other turn-of-the-century authors. They, like Chesterton, turned to romance for its ability to present "existence . . . [as] a strange thing," as "a mystery." They turned to it, in the words of Davis's mother, because in it "the commonplace . . . took on a sudden mystery and charm."35 Like James, however ambivalently throughout his career,36 they turned to the genre for its "beautiful circuit and subterfuge of our thought"—for its mirrorlike reflection of our thought back to us even as, paradoxically, this reflection remains indirect, elusive, and possibly deceptive. So writers as different as Chesterton and James agreed with Hawthorne that romance can appear simultaneously to intimate and conceal the essential mystery of existence, a mystery (if there is one at all) potentially subverting our conventional beliefs. Nevertheless, they and their contemporaries by no means agreed about the purpose of this capacity of romance. They indeed used his romances as a speculum—precisely what Hawthorne indicated they were by their generic nature—and found in them an authority for their own practice. Some romancers, like Wilde, perpetuated the tease of Hawthornean ambiguity as an aesthetic end in itself in their quest for a transcendent art. Even more profoundly influenced by Hawthorne's example, other romancers, like Wells, featured this same narrative ambiguity in order to unmoor their readers from various kinds of diseased authority, to insist therapeutically on a recovered freedom of mind concerning options in both art and life.37 These other romancers extrapolated from Hawthorne's example a particular type of the genre, a type different from both the eventuary and the aesthetic varieties of the genre, a type deeply concerned with social implications.

s Eventuary Romance Haggard

Eventuary romances use the conventional matter of the genre chiefly to emphasize plot and action. These works are designed primarily to entertain, to sell. The reader of eventuary romance is supposed to buy and consume the story as a treat of transient and renewable pleasure. Ideally, this reader's addictive appetite for such trifles should demand more of the same kind— sequels, in fact. The provocation of thought in the reader is neither the goal nor the likely result of eventuary romances. Their implied reader presumably remains passive, a captive to the vicarious, and very safe, enjoyment of the "action" of these stories. In effect, these stories are designed to be "used up" or exhausted by the time their plot is unraveled at the end. Their prospective passive consumer would seem to be engaged in a harmless, if frivolous, activity. Nevertheless, as we shall observe in Chapter 6, sometimes elite concern over the social consequences of eventuary romances led to dire warnings about the influence of this genre on its "innocent" and "enchanted" audience. These imagined consequences ranged from dereliction in the workplace to criminal behavior in the streets and at home. Such assaults on the genre, however, were really a continuation of a long-lived, deep suspicion not only of romance but also of the novel as a popular form. A version of it surfaces in our own time whenever various manifestations of popular culture are berated for their encouragement of the alleged dissipation of the masses or of the rising generation. Of course, such jeremiads are informed by at least one valid assumption: that there is more than meets the eye in all cultural expressions. Although it may not always be immediately apparent, no artwork is free of ethical im42

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plications, whether or not its creator intends them. Every product of the imagination reflects authorial ethos, either by design or by accident. In still another and related sense, an imaginative work also reflects a cultural ethos, possibly one that is beyond or counter to what its creator may have had in mind. Moreover, as we remarked in the Introduction, the "production" of the meaning of a work resides in its hermeneutic actualization by the reader. This production may be, as Iser and RifFaterre have indicated, the result of the reader's response to codes in the narrative or it may be, as Oscar Wilde and Stanley Fish have indicated,1 more randomly the result of the viewer's tendency to read "ethically" into an artwork his or her own experience, whether or not this effect accords with the intentions of its fashioner. In short, any human construction, including all modes of the romance, is a product of the imagination and likewise open to appropriative, if not necessarily appropriate, imaginative readings. Thus, whatever the shape of its plot and however simply commercial its creator's intention, eventuary romance serves as a node of ethos for its author, its culture, and its reader. In eventuary romance the profound configuration of this ethical dimension usually lies, as if it were a subtext, below the surface of the narrative plot; it also frequendy lies below the surface or on the periphery of the author's and the average reader's conscious perception. In other words, in trying to gratify an audience of consumers, an author of eventuary romance generally reinscribes (sometimes directly, but most often covertly through repetition and doubling) pervasive cultural patterns, including prevailing ideas about class, race, and gender. Eventuary romances are fundamentally formulary. Whether these formulas are consciously or unconsciously recognized, they sometimes negotiate (if not quite resolve) "tensions and ambiguities resulting from . . . conflicting interests," and they can assist in (when they do not confiscate) "the process of assimilating changes in values."2 Essentially, however, eventuary romances tend to displace such fundamental complex human concerns, at the level of conscious perception at least, by valorizing simple reason, the given social order, or the world of facts as presently and comfortably recognized by the reader. This is the world reinforced, say, by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Eventuary romances appeal to their audience in part because the various ruptures briefly and safely entertained in their plots are mended at their end with a reinstatement of the status quo, including the typical paradigms of the reader's culture. Because its mode of manifesting ethos inadvertendy or peripherally implies the deflection rather than the provocation of thought in its audience,

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eventuary romance differs significandy from ethical romance. Unlike Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial," eventuary romance does not evidence either authorial intentions or narrative codes that invite the reader to probe, say, the epistemological and ontological notions embedded in the paradigms of a given cultural matrix. Recall, for example, Doyle's disapproval of the subdety and elusiveness of Hawthorne's fiction. Eventuary romance in fact often circumvents complex thought by appealing to the pleasure of mere consumption. From the turn-of-the-century publisher's, author's, and general reader's point of view, accordingly, the intention and design behind eventuary romance were hardly focused on social issues and hardly seemed sinister. At the heart of eventuary romance, as they saw it, was a simple exchange of money for entertainment. Because of this overriding commercial concern, the participation of eventuary romance in the dialectical pattern of the genre—its simultaneous intimation and concealment of some mystery of existence—is accidental and incidental. Whereas in ethical romance this feature of the genre actively invites the reader to reflect, in eventuary romance this feature masks itself as an idle entertainment for the passive consumer. Reflexivity, accordingly, plays a different role in these two versions of the genre. In ethical romances, reflexivity implicates the reader in the text by dissolving the boundary between them; in eventuary romances, reflexivity insularly identifies and commercially advertises the work in hand as a superior version of the genre. Dr. Watson, for example, dismisses "a yellow-backed novel" he tries to read because "the puny plot of the story was so thin . . . when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping."3 This mystery to which he refers is literally the story we are reading, his and Doyle's story. Watson's comment reflexively identifies this story as essentially concerned with plot (not with an elusive, subtle mystery of existence) and also advertises it as a superior version of eventuary romance. H. Rider Haggard's best-seller King Solomon's Mines (1885) is virtually a paradigmatic specimen of eventuary romance. Not only enormously popular at the time of its first appearance and through the turn of the century, this book by "King Romance," as Haggard was dubbed, became a consummate model for numerous imitators. In one year alone, John De Morgan, perhaps the most prolific of these imitators, made a living by writing such pastiches of Haggard's work as King Solomon's Treasures (1887), He, A Companion to She (1887), and "It" A Wild Weird History of Marvelous, Phantasmagorical Adventures in Search ofHe, She, and Jess . . . A Haggard Conclusion (1887). And the continued popularity of King Solomon's Mines is beyond question. A glance at the copyright page of the Penguin printing of King

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Solomon's Mines reveals that this current edition, which is only one among several, has been reprinted almost annually for the last thirty years. In its own time, the book sold remarkably well, achieving a sale of "hundreds of thousands" by 1911.4 This longevity in the marketplace is perhaps especially noteworthy given the major challenges to the doctrine of British imperialism that had surfaced during the Edwardian period.5 Although King Solomon's Mines was deliberately written as "a book for boys" after the example of Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and was in fact marketed as five-shilling juvenilia,6 it was dedicated by Haggard "to all the big and little boys who read it."7 Indeed, this book was not only read by children at home and in public schools, where it was sometimes used as a classroom textbook; it was also read by adults at all levels of society,8 including significant writers such as Stevenson and Conrad. For many of these late Victorian and Edwardian (primarily male) readers, the prevalent idea of Africa became the picture of the territory described in King Solomon's Mines,9 even though (as Haggard later confessed) his novel was "a work of pure imagination, for in [its] day very little was known of the region wherein its scenes were laid."10 For many of these readers, moreover, King Solomon's Mines became the exemplar against which to measure other imperialistic fiction. Even Conrad, who hated Haggard's work as "too horrible for words,"11 apparently consciously or unconsciously shaped features of Heart ofDarkness (1902) in terms of Haggard's model for the imperialistic romance.12 Just what accounts for the long-lived popularity of this book over the last one hundred years mayfinallyelude us. Its eventuary plot of adventure, its humor, and its plain narrative manner—each incidentally averting the audience's attention from racist and misogynistic undertones—no doubt make the book as appealing to some today as it was earlier. Possibly, there is another feature of this romance that has likewise contributed significantly to its perennial success: that in King Solomon's Mines Haggard has apparently perpetrated a joke, one with unintended complex underlying ethical implications. This ruse is designed to appeal (probably liminally) to the prurient interests of the male readers he himself declared as his public. At the core of his novel is a joke that combines male adolescent pornographic fantasies with the misogynistic and imperialistic impulses of Haggard's imagined audience of "big and little boys." This jest is not designed to provoke thought in Haggard's audience, and its ethosfinallyexceeds both the author's intentions and his contemporary readers' awareness. In exposing this jest at the heart of King Solomon's Mines, it is important to keep in mind Haggard's admission that he never likedfiction,but that he

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nevertheless wished for the sort of money he knew it could earn him. Such an attitude suggests a less than serious approach to his craft in this book, and pertinently Haggard also claimed that he wrote this "mere jeu d'esprit" in his leisure hours during about six-weeks time.13 By his own admission, then, Haggard saw his romance as a humorous trifle to be consumed, a jeu (joke) undertaken for a frankly commercial purpose. Comedy and adventure would certainly appeal to the male audience he clearly had in mind, but even better in attaining this market would be the "playful" inclusion of sex in his book. A Jeu d'Esprit After the publication of King Solomon's Mines Haggard stated in a review of some recent fiction that "sexual passion is the most powerful lever with which to stir the mind of man, for it lies at the root of all human things."14 Sex was as much a seller of books in Haggard's day as it is in our own. In contrast to today, however, the sexual content of these works was much less blatant, much more covert and encoded in mass-marketed works.15 It is in this sense of hidden, latent, or liminal communication, we might suspect, that Haggard refers to sex as a stirrer of minds, an expression which in the specific context of its subject of sexual content might itself be either an encoded lewd jest or else a rather peculiar displacement. For to say that sex stirs minds either reveals (humorously) or conceals (censoriously) what indeed is more palpably stirred by sex. Haggard readily exploited the late Victorian interest in sex that he remarked upon in his review. His fiction, for instance, sometimes included women who are naked, who barely avoid rape, who yield to sexual temptation, or who are redeemed from fallen lives.16 In King Solomon's Mines, too, Haggard apparently employed sex as a "powerful lever" to insure the marketability of his book. Specifically, he seemed to have hit upon the strategy of structuring his book on the male fantasy of conquering the female body, a fantasy mingling cultural paradigms of misogyny and imperialism. What, Haggard might have wondered, would appeal more to his projected readership of "big and little boys" than hidden or liminal sexual innuendo, an essentially "dirty joke" with mythic overtones? In hinting at the mythic, however, Haggard's commercial reinscription of prevalent cultural patterns and their ethos apparently exceeded his more limited sense of the joke he planned to perpetrate. King Solomon's Mines explicitly refers to jokes, and, perhaps, in doing so it may also hint at the possible presence of more subtle ones. Tricks, for

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example, sometimes specifically facilitate the plot of this romance. Captain John Good's dishabille, half-shaven face, and removable eye and teeth become "playful" instruments of "humorous" mystification and domination over the hoodwinked indigenous Africans. Can most readers resist laughing at this imperialist ruse? Beneath the surface of this jest, however, lies a more serious matter. Good's funny oddities and sleights of hand save his life and the lives of his white colleagues by asserting a "benign" form of control over their black audience. Here the use of facetious, "harmless" wile supplants the necessity to use militaristic, "harmful" force in managing the unruly Africans. This maneuver, in which humor serves imperialistic ends, certainly diverts attention from certain realities of British imperialistic practice in encounters with Africans. And this maneuver anticipates the end of Haggard's tale, when the white adventurers restore order among the warring black tribes. The promise here, as in other eventuary romances, is one of displacing the turbulence of the eventuary plot with the reinstatement of simple reason, social order, and the known world of facts. In this way, Haggard's narrative implicidy tries to manage its reader in the same way that Good manages his African audience. For Haggard's reader is always reassured that the enduring typical paradigms of the status quo can be counted on to prevail and are beyond need of any thoughtfiil scrutiny. As the ruptures of the action and plot of the romance are smoothed away, Haggard's implied audience is invited to consume the narrative passively, simply, and safely, as if it were only a mutually appreciated, harmless joke too elementary to warrant a second thought—or afirstthought. The comic power of this joke simultaneously demonstrates and diverts attention from Haggard's imperialistic desire to colonize, to pacify, his targeted readers for exploitive economic reasons. Haggard's presentation of Captain Good in the romance suggests that overwhelming the indigenous people of Africa, however potentially threatening the effort may be, is as much a "mere jeu d'esprit" as is the novel itself. Captain Good's role in effect serves as a facetious subtextual gloss; it covertly decodes King Solomon's Mines as a commercially conceived, "harmless" confidence game in which its author conducts a "humorous" imperialistic quest for the reader's treasure (expendable capital). Besides the overt function of tricks (with the subde undertones we have noted) to advance the plot of the romance, there are smaller moments in the novel that likewise intimate Haggard's interest in (and perhaps authorial use of) hoaxes. For instance, the place called Loo possibly alludes to the

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game of that name, and the character called Gagoola possibly alludes to gag, suggesting a dual response to her as someone who is funny and who makes one nauseous.17 Appropriately, Gagoola's "evil mind" is ever ready for some awful "jest" or "sneer" (pp. 227, 228). No wonder that at one point Haggard's narrator (Allan Quatermain) instructs Gagoola, "Do not jest with us, " a warning followed by a candid question: "Would it prove a hoax after all?" (p. 219). This question amounts to another clue to Haggard5s game in the romance, a clue anticipated several pages earlier when the explorers (and the reader) are on the verge of attaining their goal. Then Haggard's narrator asks his associates, and presumably his audience, "Can't you guess what this is?" (p. 207), as if some riddle were about to be resolved. Such seemingly reflexive moments in the romance, especially when highlighted by the plotdriving ploys of Captain Good, intimate the existence of a possibly less obvious joke beneath the surface of the humor of the narrative, a jest buried like a hidden treasure within King Solomon's Mines itself. Besides such major plot-facilitating incidents and minor dialogic moments suggesting that some joke is being perpetrated within the romance, there are also clues as to what the subject matter of this jest might be. That the ruse at the center of King Solomon's Mines might specifically relate to women is intimated by a curious "humorous" disclaimer in the first chapter that draws inordinate attention to itself. In this chapter Quatermain promises "to tell the strangest story" that he knows and admits that this assertion "may seem a queer thing to say . . . considering that there is no woman in it " (p. 12). That the strangest story one can tell ought to have a woman in it is itself perhaps "a queer thing to say," and presumably the remark is meant to be funny in a misogynistic vein. But then Quatermain contradicts himself, and adds, "except Foulata" and "Gagoola, if she was a woman and not a fiend" (p. 12). There is no way for the reader to make much sense of the narrator5s "queer" remarks at this point, neither of his claim that the strangest story would be one with a woman nor his peculiar exception of the two women who do indeed function crucially in the story. Haggard has Quatermain draw the reader5s attention to this issue of the presence or the absence of women in his book in order to raise the question of female involvement in this narrative. But then, for the time being, he drops the matter, as if it were a sort of riddle or mystery that will be solved in the course of reading. The narrator's "queer" remarks may serve as a tease potentially urging the reader to go on with the narrative. These peculiar remarks, however, cannot reasonably be read as an invitation to thought by the reader, who after all has nothing at all to rely on at this point other than the narrator's implied promise to make sense of his own comments.

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Indeed, the average reader is likely to remain dependent upon the author to answer whatever questions are raised by his narrator's curious, contradictory jumble: first, Do women figure in the story? and second, Does their presence or absence matter to that story as narrative? Essentially, in this moment of humorous evasion (not indicating why stories with women are strange) and of blatant contradiction (not indicating why Foulata in particular is dismissible), the reader has been alerted to some kind of authorial prank, a confidence game centered around the idea of woman. We might suspect, incidentally, that this opening ploy in the novel continued to fascinate Haggard even late in his life. In his autobiography (1926), for instance, he remarks upon Robert Louis Stevenson's failure to get the joke behind Quatermain's misattributions of quotations, and he then reports another response to his romance: "A girls' school, or some members of it, evidently weary of the society of their own sex, wrote congratulating me, with great earnestness because I had in 'King Solomon's Mines' produced a thrilling book Svithout a heroine!' " 18 Placing "without a heroine" in quotation marks emphasizes the key matter in Haggard's mind as he recalls this comment, the issue raised in the claim in his novel "that there is no woman in it." These girls evidently accepted his narrator's word at face value, missed the authorial management of the contradiction in Quatermain's comments, and failed to decode the joke, which in any event was designed for a male audience. For contrary to the narrator's claim, and indeed suggested by the curious evasion and confusion of that claim, King Solomon's Mines certainly depicts a woman, a fantastic beau ideal beyond any representation of the feminine that Foulata, Gagoola, or any real woman could ever embody. And Haggard covertly guides his "big and little boy" readers in an erogenous exploration of her available, fantastically voluptuous body. The Female Body As the da Silvestra map included in the second chapter anticipates graphically, the terrain over which the adventurers must traverse corresponds to a woman's body.19 The three zones emphasized on this map are Sheba's Breasts (diagramed as if centered between two extended arms), Leu (diagramed as the letter U), and the treasure cave (diagramed as an inverted triangle around a pit). These geographic features correspond to the breasts, the navel, and the genitalia of the female body. The language of the novel is as pictorially graphic and suggestive as is the map, especially when addressing the first of these features. The name da

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Silvestra gives these two mountains reveals his perception of them specifically in feminine anatomical terms: "no snow is on the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba's Breasts"; "let him who comes follow the map, and climb the snow of Sheba's left breast till he comes to the nipple" (p. 27).20 Quatermain falls into the same mode of discourse later when he looks at these two mountains and concludes that they "are shaped exactly like a woman's breasts . . . perfectly round and smooth; and on the top of each was a vast round hillock covered with snow, exacdy corresponding to the nipple on the female breast" (p. 73). In fact, Quatermain expands upon his observations on these two apparently "extinct volcanoes." He presumably titillates his lateVictorian male readers by resorting to the word curious twice as well as to the imagery of clothing, thereby suggesting here that these voyeuristic readers are seeing a woman's breasts unclothed: "as though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange mists and clouds gathered and increased around them" and "wrapped [them] in this curious gauzy mist" (p. 74). Relatedly, among other similar references, Quatermain later reports his position "right under the nipple of Sheba's left breast," notes that "over us towered Sheba's snowy breasts," and teasingly suggests that "Sheba's breasts were modesdy veiled in diaphanous wreaths of mist" (pp. 80, 87,103). Progressing in their journeyfromthese topographic breasts to where "the road ends" at "the Three Witches,'" which are "placed like the points of a triangle" with "a great pit between them" (pp. 110-111), the adventurers mustfirstpass through the native town of Loo (Leu on the map). Representing the navel of the feminized terrain, Loo is imaged as a U on da Silvestra's map and is the site of a bizarre, albeit pertinent, ritual in the romance.21 This ritual at the topographic navel of Loo, the central point of both the human body and the anthropomorphized landscape traversed by the adventurers, symbolizes the "central" mystery of human existence. Here the women chant a song with the refrain "What is the lot of man born of woman?" (p. 131). The answer is death, the end of the road from birth: in short, the central mystery of life. It is not surprising, then, that to Quatermain this song alternates in completely opposite meanings: "Now it seemed to be a love song, now a . . . war chant, and last of all a death-dirge" (p. 131). Moreover, not only the song but also the action of the women at this topographic navel likewise symbolizes the "navelistic" dualism of the mystery of human existence. Whereas the witch Gagoola's dance eventuates in the frenzied murder of countless males by women, the charming Foulata's

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subsequent dance eventuates in the arousal of male passion for the purpose of the regeneration of life by women. This ritualistic activity, like the song, expresses a cycle that the navel likewise signifies: the beginning of life, the birth into mortality, is simultaneously a condemnation to the fatal ending of that life. For the male audience of this ritual in the story, as perhaps for the male audience of Haggard's book, this pattern seems somehow to apply to men more than to women. Led by Gagoola, who is thought to be immortal, the women in the story appear to be the agents of this pattern: they give birth and they kill. King Solomon's Mines primarily stresses the plight of the male who is at once given life and sentenced to death by women, who are the engendering maternal/bewitching agents of male enslavement to mortality, a point to which we shall return. From the navel of Loo, the adventurers head toward the still more threatening genital region of the topographic female body, "the secret of the 'Three Witches'" (p. 198). Within these "points of a triangle" lies a "great cave," a "great pit," a "secret chamber"—"the Place of Death" where countless men are buried and where specifically men, betrayed by women, have met their death (p. 202). Looking at this forbidden place, Quatermain asks his associates, and doubdessly his readers too, a question which we have identified as a humorous double entendre: "Can't you guess what this is?" (p. 207).

Take a good look at this place, Haggard seems to say. This forbidden, sacred place is the female life-giving womb and the female death-sealing tomb celebrated in the ritual song and action at Loo. It is indeed the end of the road (p.111).It is like the ultimate site of the male reader's fantasy of sexual conquest of the female body. The treasure of this essentially sexual conquest of the feminized terrain, admittedly achieved at a substantial risk, can make males "the richest men in the whole world" (p. 219; emphasis added)—and so too can reinscribing the male desire for this treasure in a narrative like King Solomon's Mines. This element of substantial risk no doubt resonates with the adolescent ambivalence of Haggard's male audience toward the female body as the object (Other) of their erogenous fantasy. His book certainly evidences ambivalence over "the fate that so often overtakes those who would penetrate into the unknown" (p. 84), specifically into the "female" mines where so many men are buried. This feature of Haggard's novel is sometimes explicit in Quatermain's commentary on women; for example, he typically remarks that "women are women, all over the world, whatever their colour," and "women bring trouble as surely as the night follows the day" (pp. 144,198).

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But this misogynistic theme is also suggested in the associations Quatermain makes with the feminized cave and pit. For him, to be "buried in the bowels" of "that accursed treasure chamber," that "ghastly hole," might well prove to be a "grave" (pp. 228, 230, 234; emphasis added).22 La Petite Mort This sentiment is similar—and I speak only analogously here—to the sense of la petite mort. That is, this sentiment in effect reinscribes the old notion that to have sexual intercourse is "to do and die," that to expend lust is to decrease one's life. But the adventurers indeed escape, and with substantial treasure. They make their way, suggestively, through successively narrower tunnels until they emerge, as if reborn from the female earth, into "blushing rosy red" (p. 239). This scene of birthlike emergence from the topographic womb of the feminized earth may have been designed by Haggard to suggest the completion of some mythic pattern. Similar ritualistic patterns of a return to and a reemergence from the generative maternal earth would also be graphically depicted in Sir James Frazer's two-volume work The Golden Bough (1890). Haggard's possibly deliberate anthropological mythic overtones notwithstanding, the reemergence of his heroes from the womb/tomb of the feminine earth particularly completes, doubdess far beyond Haggard's conscious intention, what we might speak of as a culturally paradigmatic male fantasy in King Solomon's Mines. In this book, the female landscape has been penetrated and escaped, and in the process the adventurers do not "do and die." On the contrary, the men do, and the women die. Seemingly immortal Gagoola, who initiated the ritual of death at Loo, and seemingly innocent Foulata, who initiated the ritual of life at Loo, both die, as if giving representation to a prevalent male image of the sexually penetrated woman as a slain or sacrificed person. The sacrifice of Gagoola and Foulata allows for the freedom of Quatermain and his associates, who have successfully conquered the females, taken the treasure guarded by women, and escaped the feminized cave. Beyond the fear of castration which may or may not be reflected in this pattern, the fantasy expressed here seems to suggest a symbolic male revenge on women, who (as we saw at Loo) appear to control the destiny of men by giving them birth and thereby simultaneously condemning them to death.23 Da Silvestra's female companion is reported to have betrayed him (p. 202); and in Haggard's novel women betray men principally by withholding from them "the secret

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of the Three Witches,5" the secret of the generative female maternal/bewitching power over life and death. The male fantasy in this romance, emerging as a kind of treasurelike secret in lieu of the one women refuse to reveal, apparently stresses the disempowerment (the slaying, the sacrifice, or the sexual conquest) of the female.24 The subsequently empowered males in the book triumphantly escape from the womb/tomb of the maternal earth, "out of the dark [from which] we came, [and] into the dark [to which] we go" (pp. 59-60). In this sense these males symbolically express a desire to escape to a "promised land" or "Paradise" (p. 91) regained from mortality, from the postlapsarian "navelistic" cycle of birth and death seemingly determined by carnal Eve-like maternal forces. In King Solomon's Mines this fantasy finds completion in an image of male co-option and commodification of female generative capacities; for these men find fame and fortune to be in some sense regenerative. They in fact enable Quatermain in particular to give birth to the very narrative we are reading. Gender, Race, and Imperialism In the novel this male fantasy of emancipation from female mortality (the body) is also expressed in a more obvious outcome of their quest: the seemingly mythic restoration of male order (Ignosi) in a land that has been subject to female chaos (Gagoola).25 And here, as scholars have detected elsewhere, imperialism, racism, and sexism coalesce. In the argument of this book, the black Africans apparently need the dominating presence of white colonists to establish order, which, as Rudyard Kipling's Naulahka (1891) typifies, is a conventional theme of turn-of-the-century imperialist literature. But racism and imperialism merge with sexism as well when we recall that the literature of male encounters with foreign territory frequently describes this land as a female force to be subdued.26 As Kipling's "On Greenhow Hill" (1890) indicates, the imperialistic impulse can embody displaced libidinal forces.27 If King Solomon's Mines participates in this tradition of integrating imperialism and sexism, it does so exceptionally, far beyond Haggard's or his audience's conscious comprehension. In a sense, the adolescent pornographic joke informing this novel is merely a caricatured extrapolation of the usually more muted equation of imperialism and sexism in other fiction and nonfiction of Haggard's time. Foulata's dying words provide a remarkable site for considering this paradigmatic cultural equation. Her last words refer not only explicitly to racial

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barriers but also implicitly to gender barriers: "I am glad to die because I know that he cannot cumber his life with such as me, for the sun cannot mate with the darkness, nor the white with the black" (pp. 226-227). Whether or not Haggard is aware of it, his and his culture's imperialistic hegemony emerges when Foulata, who "appropriately" dies sacrificially, equates the white race to the life-giving sun and the black race to disturbing lunar forces. Haggard's and his culture's racist hegemony is clear in Foulata's renunciation of miscegenation, even if this renunciation makes death preferable to life. Haggard's and his culture's sexist attitude is less obvious here, but it is in fact present and worth close attention. To perceive the gender implications in Foulata's comment, one needs to notice that throughout the novel the moon, the celestial body of the night, is gendered as female. The best example of this association also includes imagery implying the female threat to males: "the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out clear against her sickly face like the bones on the face of a dying man" (p. 66). In other words, the sickly female force threatens men with death, and indeed, as we have seen in the romance, the quest for the sexual conquest of the female is imaged throughout the book as one that has certainly led to the demise of many men trapped within the ruse of female treachery. In this sense, then, Foulata's dying words refer to the impropriety not only of miscegenation between the black and the white races but even of union between the female moonlike forces of the night and the male sunlike forces of the day: "the sun cannot mate with the darkness." Not in Haggard's male fantasy in King Solomon's Mines, anyway: the apparent symbolic revenge on women for seemingly controlling males by giving them birth and thereby simultaneously condemning them to death, and the related desire to disempower the engendering carnal female in order to empower the emancipated "immortal" male are both epitomized by the final absence of any women in the exclusively male petit comité and reunion at the end of the romance. Although the core (if covert) activity throughout the novel is the "satiric" representational exploration of the erogenous zones of female anatomy, as if the male characters were Lilliputians climbing over a Gulliverian woman, the end of the narrative valorizes an all-male world, a sort of paradise regained and temporarily freed from the curse of femalebequeathed mortality. By the end of the novel Quatermain's claim that "there is no woman in" his book has truly been substantiated. In this way, although the narrator's confusing introductory comments are never explicitly resolved, at some level of perception the average reader is apparendy relieved of any further questions about that puzzling opening

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statement. For Gagoola and Foulata are both dead, and the protagonists revel in their all-male bond and achievement. It is as if the end of this narrative mimics and fulfills Captain Good's rendition of "Girl I left behind me" (p. 65), whisded at the start of the journey. Is the misogyny of King Solomon's Mines so great that the "secret" Solomonic treasure it offers finally is a comment on the desirability of a world not only free from the curse of mortality but also specifically from the dark and troubling (carnal, black, and lunar) forces of women? Does this book "solomonically" suggest that this quest for such treasure as was found in the feminized cave in the romance, this quest for the female, "which men spend all their lives in acquiring, is a valueless thing at the last" (p. 231)? In other words, should men ideally live their lives as narratives, like Haggard's romance, finally liberated from the presence of women? Sherlock Holmes, the epitome of the rational patriarchal figure of eventuary romance, would likely read Haggard's book in this way. Explicitly expressing "his aversion to women," Holmes never "makes merry over the cleverness of women" and specifically dislikes and distrusts their inscrutable motives, their "naturally secretive" nature.28 Like Arthur Conan Doyle and other eventuary romancers, Haggard capitalized on the prevailing male ambivalence toward women in his culture, especially the unconscious feelings of his prospective juvenile audience (of all ages) for this "mere jeu d'esprit." He would later reflect a similar personal and cultural ambivalence toward his heroines. She (1886) likewise associates a woman with the mythic and mysterious forces of life and death determining the fate of men.29 L. Horace Holly, the narrator of She, notes at a critical moment that Ayesha is "a tall and lovely woman, instinct with beauty in every part, and also with a certain snake-like grace," as she stands before him in "soft white, gauzy material" and reminds him "most forcibly of a corpse in its grave-clothes."30 At the heart of King Solomon's Mines is a particularly male-directed hoax designed to appeal liminally to the prurient interests of Haggard's readers, a joke that (whatever his conscious thoughts) combines male adolescent pornographic fantasies with the misogynistic and imperialistic inclinations of his imagined audience of "big and little boys." In the process of perpetrating this ruse as "entertainment," he perpetrated another hoax. His romance may "agreeably" conclude with the return of reason, order, and the status quo; but below the surface of this resolution, male action is expressed in mythic terms suggesting the extinction of any female presence. Through the appeal of eventuation and the guise of jest, Haggard urges his reader to consume his story, not to think about it. Haggard's narrative maneuvers, typical of eventuary romance, try to pacify the colonized reader through

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seemingly insignificant magical tricks, the sleights of hand, of storytelling. His formulary maneuvers intrinsically divert and displace the reader's attention from the imperialistic, racist, and misogynistic ethos that inadvertendy lurks beneath the surface of a tale that seems to be little more than the working out of a merely entertaining plot. Because its manifestation of ethos is inadvertent, narratively deflecting rather than provoking thought in its audience, King Solomon's Mines does not qualify as an ethical romance.

4 Aesthetic Romance James

Henry James may have shared Hawthorne's and Chesterton's view of romance as a special literary form that simultaneously insinuates and conceals some profound truth—some "eternal mystery," as James put it in 1897.1 But for James, particularly in his Paterian moods, this performance of the genre theoretically tends to be hermetic. Romance, he observed, concerns "experience blooming in a medium 'cut off' and shut up to itself."2 This feature of romance troubled and fascinated James, whose response to the genre, it should be said, was never firm. James, in fact, struggled throughout his career to integrate various modes of fiction, especially romance and realism,3 and in this struggle he simultaneously wresded with his wavering attitude toward a popular readership.4 To some extent, the inconsistencies of his effort represent the inconsistencies of his transitional time. However ambivalent James was about the practice, if not the idea, of romance and however much he attempted to wed this genre to the in-depth characterization of the novel of verisimilitude, he occasionally fashioned works that are romances of the aesthetic type. Such narratives include The Turn of the Screw (1898), which James designated as a "pure romance."5 So if on some occasions James suggested that his fiction possesses a social and political consciousness,6 on other occasions he indicated that his fiction is "a medium 'cut off' and shut up to itself." James, the author of deep novels of psychological verisimilitude and of sophisticated moral concern, is one side of a man of varied interests and literary undertakings. My comments in this chapter, however, feature the James of The Turn of the Screw, James in an aestheticist vein. 57

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This aestheticist James found fiction, including romance, appealing precisely when it provides "another world"; that is, as we heard James say in Chapter 1, when it provides an "experience that. . . muffles the ache of the actual."7 For James, when he was thinking in these terms, true art is a selfreferential artifact; it is a brilliant insular expression of beauty that derives from the human mind but also, somehow, mysteriously separates from and surpasses the usual experiential limits of that mind. In James's well-known metaphor, "the art of the romancer is, 'for the fun of it,' insidiously to cut the cable" by which the "balloon of experience" is "tied to the earth."8 Read deeply, James's observation touches on the nature of romance of the aesthetic type. Aesthetic romance differs from the eventuary variety in its management of the element of mystery typical of the genre. In eventuary romance, mystery is dispelled when its plot reinstates simple reason, social order, and the known world of fact. In effect, its "balloon of experience," its extravagant fantasy, is retied "to the earth." Of course, as we saw in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, larger, relatively undetected authorial and cultural mysteries may continue to lurk far below the surface of the plot in eventuary romance. But at the level of plot, at least, mystery seems to dissolve into the quotidian. In this way, the implied reader of eventuary romance may be comfortably reassured and sated. Aesthetic romance, in contrast, does not displace this sense of mystery; in fact it emphatically, relendessly insists upon enigma from its opening to its last page. Aesthetic romance may reflexively utilize a traditional narrative mode, even the formulas of the eventuary variety, but it does so as a tease somewhat similar to the narrator's introductory comments on the presence of women in King Solomon's Mines. When aesthetic romance harkens back to a traditional narrative mode, as Oscar Wilde's Picture of Donan Gray (1890) invokes the example of allegory, it does so only to intensify its preoccupation with mystery. This feature is most evident, perhaps, whenever aesthetic romance obviates the fulfillment of the traditional patterns it pretends to imitate. The seemingly allegorical theatrics of Wilde's romance, for instance, gesture toward a moral, yet finally they either resist or absorb any certain moral interpretations.9 At best, perhaps, one might conclude that a performance like that of Wilde's book serves as an amoral mirror in which the reader, in contrast to Dorian's example, might sense some elusive reality about the nature of life. But even this reading may be too moralistic, given Wilde's observations concerning the anarchic relativism informing all acts of interpretation. As Wilde's tale typifies, aesthetic romance not only participates in the fundamental dynamic of the genre—the simultaneous intimation and con-

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cealment of some ultimate insight—it also attempts to celebrate this sense of mystery as an enigmatic and artistic end in itself. Like the timeless puzzles of existence artistically reflected within it, aesthetic romance presents itself as an exquisite form exempt from temporal pressures, such as cultural conditions. It gives the impression of abiding more in the realm of the imagination than in the realm of temporal experience. Its "balloon of experience," in short, gives the impression of being cut free from "the earth." Hence, unlike eventuary romance, aesthetic romance does not represent itself as a commodity to be "used up," to be consumed as a transient pleasure. As James's metaphor of the cut cable suggests, such art is identified finally as separate and insulated from the life lived by the reader. This is, I think, the deepest implication of James's further observation, apropos his image of the cable, that romance concerns "experience liberated . . . experience disengaged, disembroiled, disencumbered, exempt from the conditions that we usually know to attach to it and . . . drag upon it." In terms of this "sacrifice of community,"10 a vital concern with the reader or with other temporal factors would simply exert too much "drag" to be a proper consideration in the design of true art. Behind aesthetic romance is a Kantian ideal. In Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant speaks of taste as a "method of representing" an object "by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction" (1.1:5). Such a production, he argues, is beautiful because it "pleases universally without requiring a concept" (1.2:9). And, he further explains, "Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose" (1.10:17). Such an ideal informed turn-of-thecentury attempts at aesthetic romance. Such attempts were fated to fail; the Kantian ideal is unattainable. It is not surprising, therefore, to encounter Jonathan Freedman's recent conclusion that aestheticism is always complicit in the very materialism and cornmodification it claims as its opposite. Aestheticism celebrates an escape from time and, at the same time, the exquisiteness of temporal experience—a doubleness resulting in the subversion of its status as an alternative to everyday life.11 With this caveat in mind, then, the observations I venture in this chapter, especially on The Turn of the Screw, are intended to explain the goals behind aesthetic romance, not to imply the actual attainment of these goals. Such writers as James and Wilde, as different as is their artistic practice, had appropriated various features of turn-of-the-century aestheticism. The aesthetic doctrine of art for art's sake accommodated a wide range of thought. It included Walter Pater's sense of the centrality of art to all other

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types of experience—"art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality of your moments . . . simply for those moments5 sake"; and it included Algernon Swinburne's sense of the centrality of art to itself as imaginative expression separate from experience—"art for art's sake first of all, and afterwards we may [relatively] suppose all the rest," including "moral purpose."12 Accordingly, aesthetic romance embraces, though is not restricted to, literary expressions of aestheticism that emphasize the attainment of beauty in highly stylized art objects abstracted from the quotidian. Aesthetic romance embraces, as well, literary expressions of decadence, which mutated this aesthetic quest for beauty. Decadent authors fashioned highly stylized art objects that are (like the contrived self presumably reflected in these objects) parodistically undermined by their intimation of an axiologic, epistemologic, and ultimately ontologic vacancy at the core of everything. In contrast to the emphasis of eventuary romance upon plot and action, aesthetic romance stresses character, mood, and effect hermetically sealed (theoretically, that is) in a cryptic pattern, design, or form. Similar to aestheticism and its offshoot decadence, aesthetic romance obsessively features ornamental design. It shares the detached aestheticist celebration of this design as a transhistorical attainment of Kantian beauty. Similar to decadent art, this emphasis on design in aesthetic romance ideally amounts to, as it were, merely an attractive "skin of responses over a moral or emotional void."13 In aesthetic romance, this artistic form, this effect, is intended to be an end in itself; it is intended to be separate from mundane actualities, including the "drag" of the reader. Aesthetic romance is characteristically skeptical of readers. A sense of readership emerges in three vestigial traces. First, aesthetic romance occasionally implies the inability of the bourgeoisie and the working class—the mass of readers devoted to the eventuary variety of the genre—to appreciate it or any other form of high art. Second, aesthetic romance sometimes conveys an "intention" to dazzle, to mystify, to captivate by eliciting a nonactive response of appreciative awe. If it, like Wilde's Picture ofDorian Gray, fails to fulfill the conventions of some literary model it may simulate at first, it does so not to provoke its audience into active thought; it does so to stymie thought altogether and, instead, to induce a suprarational wonderment over transcendent splendor. Whereas the anticipated reader of eventuary romance is presumed to be passively engaged in thoughdess consumption, the prospective reader of aesthetic romance is presumed to be passively engaged in admiration of the consummate beauty of the splendid, insular artwork. A third clue to audience in this variety of the genre points to the artist.

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As one early twentieth-century critic astutely notes, the primary 'Viewer" of an aestheticist artwork is the very person who created it.14 To some extent, it could be said, aesthetic romance conveys this impression of its creator as its ideal admirer. Whereas eventuary romance in effect invites the prospective reader to find narcissistic gratification through consumption of the story as a sensational trifle of transient pleasure, aesthetic romance in effect tries to present itself as an expression of timeless beauty designed to satisfy the author's own "cultivated" self-gratification.15 Whether the artist's narcissistic desire is or is not reflected in the work, this "creator," like any other implied viewer of aesthetic romance, is ideally transfixed in passive admiration before its completed transcendent wonder, as if it were an object of worship beyond common understanding.16 This approach to art as ideally an expression of some divinelike beauty and some impenetrable ultimate truth—a reinscription of the Keatsian "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"—lies behind the belief that literature is essentially free from any moral responsibility.17 For James, when he was thinking in these terms, the cultural mission of the artist is not to impart any moral or lesson, but to achieve an aesthetic refinement. H. G. Wells focused on this mode of James's thought when describing Jamesianfictionas "essentially triumphs of conception and treatment, things in themselves completed, finished, and presented" without any commitment to "the interest of life itself."18 In other words, the refinement James had in mind would typically surpass the "vulgar" tastes of the bourgeois masses, who apparently prefer either escapist eventuary plots, as in Sir Walter Scott's romances, or dull commonplace matter, as in William Dean Howells5s realistic characters.19 As James straightforwardly proclaimed in "The Art of Fiction" (1884), "questions of art are questions . . . of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair."20 Oscar Wilde, too, whatever the truth of the matter, insisted that art possesses an autonomous intrinsic design, purpose, dynamic, and end—in short, that genuine art never conveys a social message. In the preface he later added to The Future of Dorian Gray, Wilde declared that "all art is quite useless" and that "no artist has ethical sympathies." In Wilde's romance appears a similar declaration that art "has no influence upon action," has "no ethical value."21 However, in the same year, Wilde admitted in Intentions (1891) that these facts about the nature of genuine art and the artist notwithstanding, people read ethical implications into a work. They turn to art for patterns to imitate despite the intrinsic irrelevance in life of such acts of appropriation.22 For Wilde, this common behavior reveals that the social order is only, and can be only, the imposition of a fabricated organization,

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or artifice. A little slippage occurs in Wilde's argument, perhaps, when he observes that "the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it."23 Here he seems to imply that art has some heuristic ethical capacity because it inherendy suggests the pattern for a "good society" (emphasis added). This slippage reminds us, as we noted concerning eventuary romances, that no artwork is free of ethical implications, whatever its creator intends. Art always necessarily reflects authorial and cultural ethos. Moreover, as Wilde himself admits, an audience tends to find ethical meanings in a work, even when it is authorially designed to critique or resist this sort of interpretation. Nevertheless, as we saw in our review of Haggard5s King Solomon's Mines, romances that only inadvertently manifest authorial or cultural ethos do not qualify as examples of ethical romance as defined in this study. Aesthetic romances are certainly "intentionally" engaged, more so than are eventuary romances, in probing epistemological and ontological notions. Indeed, their preoccupation with the performance of romance as a selfcontained revealer/concealer of certain mysteries of existence certainly implies something ultimate in a philosophical sense. But their reflection of this "ultimate" remains abstract. In their (impossible) quest for the Kantian ideal, they represent the fabrication of form to express beauty either as a hermetic timeless expression (an aestheticist goal) or as a displacement of an ontological void, the unknowable enigma of being (a decadent goal). As a brilliant example of aesthetic romance, we turn now to Henry James's Turn of the Screw, which has fascinated and mystified its audience from the first day of its appearance. Then it so enchanted reviewers that they virtually ignored the other tale in The Two Magics (1898). Today it remains a remarkable conundrum in contemporary critical discourse. The abiding power of its narrative manner, one might note incidentally, has recendy been manifested in the immense commercial success of Peter Straub5s exploitation of its example in Ghost Story (1979). James Reflects on His Story James's novella The Turn of the Screw was published in book form in October to benefit from the perennial popular demand for ghost stories, especially during the Christmas season.24 Introduced as a tale narrated during a Christmas party, James's novella provoked heated responses in its time. Whether reviewers declared it to be "powerful" and "extraordinary" or "distinctly repulsive" made little difference, however.25 The intensity of the reviewers5 response was more noteworthy than were their critical pronounce-

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ments; for this intensity adumbrated the abiding attention this tale, among James's most popular works in our own time, would receive through the next century from general and academic readers alike. And just as his contemporary reviewers were, on the whole, mystified as to the meaning of his strange tale, so are we today. Literary critics have arrived at no consensus about this narrative. It has produced such a "torrential flow of discussion," as one commentator has put it,26 that new entries on the tale are sometimes accompanied by a footnote explaining why the critic ought to be excused from the hopeless chore, in this case, of citing all pertinent previous scholarship. In fact, debates rage over virtually everything in this story, but particularly over whether the events experienced by the governess are the product of a conspiracy by others, or genuinely supernatural episodes, or only delusions induced by her neurosis, epilepsy, insanity, or demonic possession. All sides in this debate have meticulously combed through James's novella to find internal nuances and clues to support their respective positions. Internal narrative traces of the governess's mental problems abound, even as do traces of the possible actuality of her encounter with apparitions. Each contributor to the debate has, as well, provided pertinent external contextual data to reinforce these internal narrational intimations. This practice is most recendy evident, for instance, in an exhaustive demonstration of James's acquaintance with people engaged in the study of paranormal phenomena, his delivery of a paper by his brother William before the Society for Psychical Research, and his knowledge of the ghostcase tradition, to which The Turn of the Screw conforms in many ways.27 In contrast, proponents for reading the tale not as a ghost story but as a psychological sketch have remarked upon James's medical knowledge, particularly concerning his sister's mental illness and the alleged susceptibility of women to hallucinations.28 James's story, in short, remains an enigma as much today as it did in his own time. My comments on this tale are not intended to resolve this impasse, for I do not believe that it can be or that James intended it to be resolved. James's various comments on the tale are somewhat disingenuous, even contradictory in places. Perhaps his conflicting comments were fashioned to accommodate his audience or to reflect his whim at the moment. In any event, James was by no means consistent in his pronouncements on or in his practice of the art of fiction in general. He was struggling, as his time was struggling, with various contesting notions of fiction. It is very difficult, then, to sort out these deeper inconsistencies in his comments on The Turn of the Screw, and it is not much easier to sort out the lesser discrepancies that

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seem contextualized not by poetics but by his sense of audience when making an observation. When, in a letter apparendy responding to some mild criticism of the tale by H. G. Wells, James proclaims "the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d'esprit,"we might suspect that he subdy refunds Wells's criticism by aligning his work with some of Wells's own productions at the time, as James regarded them.29 Or we may also hear, as it were, a trendy, possibly disingenuous, decadent-like disavowal of the consequentiality of an artwork. For as we noted, James sometimes expresses various aestheticist notions. More helpful, perhaps, are the comments he made six weeks earlier in the same year (1898) to Dr. Louis Waldstein, a medical authority on "the subconscious self"30 who read the book with keen attention and approval. In this letter James expresses the aestheticist view of art that he had proclaimed years earlier in 'The Art of Fiction": that "questions of art are questions . . . of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair." He specifically instructs the scientifically minded doctor concerning this aesthetic sensibility: My conscious intention strikes you as having been larger than I deserve it should be thought. It is the intention so primarily, with me, always, of the artist, the painter, that that is what I most, myself, feel in it—and the lesson, the idea . .. conveyed is only the one that deeply lurks in any vision prompted by life. And as regards a presentation of things so fantastic as in that wanton litde Tale, I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them—I mean for the generosity of the reader. But, of course, where there is life, there's truth, and the truth was at the back of my head.31 The reference to "the back of [the] head," as if genteelly reproving the learned authority on "the subconscious self" to remember his discipline, stresses the nature of the imagination, including the doctor's, in interpreting and fashioning reality. This is a primary aestheticist notion. From this belief follows James's related aestheticist observation that "the lesson... conveyed is only the one that deeply lurks in any vision prompted by life." So while admitting that his tale may seem to evince an ethos of some kind inherendy, James (like Wilde in The Picture ofDorian Gray and Intentions) dismisses this appearance as anything other than an accident, something that is a nonessential property of the work of art as an expression of art. When ethical implications seem to surface, they emerge solely in the act of vision, in James's phrase. In other words, ethical inferences are actualized by an artist's or a viewer's interpretation of life or representation of life, and so they remain only the accidental product of the artwork's fidelity to truth, whatever truth is. Ethical ideas or lessons derived from art, in short, are

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only the epistemological productions of an audience's imaginative envisioning. And this audience's permanent condition of subjectivity, as Hawthorne similarly indicates in "Roger Malvin's Burial," prevents any closure with ontological verity, if there is any at all.32 The higher attention of the artist, James indicates when he speaks in this aestheticist mode, is always elsewhere, not on some idea or lesson. He remarks, correspondingly, that Hawthorne "combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems."33 James then censures this moral seriousness as a main source of the defects in Hawthorne's fiction. He thereby in effect cedes a primary element of the Hawthornean tradition, an element valued by the authors of ethical romance. "Roger Malvin's Burial" and The Turn of the Screw both suggest that everything in human experience remains an ambiguous enigma, to human perception at least. But they do not share the same ethos in response to this ambiguity. Whereas Hawthorne's story challenges traditional sites of authority to emphasize the open-ended authorship (for good or for ill) of the human mind, James's novella presents the sheer absence of authority unmoored from any hortatory challenge or emphasis. James splinters ambiguity from its broad moral function in Hawthorne's fiction. It must be admitted that "Roger Malvin's Burial" comes dangerously close to resisting any applicable ethos, a performance that may explain in part why Hawthorne did not include it in Twice-Told Tales. It is one of his most cryptic works, and some readers may doubt that it differs from James's novella. Two observations may help here. First, there is the context provided by Hawthorne's other fiction and by its critical reception. This context will not indicate precisely what morals his work suggests, but it does insist that ethical questions are indeed at issue. It would be unreasonable to exempt "Roger Malvin's Burial" from this context. Second, there are internal pointers in the story itself. As noted in Chapter 2, specific authorities—including tradition, history, nature, and scripture—are undercut in this narrative. Given the place of these authorities in early nineteenth-century American culture, they are truly significant targets in Hawthorne's text. There is, accordingly, a qualitative difference between this tale and James's novella concerning authority, even if a child dies in both stories. In lieu of such weighty authorities as tradition, history, nature, and scripture, we encounter the less consequential authorities of the narrator, Douglas, and the governess in The Turn of the Screw. They are hardly equivalent

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to Hawthorne's targets; accordingly, they hardly similarly "signify" large cultural, social, or personal implications. Authority is simply absent in James's novella, and absent too is the slightest hint as to the ramifications of this void. Because James's narrative necessarily fails to achieve the Kantian aesthetic ideal, it is vulnerable to an interpretation of this absence of authority that corresponds with the implications of Hawthorne's narrative. But in this instance such a reading, such afillingin of textual lacunae, lacks contextual "authorization" or "invitation" either from James's specific comments on his tale or from textual signifiers similar to those in "Roger Malvin's Burial." The issue of authority seems relatively trivial in James's story— a "local" representation of subjectivity and paralysis of judgment—when compared to the same issue in Hawthorne's tale—a "mythic" representation of ontological doubt and uncertain options. In The Turn of the Screw much less is at stake concerning the ethos of authority. If James censured Hawthorne's moral seriousness, he nonetheless admired his predecessor's coupling of the extravagance of the romance genre and the psychological depth anticipating later novels of verisimilitude. In fact, throughout his career James tried again and again to differentiate between and to bridge the two genres, as we already noted. His solution, insofar as he ever arrived at one, seems to have been to transform Hawthorne's combination of "spontaneity of imagination" and "care for moral problems" into, to apply James's own words, a regard for the "fantastic" and for "execution." Situated between romance and literary realism, James emphasized character, mood, and effect over plot and structure. In doing so, he sometimes veered in the direction of the aesthetes, whatever his occasionally expressed hesitations about them. Whenever he converted concern with idea, lesson, or morality into concern with execution only, his sense of the cultural mission of his work became very abstract indeed. When he was thinking in this aestheticist vein, he not only criticized the cultural vulgarity of the mass of readers, he also resisted the manifestation of that vulgarity in their proclivity, as he saw it, to reduce what they read into "questions of morality." On the contrary, he protested, "questions of art are questions . . . of execution" only; all other considerations are accidental to aesthetic effect. For James, at least when he speaks in such aestheticist language, art is ideally free from any intentional social consciousness or responsibility. It is art for art's sake, and it ought to be admired dispassionately from an appreciative aesthetic perspective rather than from a crude utilitarian one. As a result, even when apparendy dismissing The Turn of the Screw, James insists that it is "merely pictorial," merely a "monument to . . . [his] technical

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passion."34 In his preface to the revised New York edition of the tale, he drops the earlier traces of dismissal but continues to emphasize that this socially "irresponsible little fiction" is a "full-blown flower of high fancy": "The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no 'outside' control involved." That is, in lieu of any control exerted by social conscience, there is an aesthetic control imparted by the artist's reach for beautiful design. His task as an artist, James explains in the preface, is twofold: to "depend on the imagination working freely, working . . . with extravagance"; and "to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness," at the technical perfection of imaginative design. Some of this later commentary may reflect James's revision of perspective concerning his now revised tale. But when he speaks in this preface of the "irresponsibility" of his tale,35 its freedom from the pressure of "'outside' control," he is consistent with the earliest comments on the "accidental" imposition of ethical meanings on his story. From its conception through its final revision, the novella possesses for James (whatever the case may be for his readers) a design reflective of an art-for-art's-sake aesthetic, not reflective of some ethical idea or lesson. In the preface he says further, and rather more directly than is usual for him, that in this story "there is . . . no eligible absolute of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements." Part relates to part, aesthetically, not morally; the constraints come from within, not from without. In terms of this aestheticist ideal, James announces, "there is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expiation, but my values are positively all blanks." As an artist, then, he has evaded ethical issues and, instead, "clung to an ideal of fauldessness," an ideal of technical perfection.36 Authorial moral blanks within an intricate aesthetic design—this is James's declared aestheticist practice in fabricating The Turn of the Screw, both when he wrote it and when he revised it. And just as he gently scolded Dr. Waldstein about the nature of the imagination in filling in these blanks—in reading "the subconscious self" in the merely pictorial design of his narrative—so too in the preface he admonishes "the moralist" who "visits his abundance morally, on the artist—who has but clung to an ideal of fauldessness." All such readings amount to "appreciation, speculation, imagination . .. exactly in the light of the spectator's, the critic's, the reader's experience." In other words, an artwork like The Turn of the Screw, if successful, remains severed from "the ache of the actual." If successful, it is separate from the viewer, who is like Strether in James's Ambassadors (1903): a perceiving intelligence only subjectively guessing and creating the mean-

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ing of any experience in life or of any encounter with its representation in various tableaux. Of course, if we recall Chesterton's and Wells's devaluation of their own fiction when they anticipated its comparison to the serious novel, we might similarly hesitate to take James at his word concerning The Turn ofthe Screw. However, such skepticism on our part in this instance is confronted by the critical legacy of his tale. The Turn of the Screw has been nothing less than a Tower of Babel. The criticism on it has amounted to a virtual confusion of tongues resisting consensus not only about the meaning but about even the most basic details of what literally happens in the plot of the story. Given this demographic evidence, we might feel compelled to conclude that James's story fails in its execution, and not only because the Kantian ideal is unattainable. We might conclude that although he criticized others for shackling their fiction to a moral and consistendy denied any deliberate moral in The Turn of the Screw, James nevertheless truly intended some message. If we do so, then the empirical history of the collective Babel-like critical response to his tale testifies that it misfired. Needless to say, this unlikely denigration of The Turn of the Screw, reminiscent of dismissals of Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial" as artistically inept, is not congenial to my experience with this Jamesian "fantastic fiction."37 On the other hand, it is important to recall one of James's confessions: that he could not close the gap he sensed to exist between the genre of romance and the conventions of literary realism. This admission leaves open the possibility that in his search for a higher realism, a poetic realism, he may not always have eschewed moral issues in his fiction. Certainly the scholarly community has found any number of them in his stories, and in fact representatives of this community have critically situated him within the moral-ethical tradition.381 would be inclined to agree, too, that sometimes James's works present vestiges of romance tradition, like the use of a supernatural trace in 'The Beast in the Jungle" (1902), possibly to suggest the need to live one's life fully. Even The Turn of the Screw has been ingenuously read, for example, as instruction on the relation between fantastic literature, superstition, and human violence.39 I can offer no resolution concerning this issue of morality or ethos in James's entire corpus. Rather, I am examining one aspect of James's conflicted artistic practice, the aspect that deeply disturbed his New Humanist contemporary Stuart Sherman. Within a year of James's death, Sherman dismissed him as an escapist aesthete,40 a reaction we can perhaps appreciate given some of James's comments. Sherman's censure is extreme, to say the least, but it provides evidence that sometimes James's contemporaries

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sensed his aestheticist moods. Relatedly, we may wonder whether Oscar Wilde spied a kindred soul in The Turn of the Screw when he wrote to Robert Ross, "I think it is a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale, like an Elizabethan tragedy. I am gready impressed by it."41 It is the attempted aesthetic refinement of James's novella that interests me here. As an expression of this artistic mode, this tale frustrates any attempt to extract from it an uncontestable mundane or (in aestheticist terms) vulgar moral, whatever James's practice may or may not be in his other fiction. In terms of our taxonomy of romance, James's comments identify The Turn ofthe Screw as an aesthetic version of the genre. First, his expressions— especially fantastic, wanton, and irresponsibility—place the tale within the romance genre, of which he time and again spoke in similar terms. Second, James couples the extravagance of his romance with an absolutefreedom from outside control, which harks back to the aestheticist ideal of timelessness, transhistoricity, and dissociation from the quotidian. Third, he specifically lauds this freedom for its licensing of absolute singleness in his novella as a monument to technicalpassion,the ideal of faultlessness; James, in other words, presents his romance as a self-contained artwork, an object of wonder, an enigmatical end in itself. Fourth, James indicates that this consummate, extravagandy technical execution is the only truth his story reflects; for its absolute freedom and absolute singleness evince no absolute ofthe wrong, but only blank values concerning lesson or idea of the sort that the vulgar moralistic reader might seek. There is, in these Jamesian terms, no intentional moral dimension in the tale, such as an ethical romancer entertains. Nor is there even a clear unriddling and normalization of the action or plot, such as an eventuary romancer routinely provides. As an aesthetic romance, The Turn of the Screw resists being "used up," either as a directive to thought or as a transient pleasure. This is one sense of the warning in the story that its narrative is "incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial" (p. 3). In another sense, this tale is perpetually its own sequel. James's comments are peculiar insofar as they guardedly acknowledge the presence of the reader and at the same time, whenever they express an aestheticist angle of vision, consistendy insist that this reader is extraneous to either the composition or the completion of the artwork. Interaction between the two is essentially irrelevant. James implies only the passive submission of the reader in admiration of the marvel of his novella as a monument to technical passion, to the ideal of faultlessness, or to absolute singleness of execution. In presenting a puzzle that simultaneously seems to insinuate and conceal some truth in this romance, James might appear to acknowl-

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edge the reader's presence as a consideration; but from an aesrheticist perspective, this insinuation and concealment are intrinsic features of the timeless design of the art object, before which a mystified viewer ought finally to remain a passive witness. In James's aestheticist terms, faultless and absolute technical perfection is itself the meaning of his romance; and its viewers, James implies, always remain voyeurs outside this perfection of his hermetically sealed artwork. The ideal audience, it is suggested, should admire the artifact passively with an aesthetic sensibility, rather than try, futilely, to respond to it with or to appropriate it through some other kind of sensibility. An Artistic Jeu d'Esprit In a sense, then, The Turn of the Screw is indeed a jeu d'esprit. By transforming the ghost-story formula of eventuary romance into a consummate example of aesthetic romance, the tale is, as it were, an inside joke among knowing practitioners of the genre. It is a joke, in another sense, as well. It is an aesthetic romance basically designed for an artist's appreciation, yet it also possibly appeals commercially to any readers who relate to it naively as if it were merely one more example of eventuary romance. It is a jest, finally, insofar as it is present for the viewer to see yet resistant to the viewer's encounter. That is, like aesthetic romances generally, its beautiful technical design invites passive admiration from an audience outside of it, although simultaneously its insular perfection implicitly dismisses this extrinsic admiration as utterly irrelevant to the essential aesthetic attainment of the narrative. That fundamentally, in these three ways, an artistic jest lies at the heart of James's aesthetic romance is suggested by the references to joking in The Turn of the Screw. The most notable occasion involves the governess's reflection, midway in her account, on an interview with Miles. She then thinks, "It was I who fell into the trap" of "his joke." And she temporarily concludes that not only the disruptive apparitions but also the children's very appearance of goodness are only "a game . . . a policy and a fraud."42 Much later the housekeeper insists, "It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke" (p. 72). As an important clue to James's game, the governess unconsciously correlates this contrivance of jest with the contrivance of art, especially when she writes, "The curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama" (P· 55). There are a number of corresponding allusions to art, including passing references to serials, novels, romances, storybooks, pictures, paintings, and

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theater, among others. Such reflexive allusions to art reinforce the multileveled jest at the heart of The Turn of the Screw as an aesthetic romance. Although they allow the reader to make naive associations with antecedent models, by the conclusion of the novella these associations do not in the least help to resolve the several mysteries of the author's game and the reader's trap. These references serve as a kind of apparitional haunting within James's text. Though apparitional, however, they are a significant presence in the theaterlike spectacle of the "dreadful drama." Just as the governess may or may not be the victim of a ruse perpetrated by her wards (or some other agent), so too the reader may or may not be the victim of a prank perpetrated by the author. The joke only works, the trap only closes, when actualized by the victim, the "reader" of apparitional signs. In both instances, however, the apparitions, the hauntings, may be nothing more than something potential awaiting actualization by a "true believer." This potential may be horrible or humorous, depending on the actualizing believer. Perhaps James's jest suggests,finally,that for artists like him the actual horror and rube are those who spring the trap of his joke: those readers who come, like the governess, with "questions of morality" rather than with "questions of art" or "questions . .. of execution" only. As we saw in the last chapter, eventuary romances sometimes also contain minor moments of reflexive sport and of generic reference. These moments, like signposts, generally serve to situate an audience by identifying and promoting the type of romance being read. In the instance of King Solomon's Mines, these brief occasions are doubly reflexive. They assert the generic typicality of Haggard's book and, more covertly, hint at his exploitation of latent "forbidden" desires often inherent in traditional eventuary romance. Sometimes, as in Haggard's case, when these occasions of jest verge on the parodistic, they may seem to mitigate any sense of social censure of the genre; then they suggest that the work in hand is just a form of fun which, after all, no one really takes very seriously. Of course, this suggestion, at once reflexive andfleeting,actually amounts to a disguised license to enjoy these works as escapist encounters and possibly even as forbidden fruit. Similar sites of humorous and generic reflexivity likewise reinforce the identity of aesthetic romance. In doing so, however, they are not designed to comfort the potentially "self-entrapped" reader. They neither provide a license to read the romance nor signal any code for discovering a taboo message, as in King Solomon's Mines. The Turn of the Screw typifies how such apparitional moments in aesthetic romance are kept well within thefieldof consistent characterization and mood. It is as if these occasions were essentially incidental to narration, which in one sense they indeed are. In being

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not fully actual nor conclusively only apparent as signifiers, they participate in the insular integrity of the work. Within this aestheticist framework, they ultimately resist reduction to either the naive conventions of the genre or the naive readings of an audience. Concerning conventions of the sort evident in Haggard's popular book, we are covertly cued early in James's tale about the telling of a "story . . . incomplete and like the mere opening of a serial" (p. 3). Certain readers, progressing a seriatim toward an anticipated neat conclusion, will perceive in a work such as this novella only the escapist eventuary romance model. These readers have been given notice that such a conclusion will not eventuate in this instance. They will be as disappointed as will be those who, given any kind of romance, "visit . . . [their] abundance morally, on the artist." Apparitional reflexive references to humor and art in The Turn of the Screw, as in other aesthetic romances, derive from and point back to an intricacy of design. This design is an aesthetic puzzle—virtually a Chinese box of infinite regression—which in effect is potentially an artistic joke on the estranged reader outside of its frame. For just as the moralistic governess speaks of her recollection as "a picture in a frame," as "this picture" (pp. 16,18), so too the moralistic reader is left in an "edgy" state of uncertainty at the edge of James's "merely pictorial" aesthetic version of the eventuary horror story. Made up of three narrative frames—the narrator-transcriber, Douglas, and the governess—James's novella presents a layered design insulating (or so it may appear) some hidden secret from a "peripheral" audience. At the edge of this highly insular narrative, the reader is like the governess when she glimpses—or imagines— some person or some specter within the frame of a window. Like her encounter with this window, the reader of James's aesthetic romance may feel "as if [he or she] had been looking at [the genre] for years and had known [it] always." Nevertheless, "something . . . happened this time that had not happened before" (p. 20). Before the governess or the reader can negotiate this queer coalescence of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the "author" of it vanishes. For the reader, this visitation remains a mystery seen obscurely in the similarly grayish luster of James's windowlike narrativeframes.There is the paradoxical sense, as well, that we are not only like the governess in this regard; we are also like the real or imagined presence looking in, through theseframes,at the governess. If thusly stymied—"paralyzed," to use the governess's word in the final pages of her account (p. 87)—in seeking some resolution, the reader then enacts a version of the stance of the ideal audience of aesthetic romance. This is the closest aesthetic romances such as The Turn of the Screw come

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to a heuristic impulse. Any other message—say, our inability to judge others—would be dismissed by aestheticists as a reader-imposed moral and could be explained by us as a symptom of elusive Kantian poetics. Aesthetic romances allow the audience to actualize their entrapment as the butt of a mystifying joke, and in this way at the same time they engage this audience, as if in a mirrorlike reversed image, in a proper response to aesthetic romance. Nevertheless, this pattern does not represent an abiding concern with audience. The reader has, as it were, merely been part of a trick similar to the governess's deception of her wards when she instructs them about "charming literary exercises," far "too beautiful to be posted" (p. 54). When she tells her adult audience "I kept them [for] myself" (p. 54), she coverdy expresses James's further insistence on the exclusion of his audience from the design of his essentially author-centered enterprise. If the governess participates in a "hypocrisy of Svork'" (p. 82), so does the author in offering something that essentially gratifies himself but gives a work-ethic appearance. It seems to promise the consumer a well-crafted tale conforming to ghost-story conventions. Instead, as one of his contemporaries mentions, James's "distinctly repulsive" tale is "altogether on a higher plane both of conception and art" than is the usual ghost story.43 The meaning (the secret) of James's aestheticized ghost story lies buried, so to speak, under layers of narrative; yet it seems to be apparitionally glimpsed whenever we "read into" the well-framed, primarily insular, and possibly only incidental reflexive references (especially to humor and art) in the governess's tale. Like James's novella, aesthetic romance implies the mystification, the captivation, the dazzling of the passive appreciative gaze of its awe-paralyzed audience. This is the ideal response aesthetic romance suggests. The governess's attempt to break free of her paralysis is not presented as an appropriate model. Her mistaken effort results either in ludicrous activity or in lurid murder, depending on which critics one heeds on the "death" of Miles within thefinaltwo pages following her renunciation of powerlessness. Her misguided effort, moreover, potentially reinforces our own paralysis before the aesthetic enigma of her account. In artistically intimating and concealing some profound mystery informing human existence, aesthetic romance aspires to transhistorical, transcendental stasis—the technical precision of form over the ethos of content. Aesthetic romance attempts to represent or re-present, not explicate, this profound mystery. Like Miles's statements, as the governess reports them at the end of her account, the contrivances of aesthetic romance ultimately

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"seem . . . to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscur[ity]" (p. S7). The morpheme seem is crucial; for not even the fact of obscurity is "clear" here. Another of the governess's observations about Miles is equally apt in suggesting James's aesthetic version of the dialogism of the romance genre: "He had given exactly the account of himself that permitted least my going behind it" (p. 47). The Hawthorne of "Roger Malvin's Burial" would have admired this sentence. For in his story, as in James's tale, natural phenomena and art appear to reflect intricate design while at the same time they both appear to distance the viewer from the origin and meaning of that design. If both "transcendent" creation and "transhistorical" art appear to intimate the intention of some perpetrator, that intention as well as the identity, or even the reality, of the perpetrator remain concealed. In experiencing life and texts, James suggests, an audience shares in the governess's failure to detect finally "the hideous author of our woe" (p. 88). This authorial agent, like the strange and never explained appearances of a man in the governess's narrative, "turn[s] away" toward some secret, turns his back on the witness, who can only observe, "That was all I knew" (p. 17). The response to this enigma is more extreme in James's Turn of the Screw than in Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial." James's aesthetic romance implies that in lieu of a "liberating" consideration of morality or ethos, the ideal response to this glimpsed mystery is an appreciative paralysis. Nothing less is apposite; nothing more is accessible.

5 Ethical Romance

Hyne, Wells, Bangs, and Chesterton

Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial" is not an eventuary romance. Nor is Hawthorne's tale an aesthetic romance, though it is understandable how his enigmatic text might be read as such, at least initially. In this narrative the romance genre serves more than solely a commercial or solely an aesthetic purpose. As we have seen, Hawthorne's romance questions various common beliefs, and underlying this questioning is a large social concern that informs his fiction generally. This concern possibly features the need for greater compassion, tolerance, and open-mindedness toward the human condition, especially since every ethos, including institutional or consensual morality, appears to be ontologically and epistemologically arbitrary. "Roger Malvin's Burial" neither reinforces the status quo (as does eventuary romance) nor rejects the commonplace (as does aesthetic romance). A revealing/concealing account that withholds definitive answers to the puzzles it presents, this story potentially encourages reformational thought, as its reader struggles mentally to accommodate its incongruities and strangeness. It may be, as has been argued in the case of Hawthorne's writings,1 that romance always fails to integrate the imaginative and the experiential. Nevertheless, neither this alleged failure nor the intrinsically dialectical nature of romance impeded Hawthorne or those in his tradition from attempting to use the genre to expose and possibly to transform the beliefs of their readers. For these authors, romance could disclose that human existence is always an intersection of phenomenal experience and imagination. For these authors, the corresponding intersection of dream and fact in the genre 76

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evinces a capacity for altering human perception and (some of these authors thought) for transforming society. In these terms, the genre seemed to these authors to possess an inherent moral dimension, a latent power to provoke personal insight and, perhaps, social reformation. The practice of these authors is designated in this book as ethical romance. Ethical romancers tend to suggest that complex metaphysical issues lurk beneath everyday human life, issues generally hidden from common perception. Of course, similar to eventuary and aesthetic romances, ethical romances express moral, social, and political nuances beyond their creators' control, and as we shall see in a story by Wells, such nuances can sometimes interfere with apparent authorial intentions. This interference notwithstanding, ethical romancers often try to explore the conundrum of human options, frequently at ordinarily unrecognized sites. Ethical romancers, it should be noted, may be either optimistic or skeptical on the subject of human choice in general or on the capacity for meaningful change in particular. Even when skeptical, however, they register a desire for change. They, too, wistfully contemplate some large, mysterious, and commonly unrecognized sector of human behavior where overlooked options seem to or should exist, whether in fact or in imagination—the two categories that romances routinely treat as indistinct. The Role of the Imagination When indicating the inevitable role of imagination in all human interpretations of experience, ethical romancers sometimes included a cautionary note. These authors worried about excess, in contrast to the usual silence on the nature of imagination by writers of eventuary romances and the attempted conversion of imagination into a distant (and presumably safe) sanctuary of art by writers of aesthetic romances. Hawthorne, for example, clearly suggested that the imagination can be problematical. The opening paragraph of "Roger Malvin's Burial," as we saw, included a sardonically reflexive observation about "the moonlight of romance," especially given that "imagination, by casting certain circumstances judiciously into the shade, may see much to admire" (emphasis added). If Hawthorne was apprehensive about the selectivity of imagination—its propensity for bracketing certain facts and distorting others in our daily encounters—Chesterton was uneasy about the range of imagination—its capacity for possibly transcending the quotidian altogether. In his autobiography Chesterton reported that he learned early in life just how remote

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from actual existence the realm of the imagination can be, so remote that it could erase temporal experience altogether. "Mine was the time of Impressionism," Chesterton recalled, "and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism." The significance of Impressionism for Chesterton resided in its characteristic representation of the 1890s and 1900s, "this age . . . of scepticism": "Its principle was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow." This "highly subjective and sceptical. . . method of thought," Chesterton indicated, naturally lent "itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all." In short, commonplace identifications once thought to be real were now perceived as an "Illusion," and, Chesterton continued, "this atmosphere also tended to contribute, however indirecdy, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile isolation that settled at this time upon me; and I think upon many others."2 A sense of the unreality of everything and a sense of the lonely isolated self (also unreal) in the face of this nothingness: little wonder, in Chesterton's impressionistic opinion, that "the Decadents and the Pessimists . . . ruled the culture of the age," a time of "religious doubt, intellectual unrest, a hungry credulity about new things, and a complete lack of equilibrium." Eventually, however, Chesterton understood that this "congestion of imagination" might be transformed into something positive. "Even if the very daylight were a dream," he revised, "it was a daydream . . . not a nightmare." For Chesterton, then, romance did not necessarily reflect, negatively, the hopeless separation between the imagination and the mundane. Romance could celebrate, positively, the integration of the imaginative and the temporal realms whenever it impressionistically insinuated what tends to be concealed within the human mind: the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence." For Chesterton,finally,the ideal purpose or "object of the artistic and spiritual life," imaginatively expressed in such literary genres as romance, is to advert to this concealed, "submerged sunrise of wonder."3 If the labor of the artist is identical to the integrative work of the spirit, then in Chesterton's view, in contrast to Wilde's and James's mutual opinion, the genre of romance is inherendy moral or ethical. By no means did all turn-of-the-century ethical romancers endorse Chesterton's extreme position, which was certainly also more optimistic (on the surface at least) than was Hawthorne's attitude.4 Nevertheless, like their

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Romantic predecessors, they approached imagination in the way Voltaire had approached reason: as a means of liberating humanity.5 Chesterton and other ethical romancers, accordingly, acknowledged that the dangers of the imagination could be checked by channeling its energy in fiction fashioned "journalistically," fashioned in terms of a social interest. To achieve this purpose, these authors needed to redeem the tainted sensationalism of so much of the journalism and the romance genre of their day. In yellow journalism, as we observed in Chapter 1, the moral and social concern ostensibly generating news from exotic lands often masked "irresponsible" entertainment designed for commercial ends. This journalistically licensed blend of fact and fiction, akin to the generically licensed blend of fact and fiction in the "irresponsible" presentation of the exotic in eventuary romance, became a form of news with a social conscience in ethical romance. In utilizing the common properties of the genre, accordingly, turn-ofthe-century ethical romancers did not exploit the form primarily for commercial purposes nor exalt it primarily for aesthetic purposes. However, as we also noted in the first chapter, in using this generic matter they similarly defined their work against the model of "literary realism." This model presented normal settings typical of the everyday business of life and psychologized characters evincing complex motives in plausible situations. In contrast, romances emphasized strange settings, character types or caricatures, uncanny events, and equivocal narrative tone. "Roger Malvin5s Burial," for example, is set in a shadowy wilderness where an outre working out of fate (if indeed it be fate) is undergone by two-dimensional personages, whose biblical names at first suggest a determinative typology of character rather than (as the violation of this typology suggests) some distinctive, unique, or self-fashioned identity. The equivocal tone of Hawthorne's narrational manner, moreover, intimates simultaneously that something universal (like overwhelming fate) is being dramatized and that something local (like pathetic aberration) is being presented. In late nineteenth-century romances this uncertain tonality particularly contrasts with the manner of "literary realism." For if, as Charles Dickens's work indicates, fiction earlier in that century had some latitude in this matter of tone, by the end of the century the aegis of the "realist" and "naturalist" movements seemed, to romancers at least, to require a consistent narrative tone of comedy, tragedy, or pathos.6 To expand these comments, we turn now to consider briefly the place of the prevalent features of romance in the ethical variety of the genre. A few introductory observations are in order concerning setting, event, character-

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ization, tone, audience, and reflexivity before we review four narratives that, collectively, span the spectrum of ethical romance. Setting and Event The settings of the works considered in the remainder of my study include a forest, cave, river, island, ship, street, estate, hotel, room, and basket. These ordinary sites are transformed by the sudden emergence of some previously unrecognized mysterious force. As a result of episodes of magic, wizardry, witchcraft, disappearing corpses, haunting ghosts, or disembodied voices, these settings lose their normal associations and become strange places beyond everyday experience. Since such settings and events comprise a common feature of the genre, they alone prove inadequate in defining ethical romance. Nevertheless, when these unusual settings and events exhibit metaphoric and allusive nuances beyond generic custom, they exceed their conventional functions. Then they resist the pattern of eventuary romances, such as Sherlock Holmes's adventures, which neatly resolve the skein of plot by restoring and reaffirming the status quo. The bizarre events of ethical romances, in contrast, are not explained away, or naturalized, or normalized; or if a resolution is given to what seem perhaps to be vaguely plausible events, something else is left uncertain in the narrative. In other words, the disorientation of the characters undergoing astonishing episodes in everyday settings, suddenly gone weird, may or may not be explained in some sense; but in important ways the issue of perception, in both a literal andfigurativesense, remains unresolved in these tales. If ethical romances implicidy suggest, through setting and event, that dream and experience can fuse, they also, correspondingly, may suggest in one way or another an ontological and epistemological disorientation left unresolved or undispelled at their conclusion. Characterization Instead of in-depth characters engaging in complex interior struggles, romances present two-dimensional caricatures responding to these outlandish events in strange settings. Like the cartoons of the famous pen-and-ink caricaturist Philip May7—Stevenson, Wells, Chesterton, and Max Beerbohm were also adept at such humorous drawings—the sketchy protagonists of romance are formed by wide strokes of description, depicted through eccen-

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tricities, and basically denied an inner life of the sort insisted upon by Henry James and, later, Virginia Woolf. The lack of "finish" (to recall Wells's term) of these character types resists any attempt to read them deeply. Stevenson explicitly argues for the legitimacy of caricatures drawn "like an illustration" in "epoch-making scenes." He specifically denounces the demand of "literary realism" for in-depth characters: "the more clearly [characters] are depicted, the more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator." For Stevenson and other writers, characterization by type is a significant feature of the romance mode of representation: "our art is occupied, and bound to be occupied, not so much in making stories true as in making them typical; not so much in capturing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling all of them towards a common end."8 Wells is similarly outspoken. In one review he specifically praises Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) for its presentation of a protagonist who is "at once an individual and a type."9 In another review he praises Ivan Turgénev's Fathers and Sons (1862) as a "novel of types": "The peculiar characteristic of Turgénev's genius is the extraordinary way in which he can make his characters types, while at the same time retaining their individuality"; "they are living, breathing individuals, but individuals living under the full stress of this great racial force or that."10 Near the end of his career Wells describes his own early fictional characters as "caricature-individualities."11 John Galsworthy, whose Forsyte Saga (1906—1922) dramatized typecharacters determined by (a satirized) social status, agreed with Wells on this matter, if on little else. As late as 1927, when a new generation of writers was expressing a very different attitude toward characterization, Galsworthy forthrighdy pronounced that "in the greatest fiction the characters . . . should sum up and symbolize whole streaks of human nature," should be, in short, "not only individuals but sections of mankind."12 Galsworthy and Wells's shared notion of this dual identification is apparendy similar to Engels and Marx's mutual adaptation of Hegel's notion of the best mode of characterization.13 Such a technique of characterization can seem to be artistically slight. As we saw in the adverse responses to Wells's Island of Dr. Moreau, at the end of the nineteenth century character types were sometimes dismissed as inadequate. Likewise, Kipling's "piquant and clever delineations," which "melt away so rapidly in the memory," were dismissed by more than one reviewer as "typical characters," mere "puppets" galvanized "into the dreary semblance of life" rather than presented with "George Eliot's close analysis

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of complex and conflicting motive."14 Characterization by type would be even more thoroughly discounted during the twentieth century. So why did a number of serious writers insist on using this technique in the face of increasing criticism of it? Stevenson provided an answer: reader involvement. Writers like Stevenson augment the "participatory quality" of the fiction of such Victorian predecessors as Eliot.15 As seen, for example, in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and Wilkie Collins's Woman in White (1860), some Viaorian authors particularly developed the correlation of detection or revelation in the plot with the process of reading.16 Romance, Stevenson argued later, was a particularly apt medium for this correlation because it "woos us out of our reserve," and "something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves." In other words, the reader "can join in it with all his heart," with "entire delight"; for romances "satisfy the nameless longings of the reader" by reflecting "the ideal laws of the day-dream."17 Ethical romancers such as Stevenson seek to involve the reader in the narrative. For them, the implication of the reader—the ontological and epistemological disorientation of the reader—through astonishing episodes in average settings suddenly become strange requires a typical mode of characterization. Reading such ethical romances, the ideal audience would be unable to evade personal implications by remotely witnessing the individuality, the unique consciousness, of the protagonists. As representations, the caricatures of ethical romance point away from themselves as the center of attention. They point, instead, to some larger narrative concern as the appropriate object of the reader's scrutiny. Tone Another such pointer is ambiguity of tone, which to some extent contextualizes the function of character, event, and setting in ethical romance. This narrational equivocation is as vital to ethical romance as plot and action are to eventuary romance or ornamented form and effect are to aesthetic romance. By alternating from comic to tragic or pathetic implications, these stories latently direct their audience toward a self-conscious puzzlement over narrative meaning and authorial intention. The indefinite narrative tone of the stories bids the reader to suspect some deeper mystery, or plot, beneath the seemingly slight surface. The reader is urged to engage in a reflexive response that itself may finally become the appropriate site of attention. Primarily because of nuanced narrative tone, in short, a problem

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with perception, in a double sense, lingers even if the nominal plot should unravel. In ethical romances, humor frequendy serves as a narrative device that violates various conventional boundaries. This manner parallels the selfconscious humorous undercurrent of certain ostensibly serious examples of yellow journalism, an undercurrent suggesting the undeclared transgressive appeal of the sensationalism of these examples. In one sense, perhaps, humor in ethical romance may be seen as the proverbial sugarcoating of the bitter pill of truth disguised by the seemingly slight surface of the story. But, even more probable, humor is likely perceived by the reader as unthreatening. The reader may, as a result, be more readily disposed to relax defenses and, accordingly, to encounter the story (and its concealed intimations) with less resistance. This less wary audience possibly appropriates the stance of the safe bystander who merely observes someone else as the subject of a jest. To many readers, humor may appear to entail no risk of real personal involvement in the situation being observed. Laughter often includes this sense of overview, of superior awareness that makes us feel as if we are outside the joke, even if it thoroughly critiques something prominent in our everyday lives. A number of ethical romances, however, specifically erode whatever security their "innocent" readers may thusly associate with humor. The apparent comic attitude in these stories is compromised by the invasion of a contrary tragic or pathetic attitude. Sometimes humor and horror are blended together. Such dialogic tonality potentially activates the audience's involvement. The audience may, at first, try to understand the meaning of the narrative and, on second thought, try to understand the nature of human experience. In sophisticated examples of ethical romance, the reader's effort to resolve ambiguity of tone remains as unfulfilled as the desire for closure with a final explanation of why we can imagine and even delight in commonplace settings suddenly made bizarre or in daily life suddenly punctured by astonishing events. Primarily because of nuanced narrative tone, in short, a problem with perception, in a double sense, lingers even if the plot should nominally unravel. The reader may initially sense in the tone of an ethical romance little more than a frivolous jest concerning human foibles, like the mischievous manner of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, or little more than a sneer concerning the reader's irrelevance, somewhat like the impish manner of James's Turn of the Screw. Upon reflection, however, the reader might sense some elusive, profound implication beneath the apparent joke or the ambiguous tone of an ethical romance.

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This hint of something almost revealed and at the same time concealed about the mystery of existence is one feature of the genre that ethical romancers philosophically and aesthetically elevate. In ethical romance, this effect of intimation/concealment is especially expressed through an equivocal tone that narratively leaves metaphysical closure incomplete even when, sometimes, closure of plot seems achieved. Audience The foregoing comments on the function of setting, event, caricature, and especially tone have in each instance indicated a sensitivity to audience. Eventuary romances reflect, as we observed, an awareness of audience, but they do not invite much more from their prospective working-class and (later) bourgeois readership than the passive commercial consumption of stories. Aesthetic romances seem fairly insensitive to any concern with audience beyond the artist him- or herself as the preeminent representative of an elite (upper-class, educated) readership passively transfixed in wonder before the marvellous, beautiful, timeless effects of the objet d'art. Ethical romances situate themselves between these two extremes. Like eventuary romances, they invite their audience to deplete their narrative energy; yet, like aesthetic romances, they simultaneously resist this consumption. Their journalistic tinge suggests the épatement des bourgeois of eventuary romances, and their artistic subtleties suggest sensitivity to the upper-class audience of aesthetic romances. The potential attractiveness of ethical romance to this dual readership, however, is informed by a different sense of the relationship of art and its audience than is implied in the other two kinds of romance. Ethical romancers were well aware of the fear of the social elite concerning the alleged deleterious influences of eventuary romance on the laboring classes. Although some ethical romancers were cautious about the caprice of imagination (as we saw), they did not worry unduly about this upperclass alarm over the genre. Nor were they, at least consciously, apprehensive over an aroused audience's challenge to the legitimacy of an author's authority.18 In fact, they appeared to be comfortable with the latent power of the form as a transitory influence on its readership. While several of these authors admitted that the effect of their work, if anything, remained uncertain, others believed their writings could improve social conditions, either by provoking thought or by eliciting behavioral change. Like advocacy journalists, ethical romancers implicate their audience in their insights or messages. Like committed journalists, they are not content

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for the reader to remain a mere witness. On the contrary, they try to destabilize the conventional posture of the reader as merely a passive admirer or consumer. They therefore neither arrogandy dismiss nor submissively cater to their audience. Whereas authors of the other two types of romance conceive of their prospective readership as passive consumers of adventure stories or as passive admirers of consummate art, ethical romancers boldly explore and, in some cases, exploit the capacity of the genre specifically to stir its audience. In contrast to the implied admiring, transfixed artist-reader of aesthetic romances and to the implied gratified, tranquilized consumer-reader of eventuary romances, the ideal audience of ethical romances is urged to engage actively in the production of thought. This audience is invited to complete such texts by undergoing some mental change, at least in understanding or perspective. As Hawthorne's example in "Roger Malvin's Burial" indicates, ethical romance can utilize the traditional matter of the genre to create a certain dissonance that may profoundly vex its reader's complacent ontological and epistemological bearings. If, as reported in Chapter 1, James's reference to the "beautiful circuit" indicates that romance (like a mirror) reflects our thought back to us, the design of this circular reflection, for ethical romancers—if not for James in his aestheticist mode—is selfreflection within the reader. The most sophisticated examples of ethical romance, in short, include the reader as part of its dynamic narrative concern. As we saw in the Introduction, Jack London's "These Bones Shall Rise Again" specifically refers to creative gaps or silences designed to stimulate the ideal reader into thought or feeling—that is, to engage an implied audience in the further production of the narrative. "What more is the function of art," London asks, "than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed?"19 Such ethical romances direct attention from what occurs in the text, which never fully captures its imaginative subject, to what happens in the implied reader.20 This anticipated audience ideally engages in a mental act of detection, in an inductive and impressionistic searching out of some metaphysical mystery mirrored "fantastically" in the romance. In ethical romance the implication that some undetected secret lies hidden within the seemingly superficial generic conventions of the narrative is also a covert suggestion that some unprobed metaphysical complexity is ensconced within the apparendy mundane conventions of society; for, in the view of ethical romancers, the formulas of the genre, when not modified, reinscribe and reinforce the decorums or customs of society.

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The alignment of literary and social conventions, ethical romance suggests, is in some ultimate sense a reflection of the human self. It is humanity, collectively, that is the author of all such customs. Ethical romance, therefore, presents audience, society, and texts as reciprocal imaginative narratives, each replete with "fantastic" possibilities. Accordingly, ethical romance indicates that the mystery probed by the reader in the story, as in life, lies within that very reader, who is at once (circularly) liseur and écriture. Ethical romance, in other words, invites its implied readers to engage in a form of circular self-detection. In this way ethical romance heuristically fulfills the genre's "circuit and subterfuge of our thought." This ideal of eliciting the implied reader's selfreflection is the distinguishing force informing the special function of the otherwise common generic matter of setting, event, character, and especially tone in ethical romance. In ethical romance this generic matter appears to participate in some puzzle beneath the nominal contortions of the plot. Concern with this metaphysical puzzle, left unresolved in the narrative, potentially insinuates itself in the recesses of the readers' minds. Somewhat decentered, as if in a dream or a strange story, these readers ideally sense an erosion of the usual boundary between everyday fact and fantastic fiction, between the commonplace and the imaginative. Such an experience of "fantastic" disorientation in effect makes this "estranged" audience the final repository of the "strange" narrative. This audience is encouraged to participate actively in self-detection, as if they were not only participants in the story but the very narrative to be interpreted. Ethical romance, in short, redefines the boundary between text and self by implicating the reader in its own representation of the reciprocity of art and life. In doing so, it heuristically instructs its readers likewise to revise conventional mental boundaries, in life as well as in art. This message is embedded in the representational theatrics—the spectacle/speculum, the textual performance—of advanced expressions of ethical romance. Reflexivity The spectacle/speculum of ethical romance mirrors our thought back to us by including the process of our self-reflection within its production as reflection. In these terms, its moments of generic and textual reflexivity are particularly exemplary for the reader. At such moments, ethical romance again situates itself between the other two types. It defines itself as an alternative to both static eventuary romances (reinforcing actuality) and self-enclosed

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aesthetic romances (bracketing actuality). It often confiscates and transforms both the concern with mysterious event in the eventuary romance and the concern with mysterious art in the aesthetic romance. As we saw, however, a degree of reflexivity may also occur in the other modes of the genre. Eventuary romances will occasionally play off themselves in minor ways. Sometimes in the process of their narrative they allude, either directly or parodically, to previous romances as a means of exploiting their commercial identity. In doing so, they always include the work in hand within the genre, not the reader within the work. Such infrequent moments of reflexivity, as we observed in King Solomon's Mines, indicate that what is being read is only entertaining fun, a joke not to be taken seriously. Consequently, its audience's involvement is restricted. Its reader is presumably an appeased, temporarily sated consumer of a tale that is, even when parodic, ensconced rather firmly within a comfortable generic identity. Aesthetic romances sometimes create self-enclosing folds of reflexivity. In their narrative performance they may allude to previous romances or to themselves principally to identify themselves as an artistic revision and advancement of previous models. The result is not commercial exploitation, as in eventuary romance; the result is, ideally, an aesthetic elevation and redemption of the generic form. When a romance by an aesthete, for example, evinces a self-referential skepticism, it commends itself as an example of revision; when a romance by a decadent, for another example, reflexively departs from convention, sometimes parodically, it exalts itself as a better alternative.21 On such occasions, the formulas of the genre are selfconsciously mutated to celebrate the potentiality of the form to transcend the commonplace. In such instances, as we saw in The Turn of the Screw, reflexivity ultimately becomes an end in itself, a cul-de-sac within the hermetically sealed work of art. Aesthetic romance may in various ways proclaim itself to be superior to eventuary romance, but in the matter of self-referentiality both share at least one feature in common: the inclusion of the work within the genre, not the dramatic implication of the reader in the production or the meaning of the work. If in eventuary romance the implied reader is a passive consumer of the genre as a traditional identity, in aesthetic romance, as we also saw, the implied reader is a passive witness, transfixed in awe before the insular art object in which the commonplace identity of the genre is transformed. Ethical romance both exploits the conventions of the genre, like even-

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tuary romance, and transmutes them, like aesthetic romance. Just as the reflexivity of eventuary and aesthetic romance situates both of them in terms of the genre, so does the reflexivity of ethical romance. The selfreferentiality of advanced expressions of ethical romance, however, serves another function as well. It coalesces a belletristic interaction with genre with a journalistic concern with audience. This reflexivity does not designate the reader's role as essentially irrelevant to a timeless artistry transcending convention, as it does in aesthetic romance. This reflexivity does not relegate the reader to the role of a mere commercial consumer of transient entertainments replicating social convention, as it does in eventuary romance. The revisionary reflexivity of sophisticated expressions of ethical romance directs the reader to participate actively in (and thereby to advance) an implied search for some profound insight about life, about the very social, political, and economic actualities implicidy reinforced in eventuary romances or presumably evaded in aesthetic romances. Ethical romancers do not seek to sever the relationship between the imagination and the world, as is suggested by the indifferent transhistoricism of aesthetic romancers. Nor do ethical romancers consciously reinforce the limited perspective of current social reality, as is suggested by the climactic reclamation of the status quo by eventuary romancers. They present their work as a salient alternative to the other two types. Especially by means of tonal ambiguity and generic reflexivity, ethical romance heuristically dissolves the boundary between narrative and audience, between imagination and experience, in order to direct the reader toward some personal insight, possibly with practical ramifications. In short, ethical romance does not present itself as either an inaccessible objet d'art or as a consumable petite gâterie. It urges its audience to abandon the sort of passivity implied in a reverential appreciation offictionas wondrous examples of the art of literature or in a mindless devouring of fiction as skillful instances of the art of entertainment. In contrast, advanced ethical romances latendy disorient and possibly reorient an implied detecting reader. This imagined audience, as if coping with a peculiar memory or dream, would then actively puzzle over the question of what is real and what is true, over the wonder of life,finallyover the mysterious text of self, there to detect perhaps what can be done in the art of life. The four tales to which we now turn qualify as ethical romances. They are not, however, equal in achievement. In the following presentation, they are arranged from marginal to exceptional, from the low end to the high end of the spectrum of ethical romance. Discussing them in this order

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not only exhibits the range of ethical romance; it also tests our preceding overview in this chapter, especially since a few difficulties emerge, as we shall see. Hyne's " T h e Lizard " "The Lizard" (1898) by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, a revised version of which was included in his Atoms ofEmpire (1904),22 hovers uncertainly between eventuary and ethical romance. It lacks the identifying features of highly developed expressions of ethical romance, most notably a boundary-crossing reflexivity and tonal ambiguity. Yet, it hints at a more serious point or intention than does eventuary romance. Hyne's tale seems to verge on the low end of the spectrum for ethical romance. In any event, its feint toward some insight concerning the ethos of human options, and the trouble it runs into in making this point, are pertinent to our discussion. The story details the adventures of M'Cray (the narrator) in a cave, where he inadvertently awakens a large prehistoric saurian, a "monstrous uncouth animal that had been entombed in the forgotten ages of the past."23 Using a knife to fend off attacks by the "absolutely unemotional" and "hungry" beast (pp. 109, no), the narrator manages to escape, never again to explore caves: "I go no more cave-hunting, and I offer no help to those who do" (p. 113).

As M'Cray's words intimate, the giant lizard seems to represent the past; and the cave seems to represent the self, as it does in a long tradition ranging from Plato's Republic to Ε. Μ. Forster's Passage to India (1924), and beyond. Plunge into the self, Hyne's story suggests, and one might find a forgotten uncouth, hungry, and emotionless animal past. This implication is reinforced by the narrator's blunt observation concerning his vigorous combat with the beast: 'There is an animal love of fighting stowed away in the bottom of us all somewhere, and mine woke" (p.111).The animal hidden in the narrator's cavelike self has stirred even as the beast in the cavern has awakened. At one level, then, Hyne's story appears to present a Darwinian ethos, specifically the notion of survival of the fittest. Considering the prevalence of a similar Darwinian element in, say, H. G. Wells's fin de siècle novellas, its presence in Hyne's work is hardly exceptional. Hyne, a Cambridge Master of Arts, explores various patterns of social development, including Darwinian paradigms, in such books as Beneath Tour Very Boots (1889), about a lost race in a cave world beneath England; in The New Eden (1892), about two feral island people; and in The Lost Continent (1900), about the fall of

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Atlantis. But what is indeed different, especially from Wells's related work, is the suggestion Hyne seems to make concerning how subsequent generations survive. They survive, his narratives imply, not through encounter but through evasion. Indeed, the narrator of "The Lizard" does not kill the beast. Hefleesfrom it and is lucky in his escape, which he in fact does not remember: "How I landed I can not tell. How I got down the windings of the cave is more than I can say. And whether the beast followed me I do not know either. Somehow I got to daylight" (p. 112). Such amnesia also implies in the story how each generation survives the past. In effect, each generation lives in the sunlight of present civilization and simply forgets its animal nature, hidden and asleep at the bottom of the dark cave of self. Although this beast of the past lies beneath the commonplace realities, even banalities, of everyday civilized life at the turn of the century, the story hints, it is best to avoid "gaz[ing] upon it with [the] sickly fascination" perilously experienced by Hyne5s narrator (p. 108). And so the seeming Darwinian ethos of Hyne5s story gives way to an ethos of evasion, specifically of a flight from history. In the case of humanity, his tale seems to indicate, survival of the fittest requires that future generations avoid the beast within them. This precept may appear to be part of a vague program for achieving peace in the world, but it also carries with it a repudiation of the dark past, of even the contaminated memory of what humanity has experienced historically. The story possibly suggests that we cannot learn from the past, that we can truly advance by ignoring it altogether. But if such a conclusion is indeed his intention, Hyne inadvertently runs into some trouble. When the allegory of his narrator5s encounter dramatizes the repudiation of the past through an attempted act of violence, it actualizes the very legacy of the past it seems to repudiate. This amounts to a contradiction of sorts, even were we to think that turning the violence of the human past against itself might be an appropriate action. Less obvious, and even more important, is another problem: the implication that such an avoidance requires violence against the self, against humanity itself. Selfviolence seems the final outcome of the narrator5s repudiation of history. Representatively, M'Cray's experience insinuates that an escape from history would result in an amnesia about ourselves (our heritage) and, as well, in a fear of plunging into the cave of self (our destiny). This bleak implication is incompatible with the ethos of evasion suggested by Hyne5s story. Possibly this narrative is unsuccessful as an ethical romance, if it was ever intended to be one. In comparison, Wells5s "In the

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Abyss" (1896), which concerns a similar encounter with animal-like creatures who represent the past, points out that insufficient knowledge of history condemns us to repeat it. Accordingly, Wells's narrative urges the reader not to spurn the past in toto but to reject its superstitions in order to benefit from the scientific wonders of the future.24 H. G. Wells's "The Truth about Pyecraft" Wells's short fiction often gives the appearance of slightness, and this is certainly the case of "The Truth about Pyecraft," a fantasy included in Twelve Stories and a Dream (1903). This story is narrated by a young man who has become increasingly annoyed by an obese fellow club member, Pyecraft. Pyecraft has heard that the narrator's Indian great-grandmother dabbled in potions, and he wants the narrator to find among her possessions a prescription to cure obesity. Reluctandy, the narrator agrees, but the remedy reduces Pyecrafts subservience to gravity rather than his weight. As a result, Pyecraft floats like a large balloon, and can attain a semblance of normalcy only by sewing lead weights into his clothes. His obsessive peering at the narrator to make sure that this secret is never revealed is said to be the cause of the narrator's writing of the account we are reading. "The Truth about Pyecraft" may seem to be a rather silly story, perhaps one of those larks for which Wells was well known early in his career— Conversations with an Uncle (1895), for example. But the buoyant lightness (as it were) of this fantasy is countered by the narrator's serious attitude, comments, and behavior. For while the reader likely laughs at Pyecraft's dilemma as told by the narrator, the narrator himself singularly lacks a humorous perspective on what occurs. This disjunction might hint that the narrator is somehow also subject to the author's overall jest. If this is so, however, then the reader must make an adjustment concerning the site of authority in the story. In other words, if the narrator is as much a target of the author's humor as is Pyecraft, then the narrator is unreliable, and the reader must accordingly seek elsewhere for some bearings. This disorientation, potentially forcing the reader to become part of the narrative process through reflection, is one indication that "The Truth about Pyecraft" is more advanced than 'The Lizard" as an example of ethical romance. In Wells's tale, on second thought, the narrator is in fact more interesting than Pyecraft, whom we know only through the narrator's eyes. The narrator possesses a peevish, bad-tempered disposition, which he blames on Pyecrafts obesity and perennial presence at the club. However, a more likely cause of the narrator's biliousness is intimated in his account. He thinks that

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Pyecraft has taken advantage of the narrator's parvenu status in the club: "I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it."25 Furthermore, he suspects that Pyecraft has detected a still more sensitive secret, the darkness of his skin, which denotes the narrator's Asian ancestry. "I am not ashamed of having a Hindu great-grandmother," he protests to the reader, "but, for all that, I don't want casual strangers to see through me at a glance to her" (p. 968). Why not? we might ask. Although the answer is not expressed, the reader might surmise that the narrator believes that his attempt to rise in social status—what his new club membership represents—is vulnerable to Pyecraft's threatening perception. However much the narrator instinctively tries to prevent the reader (another casual stranger, after all) from seeing through his motives at a glance, he carelessly admits that this detection of his Asian heritage "set [him] against Pyecraft from the beginning" (p. 968). Although the narrator is unreliable, the reader is not likely to see through his narrative at a glance to glimpse either the narrator's occluded motives or the author's occluded message. Some degree of reflection is required. For 'The Truth about Pyecraft," despite its title, is certainly a story of secrets: Pyecraft continually worries whether "the secret's keeping" (p. 980); the narrator worries whether other club members will see through to his Asian secret; and the author, as we shall see, intimates a secret message. All three are disguised, as it were, insofar as they hide something important to them from their social milieu. The author's secret might seem at first to be indeed well kept, since it is hinted at through an unreliable narrator with dark attitudes. A clue surfaces, however, when the narrator draws an unusual conclusion about Pyecraft's dilemma. Because Pyecraft used the word weight rather than some other, less evasive word like fat, to refer to his obesity, the magical recipe the narrator gives him results in a literal alteration in the physics of Pyecraft's weight. Pyecraft never loses any of his size; he loses only his response to gravity. Observing this state of affairs, the narrator says without humor, "You called it, not Fat, which was just and inglorious, but Weight"; "you committed the sin of euphuism" (p. 978). On first encounter, this may seem merely a hilarious indictment, a punchline to a joke, as it were. Such an implication neatly disguises the authorial point behind this observation; for on second thought, this remark is odd. An alert reader might reflect on it somewhat, especially since the word one expects to encounter is euphemism,, not euphuism.26 The charge against Pyecraft should be the social transgression of substituting an agreeable but inaccurate expression for a blunt but precise one. Nevertheless, the charge made is the literary transgression of artificial elegance in language.

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Euphuism is a charge sometimes made in Wells's time against the aestheticist emphasis on pure effect, on highly stylized or ornamented artistry surpassing everyday concerns. This attitude, especially as embodied in the decadent version of aestheticism, was perceived by a number of Wells's contemporaries as one more sign of fin de siècle decline. Wells in particular was sensitive to turn-of-the-century theories of decline, and in such fiction as The Time Machine (1895) he associated this possible slide toward degeneration with the oppression of an underground working class by an aestheticist cultural elite.27 His allusion to euphuism in "The Truth about Pyecraft" reflects a criticism of Pyecraftian degeneracy as representative of an effete upper class. This charge is reinforced by the signification of obesity during the turn of the century, when corpulence was associated with inefficiency, depletion of energy, and societal imbalance, especially in elite consumption of available resources.28 There is a passage in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885) that sheds light on Wells's remark. Pater was associated in his time with what he himself termed the " 'aesthetic' philosophy" of art, with the shift in language to complex "artificed" abstraction. In Marius, Pater defended Flavian's use of euphuism as a response to two circumstances: that "the popular speech was gradually departing from the form and rule of literary language, a language always and increasingly artificial"; and that "the learned dialect was yearly becoming more and more barbarously pedantic." As a remedy, Pater advocates the use of aestheticist euphuism, the dualism of which (he claims) inherently accommodates extremes: "partly conservative or reactionary, in its dealing with the instrument of the literary art; partly popular and revolutionary, asserting . . . the rights of the proletariat of speech."29 In effect, however, proletarian writers like Wells saw euphuism less as a healthy compromise than as a sign of cultural malaise. To them, Pater's argument for the role of euphuism as a mediation between popular and learned speech seemed disingenuous. Such an argument seemed to them to disguise an elitist secret: the imposition of entropic upper-class values on a suppressed vital proletarian energy, which needs no negotiation by an aesthete like Pater. "The Truth about Pyecraft" hints at this secret design of aestheticism. Since the words euphemism and euphuism are not synonyms, the reader, in expecting the former but encountering the latter, may experience a surprise, a disjunction similar to that sensed in the gap between a seemingly trivial narrative told by a deadly serious narrator. This experience of dislocation might wrest the reader from a merely passive disposition toward the narrative. This potential unformed detection of something not quite right in the

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account may raise an uncertainty, a doubt, or a suspicion that serves as a clue to the reader to look for something else in the story. Minimally, the peculiar appearance of the word euphuism, when euphemism is expected, can cue an alert audience to the unreliability of the narrator. In any event, however, the specific charge of euphuism is so sufficiently problematic that something more serious seems to loom out of the apparent frivolous punchline humor of the passage. What looms is the author's occluded secret. Pyecraft, the narrator, and the author essentially engage in dishonest social discourse in order to keep their secrets. They mutually make use of both euphuism and euphemism. Such "polite" (albeit actually secret-keeping) evasive discourse is what the social milieu of club membership requires not only in everyday speech but also (Wells intimates) in written works. Hence, in penning "The Truth about Pyecraft" the narrator, otherwise a self-proclaimed "man of honour " (pp. 968-969), seems to violate this code, the upper-class code of euphuism and euphemism. If Wells's fantasy is both "a playful examination of a trick of language" and a serious "condemnation of even the most trivial forms of evasion and disguise," as one critic has noted in passing,30 it is, more precisely, a narrative that reflexively uses evasion and disguise to make an authorial statement about the ethos of storytelling (the subject of our next chapter). The narrator of "The Truth about Pyecraft" is unreliable, yet he also oddly must be the discloser of Wells's views. Wells specifically shares his narrator's disapproval of the artificial and inflated sort of writing, the "fat, abundant discourse" (p. 980; emphasis added), associated with the upper class. Evasive or dishonest, their language does not tell the truth, specifically the social truth that the upper class is a fraud made up of "the most inconsiderable of men " (p. 980), including the parvenu narrator. The writing demanded by Pyecraft and his milieu is "a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere clouds in clothing, niente, nefas" (p. 980). This manner of writing reflects the obsession of Pyecraft's milieu with self-gratification, requiring mistreated servants (pp. 969, 978) and endless consumption (represented by Pyecraft's excessive eating, even of the prescription to cure excessive eating). That is to say, Pyecraft's social milieu and the discourse it requires are equivalent to a "gas-filled bladder" (p. 976). A gas-filled bladder is vulnerable, as Pyecraft's inflated ego is vulnerable, to puncture. Puncture in this case could be achieved through the exposure of some generally unrecognized truth about the upper class. This truth is suggested in direct or journalistic speech, even lower-class speech, including a scatological innuendo in the story concerning eating and gas. Likewise,

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the play on Pyecraft's name conceals the disagreeable image of aflyingdirigible of pus (py) within the agreeable image of a flying pie. As the tide of Wells's story forecasts, the narrator will revenge himself on Pyecraft by telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth " (p. 969). But it is perhaps only "the plain truth about Pyecraft" (p. 969) that he approaches, certainly not "the whole truth. " The whole truth would necessarily also puncture his own inflated desires to join Pyecraft's club and become identified with his social class. This truth about the narrator is revealed very obliquely, and the truth about the author5s secret is still more obliquely intimated. The author's point is shielded from detection on first encounter by the seeming levity of the account and the unreliability of the narrator. The truth about the author is truly another matter. On the one hand, as we have remarked, his story contains moments of peculiar disjunction that potentially stimulate the reader into certain detectional thought processes. In this way the ideal audience becomes involved in the story, searches for some secret message—in this case, the emptiness andfraudulenceof upperclass self-representation and the truthtelling of a more journalistically expressed narrative. For 'The Truth about Pyecraft" reflects the influence of journalistic writing in its apparent slight fantasy, earthy humor, and colloquial style. On the other hand, despite these features, the story has not itself been direct in presenting its revelation, which (if critical discourse is any measure) has in fact gone unnoticed. In other words, the story has tended to keep its secret, as if it too were participating in the upper-class code of honor that requires evasion and artifice in discourse. Like Pyecraft and the narrator, therefore, the author is unwittingly implicated in the verbal games of disguise, the very craft he apparendy impugns. In 'The Truth about Pyecraft" Wells inadvertently reflects a double consciousness. At the time he wrote this story, Wells was, like the narrator, a man of working-class origin who was now nervously rising in society, especially in the club world. Within a year after the appearance of Twelve Stories and a Dream he was, for instance, playing informed advisor on the subject of clubs. In September 1904 he instructed Arnold Bennett: The Savile club has no bedrooms—The Arts has got 10. Otherwise the Arts is very much like the Savile, & these two visit when cleaning & so on. The Royal Societies is a very good little club indeed with about 25 or 30 bedrooms. These two are most in your lines. I belong only to the Savile & N. L. C, but when I've got some money I want to belong to the Garrick & Reform.31

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Club membership was a sign of financial success and social status. There was even a hierarchy of clubs. In this milieu, in 1903 and 1904, Wells was an outsider who longed to be an insider, and even when he had made the transition he would never lose his earlier anxiety and perspective. "The Truth about Pyecraft" reflects this ambivalence toward the upper class as Other. It expresses Wells's unconscious longing (like the uncomfortable parvenu narrator striving to displace Pyecraft in his milieu) and his conscious repudiation (like the narrator's intemperate excoriation of Pyecraft as a representative of his milieu). Unconsciously, it seems, Wells fears that readers will see through his story at a glance and thwart his bid for social ascendancy; consciously he urges these very same readers to detect his secret animosity, his declaration of rebellion against their weighdess social and literary values. Accordingly, he disguises his message in a congenial combination of light humor and unreliable narration. At the same time he creates moments of disjunction and journalistic innuendo to, as it were, dare his reader to detect behind this disguise his rebellious point about the ethos of storytelling. To some extent, Wells negotiated the anxiety of his unconscious desire by projecting it on the narrator. Since the narrator is included in the author's satiric attack on the upper class, this repudiated personal desire in effect is hidden from the author himself.32 Having unconsciously bracketed that side of himself that seeks the elite club milieu, Wells focuses his conscious authorial energy on assailing the social Other as enemy, and paradoxically does so indirecdy through the same unreliable narrator he repudiates. At this conscious level of his performance, Wells suggests that he will burst the bubble of inflated euphuistic discourse with truthtelling journalistic discourse. He will tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," revealing the ugly reality behind Pyecraft and behind a narrator who thinks he is better than the man he hopes to displace socially. Even if his craftiness inadvertently entraps Wells in his indictment of the Other and even if telling the truth in this story seems to amount to little more than an intemperate denial of the very life-style he was himself attaining, "The Truth about Pyecraft" nonetheless functions as an ethical romance. Wells's story is flawed and perhaps therefore as unsuccessful as is "The Lizard," but as an example of ethical romance it is more advanced than is Hyne's tale. In its generic theatrics of intimation and concealment, it is artistically more sophisticated, especially given the ways its artifice implicates the reader in the narrative process. The disjunction evident in the alternation of tone, the substitution of the word euphuism for euphemism, and

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the suggestion of narrator unreliability potentially provokes the reader to search for some explanation below the seemingly slight surface of "The Truth about Pyecraft." In this instance, as we have seen, more "truth" was finally intimated and concealed in the spectacle/speculum of his romance than the author apparendy knew. As an ethical romance,finally,Wells's fantasy reflexively reveals a concern with the ethos of storytelling. Specifically, it suggests that authors have a responsibility, like proper journalists, to reveal the truth about whatever has been conspiratorially hidden from most people, particularly the truth about the fraudulent and inflated euphuism of upper-class self-representation. The conflicted authorial presence in "The Truth about Pyecraft" notwithstanding, this story claims for fiction, especially romance, the power to intimate the truth, even if upon clarifying reflection that revelation is disagreeable or ugly. J. K. Bangs's "Thurlow's Christmas Story" Like Wells, John Kendrick Bangs was a well-regarded fin de siècle humorist. An important member of the staff of Harper's Monthly for many years and author of over thirty books, Bangs turned his satiric eye upon coundess particulars of his day, including the turn-of-the-century relish for ghost stories. He knew well that publishers were keenly aware of the perennial popularity of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol (1843) and, as we noted concerning the book version of The Turn of the Screw, considered the Christmas season to be a particularly opportune time to present ghost stories to the public. In Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (1898), many of the sketches of which have an association with Christmas, Bangs offers his contribution to this market. But not all of the narratives in this collection are merely eventuary ghost stories. Except for the last tale in the collection, they are humorous ghost stories that reflexively parody the genre, and in their theatrics some of these parodies involve the reader in unexpected "haunting" metaphysical questions. Of the sketches in this book, "Thurlow's Christmas Story" has attracted the attention of a late twentieth-century authority on ghost stories, who has mentioned in passing that this tale is "unique" in the genre.33 As we shall see, this uniqueness emanates not only from an unusual comic plot about an author trying to write a story. The truly special achievement of this narrative is Bangs's fashioning of an ethical romance out of the conventions of the ghost story. As an ethical romance, "Thurlow's Christmas Story" uses reflexivity, in conjunction with the romance features of disorienting setting,

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caricature, and equivocal tone, to breach the border between reader and narrative. If Bangs's story does not quite plunge the reader into the epistemological abyss of a Hawthornean romance like "Roger Malvin's Burial," it does similarly present a major ethical concern, despite (actually, by means of) its seemingly disarming humor. Bangs's tale subtly uses the romance conventions of the ghost story to expose the reader to a profound uncertainty concerning the origin of human moral behavior. Although Bangs's romance keeps company with such ethical-dilemma fiction as Ellen Glasgow's Schopenhauerian "Point in Morals" (1899), it defines itself against verisimilitudinous fiction, a common practice (as we noted in the first chapter) among ethical romancers. As Bangs aptly describes himself, through the narrator of his second tale in the book: "It has been said by critics that I am a romancer of the wildest sort" in "setting forth these episodes" of "strange incidents"; but "what I . . . tell is the plain, unvarnished truth" narrated "as faithfully as the most conscientious realist," including "my good friend Mr. [William Dean] Howells."34 The narrator then humorously vexes this claim to realism and veracity by apologetically commencing his account with "It was a wild and stormy night" (p. 28). This much maligned cliché (appropriated from a supernatural tale by Edward Bulwer-Lytton) signals a particularly notorious form of Gothicfiction.This confusion of identity of genre and of reliability of narrator encourages the audience from the first to have unsettled feelings concerning the relation between realism and romance, and between reader and raconteur. 'Thin-low's Christmas Story" is a letter sent by an author to his editor. Henry Thurlow has a standard advance contract to write, as he has "been in the habit of doing," a ghost story for the Christmas issue of a periodical, in which "a certain position in the make-up [has been] reserved" for him (pp. 114-115). Although he has a reputation for being able to write on demand, in this instance he is unable to produce the story in spite of many abortive attempts. The trouble is not merely writer's block; he has become haunted, or so it seems, by someone in his dreams who looks like himself—"that other self in which [he] recognized, developed to the full, every bit of my capacity for an evil life" (p. 117). Nothing Thurlow does helps him to restore control over his authorial powers. With the deadline for the contracted story hours away, he falls prey to a temptation proffered by a stranger. This man has composed a story, the only one he has ever written, and he reverendy offers it gratis to the stricken author. After reading it, Thurlow realizes that it is great—"one of the immortal stories" for which his "name will live" beyond its mere "present glory" (p. 133). After arguing with his

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counterpart, that other self urging the purloining of the proffered story, Thurlow makes a copy of the manuscript under his own name and posts it to the editor of the periodical. On the following day, however, he learns from the irate editor that he has actually forwarded only blank pages. The story we are reading is the letter he has written to the editor to explain, such as he is able, how this gaffe occurred. Throughout the story we remain uncertain what is fact and what is dream. Does an admiring stranger really appear and offer a story late in the evening? Does a doppelgänger of the author manifest itself as a separate, yet inseparable, entity? Are both only figments of Thurlow's imagination or figures of himself in one of his haunted dreams? After all, he gives way to the "temptation" and commits the "crime" of appropriation at midnight (pp. 126, 136), the proverbial witching hour when most people are asleep. Not only are actuality and dream confused, but so are fact and fiction. In his account Thurlow occasionally resorts to terms normally applied to fiction; for example, he speaks of the outcome of his experience as a "terrible dénouement"(p. 137). Throughout, of course, he has presented the "facts" about the "fiction" he could not write yet nearly perpetrated in his appropriation of another's tale. And this convolution is, in our mind, itself an act of fiction; for fiction is the "factual" identity of the story (the letter to the editor) before our eyes. The very terse appendix to the tale, a letter from the editor to the author, compounds this sense of coalescence of fact and fiction. It indicates that the explanation Thurlow offers "isn't worth the paper it is written on" when assessed as fact, but that this very same explanation "is probably the best bit offiction"he has ever written (p. 139). Bizarrely the "factual" account of the absent "fiction" has resulted for Thurlow in the present "fiction" based on a fantastic and discredited narrative of his presumably "factual" experience. Out of pages "as blank as when they left the paper-mill" and out of a corresponding "absolute[ly] blank" mind concerning these pages, he actually manages to send the great ghost story he tried to write or only thought or dreamed he had purloined. At this point the boundary between actuality and dream, between fact and fiction, between the outside and the inside of the narrative, is thoroughly breached. Like the ghost story he was supposed to compose, the strange account he does narrate centers on some undisclosed mystery. Bangs's work reflects the late nineteenth-century interest in the underside of consciousness. This interest in uncontrollable heredity and unknown motives and impulses, evident in the popularity (especially in Europe at the turn of the century) of

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Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), had begun to erode traditional beliefs in human will andfreechoice.35 Like several other fin de siècle authors, most notably Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,16 Bangs suggests that there are "secrets of the mind and conscience" (p. no) that are potentially more terrifying than the traditional specters of ghost stories, secrets that may in fact account for the sighting of such apparitions. Thurlow suspects, like the visitor of a haunted house in a Gothic romance, "that in secret there is some wicked mystery" to be disclosed; or he suspects, like the inheritor of a haunted house, that this secret is specifically "connected with [his] life" (pp. 112-113). And "Thurlow's Christmas Story" indeed at once intimates and conceals a mysterious secret: that human experience is more enigmatic than is conventionally acknowledged. In the "neutral territory" of his ethical romance—where dream and actuality coalesce, as well as fiction and fact—Bangs raises a question about the human perception of reality. Particularly at issue is the nature of consciousness and will, the mainstays of traditional moral arguments concerning the assessment of human behavior. Bangs questions the inherited and increasingly unfirm assumption of his day that consciousness, including the capacity for willing self-direction, is an essential trait defining the human being as a "free" moral agent. Bangs may be targeting more than the issue of individual responsibility when one resists "temptation" and avoids acts of "crime" (pp. 126, 136); he may also be targeting Thurlow's central concern, the American doctrine of success through morality and work as typically articulated in Horatio Alger's popular Ragged Dick (1867) and Tattered Tom (1872) and as parodied in Stephen Crane's "Self-Made Man" (1899). Like Hawthorne, Stevenson, and others, to whom he is indebted, Bangs indicates that human behavior is hardly so simply understood. Bangs suggests, in contrast, that human behavior is grounded on a secret, or mystery, beyond our conscious comprehension. This assault on any attempt to rely securely upon a valorization of consciousness and the capacity to will is certainly evident in the conflation of actuality and dream, fact andfictionin Bangs's narrative. But it also emerges at the center of Thurlow's struggle. Thurlow thinks, as do many in Bangs's late-Victorian audience, that he clearly knows what is right and what is wrong. He believes that he ought to resist temptation and not commit the crime of purloining someone else's property. He believes that he ought to perform honest work. But his precepts are defeated. The undermining of his conscious will, Thurlow notes, resultsfromthe

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"sheer force of will" of his "other self," who compels him "to do a thing which [he] abhorred" (p. 134). In this way both he and the reader can gloss his experience of the unpleasant reversal of the traditional doctrine of the human capacity to direct oneself by will. Both Thurlow and the reader can recover a semblance of equilibrium by believing they at least understand the pattern of his defeat. Yes, some mysterious will within him overpowers his conscious will, but at least, the reader might consolingly think, we know this can happen to some people. Terrible as such hidden compulsions may be, the reader might conclude, such moments are only aberrations. With this perspective, the reader would accord the "revealed" mystery some reality, but would marginalize and, correspondingly, defuse its threat to the status quo. But Bangs's final reversal problematizes this maneuver. This final reversal hints at a still deeper mysterious secret beyond the ken of Thurlow and of the hypothetical audience of his account. For having capitulated to the evil other self, having submitted conscious will to compulsive will, Thurlow (unlike Jekyll, say) has somehow produced a successful rather than a destructive dénouement. He is forced (the passive voice is indicative here of overpowered conscious will) to produce an explanation, which becomes his story of the "fact" that fulfills his contract for "fiction" without committing any social or personal transgression at all. Thurlow's conscious will gives way to willful compulsion only to manifest his initial desire—to produce his own work and avoid confiscating someone else's story. As Thurlow puzzlingly acknowledges, he had done "an unworthy thing, but by some mysterious provision of fate my conscience is cleared of that" (p. 138; emphasis added). This amounts to much more than an amusing outcome. Had Thurlow not done precisely what he did, he would never have written, as the editor confirms for us, "the best bit of fiction [he] ever wrote." Beneath the commonly received moral paradigm of the contest between conscious will and unconscious will lies still some deeper, more mysterious secret will-like force. By raising the specter of this force, hidden as if in a crypt deep within the mind, Bangs's story vexes commonplace conceptions of right and wrong. He punctures not only the conventional "habit of" advocating selfcontrol but also the conventional "habit of" understanding moral behavior dualistically (e.g., good vs. evil). Bangs seemingly leaves the reader mollified by humor that superficially marginalizes and defuses the threat of inner compulsion to the status quo. Nevertheless, this same humor has also transgressed or violated the bounda-

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ries between fact and fiction as well as reader and text. In negotiating such oppositions, the humor of Bangs's romance at once conceals and hints at some obscure truth about human ethos. The performative "circulating" infinite regression in this romance implies something hidden yet manifest about the mysterious origin and nature of the human will. This puzzle concerning will is the secret of Bangs's ethical romance. And this secret leaves this conundrum unresolved, even as it leaves unanswered precisely what is actual and what is fantastical in Thurlow's account. It replicates Thurlow's experience: "a story which had seemed to [him] in the writing to be coherent had returned to [him] as a mere bit of incoherence" (p. 115). In plot, tone, and reflexivity 'Thurlow's Christmas Story" is far from clamorous on the surface; but below its surface it quiedy arrives at a disruptive moral incoherence, a philosophical blankness, like Thurlow's manuscript and his mind at the end of his account. And the final, humorous plot-twist in Bangs's story potentially involves its audience direcdy in this mystery about a human will that eludes comprehension. Initially, an audience may peruse Thurlow's explanation and perhaps think (naively) that they understand more than does this afflicted man; however, upon completing the editor's note, the brief addendum to Thurlow's missive, the reader cannot enjoy such a privileged position. When encountering the editor's sharp dismissal of Thurlow's account as fact and his purchase (for one hundred dollars) of this very same paltry excuse as a marvellous work of fiction, can most readers resist laughing or smiling, at least interiorly? If this smile or laugh occurs, Bangs has employed his talent for humor to relax his readers even while confronting them with a bizarre paradox, a paradox that questions one of the fundamental features of traditional moral beliefs. For a smile or a laugh in response to his narrative emerges without the reader's permission, even as Thurlow's experience has exceeded his control. Bangs apparendy equates the mystery of laughter, its origin and nature beyond consciousness and will, with the mystery of moral agency that lurks in his story. Bangs's humor engages his audience in conventional ways in 'Thurlow's Christmas Story," butfinallyit also potentially includes these readers within a bizarre paradox confronting their preferred beliefs about the nature of consciousness and will. If Thurlow has produced a "seeming jest at [his reader's] expense" (p. 114), so has Bangs. His possibly smiling or laughing reader disarmingly encounters, beyond his or her control, an internal compelling "sheer force" similar to Thurlow's experience. And Bangs leaves the reader, like Thurlow, at the heart of a philosophical blankness, at once ob-

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scured and insinuated by the author's joke and the audience's laughter. This absence suggests that some profound mysterious secret haunts his apparendy slight ethical romance, the same secret that haunts any seemingly unquestionable dogma of human ethos. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades If Bangs's story surpasses Hyne's "Lizard" and Wells's "Truth about Pyecraft" as an ethical romance, Gilbert K. Chesterton's odd tales in The Club of Queer Trades are still more advanced expressions of the genre. This claim might be expeaed, given Chesterton's place in my study as a spokesman for the artistic possibilities and responsibilities of romance. A neglected work, The Club of Queer Trades provides a remarkable site for demonstrating how the narrative features of detective fiction, when fashioned as ethical romance, can be directed toward a transformation of perspective, specifically toward a potential revision of the customary perception of human existence. Although it has been readily dismissed as the least satisfying of his fantasia, as mechanical in plot, as a mere prelude to better work, and as deficient in characterization,37 Chesterton's first attempt at the mystery genre presents carefully crafted ethical romances. The power of his example here and elsewhere is evident, moreover, in the transethical selfreflexive detectivefictionof Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom acknowledged their abiding interest in Chesterton's writings. The issue of direct influence aside, however, Chesterton's practice anticipates instances of late twentieth-century detective fiction that appropriate certain features of ethical romance. For just as in Chesterton's time, so too today, detectivefictioncan surpass the prescriptions for eventuary romance. Like The Club of Queer Trades, contemporary detective fiction sometimes self-reflexively revises its generic formulas even while using them; it can, as well, involve the subsequendy disoriented, detecting reader in a critique of the very social, political, and economic forces these conventions tend to reinforce.38 Usually comments on The Club of Queer Trades emphasize its response to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. This interest is supported by the fact that in the book Basil Grant specifically refers to them: "I never could believe in that man—what's his name, in those capital stories?—Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing. Facts point in all directions, it seems to me, like the thousands of twigs on a tree."39 Generally, critics have understood this allusion to indicate Chesterton's disapproval of Doyle's stress on reason.

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Indeed, in contrast to Holmes's "cold, precise but admirably balanced mind"—a "perfect reasoning and observing machine"40—Basil Grant's special kind of madness or insanity is reiterated throughout The Club of Queer Trades (e.g., pp. 84, 158, 164). Basil, who adumbrates Father Brown, lives "perpetually near the vision of the reason of things which makes men lose their reason" (p. 121). Basil's "insanity" puts him in touch with a higher reason, the "submerged sunrise of wonder," the imagination of which we already heard Chesterton speak in his autobiography. That it is a higher reason is also indicated in Orthodoxy, where Chesterton gnomically asserts that "the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason"; he is a man, like Basil, who steps out "of the world of facts" and therefore out of "a world of limits."41 Throughout The Club of Queer Trades, Chesterton assaults the place of mundane facts as the bulwark of his audience's illusion of reality, a belief fostered by reason. In contrast to this reliance on mundane facts and empirical reason in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Basil time and again demonstrates how unreliable is the commonplace path of thought, which cannot fathom the sort of alternative "fantastic" reality informing the antics of The Club of Queer Trades. "Facts obscure the truth," the audience of Chesterton's book is told; "the discovery of [truth] is absolutely impeded by the facts" (pp. 28,191). Pertinendy, if the realistic novel, as J. Hillis Miller has observed, includes a movement from objective things, to mental images, to distorted verbal accounts,42 then its opposite genre, especially ethical romance as Chesterton practiced it, may be said to include a movement from obviously distorted accounts, to mental images, to sought-after objective truths (in some ultimate sense). Chesterton's devaluation of empirical reasoning, commonplace facts, and the general sense of the reality of temporal existence is important to note. Equally significant in Basil's revision of the Holmes stories is Chesterton's repudiation of the use of romance as merely a form of entertainment valorizing the factual "world of limits," to repeat Chesterton's phrase. Sherlock Holmes represents an ideal patriarchal authority who always successfully imposes the order of justice over the chaos of crime. By emphasizing immutable facts, certain reason, and predictable events—whether or not he strikes us today as always consistent in his practice—Holmes is akin to eighteenth-century empiricists. He appears to reinforce the myth of a "secure" world of generally known experience based on the ostensibly firm equation of discernible cause and effect. Holmes implicidy discourages the attainment of an extravagant perspective, the characteristic of the romance

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genre Chesterton specifically extends. In this sense, critics who have read The Club ofQueer Trades as Chesterton's rejection of what he perceived as the ennui and sterility of Edwardian society seem to be accurate.43 The Club of Queer Trades departs from the model of the Sherlock Holmes stories not only in its repudiation of empirical reason and of the mundane facts that support reason. It also re-presents the matter of eventuary romances, such as the Holmes accounts. It defines itself as an ethical version of romance, as an alternative mode of the genre. It critiques not only static eventuary romances reinforcing actuality but also self-enclosed aesthetic romances bypassing actuality. For as we previously observed, Chesterton severely criticized the lure of art based on aestheticist or decadent standards. In Chesterton's view, romance should confiscate and transform both the concern with adventure in the eventuary romance and the concern with art in the aesthetic romance. The Club ofQueer Trades, accordingly, does not promote itself as an act of art. Its revision of both eventuary and aesthetic romances is simultaneously suggested and disguised. First, Chesterton's deliberate lightness of style, his spare narrative surface in the book, reduces the reader's awareness of its manner as a product of belletristic consciousness.44 And, similar to the method of "The Truth about Pyecraft" and "Thurlow's Christmas Story," Chesterton's style intimates and conceals a serious message, which in effect dialogically complicates the seemingly escapist humorous tone of the narrative surface. Second, this liminal style is abetted by an impressionism of detail in the narrative itself. This feature modifies Chesterton's early exposure to developments in painting, which (as we previously noted) he criticized for improper direction; and it expresses his prevalent fascination with the sketch. This sketchiness, "like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book" or "mystical impressions" (pp. 15, 62), obscures any sense of concrete background, specific locale, or deeply drawn characters. This sketchiness, bracing other characteristics of the romance genre, leaves the reader only with a vague impression. It contributes to Chesterton's imagistic suggestion in his text of the uncertain nature of conscious life. It implies that we live in an ontological and epistemological mental fog, as if in "the twilight corridors of a dream" (p. 4; cf. pp. 22, 64, 68, 162, 219). 45

Third, the self-effacing revisionism of The Club ofQueer Trades includes Chesterton's use offigurativelanguage, specifically allusions drawn from the world of books and applied to the world of everyday life. Although these similes and metaphors are a form of artistic reflexivity, their primary energy is directed outwardly. As integrative narrative devices, they contribute to

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the unobtrusive dissolution of boundaries between fact and fiction, and ultimately between audience and narrative. This metaphoric breakdown of the bounds between the reader's world and thefictionalworld of the stories in Chesterton's collection latendy directs its implied audience's attention away from the text in hand as a self-enclosed objet d'art and toward its reader as the open-ended text to be interpreted. In other words, these allusions to books, unlike those in James's novella The Turn of the Screw, do not finally serve a hermetical function that tends to insulate the text from an excluded and perpetually mystified witness. Moreover, these transgressive allusions, designed to be perceived at some recessed level of the prospective reader's mind, may violate the customary bounds informing the audience's secure differentiation of the world of fact from the world of imagination. As a result of this metaphoric breach of the separation of fantasy and actuality, the reader may undergo a temporary disorientation similar to the experience of a dream, in which the mundane and the fantastic routinely fuse. Appropriately a number of these integrative similes and metaphors, as liminal narrative devices latendy dissolving the boundary between factual audience andfictionaltext, cluster at the end of the first (and best) story in the collection: "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown." This tale concerns a man who experiences apparendy threatening situations after he purchases a house. These actually harmless incidents are the work of the Adventure and Romance Agency, hired by the previous bored owner of the house "to surround him with startling and weird events" (p. 44). He had wanted to restore some excitement in his life. Occurring at the end of the reader's own adventure in this strange story, the metaphoric passages merging art and life look interpretatively backward to this very story; occurring at the end of the first story, they also look interpretatively forward to the succeeding tales. In this sense they are passages of direction or orientation within the field of the text for the prospective reader. At the same time, within the field of the implied reader's actual life, they potentially achieve a boundary-dissolving disorientation of ontological and epistemological certainty—a dreamlike effect characteristic of romance as practiced by writers in the Hawthornean tradition. These particular passages include a dualistic distinction which they ultimately eradicate. Explaining to Major Brown what has been happening to him, a representative of the Adventure and Romance Agency observes that "modern man" exists "in a sedentary state"; if this person wishes for an adventure into the realm of the imagination ("fairyland"), "he reads a book" (p. 46). This comment makes clear that "modern man," as Chesterton also

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views him in his autobiography, draws a narrow distinction, or even assumes a separation, between imagination and experience, fiction and fact. This division between fancy (fiction) and the world of actual experience (life) results, in Chesterton's words, in a "congestion of the imagination." This congestion tends to encourage, as Chesterton's autobiography similarly reports, either an excessive indulgence of the imagination (as exemplified by art-for-artVsake writings) or a neglect of the imagination (as exemplified by the empty fictional entertainments popular with morbid Edwardian "clockwork little creature[s]" [pp. 49, 56]). In revisionary contrast, The Club of Queer Trades subdy associates its dreamlike matrix of "wonder," its "mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar," its "combination of something that is secure with something that is insecure," with everyday life. From thefirststory to the last, Chesterton's book obscures the distinction betweenfictionand fact. This separation of art and life is typically resisted whenever the narrator, Charles Swinburne, includes his readers in his narrative through direct address. Swinburne, furthermore, indicates that Major Brown "saw life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book" and, consequendy, never anticipated being "caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventures such as he had never seen or dreamed" (p. 15; emphasis added). The narrator also remarks that Basil's brother "adopted, with a childlike delight, all the dramatic poses of the detective offiction"(p. 32; emphasis added; cf. p. 98). The distinction between art and life is similarly negated by the representative of the agency, who observed this very distinction as a problem for "modern man." Explaining the business of the agency, he says,"Wegive him back his childhood," a comment identifying (typically for Chesterton) early youth as a time when experience and imagination intersect. The clients of the Agency "can act stories, be [their] own heroes" (p. 46; emphasis added). The agency, staffed by "distinguished novelists," provides "a larger theatre of events," even an occasionalfictional"plot against [a client's] life" (pp. 44-45; emphasis added). Major Brown, the agency representative humorously explains, was "suddenly hurled into the middle of another man's story," the man who "was a subscriber to [the] agency" (p. 45; emphasis added). This narrative technique latently insinuates allusive similes and metaphors deep in the reader's mind, where ideally (as if in a dream) fact and fiction lose their separation. This liminal manner occurs as well in the other stories of The Club of Queer Trades. In "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation" a recollection "is like remembering some novel" (p. 66), again suggesting that the facts of the past are as imbued by the imagination as are the events of

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fiction. In the same narrative, one character's reduction of another protagonist into "a twopenny literary adventurer," into "a swindler of a . . . novel kind" (pp. 71, 87; emphasis added), reinforces the dreamlike blurring of any distinction between fiction and life. Likewise, in"TheAwful Reason of the Vicar's Visit," not only does Reverend Shorter "look . . . like a . . . farcical fairy tale," but he himself declares that his disguise is "only a social fiction" (p. 123). The former simile and the latter nuance in particular again deny the usual distinction between quotidian and imaginative experience. Both indicate that even the facts of human social existence are mere fictions, that every "plain literal fact always seems fantastic," that every fact contains "eternity," "an infinity of things," a surprising plentitude of possibilities (pp. 29,175).

Virtually invisible to the casual reader's conscious perception, these allusions to freehand drawing-books, adventure yarns, detective fiction, fairy tales, novelists, theaters, plots, stories, novels, and subscribers represent an appropriation of terms from the world of art, an appropriation metaphorically indicating that an overlooked imaginative factualism informs the more limited facts of everyday life. Similar to the work of the Adventure and Romance Agency, The Club of Queer Trades integrates imaginative and daily experience, or (in other terms) the spiritual and the material realms. Recall that for Chesterton "the object of the artistic and spiritual life" is identical: to suggest the concealed, the "submerged sunrise of wonder." As we have seen, the "neutral territory" of The Club ofQueer Trades, as an ethical romance, conveys this suggestion principally by "narratively" including its implied audience, as the ultimate text, in the dramatization of its dreamlike world. Ideally, this audience's sense of "the familiar" (mundane facts) dissolves before its transformative exposure to and implication in "the unfamiliar" (fantastic events). As the barriers constructed by conventional rationality are transgressed by allusive similes and metaphors, subdy integrating the fanciful and the factual, this audience may undergo a decentering similar to the experience of a strange dream. They may well wonder, however momentarily or vaguely, what is real and what is true? The raising of such questions, at some level of the mind, lies at the heart of ethical romances like The Club of Queer Trades. They are the sort of questions we approach when we dream. The specific answers, akin to limited facts, are left as open-ended in Chesterton's narratives as are the ongoing plots contrived by the Adventure and Romance Agency. Chesterton's narratives of detection potentially abandon us before the mystery of our existence. This designed, provocative evasion notwithstanding, Chesterton's book

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implies that there is indeed an ultimate reality, an ultimate truth, an ultimate factuality for us to detect. If his stories probe beneath the surface of our seemingly secure conventional experience of life to encourage an ontological and epistemological disorientation, they also suggest a still deeper level of metarational security, a reorientation based (as Chesterton said in his autobiography) on an insightful "burst of astonishment at our own existence." This discovery of an inner "submerged sunrise of wonder," Chesterton hopes, will be therapeutic. It ideally should facilitate a metamorphosed vision of wonder that reveals life to be a dreamlike protean amalgamation of imagination and fact. For Chesterton, it is pertinent to recall, the work of the proper artist is identical to the integrative work of the spirit. Chesterton seems, like Mr. Wimpole, to be "so wildly funny," yet to be "say[ing] things quite philosophical" (p. 75) in The Club of Queer Trades. This conflicted tonality is one more narrative technique contributing to the heuristic spectacle of Chestertonian romance. The coalescence of the mundane and the fantastic in the speculum of his stories implies, ethically, that the detecting reader should apply the rules of this kind of art to the rules of life. Thusly suffused by imagination, by spirit, this reader's life might range far beyond its present narrow confines. In contrast to James in The Turn of the Screw, Chesterton does not approach romance as a severing of the relationship between the imagination and the world. And in contrast to Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes chronicles, Chesterton does not rely on romance to reinforce the current realities of everyday life. Chesterton's ethical romances integrate factuality and fictionality. His narrative techniques hortatively dissolve the boundary between their medium—the imaginative text—and their reader—the ultimate text. Ideally, The Club of Queer Trades facilitates a disorientation and reorientation, an awakening of its audience to the spirit of their own fantastic possibilities. Correspondingly, Chesterton's romances imply that the reader is a sleuth puzzling over strange clues from, as it were, the memory of an artlike dream—at once a fantasy and a reality. Given this protean wonder of human existence, his implied reader should especially question conventional reality and truth, should turnfinallyto the text of self. In this text of self, mirrored in the text of a Chestertonian ethical romance, one may detect what might be achieved, potentially, in the art of life, the ultimate objet d'art.

6 The Ethos of Storytelling Davis, Crane, and

Austin

As we have seen, one element of Wells's problematic fantasy "The Truth about Pyecraft" touches on the ethos of storytelling. Wells's tale indicates that authors have a responsibility, like proper journalists, to tell the truth about whatever has been conspiratorially hidden from the average person, particularly the reality behind the euphuistically inflated and fraudulent self-representation of the upper class. And, as we also saw, Chesterton's more successful Club of Queer Trades not only sets an example of the proper art of storytelling, but also instructs its prospective audience on the proper art of self-narration, of living a life. Whereas eventuary romancers may evasively poke fun at any societal concerns that their entertainments influence the ethical behavior of readers and whereas aesthetic romancers bypass such claims as irrelevant, ethical romancers fully embrace the issue. Ethical romancers sometimes transform this concern into a complex consideration. Some acknowledge that art could and should have social consequences, while others puzzle over the question of the consequences of art as if it were a Gordian knot. The critics of the genre were, to be sure, not readily consoled by the example of ethical romance. How could they be when the vision of ethical romancers ranged from a remote irresolved questioning to an intense critique of the status quo? Neither mode reinforced the vested interests of the critics of romance. Furthermore, the use by ethical romancers of the intimation/concealment technique of the genre—to insinuate at the edge of the reader's consciousness certain subversive insights concerning human options generally hidden from common perception—was sometimes experi109

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enced by these suspicious critics as obscurity of motive. This problem emerged in our earlier commentary in Chapter 1 concerning the critical reaction to Wells's Island of Dr. Mareou and in the Introduction concerning London's defense of Kipling against the charge of a peculiar obscurity of purpose. Becausefictionserves ethical romancers as a medium for assessing human options, it is itself especially susceptible to their scrutiny. This inspection of the genre may constitute the ultimate mode of reflexivity in ethical romance. The three romances considered in this chapter collectively display a wide range of attitudes toward the ethos of storytelling. Richard Harding Davis's In the Tog (1901) presents an ambiguous reflection on the ethical status offiction.Davis was praised by fellow turn-of-thecentury romancers because he seemed to share their conviction that literature should serve ethical purposes.1 In the Tog indeed specifies that even mass-marketed, sensational fiction may be capable of exerting some influence on life. However, Davis's story also suggests that this influence, possibly subversive, tends to be negated by other factors or perhaps to be always preempted in one way or another. Stephen Crane, who knew Davis as early as 1895,2 likewise made use of both literary impressionism and romantic melodrama.3 Crane's tale "The Blue Hotel" (1899), like Davis's novella, treats the issue of the ethos of storytelling as at once a serious and a comic matter, depending on his reader's emotionally colored impression of such issues. For Crane, however, the very question raised about the influence of storytelling reflects a typical human arrogance. It reveals mankind's perverse ignorance or denial of its phenomenally occluded understanding, which always necessarily fails to comprehend the ever-obscure forces of human existence. For Mary Austin, in contrast, the universe is pervaded with a divine force imparting to humanity capacities yet to be realized in life. Each tale in The Basket Woman: A Book ofIndian Tales for Children (1904) potentially serves as a medium for quickening this post-Transcendental divine influence in nature and in the self. The spectacle of these stories provides a speculum in which viewers may perceive the open-endedness of human options. In these narratives, Austin's concern with the revision of human behavior, with the need for humanity to advance toward a greater fulfillment of its divine destiny, includes a consideration of the ethos of storytelling. All three of these works reflect an authorial resistance to "literary realism" and a preference for the matter and manner of romance. Each work emphasizes extraordinary settings and events exceeding the usual limits of everyday reality. Each presents two-dimensional caricatures identified by a generic

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nomenclature rather than by specific names, even when in the course of the story sometimes a few names do surface: the American, the young man, the gentleman with the black tie, and the gendeman with the black pearl in Davis's In the Fog; the Swede, the cowboy, the Easterner, and the gambler in Crane's "Blue Hotel"; the mahala in Austin's "Basket Woman." Moreover, each of these stories evidences an equivocal tone alternating from comedy to tragedy, or comedy to pathos, or from childlike simplicity to adultlike complexity. Such tonal instability may vex the complacency of their engaged, implicated audience. Finally, these tales exhibit a reflexivity capable of transgressing the usual boundaries between fantasy and reality, fiction and fact. In transgressing this boundary, these narratives deploy the conventional matter of romance to hint allegorically at the protean potentiality of human experience. In their reflexive consideration of the ethos of storytelling, these tales indicate that the audience is in fact the actual text to be interpreted, the real mystery to be scrutinized by the detecting reader. The manner of these three romances ideally produces a facilitating disorientation in their audience, similar to one's experience of a dream or a bizarre experience. In coming to terms with (reorienting to) this fusion of the mundane and the fantastic, ideally the awakening dreamer/reader of these stories will glimpse new questions or insights. Richard Harding Davis's In the Fog In the Fog is set in 1897, when the American press was printing sensationalisticfictiveaccounts to incite a war with Spain, a war in which Davis served as a journalist. Pertinendy, Davis's novella opens with a club member bemoaning to three other members that Sir Andrew, who is nearby and finishing a "sensational" detective story, is about to depart to speak before Parliament on behalf of a military measure that will burden British taxpayers. This man, known only as the gendeman with the black pearl, desperately says, "I would give a hundred pounds . . . if I could place in his hands at this moment a new story of Sherlock Holmes—a thousand pounds . . . five thousand pounds!"4 At this point, a member identified only as the American, begins to narrate a mystery story, which draws the attention of Sir Andrew, who is addicted to such stories. When the American (who later admits he is an author) reaches an inconclusive stopping point (a cliff-hanging chapter ending, as it were) in his alleged true account involving himself, Sir Andrew is about to leave. Then another member of the group, identified only as the gendeman with the

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black tie, continues the narrative in a new direction, presumably based on his personal knowledge. But to Sir Andrew's eventual disappointment, this second narrative also seems to end nowhere, to have been a mere digression (as it indeed is, in a double sense). Again, as Sir Andrew is about to leave, the last member of the group, identified only as the young man, commences with a promise to complete the first two accounts on the basis of his firsthand knowledge. His story resolves by revealing the first speaker, the American, to be the murderer in the account. Everyone has a good laugh, and, the parliamentary meeting certainly over, they explain to Sir Andrew what has been the plot behind their narrative plotting. But, in another twist of the plot, the joke is on them, especially on the gendeman with the black pearl; for Sir Andrew tells them that he already had spoken before Parliament and had seen the measure through to successful passage before he came to the club. That Davis's novella is a jeu d'esprit is evident throughout. It is, in fact, structured somewhat in the shaggy-dog-story manner of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-1767), a work that Davis's contemporary H. G. Wells thought to be the greatest example of English fiction.5 Sir Andrew's questions—"Is this a jest?" "Is this a game?" (p. 146)—are not only pertinent to the end of the story, when the raconteurs let him in on their sport. A hint of ruse also informs various double entendres in Davis's novella. The use of a digression in the narrative, for instance, intimates its economic purpose: to divert Sir Andrew from his appointment. This digression, in two senses, is said to be "a most serious crime" (p. 106), a remark playfully referring both to the artistically transgressive red herring in the scheme of the narrative as well as to the politically transgressive "patriotic conspiracy" (p. 153) of the scheming storytellers. A similar nuance occurs as well when we are told of "the object for which [the storytellers] plotted" (p. 154), which mingles conspiratorial plot and narrative plot. When the American storyteller says, "I admit my guilt" (pp. 152-153), he plays on the fact that in plotting his narrative as a plot to divert Sir Andrew, he is the culprit outside of his narrative as well as he has been (in the young man's conclusion) the culprit inside his story. Perhaps the wittiest of such nuanced moments occurs in thefinalsentence of the story. When Sir Andrew reveals that the measure he supported has already been passed by Parliament, the American who initiated the mystery story to detain Sir Andrew shoves the wine card toward the gendeman with the black pearl and says, "You sign i f (p. 155). The American consigns the authorship of the flawed plot (story) to the man who wanted it in the first place, the "publisher" who (like the editor in J. K. Bangs's "Thurlow's

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Christmas Story") promised money in advance for its production. The final joke may be on the man with the black pearl, who must pay for the contracted work, even if it is defective. In the Fog is effectively a kind of allegory. Davis had a flair for entertainment with a moral or social conscience.6 His journalism includes shocking or thrilling episodes that teach as well as entertain. In"TheDeserter" (1916), as a pertinent example of his fiction, a World War I American volunteer serves as a spokesman for Davis5s belief that the United States should assist the Allies. In the Fog may similarly be read as an allegorization of the relationship between storyteller, publisher, and reader. For various reasons, the story indicates, publishers pay money for the production of stories. For money, writers will produce these "diversions" full of plot digressions "turning sharply in circles" (p. 59). The audience, in this sense, buys a pig in the poke, and in fact may be (like Sir Andrew) a dupe trusting foolishly that some sense will emerge from these exercises in diverting circularity. According to the publisher, the gentleman with the black pearl, payment should be made by the reader: "In my opinion it is Sir Andrew who should pay the costs" (p. 153). But Sir Andrew, representing the audience, judges the narrative diversion to have been incompetent; and in faa it has not diverted him from the performance of his social duty. Accordingly, Sir Andrew impugns the publisher, the gendeman with the black pearl. It is the publisher who must pay the authors for their contracted work, even if that work isflawed.And the authors of this work apparently desire to suppress their name, their responsibility, in its production; they invite the publisher to "sign" it, to assign some pen, series, or house name to the work. In the Fog is a cunning tour de force focused on a much debated issue of Davis5s time, and before. This debate concerned the reading of sensational fiction, works of horror, murder, and daring adventures situated within an atmosphere of mystery. At this time, as we noted previously, popular fiction reached a wide audience because of increased literacy, industrialized mass production of printed matter, and numerous magazines featuring serials. The detective thriller was especially in demand, as Chesterton5s revisionary Club of Queer Trades and as Davis5s parodistic In the Fog suggest both in their form and in their explicit allusions to Sherlock Holmes. It is also pertinent to recall that Arthur Conan Doyle resurrected Holmes from the dead in order to appease, and financially benefit from, the relendess demand for more adventures after the detective had apparently died. If from its inauguration onward fiction generally had a spotted reputation as a dangerous, crude, or at the very least trivial form of literature, the rise of the "penny dreadful" (initially magazines or serial installments selling for a

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penny) brought those attitudes toward fiction, resisted by the Victorian authors most revered today, once again to the fore. What effect, asked some worried people of Sir Andrew's class in particular, would cheap—cheap in production, price, and morality—melodramatic stories have on the working class, their nominal audience, and juveniles, their covert audience? Would this sort of popular writing be the ruination of the social order? After all, did not these works glorify villains by emphasizing the intensity of their lives and attributing to them special qualities, particularly an exciting, perhaps admirable ingenuity? And, were there not well-known instances of their pernicious influence? Did not, for example, Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, who slaughtered an entire family, and Peter Kuerten, who engaged in a nine-month spree of rape and murder, both confess their addiction to the cheap fiction of the penny-dreadful sort? These were certainly the kind of concerns raised in the vitriolic attacks on the penny dreadful during the 1870s through the 1890s, attacks by members of Sir Andrew's social class, who labeled it a "plague of poisonous literature."7 In theFogreveals what was also true: that the audience of the "shilling shocker" (p. 19), a subgenre of the penny dreadful, included genteel readers, like Sir Andrew. Some aristocrats tended to be secret consumers of these so-called distasteful productions mass-marketed for the working classes. Davis's novella indicates the potentiality of the shilling shocker to disrupt normal societal processes, even governmental proceedings. Davis, as a journalist at the time, certainly knew firsthand the correspondence between this medium and the yellow journalism influencing societal and political attitudes in 1897· In the novella Sir Andrew is so badly addicted to sensationalist works that "once started on a tale of murder, robbery, and sudden death, nothing can tear him from it" (p. 20). He even had to sell "his country house because when he journeyed to it in the train he would become so absorbed in his detective stories that he was invariably carried past his station" (p. 20). This addiction, "his one dissipation" (p. 19), apparently makes him and the other readers of the penny dreadful vulnerable to manipulation; and indeed Sir Andrew is subjected to a "plot" by the four club members who in effect improvise a shilling-shocker narrative, not for any political purpose (on their side) but for the monetary reward offered by the gendeman with the black pearl. Part of Davis's pleasure in his parody of the shilling shocker is grounded in a fact: that most of the objections to sensational fiction were based on predictions of consequences much more dire than the attempted manipulation In theFogdepicts. Critics of such popular melodramas worried that

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these works would influence impressionable children and working-class readers, whom these critics tended to see as children, though not as innocents. This audience, critics feared, would mimic the social anarchy, particularly the violence, dramatized in these stories. Davis shifts the focus of this fear, and playfully suggests that the real threat of these stories is that they might result in their readers5 inattention to work. Davis's revision of concern, onfirstthought, seems to reduce the fear of the penny dreadful into a triviality. But, on second thought, a more problematic issue surfaces. Were increasing numbers of people, including government officials, to be infected by the "dissipation" of suchfictionand to neglect their work, what would become of the social order, of civilization? A still more sinister concern emerges: howeverfrivolousit may seem initially, the addiction to sensational detectivefictionmight leave impressionable people open to subde influence by politically motivated authors or, more likely (Davis intimates with tongue in cheek), by politically motivated publishers (such as William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer in 1897). It would seem that "these stories [possibly] have . . . a more serious purpose than merely to amuse" (p. 153). But lest the reader of his parody begin to ponder this "more serious purpose" too solemnly, Davis upends everything. The insidious subversive power of the raconteurs' penny dreadful is defeated by its poor timing. Sir Andrew has already performed his duty before he became enthralled by their narrative. In effect, this reversal transfers the target of the joke from Sir Andrew (the reader) to the authors of the story, who at the very end (in yet another transference) manage to make the publisher the butt of the joke. Davis's full meaning here is unclear, to me at least; but he certainly intends to mystify the notion that an audience is easily manipulated by storytelling. Perhaps Davis implies (probably sardonically) that the genteel class will always come through in the end for society. Or perhaps Davis implies (apparendy with skepticism) that readers are instinctively lucky in resisting any political forces designed to capture their minds throughfiction.Or perhaps Davis implies that readers are instinctively always one step ahead of authors and publishers or anyone else who might try to influence them for moral or monetary advantage. Evidendy, if there is anything subversive about the genre of sensational fiction, it is the money it earns. In theFoginsists that money is the driving force behind the production of works like the penny dreadful. Consciousness of money certainly characterizes the time when In the Fog was published.8 Whereas the naturalist A. R. Wallace, for example, devotes an entire chapter to "The Demon of Greed" in a book (1898) assessing the

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status quo at the turn of the century, Jack London writes a tribute to 'The Dignity of Dollars" (1900).9 In the best-seller The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902) Arnold Bennett focuses on "the value and the marvellous power of mere money, of the lucre which philosophers pretend to despise and men sell their souls for."10 In Davis's novella the pursuit of money is satirically presented as an authorial "patriotic conspiracy," and this pursuit of money comprises the "more serious purpose, than merely to amuse," that informs cheap fiction. In other words, it is everyone's patriotic duty to work, to conspire, as it were, to earn money, and not to be a burden to other taxpayers. Burdening the taxpayers, it should be recalled, is the expressed concern of the gendeman with the black pearl. Nevertheless, ambiguity arises when the reader confronts the possibility that the writer's labor might subvert the labor of others. This concern touches both on (as we noted in Chapter 4) Henry James's play on the "hypocrisy of 'work'"—that is, when a production essentially gratifies the artist while giving the appearance of pleasing the consumer—and on (as noted in Chapter 5) Bangs's possible questioning of the American doctrine of success through morality and work as typically articulated in Horatio Alger's popular fiction. Moreover, in both Bangs's and Davis's tales, a deep ambiguity emerges over the implications of selling one's soul, one's art, for money. Davis's novella hints at something like Saint Paul's well-known warning that "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Tim. 6:10). Because of the subversive lure of money, writers and their art, not to mention their publishers, are vulnerable to corruption, and in turn their productions may become conspiratorial vehicles designed to corrupt their equally vulnerable audience. Davis leaves this metaphysical issue of the capacity of storytelling to determine human behavior enmeshed in uncertainty, to be unraveled (if it ever can be) by the detecting reader. Unlike the melodramas it parodies, In the Fog does not resolve its many ambiguities in the dénouement of its final scene.11 Davis's novella, on the one hand, indicates that popular fiction apparently has a latent power to subvert the status quo, but it also, on the other hand, indicates that this fiction never necessarily causes any such alteration. This irresolute dialogism is reinforced by a vacillation of attitude in the novella. The serious objection to the shilling shocker as an incitement to violence in its childlike working-class readers is displaced in the novella by the relatively frivolous objection to the genre as an encouragement of its audience's inattention to work; yet, the seemingly trivial humor of this sec-

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ond feinted objection takes on ominously serious implications in turn when the labor threatened is that of the highest order, governmental work itself. In still another equivocation, as we have seen, in fulfilling the patriotic duty to earn money through work, one's labor may well participate in a conspiracy to subvert the patriotic duty of others. As this last observation indicates, Davis has schematized the unresolved ambiguities of In the Fog in a circular pattern. This scheme is implied in the circuiting of serious and humorous tone, and of the alleged potentiality and equally alleged ineffectiveness of fiction's influence on the lives of its audience. This pattern is also intimated in the puzzle of just who is the victim of the joke. Davis's jeu d'esprit is played on the reader but rebounds on the internal authors (plotters) and finally on the internal publisher; then, too, in a reversal of this pattern, Davis's own cleverness in parodying the shilling shocker has not quite given his readers what they expected and so, in a sense, his "hypocrisy of 'work'" has perhaps duped them after all. Does Davis get the last laugh? The scheme of circularity is most evident, however, in this interchange of what lies outside (fact) and what lies inside (fantasy) the authors' narratives. The stories told to Sir Andrew are fiction, but they are extrapolated from specific facts and people in his world. Then, at the end, two revelations occur that contribute further to this crossing of the boundaries between fact and fiction: the American, the storyteller who inaugurated the series, is revealed to be the culprit in the narrative; and Lord Chetney, a main character in this fiction, is revealed to be the young man, one of the storytellers. Both are living authors outside their made-up story, and both are fictional characters within it. This circular schematic enhances the ambiguity οf In the Fog. It essentially animates the metaphysical questions raised concerning the ethos of storytelling. At best, this narrative circuitry returns the detecting audience to themselves as the source of whatever answers there may be to the tangle of questions raised in the novella. As the tide of Davis's ethical romance indicates, the ethos of storytelling remains in a moral fog, even as his story, like the thrillers it parodies, is set in an environment of fog. Davis's tale indicates that just as readers cannot see very far into the foggy maneuvers of plot digressions and diversions in the penny dreadfiil, they cannot readily penetrate the motives of authors, publishers, or even themselves as readers. Nor can they see very far into the social effects of their addiction to the diversions of popular literary productions. When the plot of a thriller is resolved, moreover, the issue of real or imaginary, factual or fictional, social effects remains an unsolved mystery to be deciphered in the

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reader's mind. The audience is thusly implicated in the circular pursuit of this mystery because it is ultimately hidden within themselves. Readers and critics, Davis's ethical romance further implies, are like the characters in the shilling shocker: they have "penetrated [this] fog only to the distance of a few inches from [their] eyes"; they "beat the mist [of this ambiguity] . . . like one at blind man's bluff, turning sharply in circles" (pp. 29, 59). Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel" A reference to the "fog of mysterious theory" concludes "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane,12 which appeared two years before In the Fog and which also transforms the turn-of-the-century mystery romance into a metaphysical investigation of the ethos of storytelling. Crane's tale, set in Nebraska, concerns three men who stop at an inn for a night. The man known as the Swede, presumably having read fictional accounts of the West, fears that violence might erupt at any moment and lead to his death. As his paranoia worsens, the Swede drinks alcohol anxiously, becomes increasingly argumentative, and finally provokes his murder by a complete stranger. The reader of Crane's metaphysical whodunit is left in a "fog of mysterious theory" concerning these strange events, especially concerning their cause and meaning. The blinding snowstorm (p. 162) that rages throughout the events of "The Blue Hotel" corresponds in function to the fog, as setting and symbol, in Davis's In the Fog. This blizzard, like the fog in Davis's tale, represents the phenomenal limitations of occluded human insight into the nature of existence. This limitation of understanding is not restricted to the Swede or to the westerners; it includes the Easterner, who is thought by some critics to be exempt,13 and it includes the reader. The snowstorm, like the fog, provides an apt setting for the irresolvable ambiguity that persists whenever humanity attempts to detect, to read, the meaning of experience, either one's own or someone else's. In this setting of impaired vision, humanity essentially engages in a game of blindman's bluff, turns sharply in circles, and ends up where it began: with humanity as puzzled sleuth. This circular pattern is as important in Crane's story as it is in Davis's. If "the huge arms of the wind" seem (in anthropomorphic terms) to make "attempts—mighty, circular, futile—to embrace" the "turmoiling sea of snow" (p. 144), so too the characters in "The Blue Hotel" attempt, in futile and finally circular gestures, to comprehend the forces of turmoil within themselves. The Swede, as the prime example in the story, "fizze[s] like a fire-wheel," and his fight with the innkeeper's son is likened to "a swiftly-

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revolving wheel" (pp. 154, 160). The Swede's anticipation of violence has been futile as a preventative because the fury he fears emanates from within himself,fromwithin the human self generally. The Swede's impudence, after his successfulfistfightwith the innkeeper's son, provokes this very fury in the innkeeper and the cowboy. "Burning with hatred," the men in the hotel stare at the stove in the center of the room, "lighted [as well] with the[ir] anger" (pp. 151,157). A symbol of the animating principle at the center of each and every person and possibly of all life, the stove hums "with god-like violence" (p. 143). A fatal turmoil appears to be the Swede's, or humanity's, destiny, which in turn seems to derive from within the self and (as if on a wheel of fortune) seems always to circulate back to this source. This configuration appears to be one reason why the Swede's fear that violence will kill him transmutes into a selffulfilling prophecy. Crane presents this peculiar circuiting of the wheel of fortune as a mystery shrouded in unresolved ambiguities. On the one hand, Crane suggests (as if he were a Darwinian-influenced naturalist) that violence is the fated condition of all life, at least as humanity experiences life. As the blizzard rages outside the inn, fury rages within various characters inside the inn. In "The Blue Hotel," as in Crane's tale "The Open Boat" (1898), humanity experiences phenomenal nature and human nature as essentially violent. On the other hand, Crane suggests that possibly such destructiveness is not at all the primary attribute of the universe, that possibly the indifferent principle of animation in creation might simply be perceived as violent by humanity. Perhaps only human arrogance, a futile godlike sense of selfimportance, accounts for a sense of personal outrage over the seemingly impudent forces of indifferent nature; and, likewise, perhaps this pathetic imperious anger becomes the wellspring of the violence within humanity that invariably and self-destructively circles back to its human source. For if the source of animation in creation remains obscurely aloof, in effect absent, where else can human outrage at this void be directed other than upon itself as an afflicted consciousness? Pertinendy, the narrator equivocally comments, 'The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life" (p. 165). Does the fury of human conceit direcdy imitate violent natural forces, or does the fury of human conceit indirecdy eventuate as a response to humanity's perception of these forces? Crane's story leaves this question unanswered."TheBlue Hotel" suggests that violence may seem, in human terms, to characterize the nature of creation and to influence human behavior; but the story simultaneously suggests that, given the utter indifference of the universe to humanity, human

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violence may be less an essential expression or imitation of a natural force than a distinctly egocentric human response to nature's disregard. As the narrative voice admonishes at one point, "there can be little of dramatic import in environment," for "any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic" (p. 156). Natural or social environment, in short, might be neutral from a cosmic perspective. Any emotional coloration, whether it be comic or tragic, attributed to it is (as typified by various responses to the blue color of the hotel) a matter of human perception, interpretation, reading. Such coloration may have nothing at all to do with reality, whatever reality is. Thus, the name of the town, Fort Romper, intimates both fun (romp) and death (fort); thus a card "game played for fun" (p. 170) can suddenly transform from an enjoyable into a fatal experience. 'The Blue Hotel," in other words, remains ambiguous concerning a central philosophical issue: does humanity perversely choose or is it hopelessly fated to acts of violent self-destruction? Humans, the narrative reports, are like "lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb" (p. 165). The passive voice structure of "were caused" implies that mankind's enmeshed origin, purpose, and direction are hidden in an obscure origin beyond detection. Humanity direcdy encounters only the present moment, a present of unresolved polarities (fire and ice, choice and fate) whirling as if on a ceaseless wheel of fortune; yet, mankind conceitedly experiences, perceives, the impersonal cosmic motion of this "swiftly-revolving wheel" (p. 160) personally as an impudent essential violence. This cosmic perspective of the "space-lost bulb" appears suddenly in "The Blue Hotel." It ruptures the seemingly neutral, transparent narration of the story, and this intrusive opinion by an unidentified narrative force may break the absorbed reader's comfortable engagement with the story. It intrudes, as if from outside the narrative, latently to implicate the reader in the developments within the narrative. This cosmic perspective diminishes the local event, including the local reader, and confuses perspective.14 Especially unclear, as a result, is the distinction between freedom and fate. In 'The Blue Hotel" the anger provoked by the card game, as a symbol of this blurring of the boundary between freedom and fate, corresponds to the mental fury apparently provoked in mankind by creation. Just as a deck contains a limited number of cards that can be distributed in many finite variations, in the story life appears likewise to be fated by limits. Nevertheless, these variations of distribution involve chance, which is equivalent to the caprice of human emotion and choice. Choice, however circumscribed

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by a fated limitation of possibilities, is a factor that (like the whirling wind) scatters the deck into its finite configurations (pp. 155,162). This metaphysical concern with freedom and fate is also a concern with reading as detection. In 'The Blue Hotel" human perception is equated with interpreting, with reading, nature as sign or symbol, even as audiences interpret stories. Included within the large philosophic consideration of Crane's tale is the specific issue of whether storytelling determines the behavior of readers. Just as 'The Blue Hotel" raises questions about whether self-destructive human violence is the inevitable product of our natural heritage (fate) or of blind reaction to this heritage (unconscious choice), it also raises questions about whether narratives determine violent behavior in their readers or whether these readers unwittingly respond to these tales— essentially as indifferent as the natural environment may be—in personal ways that lead to violence. In this sense, like Davis's In the Fog, Crane's "Blue Hotel" is a metaphysical whodunit. It flaunts conflicting clues in challenging its audience to assign culpability for human violence. Crane's mystery story asks its prospective detecting audience, whom should we accuse—the absent storyteller (whether deity or author) or the present reader of natural facts or narrative fictions? In 'The Blue Hotel" the dime novel provides a metonymic site for this consideration of the ethos of storytelling. The late nineteenth-century dime novel was the American equivalent of the British penny dreadful, which figures so centrally in In the Fog. The dime novel sold for a nickel or a dime, and this bargain price, compared to fiction selling from $1.00 to $1.50, doubtless accounted for thefinancialsuccess of the houses which published them. Read as cheap in another sense as well, the dime novel was subjected to the same social opprobrium in America as was the penny dreadful in Britain. Although (as Davis also suggested concerning the shilling shocker) the readership of the dime novel ranged from the barely literate to the intelligentsia, some turn-of-the-century Americans worried about the possible influence of such popular fiction on the potential criminal behavior of certain of its impressionable readers, especially children and the working class. This fear clearly surfaced during the trial of Jesse Pomeroy, a sadistic murderer who, it was suggested in court, might have been prompted to commit his crimes by his exposure to cheap "literature of the dime novel type."15 The plot of action and detection in dime novels set in the West is identical to that of dime novels focused on crime per se in the East; and their shared mystery formula is parodied in 'The Blue Hotel."16 An explicit parodistic moment occurs when the innkeeper enters the Swede's room to convince

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him to stay the night. Startled by the innkeeper's sinister appearance, the Swede utters a loud cry in terror. The innkeeper's "wrinkled visage showed grimly in the light of the small lamp he carried. This yellow effulgence, streaming upward, colored only his prominent features, and left his eyes, for instance, in mysterious shadow. He resembled a murderer" (p. 149). This scene would also have suited In theFog,not only in its burlesque of sensational fiction but in its peculiar, vexing association of earning money (the innkeeper's intention) and horror (the innkeeper's effect). The dime novel, moreover, is explicidy mentioned in 'The Blue Hotel." This occasion serves as a reflexive moment similar to the allusion to the shilling shocker in Davis's In the Fog. Observing the Swede's peculiar, paranoid manner, the Easterner remarks, "It seems to me this man has been reading dime-novels, and he thinks he's right out in the middle of it—the shootin' and stabbin' and all." The cowboy, amazed that the Swede should think that dime novels describe the Midwest, complains, "This ain't Wyoming, ner none of them places. This is Nebrasker." And the innkeeper's son similarly remarks, "Why don't he wait till he gits out West?' The traveled Easterner gets the last word: "It isn't different there even—not in these days. But [the Swede] thinks he's right in the middle of hell" (p. 152). This is a humorous scene, one of many in 'The Blue Hotel." The humor of this scene includes, for example, the fact that the cowboy and the innkeeper's son are actually as credulous as is the Swede concerning the image of the violent West described in dime novels. They respond to fiction as if it were fact, which is funny in one sense; but as the story indicates, mankind's efforts to interpret facts only amount to the creation offiction,which is not funny in another sense. The humor in this scene also includes the detail that an easterner instructs westerners, which pattern reverses the motif of the gullible greenhorn in Western tall tales. The Easterner hails from the geographic region where the dime novel was produced, and presumably he, like the Swede (who has spent the last ten years in New York [p. 144]), should have been more susceptible to afictionalportrait of the West than would be the other two card players. But he has traveled and knows better, at least concerning dime novels at present. Yet, in still another peculiar twist, the Easterner is as credulous as the others insofar as he too believes that the milieu depicted in dime novels was once real, not fictional, and is onlyfictionalnow "in these days." Thus, this scene suggests, satirically and earnestly at once, that the idea of the West is merely an extension of the idea of the East, that they are not fundamentally different, that they arefinallymere fictional ideas— ambiguous ones at that—interpreted as reality.17

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As this scene alternates between the comic and the tragic,18 it typically presents a disorienting tonal uncertainty similar to that of Davis's In the Fog. Its tonal amalgamation narratively expresses in part Crane's literary impressionism, which, like Davis's, emphasizes that perception may determine human experience. If "any room can present a tragic front; [if] any room can be comic," then the reality of experience always remains unstable and elusive. The apdy unresolved dialogic tone of "The Blue Hotel" narratively embodies Crane's thematic emphasis on the interpretative function of human emotional coloration in the absence of any clear human detection of (insight into) the nature of existence or experience. Accordingly, the ability of the dime novel or Crane's story to influence an audience's interpretation of reality might seem to attribute some dangerous power to storytelling. But, like In the Fog, 'The Blue Hotel" hints at and resists such a reductive "reading." For Crane's tale does not even confirm that the Swede has in fact read any dime novels and leaves open the possibility that, instead, he might be crazy. Moreover, the story asks, can fiction truly make any difference in the world, can it truly have any social consequences, when readers tend to respond to it as personally as they respond to everything else—that is, when they tend to employ an impressionistic emotional coloration that occludes what something might really signify? Here Crane shares Oscar Wilde's aestheticist awareness (as remarked upon in Chapter 4) of the tendency of audiences to read ethical implications into an artistic production, even if that work is inherendy devoid of such value. Crane, who served with Davis as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American confrontation, also pertinendy observes in "Virtue of War" (1900), "there was not anything in the world which turned out to be as books describe it."19 To claim, then, that stories determine human actions is akin to claiming environmental determinism, and, as we remarked, the narrative voice of"TheBlue Hotel" rejects the idea of any "dramatic import in environment." Just as a room can present a comic or a tragic front—as the tonal mix of 'The Blue Hotel" itself demonstrates—a story can be appropriated to reflect the comic and the tragic proclivities of human nature.20 Consider, too, the irony of the Swede's behavior. Even if he may have actually read dime novels—and it is uncertain that he has—he has not been directly inflamed to violent behavior. Such direct influence is precisely what turn-of-the-century critics of sensational fiction mainly feared and relendessly predicted. The Swede, on the contrary, has (according to the Easterner's surmise) apparendy read dime novels as cautionary tales. Fear, rather than encouragement of violence, has been the result. Bizarrely, however, even this seemingly preventative fear results in the eventuation

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of the very outcome that the Swede wants to avoid. And so if he has read dime novels, he indirectly arrives at the same violent behavior that the critics of the genre argue would be the direct consequence of such an exposure to them. This transmutation of direct influence into indirect influence obscures the issue of whether fiction really makes any difference in human social behavior. For what hope is there for resolving questions pertaining to the ethos of storytelling when even a cautionary interpretation results, as if inevitably, in the eventuation of the very action that caution ought to prevent? Whence, then, the origin of this twisted fate? Does this fate originate in the "text" of environment (whether story or nature) or in the "text" of self ? As this last question implies, 'The Blue Hotel " opens the boundary between reality and imagination. The distinction between fact and fiction is representatively blurred when the Easterner observes that the murderer of the Swede "isn't even a noun, " but "kind of an adverb" (p. 170). Like the murderer, like the "plotting" narrators of In the Fog, "we are all in it " (p. 170); we all conspire and collaborate in a collusive mingling of fantasy and experience. If there is a culprit in Crane's whodunit, that malefactor is everyone who contributes to the "plot" of life. The interaction of chance, character, and circumstance in the plot of one's daily life is, accordingly, identical to their unfathomable intersection in the "action" of a work of fiction like "The Blue Hotel. " Because of the occlusion of human insight, because of the human phenomenal imprisonment in subjectivity, mankind's reading of "reality" is akin to reading fiction. This fusion of the actual and the imagined is enhanced in"TheBlue Hotel," as it was in Davis's In the Fog, by an impressionistic setting, a conflicted tonal resonance, a generic reflexivity, and a descriptive nomenclature for twodimensional characters (the cowboy, the Easterner, the Swede). In thusly dissolving the distinction between fact and fiction, "The Blue Hotel" presents itself (sardonically and aesthetically) as a sensational work that, in theory, turn-of-the-century guardians of society could find to be far more dangerous than any conventional dime novel or similar eventuary romance. In exemplifying what scholars have acknowledged as Crane's expressed aim of taking parody "up" rather than "down," his story does more than employ a popular form of fiction to embody major ideas. 'The Blue Hotel" transforms the socially suspect genre of the dime novel into a potentially subversive social inquiry. It reveals a metaphysical violence at the heart of human nature, a collusive self-immolation that seems to be mankind's interpretative fate (whether in imitation of or reaction to nature). The preservation of the social order, that primary concern of turn-of-the-century

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critics of the dime novel, is subverted by the implication in"TheBlue Hotel" that fictional elements of stories are always impressionistically applied to reality, and reality is always necessarily read as fiction. Art and life are mutual representations, Crane's story intimates, related less through the influence of one upon the other, than through the indistinctness of one from the other as mirrors of the human mind. In short, "The Blue Hotel" suggests that any claim concerning the adverse influence of romance, as some objective force, on human behavior comprises a form of tautology. All fiction, the story implies, emerges from the human mind to be read by that same mind. Fiction, like the violence it is sometimes accused of stimulating, merely reflects this mind, not only in some fabricated melodrama but equally in the social narrative mankind collaboratively "plots" to "tell." Literary and social fictions, as Crane's story shows concerning violence, invariably and self-destructively circle back to their human source. In thusly transgressing the boundary between life and art, "The Blue Hotel" eradicates the moral boundary between cause and effect, a mainstay of the turn-of-the-century social order. But, the story also teasingly asks, how subversive is any narrative that, after all, only reveals the mind to itself, the detecting readers to themselves? By deploying the generic features of setting, tone, characterization, reflexivity, and play with facticity/fictionality specifically in an investigation of the ethos of storytelling in "The Blue Hotel," Crane converts the dimenovel murder mystery into an ethical romance of metaphysical detection. Certainly apt, in this regard, is the observation that Crane's story "raises questions one is tempted to call ontological—questions, that is to say, about the very foundations of being."21 Exceeding the inquiry of In the Fog, the question of the influence of popular fiction raised in "The Blue Hotel" emerges as a metonymy for a philosophic uncertainty about the consequences of art, society, and nature itself on human behavior. Although Crane's story is more sardonically ironic and Schopenhauerian in its treatment of the ethos of storytelling than is Davis's more playful and affectionate jest, finally both works leave the ambiguities they raise unresolved. In effect they dramatize the Scholastic dictum Omnia exeunt in mysterium. Both works abandon the sleuthing reader to an inevitable yet unresolved circular self-detection within "a fog of mysterious theory." Mary Austin's The Basket Woman Mary Austin shares Davis's and Crane's notion of the use of the "strange" in romance, as she put it, to "impl[y] a criticism of the familiar of which we

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lack any criterion of authenticity other than it is ours."22 Doubtless this was one reason Wells compared her to Crane as another important writer inappropriately left to "die of neglect" by American readers.23 Austin, however, does not share Davis's bemused playfulness or Crane's profound skepticism about the ethos of storytelling. Like Chesterton, Austin earnestly embraces and then redirects the social indictment of romance as juvenile in matter, unsophisticated in manner, and potentially subversive in effect. She strives for a "mythic" literary artistry informed by a specific ethical concern: to awaken a transformational childlike sense of wonder in her audience. For Austin, who had mystical experiences especially when young,24 romance can be a vital and healthy mode of expression capable of guiding its audience to a fuller spiritual realization of themselves. Austin's second book, The Basket Woman, is an excellent example of her practice. The first tale in this collection, entitled 'The Basket Woman," relates an account of a little boy's unfounded fear of a mahala (a female Native American), who comes periodically to his home to wash his family's laundry. Alan imagines that she will kidnap him and conceal him in one of her many baskets. One night he dreams that she comes for him and that he voluntarily goes with her on a journey. In this dream she carries Alan into the past to visit her people's bygone village, where he primarily hears various legends. The principal fable he learns concerns the origin of the human proclivity to tell stories, a trait acquired from a wolf. In this fable, the first human singer is so inspired that at one point he lulls himself into a deep sleep, which allows the wolf to repossess his storymaking ability. When, at this point in her tale, the Basket Woman commences her own coyote-like song, Alan becomes frightened again, awakens from his dream, and is comforted by his mother. Like many of the romances we have reviewed so far, Austin's narrative at first seems rather slight; and that its author designates it as a story for children perhaps encourages this impression. Nevertheless, in anticipation of many women authors of children's literature after her, Austin has invested in her story both an ethical disposition and an artistic ingenuity. The apparent simplicity of the tales in The Basket Woman disguises its philosophic and aesthetic subtleties. These subtleties, moreover, produce a conflict in tone, not between comedy and tragedy or pathos (as in the tales by Davis and Crane), but between simplicity of narrative manner and mythic implication of narrative matter. Indeed, Austin's collection implies an audience who will (as children or childlike readers) unconsciously absorb the mythic matter of her stories and will (as adults) eventually act on the liminal challenge to the status quo in her stories.

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Austin's designated readers are schoolchildren; but given the prior publication of many of these sketches in such periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly, her prospective audience also includes adults still capable of a childlike sense of wonder. Austin's preface specifically indicates her intention to create tales that "present certain aspects of nature as they appear in the myth-making mood," tales that will "appeal to the child mind."25 Her goal features the reclamation of her audience's "normal intimacy with nature"; for human "consciousness and personality [are] by-products of animal life only" (p. iii). Extolling the therapeutic capacity of mythic tales, Austin (like Chesterton) emphasizes the importance of the "broadly human" in art, if art is to have "educative value" (p. viii). In other words, similar to other ethical romancers, she defends the use of enchanting fantasy, "broadly human" caricature, and disguised depth as a means of influencing the values of her audience. The chief value stressed in 'The Basket Woman" is the importance of mankind's repatriation to nature, a lesson Austin believes is evident in the lives of Native Americans. As will become clear, "The Basket Woman" not only presents this moral but also reflects on the ethos of art, specifically of storytelling, as a sacramental medium for reconnecting humanity to nature and itself. The texture of Austin's tale, like that of Davis's and Crane's stories, incorporates the fantastic quality of dream. Alan falls asleep and experiences his adventure with the mahala. In his dream, he learns of a primal episode of dreaming, when a Native American had his ability to tell stories stolen by the same wolf who had originally given it to him. The ability to dream is critical to Austin, who values Alan's difficulty, as a very young child, in differentiating between dream and reality. As a late Romantic like Chesterton, Austin valorizes precisely this mythic mode of a child's perception: 'There is a period in the life of every child when almost the only road to the understanding is the one blazed out by the myth-making spirit, kept open to the larger significance of things long after he is appraised that the thunder did not originate in the smithy of the gods nor the Walrus talk to the Carpenter" (p. v). Austin suggests that nofixedboundary exists between the experiences we perceive as empirical and the experiences we tend to denigrate as fantasy. Austin maintains, in accord with her study of Native American beliefs and her understanding of child perception, that the world of matter is always intertwined with the world of mind. In fact, she radically contends that the world of matter is only the manifestation of the mental perception, the spirit, of a people. This notion informs 'The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman," in which tale the protagonist transforms an animal into a man by

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convincing it to believe that it already is human. "According as they think man-thoughts or beast-thoughts," Austin writes in this story, people "can throw over them[selves and others] such a change that they have only to choose which they will be" (p. 54). What is experienced as real, in short, is ever mutable, is always potentially another actuality. This belief in the polymorphousness of life, in its protean nature as reflected in the "fantastic" nature of dreams, is a feature of romance that Austin puts to special use in trying to educate her audience about alternative possibilities for human perception and behavior. Relatedly, like other ethical romancers, Austin employs generic twodimensional characters to suggest the "broadly human," the "larger significance of things." In the dream comprising "The Basket Woman," for example, the mahala is a caricature with a descriptive rather than a personal name; Alan is merely a representative little boy acting in thoroughly typical ways; and the wolf is a fantastic creature who talks to, barters with, and even outwits humans. This narrative manner is not simply a replication of the practice of Native American storytelling. In Austin's story the Native American belief in a lost time when animals and humanity dialogued and interacted as equal sharers of the world coalesces with the tendency of children to anthropomorphize animals or to animate the natural realm. In the mythic dream life shared by Alan and the Basket Woman, Austin discerns something she thinks her civilization either forgot altogether or repudiated as infantile. Indeed, as Austin knows, the perception of Native American primitiveness as childlike, in comparison to white civilization, was a mainstay of the justification for the United States policy of Manifest Destiny, including the displacement of the indigenous peoples of North America. In"TheBasket Woman" she boldly challenges this reading of reality. In Romantic terms, she indicates that some greater, and opposite, truth concerning the "broadly human," the "larger significance of things," is concealed in the ready alignment of children's fanciful perceptions and Native Americans' mythic beliefs. This message is of course subversive to the status quo, particularly given the time and the likely readership of Austin's book. Her assault on the existing state of affairs is epitomized in 'The Christmas Tree," the story which appears exacdy midway in The Basket Woman. Not only the positioning of this tale but its tide, changed from "The Kiss of Niño Dios" when it first appeared in Out West,26 intimates Austin's effort to attract more attention to it. Through careful nuance, this narrative confronts Christian beliefs, and it aligns these beliefs with imperialism. In this story, a boy named Mathew (recalling the author of thefirstbook

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of the New Testament) at first becomes a devoted convert to Christianity but later becomes a witness to a contrary gospel. As a child, Mathew had loved a silver fir, which provided a maternal force in his life after the death of his mother. But to satisfy the male-proclaimed Christian doctrine of sacrifice, he offers up this silver fir so that it may serve as a Christmas tree in the town church he attends. During the Christmas Eve service, however, Mathew undergoes a reverse conversion: "he heard the minister talking, and it was all of a cross and a star; but Mathew could only look at the tree, for he saw that it trembled, and he felt that he had betrayed it" (p. 102). Mathew leaves town and returns to the wilderness he previously knew. Austin cautiously expresses Mathew's resolution: "that he might find more in the forest than he ever thought to find, now that he knew what to look for, since everything speaks of God in its own way" (p. 104). This nuanced passage allows some of Austin's contemporaries to think that Mathew has learned in church how to find God in all of life; however, for other readers, it may insinuate that Mathew has adopted nature as the true church. That Mathew never returns to the town's church again and that nature is depicted in terms of female nurture both reinforce Austin's emphasis on the need to restore humanity's "normal intimacy with nature." And this message contrasts in the story with the emphasis of the Christian church and civilization on sacrificing what is natural in humanity and in the world. "The Christmas Tree" repeats a theme in Austin's first book, The Land of Little Rain (1903): that white civilization's alienated relationship to nature has resulted in a hostile disfigurement and desecration of the land and the self, a result masked as a necessary sacrifice.27 White civilization has forgotten something from the past, something (the mahala tells Alan) that "is never as it is now except in dreams" (p. 15). Austin imagines a future of human recovery. She imagines a reclamation of health characterized by less fear of and, correspondingly, less hostility toward nature both in the world and in humanity. To implement her dream of a different reality, she turns to literature directed toward children, including the child hidden within the adult, as a medium for social reform. The mythic tales in The Basket Woman, Austin says in her preface, should expose their audience to "successive layers of insight and purport" concerning their "passing experience" (p. viii). In other words, Austin indicates that accounts like "The Basket Woman," seemingly a simple children's story, can contain layers of important subdeties. These accounts intimate something concealed, in both narrative execution and human experience. Moreover, she indicates that such mythic tales are designed to influence their audience

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over time. Austin, in short, considers fantasies for children and for the dormant child in adults as apt media for creating a new readership in the future. She therefore adepdy uses the romance form to recover an ethos supplanted by the conventional wisdom of Christian civilization. She encourages an ethos of intimacy with nurturing nature, an ethos shefindsto be evident in the dreamlike beliefs of children and Native Americans. When the man gets his storytelling ability from the wolf in "The Basket Woman," he in effect gets it from nature, as one of the "by-products of animal life." And when this ability is retaken by the wolf during the man's dream, it merely returns to its source, nature itself. This episode allegorically suggests the extent to which no one can ever fully possess what originates in nature, including human "consciousness and personality," both of which Austin designates as "by-products of animal life." Human experiences are, as it were, only borrowedfromthis source. Consequently, just as the man's dream is invaded by a manifestation of nature (a wolf), so too Alan's dream (encompassing this dream episode) is invaded by a manifestation of nature (a coyote). Likewise, as "the spaces in between the words" of the Basket Woman become "filled with long howls" (p. 15), her song about and mimicry of the coyote coalesces with the cry of the coyote outside Alan's window, and he awakens. But, Austin's story implies, he simply awakens from one dream of reality pervaded by nature into another dream of reality pervaded by nature. This transgression of the usual sense of a demarcation between life and dream may implicate the reader in a resultant decentered perspective. This transgression implies that external experience (the reader's world) is as much a fiction as internal experience (the dream within a dream of Alan's world). As we have seen in other ethical romances, this hint of disorientation may latendy provoke thought in an audience. Austin of course hopes that this thought will provide a basis for a healthy social reorientation. For although Alan is frightened at the time of this awakening,frightenedby his vision of the animal origin of human nature, the next story in The Basket Woman heuristically begins: 'The next time Alan saw the Basket Woman he was not nearly so much afraid of her, though he did not venture to speak of their journey" (p. 17). To further this transformation in her audience—children and the unawakened child within adults—Austin approaches language as a sacramental matrix connecting spirit and matter. "The Basket Woman" implies that songs and stories—words—are rooted in nature, are the gift of the wolf, are the "by-products of animal life." Accordingly, just as language emanates from the natural, it potentially can reconnect humanity to the natural. This

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re-visionary use of language—a revision that results in the recovery of our original healthy childish and aboriginal vision of nature—is for Austin essentially a therapeutic means of curing the alienated colonialist from an ill disposition toward humanity's natural heritage. This recovery of health, in Austin's view, requires the reinstatement of an active imagination, an ability to appreciate the "broadly human" as a manifestation of the divine principle of animation infusing all of nature. Stories are for her latently therapeutic because they express this imagination. If, like dreams, stories are not literally real, in one sense, they are metaphorically real, in another sense. But as 'The Basket Woman" insinuates, literal reality and metaphorical reality merge in life, in stories, and in dreams because their common ground is the truth of nature infused with spirit. Just as "The Basket Woman" contains a dream episode within Alan's dream, it also reflexively presents stories within stories, as if replicating in its structure Austin's intention to reveal "successive layers of insight and purport." The outermost narrative layer is the account of Alan's everyday world. Within this account Alan experiences a dream journey backward in time to a Native American village; this second narrative layer is comprised of the Basket Woman's tale. Within the mahala's narrative "an old tale of [her] people" (p. 13), the story of the wolf's song that surpasses anyone's memory, is recounted; and this third narrative layer concerns the very origin of stories. In effect, "The Basket Woman" amounts to a story within a story within a story, as if evincing some infinite regression into an unrecoverable past when humanity and nature (represented by the wolf) dwelt in a dream reality different from the current one. And the reflexivity of this narrative regression involves the reader, who (as if a sleuth of sorts) is invited to search for some elusive beginning of the series of tales. This implied audience ideally will seek not only the mysterious diminishing point in the layers of regression within the narrative, but also the lost core of human identity. Both quests are for Austin finally identical. The readers of Austin's book are encouraged to pursue self-knowledge, in the manner of children who possess wondrous expectations of the world and its possibilities. Unlike Davis and Crane, Austin does not abandon the engaged reader to an inevitable and unresolved circular self-detection within "a fog of mysterious theory." On the contrary, in Romantic fashion she indicates that the freedom imagined in our dreams (fictions) can become the wonderful fate of our lives (facts). The narrative regressions of Austin's story intimate that the origin of humanity's ability to tell stories is indeed a mystery; but these regressions do not suggest Davis's or Crane's abiding puzzlement over the

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ambiguous implications of this mystery concerning the ethos of storytelling or of human behavior. For Austin, the properties common to the text of fiction and the text of self indicate that romance can truly convey a sense of humanity's "textual" closure with itself. In its ethical mode, Austin suggests, romance can indeed aid its audience in approaching (as if in a Hegelian sense) the real site of human identity: the primal human encounter with nature ("the animal life"). Accordingly, Austin readily associates dreams, stories, and life in 'The Basket Woman." Natural forces permeate and eradicate the normally distinctive boundaries of Alan's dream, the mahala's song, and the man's experience with the wolf. This pattern of the regression of life, story, and dream toward some mysterious principle of animation in nature is anticipated in the first paragraph of Austin's story: 'The hills had a flowing outline and melted softly into each other and higher hills behind, until the range broke in a ragged crest of thin peaks white with snow" (p. 3). These tiered or layered mountains recede before Alan's vision, and they anticipate Austin's use of layers of narration, of stories within stories, to create a heuristic artistic structure implicating the implied reader in the process of detection. The message that lies hidden within the text of 'The Basket Woman" likewise lies hidden within the text of the human self. This message reads: humanity needs to recover an awareness of its mysterious and elusive origin, the "normal intimacy with nature" known by children and Native Americans. This structure of regression as well as the boundary-defying coalescence of dream, story, and reality amount to a subtle artistic weaving of "successive layers of insight." In this sense, the mahala, known only by her many baskets, can be seen as a surrogate for the artist engaged in one or another form of weaving. That, as one critic put it, "the narrator/writer and the Basket Woman merge at certain points in the narrative, both being receptive creative spirits," is an apt observation.28 It is the art of weaving that especially joins them. The vision of the village shown to Alan by the mahala specifically includes women weaving (p. 12), but the connection between their artistry and Austin's is made clearer in the story 'The Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman." In this tale, the Weaving Woman's peculiar way of seeing "everything with rainbow fringes" sets her apart from others and results in baskets that were "such wonderful affairs" that people, "as they stroked the perfect curves . . . or traced out the patterns," thought "how fine life would be if it were so rich and bright as she made it seem" (pp. 46-47). The Weaving Woman is an artist who envisions "the places where one had always wished

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to go" (p. 47); but, more importantly, in her transformation of the coyote into a man through mere language, the Weaving Woman also reminds the reader that art and life are not separate. Her performance reveals that life may in fact be formed or crafted in conformity to any aesthetic vision we imagine or dream. In a certain sense, then, Alan's initial fear that the mahala would conceal him in one of her baskets is noteworthy. It is through the visionary art of her story, that she does indeed "kidnap" Alan and transform his fear. He becomes a captive of her woven narration, her art, even as Austin seeks to carry off any children (in a double sense) who are enchanted by the intricately woven baskets that are her stories. There certainly is, as well, a feminist ethos in Austin's romance. At one point, the mahala notes that "the old men told tales one after the other, and the children thought each one was the best" (pp. 12-13). Apparently, in the past men were the primary storytellers, the primary agents of deriving words from the encounters with nature. "The Basket Woman" suggests, however, that in our present condition of alienation from that source, women could be the storytellers who might most help humanity recuperate what it has lost—"man's normal intimacy with nature." Not only is the story written by a woman, but the primaryfigurein the account who makes a change for the good in Alan is the mahala, Austin's surrogate artist. Even when Alan is frightened as he awakens from his dream, he is comforted by his mother. Austin implicidy advocates a matrilineal art that would nurture future generations of children to a healthy recollection of their relationship to nature.29 It is, then, as a specifically feminist artist that Austin emphasizes the basket as an icon representing art. The intricately woven layers comprising a basket correspond to the heuristically useful structure and coalescent motifs in Austin's story. Moreover, this successively layered matriarchal artistry potentially provides life-sustaining nurture for future humanity, just as the mahala's baskets contain food or water (pp. 4-5). Of the three authors reviewed in this chapter, Austin is the most serious in reflecting on the ethos of storytelling. As an ethical romancer, she sacralizes storytelling by emphasizing its origin in nature and its power, especially in matriarchal art, to reconnect humanity to its natural heritage, to give birth to a renewed life. For Austin, recovery—the reclamation of human heritage and of human health—depends on this restoration of our intimacy with nature, this circular return to ourselves. For Austin, the pursuit of this recovery will not lead to an unresolved circular self-detection within "a fog of mysterious theory," but to insightful self-closure. And this

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recovery will reverse the imperialistic and antifeminine agenda of conquest, such as we saw in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (Chapter 3). Only then will humanity again be empowered to sing: that is, to dream, to imagine stories, and to create in the process of storytelling other and better contingent versions of human reality.

7 The Art of Life

London, Stevenson, Cholmondeley, and Kipling

his final chapter reviews several sophisticated ethical romances that correlate the art of fiction and the art of life specifically to advocate a change in the attitude and behavior of their prospective audience. Many tales were eligible for inclusion in this chapter. The stories considered here were finally selected because they form a fascinating cluster. In one way or another, their correlation of art and life centers around a mutual concern with patriarchal power, including imperialism. London's "A Thousand Deaths" "A Thousand Deaths" by Jack London has been consigned to the margins of critical interest. London himself seems to have authorized this neglect. Although he was initially pleased with the appearance of this work in Black Cat Magazine (May 1899), a Boston periodical of short stories, he nonetheless spoke of it somewhat apologetically as "a pseudo-scientific tale" that he had "written several years ago."1 This attitude may reflect the fact that his interest had turned to a series of Malemute Kid stories he was then writing, but as the years passed London ignored "A Thousand Deaths," which never found its way into any of his collections. The merits of this story have been compromised, furthermore, by London's willingness to relinquish control over it from the first. He had, for instance, allowed the Black Cat editors carte blanche in reducing the work to half of its original length of four thousand words.2 It is not surprising, then, that the story has gone virtually unnoticed, save for its inaugural position in London's career; that it has very rarely been reprinted and does not appear even in a collection of London's 135

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science fiction;3 that, when mentioned, it has been quickly dismissed as not representative of London's best fiction, as in fact mediocre or "obviously hack work"; and that it has been assigned in passing to some marginal category of literary production, such as the horror-story genre.4 The plot of London's tale is not complicated. A young man, unhappy in his youth, is disowned by his parents and becomes a sailor. He drowns off the coast of San Francisco, but is revived by a mechanical apparatus invented by his father, who atfirstdoes not recognize the sailor as his son. His father, now a mad scientist envisioning himself as a future potentate in a technological paradise of his own creation, disregards the revelation of his son's identity and conducts experiments on his captive, whom he repeatedly kills and resurrects. The narrator manages his escape by slaying his father and two black servants. "A Thousand Deaths " is a gruesome, perhaps a distasteful, narrative, but as we shall see it is not merely a slight horror or a science-fiction "entertainment. "5 Nor is it merely an autobiographical reflection. Even if this tale quite probably records London5s anxiety and anger over the fact that his biological father had never acknowledged him as a son,6 it amounts to more than an act of psychological revenge. In the tradition of Hawthorne5s tales "The Birth-Mark" (1835) and "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), London's story is a political allegory7 utilizing the ethical mode of the romance genre to urge a psychological revision in our perception of human existence. In advancing this reading, it is helpfiil to recall that London was attracted to Marxism while a young man and that (however conflicted his socialistic thinking) he had read, among other works, the writings of anarchist intellectuals.8 And it is also helpfiil to recall that prior to the publication of "A Thousand Deaths" London had personally experienced something of an anarchic life-style, had as a criminal and vagabond "lived outside the increasingly restricted, increasingly stifling atmosphere of an industrial society."9 Both of these facts provide important contextual clues to the ethos of "A Thousand Deaths." London's story depicts a generational conflict. This conflict is presented through the encounter of two pronounced character types, "the father" and "the son" interacting in a womanless space. Such character types, especially in the romance genre, were specifically defended by London in 1899,10 and in "A Thousand Deaths" the typical father represents a patriarchal engineer of the developing industrial society at the turn of the century. This father is specifically identified as a "bourgeois" whose "account with the bankers far exceeded" any interest in his children.11 He envisions "a scientific paradise" based on the model of his own bourgeois nature: the suppression of "the

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slightest grain of emotion," particularly of such feminine "petty weaknesses" as "love or sympathy35 (pp. 32, 34). "Reason was all in all to him" (p. 34), his victimized son reports. The reader of the victim's narrative is presumably meant to perceive this father as an insane patriarch, a perverse Abraham "of cold-blooded cruelty" (p. 33), who is willing to sacrifice his ownfleshand blood, not in response to divine decree but in response to his own hegemonic desire. The primary outcome of his father's personal "scientific pursuits" (p. 32) is indicated by the prevalence of imagery pertaining to machines in the son's account. This imagery insinuates that the repressive male-controlled industrial forces at the turn of the century are inclined to be inhumane and dehumanizing, perhaps even to displace biological (maternal) reproduction.12 When the son is resuscitated, for example, his lungs are attached to a machine, and even his arms are worked "like pump handles" so that "the process of breathing" itself, an elemental human life function, is now "artificially carried on" (pp. 30, 31). Throughout the story, the reader encounters not only a father lacking certain prized (traditionally feminine) human emotions, but a man who treats his son as—in a sense seeks to convert his son into—a mechanical apparatus. The father's eventual vivisectional "tampering with [his son's] breast" (pp. 36-37), that metaphoric seat of human emotion, intimates his desire to transform his son from a human with feelings into an ideal apparatus. "He was not a father but a scientific machine" (p. 34), and he seeks to reify his self-concept in his son. Allegorically, the story presents a vaguely Marxist or anarchistic reading of turn-of-the-century industrial forces, which are imaged as inherently dehumanizing andfinallyfiliacidal.The fathers of late nineteenth-century technology are represented in the story as strong generational powers that unfeelingly, inhumanly insist on the imperialistic subjugation of the rising generation. They insist on a slavelike devotion from their own flesh and blood similar to that required of the two black men by the mad scientist in London's story. Such enslavement by their fathers, the story suggests, results in alienated labor, in the transformation of a vital relation to work into an expendable or sacrificial "mechanism" of dehumanized factory-like production. This"vivisectional"transformation in effect equates human life to machinery, and in the son's confession it is depicted as a form of living death. For the patriarchs authorize a sacrifice of their sons that eventuates in the next generation's loss of emotion and its spiritual death. This sacrifice is equivalent to, and may in fact lead to, the loss of life. Although the son in "A Thousand Deaths" is able to think—to live in his mind—he seems atfirstphysically powerless to prevent his tyrannical bour-

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geois father's relentless sacrifice of his life. Consequently, as a sailor who jumped ship and who has now become a servant of less value than the two "utterly devoted" black men who guard him (p. 34), the son leads an expendable proletarian life that is a form of living death. His existence is, physically and spiritually, only "artificially carried on"—that is, it always remains the captive of patriarchal technology and, therefore, always is denied its independent organic being. London's sense of this condition of the rising generation at the turn of the century is dramatized most overtly in his story whenever at odd moments his narrator senses himself to be at once a subject and an object. This dichotomized perspective is evident during the episode of his first revival, a "scene," he says, "of which I was protagonist" (p. 30). Later this experience of simultaneously seeing himself from within (as subject) and from without (as object) is aptly epitomized when he grimly perceives that he is "conscious of officiating at my own funeral" (p. 35). Likewise, while dead at one point, he "retain[s] consciousness" and remains helplessly "cognizant of everything that transpire[s]" (p. 35). Such a description of alienation from oneself, simultaneously a subject of suppressed consciousness and an object treated like a technological implement, represents London's essentially Marxist or anarchistic perception of the proletariat's cultural and economic enslavement by the captains of industry at the end of the nineteenth century. This dissociative experience of dual perspective, the story implies, is indeed the horror of the victim's narrative, the horror borne by the proletarian living dead. Nevertheless, the story also suggests, the threat of such a premature death of spirit and (eventually) of body might motivate the sons (the rising generation) to revolt against the fathers. Accordingly, the example of the narrator may be seen as heuristically ethical for London's readers. Readers are latently implicated in "A Thousand Deaths" not only by a peculiar bifurcated perspective that functions like the conflicting tonality we have observed in other ethical romances, but also by a reflexive allusion to a protagonist that discordantly obscures the distinction between fact and fiction. By being both the "subjective" protagonist of his story and also its "objective" observing audience, the narrator latently dissolves the boundary between his audience (in the world of fact) and himself (in the world of fiction). This fluid boundary intimates that the readers of the "story" are like the son; they are also protagonists whose actual lives in the real world have been converted into an "objectified"fictionsimilar to the narrator's experience. By killing his father, the narrator allegorically instructs his audience,

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with whom he identifies when he speaks as an outside witness to his own experience, to invert the biblical and cultural paradigm of the dutiful son willing to be sacrificed by the father for the alleged common good. He urges the repudiation of any societal proclivities based on this Judeo-Christian paradigm. The narrator thinks, "My only hope was to destroy my captors" (p. 34)—a message the reader is doubtless meant to take to heart, especially given the closing lines of the story: "The wide world lay before me. My captors were not" (p. 38). The pursuit of this "wide world" of possibility, this potential paradise quite different from the scientific model envisioned by the insane scientist, requires a severance from the past. One must embrace orphanhood, as it were; one must, like the narrator, transform a concern with being "disowned" or "ostracized by . . . society" (p. 29) into a concern with being an autonomous consciousness, specifically with awakening from a sleeplike living death. To escape captivity by the past, as represented by the industrial patriarchy, is truly to be "given . . . life" (p. 34), to be "resurrected" (p. 36), to be reborn into the fullness of human existence. This message underlies the cyclic death and resuscitation of the narrator in "A Thousand Deaths." Rebirth is possible, London's ethical romance indicates, if the captive working class will act on its experience of alienation from itself: its experience of being at once a subject of suppressed consciousness and an object treated like a technological implement. That such a rebirth into millennial possibility is essentially an apocalyptic experience is intimated by the narrator's reference to "the sound of many waters" (p. 30), an allusion to Revelation 1:15. The narrator admits that this apocalyptic revolt would comprise "a disintegrative force" (p. 37), but it would not be merely destructive. It would express a natural decomposing force that balances "terrestrial attraction" (p. 37) and that precedes social reconstruction and reintegration.13 For London, this annihilation of the fathers has, moreover, biological as well as physical science as its warrant. When the narrator says that he "evolved the plan by which [he] ultimately escaped" (p. 37), London's selection of the word evolved seems calculated. London's Darwinian theories are well known, but pertinent in this instance is a remark he made in 1899 concerning the assassination of monarchical figures, whom he believed "Survival of the Fittest will dash . . . down": "nature, evolution, call it what you will, or rather, come to think of it, Natural Selection does away with such organs of the individual that become useless or detrimental. Such a position the Empress [of Austria] occupied in relation to the social organism."14 This potential evolution of "factual" subjective consciousness, currendy

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suppressed within the "fictionalized" objectified proletarian body, informs the allegory of "A Thousand Deaths" as an ethical romance. That "A Thousand Deaths" is not an ordinary romance is hinted when the narrator assures his audience that "merely . . . form" is annihilated (p. 37). London here also possibly alludes to the romance form of his narrative. In his story, he has pushed the genre to its gruesome limits, as if to effect the "apocalyptic" disintegration of both the delimiting patriarchal model and the social perception of romance. At the same time, his revolt against convention in the tale evinces an "apocalyptic" reconstruction, or resuscitation, of the traditional manner and matter of romance. "A Thousand Deaths" is aligned with the forces of "terrestrial attraction" and "evolution" in its design to revise the expectations of its implied readers concerning the nature of romance and the nature of life. However, relying on scientific authority to refute a technological culture based on the dream of "a scientific paradise" raises a problem that escaped London's management of "A Thousand Deaths" as an ethical romance. One might suppose that London possibly had in mind two different uses of science, but an alternative to the father5s scientific knowledge is never demonstrated in the story. In fact, in the use of science the narrator is just as learned, just as autonomous, and just as violent as is his demented father. This similarity would be less troubling were the narrator to show the slightest sign of love and sympathy, the emotions he specifically identifies as absent in his "cold-blooded" father. On the contrary, in the final paragraph of his account, the narrator reports, "I laughed to myself" (p. 38). His revenge may be justified, even realistic given his experience; but if the narrator is meant to exemplify for the reader a generational alternative to a filiacidal patriarchy, should not his own behavior and feelings testify to a different sentiment, especially upon reflection during the interval between the events themselves and his narration of them? Should the death of a dog, two servants, and his father still be, upon reflection, as refreshing as "the wind sighing among the pines" (p. 38)? The narrator not only confiscates his father's place in the use of science, he also reenacts his father's emotionless, "cold-blooded" disposition and violent behavior. Beyond the narrator5s awareness and apparendy beyond London's realization, the son's breast has truly been tampered with. The narrator apparendy has "mastered his [father's] speculations and methods of reasoning, becoming almost as mad" (p. 33). Indeed, the narrator seems very much his father's son. Although London's portrait of the narrator evidendy violates the ethical message of "A Thousand Deaths," this story is, as we have seen, far more interesting than its general neglect by critics suggests. It reflects, too, Lon-

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don's argument in 1901 about Kipling's narrative technique,15 as we noted in the Introduction, that the "function of art" is to invite an audience to "read between the lines" and thereby attain "excit[ed] states of consciousness." In this regard, London's tale provides an interesting, if conflicted, instance of how the genre of romance, even in the guise of a trivial sciencefiction or horror story, can serve as a spectacle of ethical design. So although "A Thousand Deaths" may be flawed inherendy, like Wells's 'Truth about Pyecraft," it nonetheless serves as a good point of departure for this chapter on the ethos of patriarchy and imperialism. Stevenson's "The Isle of Voices" On first encounter, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Isle of Voices" (1893) also seems a slight work,16 and this impression may account for its similar longstanding neglect by literary critics. Several other stories by Stevenson, however, have recendy undergone favorable critical reconsideration, including not only The Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde17 but also "The Beach of Falesá,"18 which appears with "The Isle of Voices" in Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). Stevenson, it would appear, is slowly emerging in our present critical perception as a serious writer whose craft cunningly combines social message with artistic strategies.19 His contemporaries, however, were not in complete agreement on this point, as Julia Wedgwood's rebuke of Stevenson's "tone of entire scientific impartiality" and alleged "complete non-morality" attests.20 In describing the narratives in Island Nights' Entertainments Stevenson spoke of their "queer realism," and he singled out 'The Isle of Voices" as "the most extravagant" tale in the collection.21 The phrases "queer realism" and "extravagant" express Stevenson's preference for romance. Perhaps because it is intrinsically dialectical,22 romance appealed to him as an apt medium, more flexible than verisimilar fiction, for complex and uncertain philosophical inquiry into the nature of existence. The plot of "The Isle of Voices" is deceptively simple. Keola resents his father-in-law's ability to produce money by means of magic, which enables him to purchase goods from foreign traders. One day, the sorcerer Kaiamake asks his son-in-law to participate in the process, and they arrive on a strange island where they can be heard but not be seen by its itinerant visitors. By burning certain leaves, Kaiamake transforms seashells into shining coins, and after their return Keola broods over the small reward he receives for the venture. As a result, he threatens his father-in-law with exposure unless further bounty is forthcoming. In revenge, Kaiamake tricks Keola

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and abandons him to drown in the Sea of the Dead. However, Keola is rescued by sailors, albeit he later jumps ship and swims to a strange island. Eventually he recognizes this island (seemingly haunted by the voices of invisible spirits) as the place he had visited with his father-in-law. Nervously, he takes another wife, but learns to his horror that her tribe plans to eat him. He then flees to the beach where the ghostly sounds occur and where fortuitously he is saved by his (invisible) first wife, whose rescue of her husband requires the abandonment of her father on the island of voices. As even this abbreviated synopsis of the plot suggests, "The Isle of Voices" may be extravagant in narrative matter, but it nonetheless conveys a sense of some serious purpose. It stresses the nature and consequences of greed for the son-in-law and, as well, for the patriarchal father-in-law. This thematic concern with avarice is particularly appropriate if this story was, as Stevenson's wife reports,23 primarily intended for a Polynesian audience. In the last four years of his life, Stevenson direcdy observed Polynesian culture, and as his In the South Seas (1896) documents, he saw greed and its complement, theft, as abiding characteristics of the islanders. He noted especially how they were "greedy of things new and foreign."24 Of course, as his earlier writings indicate, the Polynesians were hardly unique in this vice, and obviously the imperialistic foreign traders in "The Isle of Voices" are similarly motivated. Although Stevenson explicitly remarked elsewhere that he did not agree with the observation that the South Sea islanders were innocents corrupted by foreigners,25 he nevertheless intimated irritation and disappointment over the existence of such a spiritual malaise in a place so naturally opulent. This natural richness figures importandy in "The Isle of Voices." When Kalamake makes "bright" and "shining" coins, he does so on an island of "fresh and beautiful" palms with "fans like gold," and he uses sea shells that "glittered" (pp. 219, 224, 227). These images suggest that the natural world of the islanders is already replete with a wealth (kaupoi) that surpasses the monetary "treasure" (p. 219) into which it is debasingly transformed, a wealth free for the taking by any viewer with the sensibility to appropriate it through aesthetic appreciation. The temptation of foreign goods (as Stevenson's In the South Seas also notes) reinforces Kalamake's and Keola's avarice. Both men are blind to the indigenous affluence of their lives. Like many of the other ethical romances we have reviewed, "The Isle of Voices" exposes such an oversight by mingling imaginative dream and experiential reality to suggest that all of life is at any moment like a dream. Keola experiences the strange collision of two modes of being (visibility and invisibility) "like one that dreams" (p. 255), which analogy recalls Kalamake's

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remark during Keola'sfirstventure on the island of voices: "All this is like a dream and shadows. All will disappear and be forgotten" (p. 226). But Kalamake's comment applies not only to the condition of invisibility but also to life in the visible world; for as Keola discovers, when he is invisible he is merely situated in another part of the visible world. Stevenson, in short, expresses an ancient notion, found in pagan and Christian thinking alike, that the life humanity experiences as substantial is essentially as shadowy andfleetingas is a dream. This thematic equation of life and dream is reinforced by the tonal uncertainty of the narrative, which alternates between slightness and seriousness. Together these techniques challenge the audience of Stevenson's story to reconsider the seemingly stable, empirically reinforced capacities of reason. Reason cannot readily come to terms with the fantastic elements or conflicted tone of this story. How, for instance, can reason reconcile a condition of invisibility that flows, as if on a Möbius strip, both from and to the condition of visibility? Such resistance to the reductive and normalizing nature of reason is a feature of the extravagant nature of Stevenson's ethical romance. Just as London's 'Thousand Deaths" urges an apocalyptic transformation of the dehumanizing authoritarian status quo, 'The Isle of Voices" likewise potentially destabilizes its audience's complacent "rational" sense of ontological and epistemological bearings in order to urge a reformation of perception. Whereas London alludes to Revelation to suggest this millennial revision, Stevenson apparently alludes to Saint Paul. For Stevenson, the process of decentering the status quo is a form of dying awayfromthe world as conventionally seen through darkened glasses. It is a demise of only one mode of dream perception, a demise that is preferable to the ultimate extinguishing of one's life. Death is emphasized throughout Stevenson's story, as it is in London's tale.26 Not only is Keola nearly drowned in the Sea of the Dead by Kalamake and nearly eaten by his second wife's tribe, but his experience while invisible on the island of voices is accompanied with a "pang . . . like death" (p. 223). And his later experience while visible on that same island similarly produces a fear "as sharp as death" (p. 255). Whether visible or invisible, Keola is pursued by death, the end of either version of dreamlike life. That physical death may indeed befinal,may be the end of one's dreamlike alternatives for existence, is implied in Stevenson's story. For if the itinerant inhabitants of the island believe that the "bodiless voices" (p. 253) they hear belong to aitu (ghosts or spirits), Stevenson's audience knows better, knows that these voices belong to living people "fantastically" circuited (as if on a Möbius

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strip) through some sort of space-time warp. In this way, Stevenson's audience is instructed about the insubstantial dreamlike nature of life as well as about its fleeting endurance—a life sofragilebefore the rupture of death that quite possibly, like Kalamake, one may "never more [be] heard of" again (p. 259) and so never have lived a more fulfilling version of existence. Given the fleeting insubstantiality of this fantasy called life, Stevenson's story suggests, one ought to appreciate the dreamlike, protean possibilities of that life, especially the abundant riches so often overlooked in everyday experience. As Keola discovers at the end of his terrifying adventure, his first wife bears him the greatest treasure of all: the gift of love that leads her to abandon her wizard father in order to save her ordinary husband's life. She manifests the "love and sympathy" mentioned but never represented in London's account of revolt against the father. In effect, she gives her husband a new birth into the world, in contrast to Kalamake's patriarchal threat of death. Her affection, in contrast to the reenactment of the patriarch's violence in "A Thousand Deaths," gives the "resurrected" rising generation in "The Isle of Voices" another life in "the wide world [that] lay before" it. Pertinently, a resuscitated Keola suddenly sees everything he once took for granted with renewed childlike vision: "Now, when Keola could see his wife at last he was mighty pleased, and he was mighty pleased to be home again in Molokai and sit down beside a bowl of poi" (p. 257). Simple, commonplace things—a bowl of cooked and fermented taro root, a palm with golden fans, a glittering seashell—are among the countless treasures that naturally abound in one's life. And in order not to forfeit that wealth through a blinding and inexplicable greed, one must see this richness of life for what it is, must experience an appreciative vision of the protean everyday wonders that intrinsically inform and redeem the shadowy, fleeting dream that is human existence. This ethical message, urging Polynesian and English audiences alike to a personal reformation of vision concerning the riches of life, carries a particularly poignant note. Stevenson published "The Isle of Voices" about a year before he died (1894), and while writing it he was keenly aware of his own approaching death. In the South Seas, for example, opens with explicit comments (penned no earlier than 1891) on his expectation of dying shortly as a result of his bad health; and this same concern permeates the letters he wrote during the 1890s. These autobiographical revelations help explain Stevenson's angle of vision in "The Isle of Voices," as if in it he were meditating on how his own imminent death, or the threat of permanent "invisibility," had highlighted for him those treasures of the visible world that he, like others, had previously overlooked or underestimated.

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But the author's personal investment in 'The Isle of Voices" appears to be even more subtle. Just as in the plot of the story Keola circuits through a space-time warp, so too in the narrative the living author circuits through something akin to a space-time warp. The narrative voice of 'The Isle of Voices" is at best a weak presence, only once identifying itself in passing as an "I" (p. 251), as if that voice were "dying away" like the "bodiless voices" Keola hears on the beach. In the sorcery of his extravagant romance, the author, while still visibly alive, paradoxically subsumes his identity in a narrational "bodiless voice," as if the narrator were already an invisible aitu of the dead author. This reflexive maneuver reinforces the thematic emphasis of the story. Just as Keola's experience of invisibility (as a foreshadowing of death) awakens him to value the treasures of everyday life, just as perhaps Stevenson's anticipation of his own death quickens his appreciation of the intrinsic opulence of life, the author becomes a disembodied voice on the island of his narrative. On that textual island he tries to "haunt" his audience (on the beach or edge of the narrative, as it were), who might thereby develop a keener perception of the protean extravagancy of human existence. And just as Keola leaves the island of voices, so too ideally this implied haunted audience should escape Stevenson's "isled" text and return to the everyday world with renewed sensibilities. In this way, the narrative voice of "The Isle of Voices" serves as a revision of Kalamake's improper patriarchal voice. The author's aitu, his disembodied narrative voice, instructs its audience both through Keola's exemplary realization that no man should try to be a self-centered island of greed and through the story's own exemplary insistence that no art should try to be a self-centered island of insulated aestheticism devoid of ethical influence on human behavior. Just as Keola discovers the role of community—his wife's love gives him life—in the nurturing of his new perceptions, Stevenson discloses this same valuation of community—his audience's memory gives him life—as a motive behind the extravagance of his ethical romance. In short, the narrative manner of"TheIsle of Voices" mirrors the central spectacle and the moral of the plot of the story. Accordingly, Stevenson's ethical romance, which twice refers to the interaction of stories and belief (pp. 236, 245), becomes a reflexive statement about the nature of both life and art. In suggesting that life and art are equivalent to dreams in their mutualfleetinginsubstantiality and protean possibilities, this tale represents the use of art about life to urge a personal reformation in the art of life. Fellow ethical romancer Gilbert K. Chesterton appreciated precisely this feature of Stevenson's "sort of romanticism, as compared with realism": that

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in returning "to elemental things," to the "first vividness in the vision of life," it "showed mutinous signs of deserting art for life."27 Were Stevenson's story to succeed, it would in effect manifest a kind of sorcery. In time, then, the "bodiless voice" of the deceased (invisible) author would, so to speak, circuit back into the visible world—would, as it were, be given new life—through a feminized patriarchal message embodied in the reformed perceptions and lives of his audience. In a wondrous act of artistic sorcery his romance would amount to a continuous circulation of a once visible (living) author speaking through an invisible disembodied voice, now speaking that absent author back into a visible communal embodiment represented by the reformed lives of his audience. This circuiting back to the visible world of the hearing or reading community (specifically denied Kalamake in the story) would be equivalent to the rescue of the author from the island of voices, the island of his text. In 'The Isle of Voices" Stevenson tried to be more than a storyteller— Tusitala, as the Samoans called him. He tried to be a healing, rather than selfish, patriarchal sorcerer. He hoped, unlike the fate of Kalamake, to be "heard of" again. He hoped to be reborn in another dream reality through a magical, feminized communal artistry that would transform his ethical romance from fiction to the art of life. Cholmondeley's "Let Loose" Mary Cholmondeley does not quite conform to the authorial profile, as exemplified by Stevenson and London, featured in this study. She was not a reporter, she did not earn her living primarily from her writings, and she rarely wrote romances. But even her "realistic" novels evince a concern with the ethical revision of the conventions of art and life. Red Pottage, a bestseller in its day, is a case in point. Cholmondeley's criticism of various social hypocrisies made Red Pottage a sensation when it first appeared,28 and this criticism still interests us today. But this novel also suggests a correspondence between the customs of society and the formulas of fiction. In Red Pottage, accordingly, the call for a revision of social ethos coalesces with the need for a revision of artistic ethos.29 Our appreciation of Cholmondeley's association of life and art, and of her related revisionary narrative methods, is enhanced by a reconsideration of her less-known writings. Her virtually unknown romance "Let Loose" is particularly noteworthy. After its initial appearance in the periodical Temple Bar in 1898, this fantastic tale was included in the American, but not the British, edition of Moth and

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Rust (1902). Because its prior appearance was not widely known, "Let Loose" struck some readers as a purloining of F. G. Loring's tale "The Tomb of Sarah" (1900), and in a note to its reprinted version Cholmondeley defended herself against the charge of plagiarism.30 The story itself, however, is far more interesting than its unfortunate history. A revision of a popular version of the romance genre, this tale heuristically eradicates the commonly understood boundary between thefictionaland the actual. "Let Loose" is presented by a frame-narrator who includes his brotherin-law's account of why he conceals his neck behind high collars. Earlier in his life, the brother-in-law (Blake) had gone to a small church for the purpose of copying a lost fresco that his deceased father had sketched many years ago. Hoping to become famous by publicly presenting a careful rendition of his remarkablefindto fellow artists, Blake overcomes the resident clergyman's peculiar reluctance to admit him to the sealed crypt containing the fresco. Each night following his visit to this site, a local citizen is mysteriously strangled. In response to these events, the clergyman gives Blake an account of a horrible episode of thirty years ago. Then Sir Roger Despard, known for his cruelty, cursed the town. In his death throes Despard had cut off his hand so that it might strangle others were he indeed eternally damned. Blake's entry into the crypt has apparendy released this malign force. After Blake completes his sketch on his third visit, he unaccountably becomes despondent. That night he thinks he is attacked by his dog, which he kills in the dark. But it is doubtful,finally,that the dog had attacked him. Since the marks on his neck were not of canine origin and the discoloration still present on his neck appears to be the imprint offivefingers,the dog apparendy had tried to defend him. Read only in terms of its plot, "Let Loose" might seem to be merely one more example of the sensational romances so prevalent at the turn of the century. Certainly none of its principal generic matter—including the motifs of crypt, painting, curse, and visitation—is original. Its generic manner, stories within stories, is likewise fairly familiar. Nevertheless, this matter and manner are presented far more complexly than is customary in its unexceptional prototypes. At the heart of this complexity is a narrative silence that resists the reader's likely desire for a fuller explanation of events than the story provides on the surface. This silence, as London said of narrative omissions directing us "to read between the lines," potentially invites the reader to linger and puzzle further over some mystery not completely or readily disclosed at the level of plot alone. Specifically, the sensitive reader may wonder why Blake's seemingly innocent activity had such a terrible consequence on others and himself. At

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the level of plot, no explanation of this causal relationship clearly emerges. And the narrative silence on this association lingers as an unexplained mystery, as another story, buried within the nominally resolved mystery. Such a narrative silence amounts to an ellipsis or lacuna that possibly leaves an audience with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, as if something has been left unsaid or unfinished. Indefiniteness of tone, too, latendy contributes to the implied audience's disorientation concerning narrative meaning. "Let Loose" is a horror story, but the frame-narrator commences his account with jocular observations about having "chaffed" and "attacked" Blake on the subject of his "splendid collars" (p. 237). Blake likewise humorously speaks of his reluctance to pick up the scattered teeth of a fallen skull and jestingly reports that his dog ought to have been soothed by the sight of so many bones in the crypt (pp. 247-249).

The involvement of the implied reader's production of thought, in an effort to resolve an emergent dissatisfaction or discontent, suggests that "Let Loose" is no ordinary example of romance. As we shall see, similar to the example of London's 'Thousand Deaths" and Stevenson's "Isle of Voices," the ingenious and complex narrative maneuvers of Cholmondeley's tale revise and expand the conventional matter and manner of the genre to create an ethical version of romance, a version that specifically focuses on the need to reform a patriarchal stress on dehumanizing reason, ambition, and labor both in life and in art. A reflexive concern with art is evident throughout "Let Loose." The frame-narrator, for instance, had earlier envisioned himself as a great artist. Blake in fact has become "one of the leading architects of the day" (p. 236). And even the clergyman thinks that he himself "may be not unknown in the paths of literature" (p. 241). For each of these men, not just for the narrator, art is "a stern mistress" (p. 235). This gendering of art as female is not an incidental detail. All three men, each manifesdy "fired with ambition" (p. 241), prioritize the alleged "stern mistress" of art over the company of real women. Devotion to this supreme muselike female "shrine" (p. 236) of idealized art displaces interest in fleshand-blood women. These men are akin to the father in "A Thousand Deaths" and the father-in-law in "The Isle of Voices." None of these men respond warmly toward women specifically; and each of them evades emotional responses to others generally. In fact, the frame-narrator's feminizing of art is expressed in terms suggesting disapproval of any female force that resists male desire. Blake specifically reduces women to utilitarian handmaids in service to his ambition as

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an artist: "I am of opinion that a well-chosen companion of domestic tastes and docile and devoted temperament may be of material assistance to a professional man" (p. 253). The clergyman pronounces a dire censure of women: "My son, marry not in youth, for love, which . . . turns away the heart from study. . . . Neither marry in middle life, when a woman is seen to be but a woman and her talk a weariness, so you will not be burdened with a wife in your old age" (p. 253). The clergyman, who perhaps ought to resist vanity in himself and others, also admonishes Blake that "young children break the back of ambition" (p. 253). He need not have bothered. Blake has little feeling for children. Annoyed by the "rough, uncouth children" of the village, Blake eludes them "by taking the narrow private path" to the crypt (pp. 240, 243). Although at one point he draws some pictures for a young girl, sitting on his knee, he (similar to a colonizer) enjoys using his skills to mystify the naive child and the "ignorant" villagers. It is telling that when she dies that same night Blake refers to her coldly as "the little creature" (pp. 251-252). Although his appetite is compromised, he "hurrie[s] off early to [his] work" as usual (p. 252). The "stern mistress" calls, not to mention Blake's "ambitio[n] for the success of [his] paper" (p. 238). All of these men view art as separate from and superior to life. For them a distinct boundary divides the quotidian and the imaginative. One, it seems, must choose either art or life. As the frame-narrator's use of the word shrine in regard to the "stern mistress" insinuates, art is like a religion; both, as the clergyman suggests, require the repudiation of life—although, ironically, this devotion to the "narrow private path" may result in some reputation in the ostensibly repudiated world. Blake's use of the word private, to describe the path he follows, is also noteworthy. "Let Loose" intimates that Blake's aestheticist claim, "My one object in life is my art" (p. 241), not only displaces a normal attraction to others (women, children, and villagers) but especially masks his selfdevotion, his self-worship. It is not art but, tellingly, my art, that he pursues. Pertinently, he has no time to read others' books (p. 241), nor does he plan to give his father any credit for finding the fresco, nor does he ever share "with others" his "opinions once formulated" (p. 253). The narrow and private undertaking of these men, characterized by generally antisocial and specifically misogynistic attitudes, suggests their narcissistic selfabsorption. Indeed, as a sensitized reader may surmise, the direction of their attitudes ultimately leads to Despard, the most perverse of patriarchs. "Neither fearing God nor regarding man," Despard profoundly lacks "compassion on innocence" (p. 257).

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In fact, the narrative layering of "Let Loose" reinforces this association of Despard and the three other men. This layering is like a pathway exposing the reader to a diminishing concern with others and, conversely, to an increasing concern with self-gratification. The frame-narrator is the least identified of the characters and the least extreme; he does not mind "chaff[ing]" and "attack[ing]" his brother-in-law (p. 237), but he has actually renounced his earlier ambition as an artist. As the narrative pathway narrows, Blake's story within the narrator's story reveals a still more antisocial man, someone who deals with people only when they are useful to his purposes. The narrator suspects, for instance, that Blake's friendship with him "was because he was getting up steam for . . . 'an alliance with [the narrator's] family"' (p. 237). As the narrative pathway narrows still further, the clergyman's story within Blake's story reveals a more explicit repudiation of community, including children. And at the center of these narrative layers lies dead Despard, who represents the vile epitome of the trajectory of the other three men's misanthropy. This narrative structure provides a device whereby the reader may attempt to resolve the mysterious silence, at the level of plot, concerning what Blake has done to deserve his close encounter with Despard's vengeful hand. Narrative structure, as we have seen elsewhere, often serves this pathlike or directional function in ethical romance. The narrative layers of "Let Loose" are in effect dwindling circles potentially guiding the reader toward some cryptic secret buried at the center, entombed like Despard's hand in the crypt. Despard's hand is virtually an emblem inviting contemplation. The narrative layers of "Let Loose" narrow toward the episode of Despard's selfmutilation and the final image of the mark of five fingers on Blake's neck. Throughout the story hands are emphasized. The frame-narrator shapes landscapes and fashions the story we read, Blake paints during much of his account, the clergyman is writing when first encountered, and Despard uses one hand to sever the other. In the story, the metonymic hand represents the complete range of human action in life and art. As one of Cholmondeley's favorite writers, who also used the hand emblematically, notes in "The Poet": "Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words."31 Like actions, accordingly, words (art) can be "authorized" properly or improperly. If Blake's aestheticist claim that his "one object in life is [his] art" somehow activates the curse of Despard, then the coalescence of the quotidian and the imaginative in the image of the hand apparently targets the art-forartVsake sensibility endorsed by a number of Cholmondeley's contempo-

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raries. Insofar as this art is sent out into the world, it contradicts itself, even as do the artists in "Let Loose" when they seek fame through an artistry that allegedly requires the repudiation of the world. Moreover, as Blake's experience in the crypt intimates, the more art succeeds in withdrawing from "the outer world," the more it is as "silent as the grave" (p. 248), "to which all human life, and strength, and beauty, travel in the end" (p. 263). Pertinently, and ironically, the fresco of the Ascension is entombed with an unredeemed man. For Cholmondeley, no art is transcendent, ascensional, or separate from the world. In withdrawing from the world, art-forartVsake aesthetics unwittingly mimic the condition of the grave. Even this presumed elevated mode of art is inescapably grounded in the nature of human life. Since art necessarily shares the human condition of temporality, it is not and cannot be separate from life. For Cholmondeley, therefore, the proper mission of art is to integrate the quotidian and the imaginative in lifelike timely expression rather than in deathlike timeless artifice. Cholmondeley reverses the dictum pronounced by Blake, "Ars longa, vita brevis" (p. 241). It is life that goes on, not art detached from life. Art that self-defeatingly insists on a boundary between the quotidian and the imaginative is inimical to life. This implication is unwittingly intimated in Blake's, the clergyman's, and Despard's mutual attitude toward innocents or children; and this implication is likewise symbolized in Blake's and Despard's experience of being "strangled by the Evil One" (p. 257). These men, each to a different extent, have been strangling themselves by the misuse, the misauthorization, of their hands in egotistical ambition, both in deeds and art (which are inevitably one). By "unnaturally" repudiating the human community, represented by the children and the villagers, they violently assail their own human nature. If Red Pottage "implies the need for humanity to return to a more elemental (natural) sense of self," which at present is "alienated from its own (divine) nature,"32 so too does "Let Loose," published a year before the novel. Echoing Transcendentalist theory, as expressed by Emerson, and Fourierist theory, as expressed by George Eliot, "Let Loose" adverts to the human capacity, through the reciprocity of action and art, to evolve naturally and spiritually. The model for fashioning this art of life, Cholmondeley's story suggests, is a divinely informed nature. Nature presents "a perfect circle," like the moon that Blake speaks of poetically (p. 263); and significandy Blake's dog tries to save his life (for the marks on his neck are not of canine origin). That the narrator, as the least offensive of the men in the story, gives up art and, "naturally transfer[ring]" his "attentions" to "another shrine" (p. 236), applies himself to landscape

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gardening is also pertinent. In his opening remark he declares that "there are other things in the world besides art" (p. 236), and the story he tells extends this point far beyond his understanding. Close to nature are the villagers Blake thinks are so ignorant. They "naturally5' nurse him back to health. He admits, "Country people especially are remarkably attentive to strangers in illness" (p. 267). They use their hands in the art of communal healing. Blake even goes so far as to observe, "I can honestly say that I have received many more kindnesses than I have time to repay" (p. 267). The first part of his remark reinforces Cholmondeley's point positively, whereas the second part of his remark reinforces her point negatively. Repayment seems in order indeed. Not to meet this communal obligation because of a refusal to reallocate one5s activities or time, rather than on account of an excusable inability, indicates that Blake, the famous artist, has not penetrated to the core of his experience. Insight eludes Blake, but perhaps not Cholmondeley's alert readers. These readers are directed by the imperfect narrative surface in "Let Loose, " which replicates Blake5s imperfect insight. Rejecting the aestheticist goal of artistic perfection, Cholmondeley's narrative manner represents the imperfection of the human condition, the very imperfection that (for her) obligates art to a social conscience. Rather than achieving perfect closure in its surface narrative, "Let Loose " remains silent, at an explicit level, concerning why Blake5s commonplace activities should result in so much horror, including the seizure of Blake by Despard5s despotic hand. This open-endedness, like that of life generally, may lead one to thoughtful puzzlement, to a search for some further implication between the lines and below the narrative surface. For a secret is entombed at the cryptic center of the narrowing concentric layers of the "unfinished" narrative of "Let Loose": that all degrees of selfishness, of lack of communal identity, lead to the fate of Despard. Despard5s patriarchal lack of "compassion," noted by a clergyman who (ironically) himself counsels against love, is the site at which, prospectively, the reader might no longer contemplate the art of fiction but, instead, the art of life. If the reader's attention is transferred from the narrative as a fictional text to the text of self as a potential narrative, then the reader in effect engages in the production and completion of Cholmondeley's ethical romance. Art, Cholmondeley indicates in Red Pottage, should not be artifice, should not be excessively reverential toward the fatherlike authority of the past (social or literary conventions), should not be insensitive (dead) to or subjugate humanity's future generations. Like nature, art should reflect the principle of longevity, but not as understood in the antiquated expression

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"Ars longa, vita brevis." On the contrary, the true longevity of art resides in its "feminizing" engagement of compassion as a natural revisionary force expressing the evolution of spirit—that is, in art's ongoing natural revision of patriarchal authorizations of form in both aesthetics and life. This principle in Red Pottage, that while "the outward and visible form [may seem] dead" but the "spirit lives on, "33 also informs "Let Loose." In this short story Cholmondeley heuristically revises the matter and manner of the romance genre, especially in itsfinde siècle aestheticist mode. Her story shares a concern vital to London's 'Thousand Deaths" and Stevenson's "Isle of Voices": that the present cultural hegemony of the selfinterested (essentially patriarchal) subjugation and dehumanization of others requires the restorative (essentially matriarchal) influence of "love and sympathy." Furthermore, in critiquing the correspondence between the pursuit of self-gratification and the aestheticist desire to divorce the imaginative from the commonplace, "Let Loose" indicates that art should be representative of life, including the possibility that life can be fashioned like art. The social ethos behind the "imperfect" narrative finish of the surface of Cholmondeley's short story urges its prospective audience to recognize love and compassion as natural requisites in the shaping of the "narrative" matter, of art and life, toward a more perfect (circular) closure with human (communal) possibility. Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" However much 'The Man Who Would Be King" (1888) by Rudyard Kipling has been appreciated as an entertaining "fantastic story rendered fantastically convincing,"34 it has also been a site of considerable controversy. It may be Kipling's chef d'oeuvre and one of the greatest stories in the English language, as Arthur Conan Doyle declared in 1906,35 but its intention has not been perfecdy clear. Critics have, for instance, been unable to agree whether the story defends, assails, or ignores imperialism.36 No side in this debate has prevailed because each has been capable of making a case of some kind. We might be tempted to conclude from this situation that the tale has been authorially mismanaged37 or that it was never meant to be anything more than an entertainment, though perhaps the example of Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial" might caution us to hesitate before drawing either conclusion. Possibly Kipling's narrative is double-voiced, designed so that different readers may read their own views into it. If so, however, then we are left with the problem of why its author would encourage the debate likely to ensue.

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In all of this critical controversy, two features are particularly noteworthy. First, Kipling's narrative gives an impression of ambiguity; second, this apparent ambiguity puzzles readers and draws them into discussion. As we have seen in this and previous chapters, such disorientation through puzzlement and such engagement of the reader with the narrative in the production of meaning can be features of ethical romance. Accordingly, seeming ambiguity of manner may not be actual ambiguity of purpose. Such a manner may provide a medium for the typical performance of romance when it intimates that some mystery is concealed in both the art of fiction and in the art of life. "The Man Who Would Be King" is narrated by a newspaper editor in India who encounters two adventurers, Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. These two confidence men succeed in tricking several warrior tribes of Kafiristan into recognizing them as divine kings. Soon, however, Dravot begins to dream of building an empire. In pursuit of his vision, he ruptures his relationship with Carnehan and determines to take a wife. The chosen frightened young woman bites Dravot in the neck, and this wound reveals him to be a mere mortal being. As a result, he is sent to his death down a great ravine, and Carnehan is crucified. Because Carnehan "miraculously" survives this punishment, he is released. Mentally deranged and badly crippled, Carnehan makes his way to the editor's office, where he tells his barely credible story and displays Dravot's head and crown. He dies two days later in an asylum, but the head and crown have disappeared. 'There the matter rests," concludes the editor, the frame-narrator of Kipling's short story.38 This ending is a good place to begin in thinking about Kipling's extravagant romance. Indeed, the reader whose curiosity has been aroused in the course of the narrative is likely to encounter this ending with some discontent. For the narrator's final words hardly seem adequate as a terminus for what has preceded them. Surely, his listeners might well expect, something more should be forthcoming—a clarification of point, perhaps. And as the extensive critical debate about this story attests, its audience truly has not been able to share the editor's final terse closure. They have been unable to let the matter rest or to put the tale's "matter" to rest. In other words, a gap in effect potentially opens between the narrator's willingness to let go of the story and the audience's inability to do so. The audience's experience of this discrepancy between themselves and the narrator is a form of disorientation. This experience of the audience is analogous to Carnehan's disorientation after his encounter with the ravine. Discomfort over this lacuna between the narrator and his listeners potentially

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motivates the perplexed reader to engage in thought, to process discontent. This reader ideally puzzles over some mystery suggested but not quite disclosed by the narrator or by his account. This hypothetical engagement of the audience, we might recall, inspires London's praise of Kipling's reliance on confusing gaps or silences in his fiction to provoke thoughts or feelings in his readers as they try "to read between the lines what Kipling intended . . . should [be] read between the lines": "And what more is the function of art than to excite states of consciousness complementary to the thing portrayed?"39 The ending of "The Man Who Would Be King" is not the only possible site of difficulty between the narrator and his hearers. The opening paragraph of the tale presents another disjunctive moment. On first encounter, this paragraph is utterly bewildering. From the point of view of accommodating (rather than vexing) his audience, the narrator might better have commenced his report with the second paragraph. Then the story would have more conventionally opened, 'The beginning of everything was in a railway train" (p. 107). As the narrative presently opens, the audience's comprehension of the muddled first paragraph seems to require privileged hindsight similar to the narrator's. But even with what perspective the completion of the tale imparts, we are still left with unanswered questions concerning the first paragraph. At the end, we might wonder, has the editor withheld something important? If so, why? What, for example, are we to make of his claim that he "once came near to kinship with what might have been a veritable King," but that he now "fear[s his] King is dead, and if [he] want[s] a crown [he] must go and hunt it for [himself]" (p. 107) ? With hindsight, this reference to a crown may seem a peculiar reflection on the lost crown at the end of the narrative—a most peculiar allusion. And, we may wonder, is Dravot the presumably dead king to whom the editor refers? If so, in what sense could this confidence man be considered a veritable king? If not, then why is the detail of the narrator's kinship introduced and never otherwise glossed in the narrative? Does a clue perhaps surface in the story when Dravot addresses the editor as "Brother" and then says, "Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the saying is" (p. 131)? Has the narrator conveniendy read kinship into the word brother, and has he taken Dravot at his word, even though Dravot's expression is only an old saw? Moreover, is the editor being ironic or sarcastic in implying kinship with these adventurers, not only as erstwhile royalty but also as veritable vagabonds? Our expectation, however conventional, that the ending will resolve the numerous questions elicited by the opening of the editor's account is left

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unfulfilled. The ending and the beginning do not quite mesh to form a hermetically sealed narrative circle. This disfranchisement of the audience's expectations, based on their experience of the conventions of eventuary romance, may be objectified in the ironic icon of the elusive "heavy circlet of gold" in 'The Man Who Would Be King." The implication of this lost crown corresponds to Stevenson's intimation in 'The Isle of Voices" of a deferred, if ideal, continuous circulation of an author's disembodied invisible voice in an embodied visible community of reformed lives; and it corresponds to Cholmondeley's intimation of a deferred, if ideal, circular fashioning of the aesthetic medium of art and life toward a more perfect closure with communal possibility. In Kipling's tale, this absent "heavy circlet of gold" is the repository of the adventurers' commonplace dream of personal fulfillment in societal terms. It is, as well, an apt representation of the readers' customary anticipation of narrative fulfillment in fictional terms. If Dravot and Carnehan's undertaking fails "narratively" to fulfill their expectations concerning the outcome of their social context, so too the editor's report fails narratively to satisfy the audience's expectations concerning the termination of his journalistic account. In fact, Kipling's tale suggests that "the wheel of the world swing[ing] through the same phases again and again" (p. 132) subverts the human fantasy of self-willed closure, in the mutual texts of stories and lives. On this mysterious wracking wheel of fate, vagabonds may become kings, and kings may become vagabonds beyond any discernible reason. Whatever its desires for self-directed closure, in life or in fiction, humanity finds itself helplessly, painfully, grotesquely "bent into a circle" (p. 133), as imaged by Carnehan's crippled body. In other words, the wheel of fate disfigures, fashions a parody of, humanity's dream of the golden circlet of fulfilling closure. And, likewise, 'The Man Who Would Be King" is no circlet of golden aesthetics. On the contrary, it is deformed, "twisted" (p. 135) like Carnehan's hand, both in the disjointed manner of its contesting narrative voices40 and also in the failure of its opening and closing paragraphs to form a perfect narrative circle. As we also saw in Cholmondeley's "Let Loose," this uprooting of the audience's expectations concerning the conventions of fiction hints at some buried secret, a secret on the verge of disclosure yet also basically kept, at the level of plot. Indeed, 'The Man Who Would Be King" emphasizes secrets. The two vagabonds and the narrator engage in encoded expressions derived from their shared knowledge of arcane Masonic lore.41 When, for instance, Dravot emphasizes the word brother—it is italicized in the

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text—he covertly addresses the editor as a fellow Freemason. Although they speak such words aloud, their hidden meanings generally remain inaccessible to others. Consequently, we may liminally sense some lacuna in signification within the exchanges between the men. We may vaguely feel as if something has been left undisclosed, especially given the editor's cryptic silence at the end of his tale. To hear one thing and then to sense something else not quite heard is potentially a decentering experience. Just how reliable is this speaker? the hearer might subsequently wonder. Is he another confidence man of some kind? After all, he identifies himself with vagabonds as much as with royalty; or was that a sarcastic observation on his part? Equally worrisome, of course, is the possibility that he is sincere in this identification with the two adventurers. He sometimes, by his own admission, wears "dress-clothes and consort[s] with Princes" but also sometimes lies "out upon the ground and devour[s] what [he can] get" (p. 113). Is such a man in his right mind? Sanity is certainly an issue in the story. After his ordeal, Carnehan feebly protests, "I ain't mad—yet, but I shall be that way soon" (p. 134). His disjointed narrative—the story within the narrator's story and the bulk of the text—also has a latent capacity to disorient the reader. For his account is, as Carnehan himself fears, always on the verge of "go[ing] all to pieces" (p. 134). It is of course a personal narrative; nevertheless, throughout it Carnehan randomly alternates fromfirstperson to third person in speaking of himself, often in the same sentence (e.g., pp. 142—143). Doubdess this confusion in point of view exhibits Carnehan's madness. Whenever he mentions himself in the third person, Carnehan speaks as if he were Dravot observing Carnehan. That deranged Carnehan possesses a dual identity is indicated, too, when he says: "Peachey . . ., I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn't neither. The King lost his head, so he did" (p. 167). Dravot's madness leads to his decapitation, which in turn causes Carnehan to lose his head (mind). He and Dravot are one, as it were; and so, earlier in his twisted account, he identifies with Dravot's fatal fall into the ravine, a fall he himself only witnesses: "But we tumbled from one of those damned rope-bridges, you see, and you couldn't expect a man to laugh much after that" (pp. 139-140). Carnehan's juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy here touches on another feature of the seeming ambiguity of Kipling's story. The perplexed reader struggles not only with the narrator's position in thefinalparagraph, with the failure of his report to unravel fully his opening remarks, and the irrational alternation of point of view in Carnehan's account (not to mention the narrator's odd comments about himself), but also with uncertain nar-

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rative tone. There are ample humorous episodes in this incredible tale; yet at the same time its final horror, involving human mutilation and death, strikes a starkly opposite note. No wonder that in their debate over this story critics have not determined whether the story is to be read as an imperialistic allegory or parody. They have not been able to ascertain—to apply terms associated with Carnehan—whether the tale is to be read as a "straight" or as a "twisted" narrative performance (pp. 135,137). That Kipling's tale is a story within a story augments the reader's trouble in trying to ferret out some intimated yet elusive mystery. The intertwining of these two narrative voices is similar to Carnehan's mingling of first- and third-person point of view. And, as we noted, just as Carnehan's unreliable account is unstable in viewpoint, so also is the narrator's frame account. A frame-narrator can provide a reader with bearings, as Haggard conventionally demonstrates in King Solomon's Mines. In "The Man Who Would Be King," however, the narrator's words seem at once conventional and encoded, insular and open-ended in signification. The sensibility, the attitude, behind his language seems to resist penetration. Skepticism may arise in the audience as a result of this narrative trait. Indeed, the editor's reliability has been questioned by critics, who have even wondered about his susceptibility to delusions.42 Suspicion emerges, for instance, if we hesitate over his comments about his newspaper. The narrator cynically (and reflexively) informs us, without a trace of ethical disapproval, that his newspaper routinely distorts or evades the truth. This especially occurs whenever, in hisfinancialjudgment, there is a need to preserve "the peace of the subscribers" (p. 117). Do such reflexive observations pertain to the story he is telling us about the two adventurers, a story reminiscent of the sensational journalism of Kipling's day? Moreover, just what are his motives for telling us this story? This question is important, given the editor's attitude toward people. For the way he sees people is indeed peculiar. In the first paragraph of his account he reports that he has associated with kings and with beggars, though the tone of these remarks remains uncertain. Then in the second paragraph his uncharitable observations indicate his personal superiority to others. Like Dravot's "talking so superior" in dismissing Carnehan (p. 154), the editor later similarly asserts his elevated status when cynically noting that everyone is at heart a confidence man of one kind or another (pp. 115-116). He is distant from others, glacially remote. He is not in the least moved by Carnehan's pathetic story. He listens as if he were as indifferent as "the wheel of the world," as if he were merely witnessing "the same phases again and again" of human folly. Presumably this indifference, the by-product of what

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he believes to be a Parnassian insight into the human condition, informs his sense of superiority to people who are futilely racked by blind ambition on the wheel of fate. Similar to Dravot, with his Masonic secrets, the editor speaks as if he were an insider in possession of superior insight into reality. He believes he sees what they fail to realize: that the wheel of fate always reduces dreams of self-fulfillment into twisted parodies of circular closure. Although the adventurers expect the editor to grasp their Masonic nuances, he in turn does not expect them, or his listening audience, to penetrate the secret attitudinal nuances encoded in his own discourse. Should we not suspect that there is something profoundly wrong with this man? Do most readers admire him? Do they feel as if they have been taken into his confidence? Do they get to know much about his stance, except inadvertently? The reader would have to be as desperate and as indiscriminate as Carnehan to think the editor speaks or acts "as betwixt friends."43 In dispassionately ending his narrative with "there the matter rests," the editor apparendy renounces any ambition concerning his report; but more importandy, in doing so he also authoritatively or patriarchically punctuates the absence of compassion evident throughout his account, just as do the male raconteurs in Cholmondeley's "Let Loose." With his keen glimpse at the wheel of fate, as relendess as the two phases of the year he describes in India (pp. 117-118), he remains indifferent, ironic, or sardonic at best. Consider, for example, his annoyance with an event, "whatever it was," postponing the printing of his paper: "I drowsed, and wondered . . . whether this dying man, or struggling people, was aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing" (p. 119). Consider, too, his equation of the indifferent turning of the newspaper cylinder press with the rotation of the wheel of fate and the annual round of the seasons: "A few great men had died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the Office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference" (p. 132). Furthermore, consider his behavior when Carnehan returns, nearly dead on the spot. The editor does not tend to him or see that he is tended to; on the contrary, perhaps as a newspaperman looking for something to interest subscribers, he insists that the obviously distraught man tell his story now, all of his story. Time and again, the editor implies that not just the aborigines but people in general "are utter brutes" (p. 123). The phrase could apdy be applied to him. We might reasonably suspect that the editor's prospective hearers should be put off by his attitude and behavior. If so, then the distance his audience would detect between themselves and him at the end of the tale—"there the

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matter rests"—would culminate a dissociation developed throughout the course of the narrative. In short, a gap potentially opens between the dismissing cynical narrator and the engaged sensitive reader. This rift possibly confronts the decentered reader with an alteration of expectation that would encourage reflection. Ideally, this reflection would center on the mystery of narrative motive suggested but not quite disclosed by the editor or by his account. Kipling gives a clue to this mystery of narrative motive. As a reflexive feature of his revisionist view of romance, Kipling has the editor note the function of formula, or convention, in reinforcing the status quo. The editor practices an art that does not disturb "the peace of the subscribers." So, he says, "you sit down and write:—'A slight increase of sickness is reported. . . . The outbreak is purely sporadic . . . now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record the death, etc.'" (p. 117). This manner utilizes the mollifying formulas of simple convention. Although the editor indicates that he is above such tripe, he indifferently stoops to conquer for economic reasons. He, who never shows "deep regret" for anybody, employs such conventional discourse to keep his subscribers in countenance. He doubtless knows that his readers might detect the truth: that such conventions are as empty as are the rituals of Dravot and Carnehan.44 But apparently he is not worried that his audience will apply his cynical observation at this point to the story in hand. After all, like the author of an eventuary romance, the editor is only satisfying his reader's demand for ceremonial narrative forms. His story, as if encoded, only intimates that literary conventions, like Dravot's use of religious rituals, are a form of mystification that works because it conforms to an audience's complicit expectations. However, behind such acts, Kipling's story suggests, lay the secret motives of the mystifiers, who like Blake in "Let Loose" use their talent to manage their "ignorant" audience. Indeed, as we noted in our discussion of Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, fulfilling expectations by means of literary conventions can be read as a reinscription of the process of colonization. In other words, the quest of the imperialistic confidence man is replicated when (like Dravot or Carnehan) an author seeks to loot the treasure of an "inferior" audience by reinforcing their expectations. If Dravot and Carnehan try to rule others through the mystique of a superior mode of brute force, the editor tries imperialistically to dominate his naive readers through the mystique of a "superior" mode of cryptic and brute indifference. 'The Man Who Would Be King" twists the formula of the Haggard type of imperialistic romance and, correspondingly, challenges the prevailing pa-

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triarchal ethos associated with this genre.45 One such twist revises the formulaic fear of and hostility toward women commonly embedded in eventuary romance. Sherlock Holmes summarizes this reaction toward women when he speaks of them as "naturally secretive" in their inscrutable motives. Because they have previously rattled even this normally emotionless supreme sleuth, he explicidy expresses "his aversion to women" and never "makes merry over the cleverness of women."46 Carnehan sounds the same warning typical of these romances. He advises Dravot, 'The Bible says that Kings ain't to waste their strength on women, 'specially when they've got a new raw Kingdom to work over" (p. 157). The subdued femalelike kingdom is trouble enough, Carnehan suggests. One must be mindful of the forlorn fate of Sampson, who had indulged his fondness for Philistine women. Nevertheless, Dravot insists on his imperialistic prerogative over the female subject,47 and his intended indeed proves to be a devastating force. However, in Kipling's story this view of women does not culminate in the male dream of domination prevalent in the imperialistic romance. Whereas King Solomon's Mines presents a ritual of male conquest and displacement of "dangerous" female forces, "The Man Who Would Be King" dramatizes the defeat of male colonizers by these forces (represented by the intended and her people). The bite of a frightened, resistant young woman amounts to a death warrant for the two erstwhile imperialists. Her bite reveals the fraudulency of imperialistic conventions, both in life and in fiction. In a sense, one might say that the intended's bite avenges all the subjugated and sacrificed women in romances such as Haggard's. This departure from convention is just one more feature of Kipling's bid to revise his audience's expectations, one more aesthetic "twist" or breach for the reflective reader to ponder. Such a lacuna, as London indicates, is central to Kipling's artistry. In the bleak silences of the remote narrator, in the gaps liminally sensed between him and us, something is missing. The involved reader is thereby urged to end the narrator's final and disturbing silence, to continue the search, to bridge the ravine, as it were. The narrator's emotional void provides a narrative vacuum. It ideally draws the audience into the story by drawing out the audience's thoughts and feelings, both of which in effect advance the production of the text toward completion. This involvement contrasts to the narrator's sense of distant, superior emotionless separation from those with whom he says (in uncertain tone) he once shared common ground. London observes this method of vacuumlike silences and lacunae in Kipling's work: "Is there not here all the excitation in the world for our sorrow,

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our pity, our indignation?" As the outermost narrativeframeof the story, the audience of "The Man Who Would Be King" is goaded to ponder the rift between themselves and the narrator and, presumably, to sense the propriety of compassion. This compassion would extend to all humanity. It would be a universal compassion48 because there can be no linear hierarchies on the relendess circle of fate. Kipling's tale suggests that everyone is finally only human and that deluded humanity's pathetic Christlike suffering is not inherendy redemptive.49 Supreme indifference to this common plight is, the story implies, akin to insanity. It corresponds (as the editor's possible allusion to kinship with Dravot suggests) to the egotistic desire to subjugate others. This patriarchal indifference to others and preoccupation with self-gratification was evident as well in Cholmondeley's "Let Loose" and Stevenson's "Isle of Voices"; and if Despard and Kalamake may be suspected of insanity, London's 'Thousand Deaths" specifically characterizes the dehumanizing indifference and egotism of the father as unmitigated madness. The memento mori of Dravot's skull encodedly cues us to respond differendy. It reminds us that we are all brothers (insiders) when it comes to experiencing the fatal revolutions of the cosmic wheel. It is loyalty at this universal level that matters, insofar as anything can matter. This recognition of a mutual bond through human mortality provides a common ground for universal compassion. Universal compassion redeems no one, but (the story implies) it is existentially the grandest available human sentiment. This perspective on universal compassion is Kipling's buried narrative motive in "The Man Who Would Be King." It is the authorial secret designed to be detected by the reader who futilely searches for the editor's hidden motive. As we have seen, perspective is at issue throughout the story, and, appropriately, the decentered reader's struggle for perspective, for reorientation, turns out to be the very point of the story. Thus, the mystery liminally sensed by the perceptive reader finally lies within the reader, who is also a text shaped by convention and in need of revision. The drawing out of the audience's compassion transgresses the boundary between reader and narrative, and engages the reader in a revisionary production of the story. The text of the reader's self potentially completes the narrative, now revised by compassion. Ideally, if the conventions of romance can be thusly reformed, then the Weltanschauung of current society (the art of life) may in turn be revised; for, as we noted, Kipling understands that narrative conventions reinforce societal rituals. This breakdown of the boundary between the reader and the story, for the purpose of mutual revision, underlies Kipling's deformation of the cir-

The Art of Life

163

clet of golden aesthetics—that is, his violation of the usual expectations concerning conventional narrative practice in eventuary romance. Out of this revision emerges his ethical version of the genre. "The Man Who Would Be King" heuristically invites the reader to discover universal compassion as a medium latently capable of transforming our perception of the mutually reinforcing ritualistic forms typical of the art offictionand the art of life. If Stevenson, in Chesterton's assessment, "was one of the crowd of artists who showed mutinous signs of deserting art for life," so were London, Cholmondeley, and Kipling in the stories reviewed in this chapter. All four of these tales share the notion that art should represent life, not in the mimetic terms of "literary realism" but in the prodigious terms of romances that ethically reflect the belief that human existence is or can be fashioned like art. In one way or another, these four romances explore this notion by positioning a putative feminine force of love and compassion against certain authoritative patriarchal or imperialistic strictures in both life and aesthetics. In these four tales, specifically, love and compassion are presented as necessary developments in human understanding if the mutual "narrative" matter of art and experience is to arrive at a more perfect denouement. The authors of these tales turned to romance because the genre seemed to them to be especially adaptable to the artistic blending of the imaginative and the experiential. The formulas of romance appeared to be less resistant to revision and more open to implicating readers than did the conventions of "literary realism." Romance, they thought, could achieve a heightened effect because it readily exceeded the limits of moderation, balance, necessity, and reason. Romance, in other words, could be utterly extravagant, even transgressive of its own established patterns. It could be a medium with fluid boundaries, and this topographic feature of the genre was ideal for questioning an audience's complacent ontological and epistemological bearings. Whether only musing on the human condition or actually advocating personal, social, and artistic reform, authors of ethical romance, in particular, explored the capacity of the genre to be heuristically reflexive, to be a spectacle/speculum that reflected the "fantastic" reciprocal nature of the art offictionand the art of life. H. G. Wellsfirstglimpsed this capacity of the genre when, at the age of fourteen, he encountered Plato's Republic, "a very releasing" Utopian romance with "the amazing and heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law, custom and worship, which seemed so invincibly established, might be cast into the melting pot and made anew."50 And Kim Stanley Robinson,

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latter-day practitioner of ethical romance, speaks similarly of the mutual narrative nature of imaginative fiction (art) and "invincibly established" history (life): "History is made of stories people tell. And fictions, dreams, hoaxes—they also are made of stories people tell. True or false, it's the stories that matter to us. Certain qualities in the stories themselves make them true or false. . . . We value them according to how much they spur our imaginations."51

Notes

Introduction 1. "Fun as Acrobat," Saturday Review 120 (1915): 115. 2. "Modern Novels," Spectator 55 (17 October 1885): 1365-1366. More recendy, Robert S. Levine concludes that even in its ironic modes, American melodramatic romance signals a desire to engage shared cultural concerns, and not necessarily from a cultural distance: Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. On the complex heritage of the Scott romance, see Diana Elam, Romancing the Postmodern (London: Roudedge, 1992). 4. On several features of romance, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973). 5. Peggy Kamuf, "Replacing Feminist Criticism," Diacritics 12 (1982): 47. 6. G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder and Stoughton, [1927] 1929), p. 102; all references are to the 1929 edition. 7. Among such otherwise useful studies, especially noteworthy are John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), and Kenneth A. Bruffee, Elegiac Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 8. As argued by Peter Ruppert, Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 9. See Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 10. See Kenneth M. Roemer, "Getting 'Nowhere5 beyond Stasis: A Critique, a Method, and a Case," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), pp. 126-146. 165

166

Notes to Pages 6—11

11. See William J. Scheick, Design in Puntan American Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), pp. 130-145. 12. Jack London, Revolution and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 231. Pertinently, Gary J. Handwerk has differentiated between normative and ethical irony, the latter depending on a context of human values to encourage a deeper interrogation of self-consciousness, a certain open-endedness concerning alternatives: Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Locan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 13. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 34, 285, 293.

14. Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 96. 15. On the partial recoverableness of authorial intention and historical context, see Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 16. In Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), Lennard J. Davis refers to this field of expectation as "the 'prestructure' of the work" (pp. 12-13). 17. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). 18. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); William J. Scheick, 'The Ethics of New Historicism," Soundings, forthcoming. 19. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p· 40. In The Form of American Romance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), Edgar A. Dryden argues that "the experience of reading becomes the essential theme of romance" not only because its audience is seduced by its magic but also because its audience challenges the legitimacy of an author's authority. See also Emily Miller Budick's observation of "aversion" as a mechanism of verbal instability that opens "pathways to interpretive freedom": "Sacvan Bercovitch, Stanley Cavell, and the Romance Theory of American Fiction," PMLA 107 (1992): 85. 20. J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 332.

1. Beautiful Circuit and Subterfuge: Romance 1. The Autobiography ofG. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936), p. 332. 2. "A General Introduction," in The Works of H. G. Wells (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924), 1:xi. 3. Rudyard Kipling, Something ofMyself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), pp. 244-247. 4. Kipling, Something of Myself p. 228; Y. Y, "Kipling," Bookman 1 (OctoberNovember 1891): 29; [W. E. Henley], 'The New Writing," Scots Observer, 3 May 1890, reprinted in Kipling: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 55-58.

Notes to Pages 12-18

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5. John Kendrick Bangs, Peeps at People, Being Certain Papersfromthe Wntings of Anne Warrington (New York: Harper, 1899), p. 129. 6. Henley, 'The New Writing," p. 58. 7. Scott Compton Osborn and Robert L. Phillips, Jr., Richard Harding Davis (Boston: Twayne, 1978), p. 11; Gerald Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of a Mother and a Son (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961), p. 202; Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1992). 8. As quoted by Langford, Richard Harding Davis Years, pp. 92-93. 9. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: Volume IV, 1891-1894, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 157. 10. Letters ofRobert Louis Stevenson: Volume HI, 1887-1891, p. 270. 11. Henry James, Notes on Novelists, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914) p. 24. 12. L. J. Davis, Factual Fictions, pp. 42—70. 13. See, for instance, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's discussion of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos in From Faa to Fiaion: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 14. Ada Woodruff Anderson, The Rim of the Desert (Boston: Little, Brown, 1915), p. 294. 15. London, Revolution, p. 237. 16. Alfred Moss, Jerome K. Jerome: His Life and Work (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1928), pp. 103-104. The increasing power of the press throughout the century can be gauged in the episodes reported in Viaorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class, ed. Kristine Ottesen Garrigan (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992). 17. Joyce Milton, The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p· xiii. 18. James, Notes on Novelists, p. 436. 19. Julia Wedgwood, "Ethics and Literature," Contemporary Review 71 (1897): 63-80. 20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Traaatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. B. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 6:421. 21. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 418. 22. Mrs. Humphry Ward, A Writer's Recollections (New York: Harper, 1918), pp. 244-246. 23. An ample discussion of this debate appears in Robert Bloom's Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading ofthe Last Novels ofH. G. Wells (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), PP. 9-37. 24. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 93, 209. 25. See, for example, Walter Reed, "The Problem with a Poetics of the Novel," Novel 9 (1976): 101-113; and Jonathan Culler, "Problems in the Theory of Fiction," Diacritics 14 (1984): 2-11. 26. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, pp. 410,416.

168

Notes to Pages 18-24

27. Wells, Works, 1:xi. 28. London, Revolution, p. 234. 29. Walter Pater, Appreciations, inWorks(London: Macmillan, 1915), 5:66. 30. William J. Scheick, The Splintering Frame: The Later Fiction of Η G. Wells (Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1984), ρρ· 37-40. 31. Frank Swinnerton, Foreword, in Hilton Brown, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Harper, 1945), p. xii. 32. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, "Aliens in the Garden: The Re-Vision of Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage," Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 103-121. On other overlooked turn-of-the-century women who broke out of or disrupted the conventions of literary realism, see Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 33. In an early interview, for example, Wells refuted the notion that the two literary modes are absolutely separate: A. H. L., "Realism v. Romance," To-day 16 (11 September 1897): 164-165. 34. John Kendrick Bangs, Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898), p. 26. 35. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, pp. 412-413, 414, 420. 36. Robert Louis Stevenson, Memories and Portraits (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 276. 37. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 98, 235. 38. Bangs, GhostsIHave Met, p. 28. 39. London, Revolution, pp. 224, 232. 40. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 104. Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957), a pioneer investigation of nineteenth-century fictional romance, discusses the romancer's opposition to literary realism. 41. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction, and Other Essays, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: New York University Press, 1959), p. 234· 42. William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, ed. Norman Penny (London: Society of Friends, 1930), pp. 252-253. 43· Penn, No Cross, No Crown, p. 253. 44. Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery (Amsterdam, 1678), p. 12.

45. Theophilus Gale, The Court of the Gentiles (Oxford, 1669), 1:296. 46. William Congreve, in a preface to Incognita (1692), in Shorter Novels: Seventeenth Century, ed. Philip Henderson (London: Dent, 1930), p. 241. 47· L. J. Davis, Factual Fictions, p. 25. 48. As cited by Harvey F. J. Darton, Children's Books in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 47· 49. J. M. S. Tomplins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (London: Constable, 1932), p. 210. 50. See, for example, Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice ofRelation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Notes to Pages 25-29

169

51. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), p. 32. 52. "Fiction," Speaker 13 (18 April 1896): 429-430. 53. Untitled review, Guardian, 3 June 1896, p. 871; P. Charlmers Mitchell, "Mr. Wells's Dr. Moreau," Saturday Review (Lond.) 81 (11 April 1896): 368-369; 'The Transformation of Living Tissues," Natural Science 13 (May 1896): 291. 54. Untided review, Guardian, 3 June 1896, p. 871; "Fiction Good and Bad," New York Times, 16 August 1896, p. 23; W. L. Courtney, "Books of the Day," Daily Telegraph (Lond.), 3 April 1896, p. 6. 55. "Recent Novels," London Times, 17 June 1896, p. 17. 56. [Basil Williams], "New Novels," Athenaeum, no. 3576 (9 May 1896), pp. 615-616; "Novels," Manchester Guardian, 14 April 1896, p. 4. 57. In an interview published in The Young Man, August 1897, p. 256. 58. "King Solomon's Mines," Critic, 30 January 1886, p. 56; "King Solomon's Mines," Literary World, 23 January 1886, p. 24. 59. In 'The Fashion in Literature," magazine editor Jerome K. Jerome humorously speculates that the extensiveness of serialization of fiction, which requires the use of synopses, may be the death of the novel: American Wives and Others (New York: Stokes, 1904), pp. 29-42. 60. James Mark Purcell, 'The Edwardian Populism of Chesterton's Art," The Chesterton Review 6 (1980): 212—220; Samuel Hynes, Edwardian Occasions (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 81. 61. If on the one hand Jameson sees in romance a subversive resistance to "oppressive representation, on the other hand Northrop Frye sees in the genre a masked legitimation of the dominant ideology (The Secular Scripture [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 57). See also Budick, "Romance Theory of American Fiction," pp. 78-91. 62. Dixon Scott, "Rudyard Kipling," Bookman 43 (December 1912): 143. 63. Augustus Thomas, "Richard Harding Davis," in Soldiers of Fortune (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916), pp. ix, xv. 64. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 134, 233. 65. There are exceptions; for example, Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 66. Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 1:319. On the limits of Woolf's revolt against the Edwardians, see James Gindon, Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1971), pp. 203204.

67. The ideas summarized in this and the next paragraph are detailed in my Fictional Structure and Ethics: The Turn-ofthe-Century English Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990). 68. Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," 1:319. 69. H. G. Wells, Babes in the Darkling Wood (New York: Alliance Book Co., 1940), p. x; emphasis added. 70. Elam, Romancing the Postmodern, p. 8. 71. Chesterton, Autobiography, p. 352.

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Notes to Pages 29-32

72. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p. 1. 73. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 36. 74. Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Lane, 1908), pp. 15-16. 75. James, Art of the Novel, p. 32. Chase notes the importance of this remark (The American Novel, p. 27). 76. G. K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1987), p. 136. 77. James, Notes on Novelists, p. 436. The epistemological challenge of Jamesian fiction is the subject of Paul B. Armstrong's Phenomenology ofHenry fames (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). 78. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), p. 230. 2. The School of a Great Master: Hawthorne 1. These observations appear in an untitled review, probably written by R. H . Hutton in The Spectator 40 (12 March 1887): 358-359. 2. See, for instance, Catherine Rainwater, "Encounters with the 'White Sphinx5: Poe's Influence on Some Early Works of H. G. Wells" and "H. G. Wells's Re-Vision of Poe: The Undying Eire and Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island," English Literature in Transition 26 (1983): 35—51; 30 (1988): 423-436. 3. Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1920), p. 121. 4· See, for example, Robert E. Hogan, "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process and Miss Ludington's Sister: Edward Bellamy's Romances of Immortality," Studies in American Fiction 8 (1980): 51-68; and Robert Secor and Debra Moddelmog, "Conrad and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)," in Joseph Conrad and American Writers: A Bibliographical Study of Affinities, Influence, and Relations (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 11-17. 5. Wells, Experiment, pp. 250, 253. 6. Austin, Earth Horizon, p. 230; Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 12; Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Tears, pp. 6,114; Osborn and Phillips, Richard Harding Davis, pp. 23, 39,138. 7. Ann Matlock Weygandt, Kipling's Reading and Its Influence on His Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1939), p· 158. 8. See, for example, Scott, "Rudyard Kipling," p. 143. 9. Weygandt, Kipling's Reading, p. 198. 10. Charles N. Watson, Jr., The Novels ofJack London: A Reappraisal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), p. 241. 11. London, Revolution, p. 233. 12. As quoted by R. W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 43. On the ambiguity of Crane's reaction to Stevenson's example, see Stallman, pp. 26, 36, 486; and Edwin H. Cady, Stephen Crane (Boston: Twayne, 1980), pp. 66, 73. " T h e Blue Hotel," in fact, has (righdy or wrongly) been said to

Notes to Pages 32-34

171

follow the romance formula of Robert Louis Stevenson; and The O'Ruddy (1903), the work left unfinished at the time of Crane's death, has been described as a parody of the Stevensonian romance that reflects Crane's dislike of the genre generally even while he tried to benefit financially from its example. 13. Osborn and Phillips, Richard Harding Davis, pp. 23, 39, 138; Austin, Earth Horizon, pp. 183-184; Peggy Pond Church, Wind's Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 174; Wells, Experiment, p. 250. 14. In Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Biography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), John A. Stewart says that Stevenson played "the sedulous ape" to Hawthorne (1:98). 15. See, for example, the reviews of The Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by James Ashcroft Noble and Julia Wedgwood, reprinted in Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage, ed. Paul Maixner (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 203-205, 222-224. 16. Riffaterre, Fictional Truth, p. 91. See also Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 112-113, 250-251. 17. Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables, p. 2. 18. Representative treatments of these two points of view include Gloria Chasson Erlich, "Guilt and Expiation in 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26 (1972): 377-389; and Dieter Schulz, "Imagination and Self-Imprisonment: The Ending of 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Studies in Short Fiction 10 (1973)· 83-86. An earlier version of my comments on this story appeared as 'The Hieroglyphic Rock in Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" ESQ: A Journal ofthe American Renaissance 24 (1978): 72-76. 19. The former position has been argued by Hyatt H. Waggoner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 78-86; Robert Emmet Whelan, Jr., '"Roger Malvin's Burial': The Burial of Reuben Bourne's Cowardice," Research Studies 37 (1969): 112-121; and Sheldon W. Liebman, "'Roger Malvin's Burial': Hawthorne's Allegory of the Heart," Studies in Short Fiction 12 (1975): 253-260. The latter position has been argued by Roy Harvey Pearce, "Hawthorne and the Sense of the Past; or, The Immortality of Major Molineux," English Literary History 21 (1954): 327-349; Richard P. Adams, "Hawthorne's Provincial Tales," New England Quarterly 30 (1957): 39-51; and Neal Frank Doubleday, Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 192-200. 20. Michael J. Colacurcio, The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 108. 21. See, especially, Waggoner, Hawthorne, p. 80; and Agnes McNeill Donohue, "'From Whose Bourn No Traveller Returns': A Reading of 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction 18 (1963): 1-19. 22. Mossesfroman Old Manse, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 10:338, 356. All subsequent quotations from "Roger Malvin's Burial" are drawn from this edition, and the page references are included parenthetically in my discussion. 23. See John T. Irwin, 'The Symbol of the Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance," American Quarterly 26 (1974): 103-126; and William J. Scheick, The Slender Human Word: Emerson's Artistry in Prose (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), pp. 3-26.

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Notes to Pages 34-41

24. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 164—190.

25. The place of imaginative deception in relation to other features of the story is discussed by Schulz, "Imagination and Self-Imprisonment," pp. 83-86; and Robert J. Daly, "History and Chivalric Myth in 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Essex Institute of Historical Collections 109 (1973): 99-115. 26. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1 9 0 3 - 0 4 ) , 4:142; 8:65.

27. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 308. 28. Hawthorne originally wrote "soul" for "heart," which fact also indicates his equation of "heart" with "self." 29. See Liebman, "'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" pp. 253-260, for a discussion of the connection between the forest and the heart in this story. 30. On the place in the tale of Hawthorne's attitude toward history, see Daly, "History and Chivalric Myth," pp. 99-115; Diane C. Naples, "'Roger Malvin's Burial': A Parable for Historians?" American Transcendental Quarterly 13 (1972): 45-48; and especially Colacurcio, Province of Piety, pp. 102-130. Colacurcio's emphasis on Hawthorne's intimation of the possible dire outcome of American national history is sympathetic to my interpretation and also significandy advances two earlier discussions of the historical sources for the story: G. Harrison Orians, 'The Source of Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" American Literature 10 (1938): 313-318; and David S. Lovejoy, "Lovewell's Fight and Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 527-531. 31. An account of several biblical features of the story is provided by W. R. Thompson, 'The Biblical Sources of Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" PMLA 77 (1962): 92-96; Ely Stock, "History and the Bible in 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Essex Institute Historical Collections 100 (1964): 279-296; and Burton J. Fishman, "Imagined Redemption in 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 257-262. But also see J. T. McCullen, Jr., "Ancient Rites for the Dead and Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Southern Folklore Quarterly 30 (1966): 313322; and Harold Schechter, "Death and Resurrection of the King: Elements of Primitive Mythology and Ritual in 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" English Language Notes 8 (1971): 201-205.

32. See Schulz, "Imagination and Self-Imprisonment," pp. 83-86, for a reading of this final scene as Reuben's retreat into complete subjectivity. Fishman, "Imagined Redemption," pp. 257-262, draws attention to the passage in Numbers as a source for the image of water flowing from a rock but does not observe the possibility that confusion over this biblical allusion—that it refers to Isaiah as well as Numbers—may be another instance of functional ambiguity in Hawthorne's tale. 33. On Reuben's well-recognized compulsiveness, see Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 80-95; and Jack Kligerman, "A Stylistic Approach to Hawthorne's 'Roger Malvin's Burial,'" Language and Style 4 (1971): 188-194. 34. Richard H. Millington, Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 53. 35. Langford, Richard Harding Davis Years, p. 6.

Notes to Pages 41-46

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36. Sarah Β. Daugherty, The Literary Criticism of Henry James (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981), pp. 86-101,153-167. 37. On this reading of "Roger Malvin's Burial," see Millington, Practicing Romance, pp. 15-25. 3. Eventuary Romance: Haggard 1. See John Allen Quintus, 'The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde's Aestheticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 559-574; Stanley E. Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority ofInterpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). 2. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, pp. 35-36. 3. Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891), in The Adventures and Memoirs ofSherlock Holmes (New York: Modern Library, 1921), p. 94. 4. H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1926), 1:233. An earlier version of my comments in this chapter on Haggard's work appeared as "Adolescent Pornography and Imperialism in Haggard's King Solomon's Mines," English Literature in Transition 34 (1991): 19-30. 5. Jefferson Hunter, Edwardian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 99-123. 6. Haggard, Days ofMy Life,1:22ο, 233. See also "H. Rider Haggard," The Book Buyer 4 (May 1887): 156-157. 7. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines (Harmondsworth, England: Puffin Books, 1958), p. 5. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are given parenthetically in my essay. 8. Morton Cohen, Rider Haggard: His Life and Works (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 231-232, 237. Haggard's novel also was listed in A Guide Book to Books (1891) as a work of value (Cohen, Rider Haggard, p. 234). 9. Cohen, Rider Haggard, pp. 95-96. In Rider Haggard and the Fiction ofEmpire: A Critical StudyofBritish Imperial Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Wendy R. Katz concludes that despite the little merit of Haggard's work as literature, it was nonetheless a major cultural and ideological presence for "the largely uncritical and accepting reader" of his time (pp. 4-5,153)· 10. Haggard, Days of My Life, 2:96. 11. Norman Sherry, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973),p.35. 12. See, as a recent example, Murray Pittock, "Rider Haggard and Heart of Darkness," Conradiana 19 (1987): 206-208. 13. Haggard, Days of My Life, 1: xxii-xxiii, 226,232. In Rider Haggard: A Biography (New York: Stein and Day, 1981) D. S. Higgins reports that the writing of this novel actually took thirteen weeks (p. 71)· 14. H. Rider Haggard, "About Fiction," Contemporary Review 51 (February 1887): 172-180. 15. Specific late nineteenth-century instances of the encoding of sexual nuance for a knowing audience are discussed in Joseph Katz, "Eroticism in American Literary Realism," Studies in American Fiction 5 (1977): 35-5o; and William J. Scheick, "Marginal Characters and the Image of Texas in the Dime Novel," New Mexico Humanities

174

Notes to Pages 46-53

Review 3 (1980): 15-16. In Rider Haggard (Boston: Twayne, 1989) Norman Etherington sees, more generally, the underlying implication of this novel as the recovery of "lost aspects" of the self, of suppressed "alternative personalities hidden beneath the surface of Victorian propriety" (pp. 41,44)· 16. Richard Dale Muller, "The Prudish Prurience of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs," Riverside Quarterly 6 (August 1973): 5-19. 17. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that both of these meanings of gag were available to Haggard in 1885. 18. Haggard, Days ofMy Life, 1:243. 19. In "Embodying Africa: Woman and Romance in Colonial Fiction," English in Africa 15, no. 1 (1988): 10, David Bunn notes that this map is shaped like a woman lying on her back, a configuration suggesting that an "unconscious sexual allegory" underlies this diagram. 20. The geographical place called Sheba's Breasts was a complete fiction, as Haggard admitted in "The Real King Solomon's Mines" Cassell's Magazine 44 (July 1907): 144-151, and in Days of My Life, 1:242. 21. Loo may also allude to Lues, diseased arteries resulting from syphilis. This allusion may participate broadly in the pattern I am detailing here; for male syphilophobic fantasies, Elaine Showalter has suggested, exhibit an anxious and guilty acknowledgment of "monstrous" sexual desires: "Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle," in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 88-115. 22. In "King Solomon's Mines: Imperialism and Narrative Structure," Journal of Narrative Technique 8 (1978), Richard F. Patteson notes that the "language describing this descent combines traditional allusions to Hades with the notion of envelopment by the female body" (pp. 112-113). 23. Male ambivalence toward the infantile experience of the omnipotent mother who determines the duration of life is discussed in Dorothy Dinnerstein's Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 24. In "More about 'Medusa's Head'" {Representations 4 [1983]: 55-57) Catherine Gallagher briefly notes a pervasive relationship between the male fear of female generativity and the claims for sexual control of women, who intrinsically threaten male property ownership and established power. The expression of the male desire for power over and revenge on women as a central component of all pornography is the subject of Andrea Dworkin's Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee, 1981). 25. Does this pattern reinforce Margaret Homans's conclusion that the myth of the absent mother is a prerequisite for patriarchal cultural enterprise? See her Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 2—11. On Haggard's strategies for displacing the economically exploitive nature of imperialism by stressing its imposition of order and justice over barbarism in this novel, see Jeff D. Bass, 'The Romance as Rhetorical Dissociation: The Purification of Imperialism in King Solomon's Mines," Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (1981): 259—269. On related matters, see Abdul R. JanMohamed, 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonial Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, ed.

Notes to Pages 53-58

175

Henry Lewis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 78-106. 26. "The colonial mentality which sees 'natives' as needing control is easily transferred to 'woman'": Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," in "Race," Writing, and Difference, p. 256. See also Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphors as Experience in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Patteson, "Imperialism and Narrative Structure," p. 116; and Bunn, "Embodying Africa," pp. 1-28. 27. John A. McClure, Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 19· 28. Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891) and "The Greek Interpreter" (1893), in Sherlock Holmes, pp. 22, 30,527. See also 'The Second Stain" (1904), "The Dying Detective" (1913), and 'The Valley of Fear" (1914). 29. If some of my remarks sound Freudian, perhaps it is useful to recall that in The Interpretation ofDreams (1900) Freud identified Haggard's Ayesha in She as an expression of the eternal feminine: see Etherington, Rider Haggard, p. 77. And the feminist features of my argument are apparently caught in the dilemma defined in "Imperialism and Sexual Difference" (Oxford Literary Review8[1986]: 225-240), in which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains that the idea of the privileged white male is merely a trope; when this trope is treated in feminist criticism as some sort of absolute against which the idea of woman is presented (even if in reaction), then this criticism replicates (reinscribes) the epistemology of the male imperialist lie. 30. H. Rider Haggard, She (London: Octopus Books, 1979), p. 295. 4. Aesthetic Romance: James 1. James, Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914), p. 436. 2. James, Art of the Novel, p. 39. 3. Walter R. McDonald, 'The Inconsistencies in Henry James's Aesthetics," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10 (1969): 585—597; Sarah B. Daugherty, The Literary Criticism ofHenry James (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1981), pp. 153-192. 4. See Anne T. Margolis, Henry James and the Problem ofAudience: An International Act (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985); Michael Anesko, "Friction with the Market": Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Margaret Scanlan, 'Terrorism and the Realistic Novel: Henry James and The Princess Casamassima," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 3 8 0 - 4 0 2 .

5. James, Art of the Novel, p. 175. 6. See Henry McDonald, "Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and the Tragic Henry James," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 403-439. 7. James, Notes on Novelists, p. 436. 8. James, The Art of the Novel, pp. 33-34. 9. See, most recently, Michael Patrick Gillespie's assessment of the continual "provisionality of interpretation—a form of literary hypostasis—" resisting hegemonic and hierarchic meanings in this romance: "Picturing Dorian Gray: Resistant Readings in Wilde's Novel," English Literature in Transition 35 (1991): 7-25.

176

Notes to Pages 59-63

10. James, The Art of the Novel, p. 33. 11. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 47-78. 12. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), p. 274; Algernon Swinburne, William Blake (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 91 [emphasis added]. My distinction between Pater and Swinburne is based on Jonathan Loesberg's defense of Pater's aestheticism against the charge that he advocated an unreal art as the only value: Aestheticism and Deconstruction: Pater, Derrida, and de Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). On the turn-of-the-century sense of the authority of the text, specifically devalued by Virginia Woolf, see Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Pin de Stècle(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 13. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1985), p. 16. 14. In "Rudyard Kipling" (Empire Review 47 [March 1928]: 186) R. Ellis Roberts mentions in passing that art for art's sake is "a doctrine which soon resolves itself into art for the artist's sake." 15. See, relatedly, Jeffrey Wallen, "Reflection and Self-Reflection: Narcissistic or Aesthetic Criticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34 (1992): 301-322. 16. On the related tendency of Aestheticism to transubstantiate temporal flux into the divinelike stasis of art, see Leon Chai, Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in PostRomantic Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 17. See Bell, Development of American Romance, pp. 8-9. 18. Wells, "General Introduction," 1 :x-xi. 19. Daugherty, Literary Criticism, pp. 30-31,108-111. 20. Henry James, 'The Art of Fiction," in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazzard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 669. 21. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1949), pp. 5-6, 68, 241. 22. See, for example, John Allen Quintus, 'The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde's Aestheticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 559-574. 23. Wilde, Picture of Donan Gray, p. 158. 24. "Henry James . . . is by no means a safe author to give for a Christmas present," cautions John D. Barry: "On Books at Christmas,"Ainslee'sMagazine 2 (December 1898): 518. 25. See, for example, the anonymous reviews: "Magic of Evil and Love," The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art 3 (15 October 1898): 681; and "Books and Authors," Outlook 60 (29 October 1898): 537. For other early reactions, see Thomas M. Cranfill and Robert L. Clark, Jr., An Anatomy of"TheTurn ofthe Screw" (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965). 26. Albert J. von Frank, "James Studies 1980: An Analytical Bibliographical Essay," Henry James Review 4 (1982): 218. For a review of the scope of scholarship on this story, see Kristin Pruitt McColgan, Henry James, 1917-19S9: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); Dorothy McInnis Scura, Henry James,1960-1974: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); John Budd, Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1975-1981 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983); and Judith E. Funston, Henry James: A Reference Guide, 197S-1987 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991)·

Notes to Pages 63-77

177

27. Peter G. Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: "The Turn of the Screw" at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989). 28. See Cranfill and Clark, Anatomy, pp. 34-41; and William J. Scheick, "A Medical Source for James's The Turn of the Screw," Studies in American Fiction 19 (1991): 217—220.

29. The Letters ofHenry James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 1:299. However, James also spoke of it in the same year as "a poor little pot-boiling study of nothing at all" and as "rather a shameless pot-boiler" (Letters,1:29ο, 300). 30. Louis Waldstein, M.D., The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health (London, 1897). 31. James, Letters, 1:297. 32. On the epistemological challenge of Jamesian fiction, see Armstrong, Phenomenology ofHenry James. 33. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183. 34. James, Letters, 1:300, 290. 35. On James's dual sense of the word irresponsibility as applied to romance, see Daugherty, Literary Criticism, p. 169. 36. Quotations from James's preface to the New York edition of The Turn of the Screw are cited from The Art of the Novel, pp. 169—177. 37. Letters, 1: 279. 38. See, for example, William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 450. 39. Tobin Siebers, "Hesitation, History, and Reading: Henry James's Turn of the Screw," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25 (1983): 558—573. 40. Stuart P. Sherman, On Contemporary Literature (New York: Henry Holt, 1917), pp. 234-236. Recendy, Daniel R. Schwarz, remarking upon James's assessment of the tension between aesthetics and morality, indicates that James polarizes toward the practice of allowing the text to generate its own aesthetic: The Humanistic Heritage: Critical Theories of the English Novel from James to Hillis Miller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 22. 41. The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), p. 776. 42. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York; Norton, 1966), pp. 47-48. Subsequent page references for quotations drawn from this edition are cited parenthetically in my discussion. 43. "Books and Authors," Outlook, p. 537. 5. Ethical Romance: Hyne, Wells, Bangs, and Chesterton 1. Evan Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Roe, and Hawthorne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 151-190.

2. In contemporary discussion, the experience described by Chesterton and others has been described as an erosion of standards that led to a pervasive post-Victorian sense of unreality, in terms of which even the self seemed insubstantial: see

178

Notes to Pages 77-84

Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 3. Chesterton, Autobiography, pp. 87—90 (emphasis added). Chesterton's concept of the imagination, particularly its capacity for continual creativity, is documented by John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, England: Hull University Press, 1984), pp. 124-143. Chesterton's celebration of childlike fantasy may be read in the context of late-Victorian interest in such perceived medieval traits as emotional vitality, uninhibited spontaneity, cultivated dreamlike states, and mystical encounters with the mystery of being; on the function of this fascination with medievalism as a conflicted response to the fin de siècle disenchantment, see Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 142-181. 4. On the darker undercurrents of Chesterton's beliefs, see William J. Scheick, 'The Twilight Harlequinade of Chesterton's Father Brown Stories," Chesterton Review 4 (1977-78): 104-114· 5. See, for instance, John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship ofReason in the West (New York: Viking, 1992). 6. This viewpoint of ethical romancers notwithstanding, in The Tragicomic Novel: Studies in a Fiaional Mode from Meredith to Joyce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989) Randall Craig discusses a type of "realistic" fiction in which ambiguity of tone (appropriated from the romance model) disturbs conventional perspectives. 7. F. York Powell compared May's drawings and Kipling's method of characterization: "Rudyard Kipling," English Illustrated Magazine 30 (December 1903): 296. 8. Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, pp. 237, 247, 262. 9. H. G. Wells, "Jude the Obscure," Saturday Review 81 (1896): 153-154. 10. H. G. Wells, "The Novel of Types," Saturday Review 81 (1896): 23-24. 11. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 420. 12. John Galsworthy, 'Twelve Books—and Why," Saturday Review ofLiterature 4 (3 December 1927): 364. See also Galsworthy, Candelabra (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1933). 13. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 29. 14. Francis Adams, "Rudyard Kipling," Fortnightly Review 56 (November 1891): 686-700; Y. Y, "Kipling," pp. 28-30. Edmund Gosse, however, reported that Kipling had filled the "void" he thought existed "between excess of psychological analysis and excess of superhuman romance": Rudyard Kipling, Century Magazine 42 (October 1891): 901-910. 15. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. ix. 16. John P. Farrell, "Reading the Text of Community in Wuthering Heights," English Literary History 56 (1989): 173-208; Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., "Reading Detection in The Woman in White," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22 (1980): 449-467. 17. Stevenson, Memories and Portraits, pp. 247-248. 18. In The Form ofAmerican Romance, Edgar A. Dryden perceives this challenge as a feature of romance. 19. London, Revolution, p. 231.

Notes to Pages 84-99

179

20. O n this pattern in other writings, see Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1972). 21. See Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction, pp. 171-172; Reed, Decadent Style, pp. 9 - 1 0 . 22. Hyne may have intended ' T h e Lizard" to appear in The Adventures of a Solicitor (1898), published under the pseudonym Weatherby Chesney. In the original version o f this story the narrator is Chesney; in the revised version the narrator is M'Cray. 23. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, ' T h e Lizard," Atoms of Empire (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 103-104. Page references t o subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 24. See Scheick, Fictional Structure and Ethics, pp. 4 0 - 4 5 . 25. The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), p. 968. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 26. The word euphuism appears in every authorized version o f this story, including the first book edition, the Adantic edition, and the Benn edition. That readers anticipate the word euphemism is evident in John R. Reed's mistaken transcription o f the passage in The Natural History ofH. G. Wells (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 182. 27. In The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1961) Bernard Bergonzi discusses Wells's awareness o f notions o f end-of-the-century degeneration (pp. 4 - 7 ) ; he also notes that the Eloi in The Time Machine, like the angel in The Wonderful Visit (1895), represent the insufficiency o f aestheticism (pp. 91-92). 28. Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History ofDiets, Fantasies, and Fat ( N e w York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 77-95· 29. Walter Pater, Manus the Epicurean (London: Macmillan, 1910), 1:94-95, 149. 30. Reed, Natural History, p. 182. Wells may convey a sense o f "the spreading weightlessness o f late-Victorian culture," in which "intense experience—whether physical or emotional—seemed a lost possibility" (Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 48, 55). 31. William J. Scheick, "Yours, H . G.: Some Missing Wells Letters to Arnold Bennett," English Literature in Transition 25 (1982): 12. 32. This mechanism o f segmentation and projection helps explain why some o f Wells's contemporaries insisted that he portrayed himself in his fiction even though he time and again explicitly denied this charge. O n this critical response to Wells, see Ingvald Raknem, H. G. WeUs and the Critics (Oslo, Norway: Universitetforlaget, 1962), pp. 195-203. 33. Richard Dalby, ed., Ghosts for Christmas ( N e w York: Carroll & Graf, 1989), p. 89. 34. Bangs, Ghosts I Have Met, pp. 26—28. Page references t o subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 35. Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 32-47· 36. Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde had entered the turn-of-the-century imagination

180

Notes to Pages 99-110

to such an extent that they had already become virtual clichés in commonplace conversation. See, for example, the casual, even comic designation of someone's professional and social aspects as a Jekyll and Hyde in 'The Princess Aline" (1895) by Richard Harding Davis, an American contemporary of Bangs: Gallegher and Other Stories (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1919), p· 76. 37. Masie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943),p.177; Lawrence J. Clipper, G. K. Chesterton (New York: Twayne, 1974), P· 129; Ian Boyd, The Noveb of G. K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), PP· 155-156; David Jago, 'The Metaphysician as Fiction-Writer: G. K. Chesterton's Narrative Techniques," Antigonish Review, no. 22 (1975), PP· 90-91; Joseph Quinn, "The Club of Queer Trades" Chesterton Review 5 (1978-79): 81. 38. See, for example, William W. Stowe, "Critical Investigations: Convention and Ideology in Detective Fiction," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 31 (1989): 570-591; and Robert P. Winston and Nancy C. Mellerski, 'The Detective in the Intertext: Freeling's Dialogue with Chandler," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 31 (1989): 611-633. 39. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1987), pp. 28-29. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. An earlier version of my comments here appeared as "Ethical Romance and the Detecting Reader: The Example of Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades" in The Cunning Craft: OHginal Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990), pp. 86-97. 40. Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia," p. 3. 41. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 32, 71. 42. J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 65. 43· Clipper, G. K. Chesterton, p. 129; Jago, "Metaphysician as Fiction-Writer," pp. 88-89. Joseph Quinn also notes an attack on intellectuals in this book similar to that in Chesterton's Heretics (1905); Jefferson Hunter notes in Edwardian Fiaion that The Club of Queer Trades satirizes the contemporary romanticization of London while it also takes seriously urban restlessness (pp. 80-82); and in The Outline of Sanity: A Life ofG. K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982) Alzina Stone Dale notes some autobiographical implications in The Club of Queer Trades (p. 95). 44. In "Some Theological Implications of Chesterton's Style" (Chesterton Review 5 [1978—79]: 121-137) John Martin attributes this style to the author's suppression of ego. However, its function as a narrative technique designed to influence the reader is also significant. 45. On the relationship between Chesterton's "sketchy" style and his frequent use of a twilight setting (as a metaphor for humanity in a transitional historical age, in a postlapsarian condition, and in ontological and epistemological uncertainty), see Scheick, 'Twilight Harlequinade," pp. 104-114. 6. The Ethos of Storytelling: Davis, Crane, and Austin 1. On the appropriation of Davis's work by realists and antirealists alike, and on the romancers' regard for what they perceived as his ethical concerns, see Scott C.

Notes to Pages 110-118

181

Osborn, "Richard Harding Davis: Critical Background," American Quarterly 12 (1960): 84-92. 2. This date is established in R. W. Stallman's Stephen Crane: A Biography, p. 153; and Stallman's Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1972), p. 415· Stallman revises the date given in Scott C. Osborn's treatment of their relationship in 'The 'Rivalry-Chivalry5 of Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane," American Quarterly 28 (1956): 50-61. 3. See, for example, James Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). 4. Richard Harding Davis, In the Fog (New York: R. H. Russell, 1901), p. 21. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 5. Wells, 'The Contemporary Novel," in Works, 9:364. 6. Osborn and Phillips, p. 141. As my preceding and subsequent comments suggest, I disagree with Osborn and Phillips's unexplained assertion, such as I understand it, that In the Fog is "a detective story" advancing "the notion that Romance can be found in a materialistic world" (p. no). 7. Michael Anglo, Penny Dreadfuls and Other Victorian Horrors (London: Jupiter, 1977), pp. 28-29, 74, 92. 8. Hunter, Edwardian Fiction, p. 51. 9. Alfred Russell Wallace, The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Its Failures (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1908), pp. 343-368; London, Revolution, pp. 57-70. 10. Arnold Bennett, The Grand Babylon Hotel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902), p. 326. 11. On the retreat from any dangerous ideas in the plot to the safety of conventionality in Edwardian best-sellers, see Hunter, pp. 53—55. 12. Stephen Crane, 'The Blue Hotel," in The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), 5:170. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 13. That the failure of understanding is a fault of the Swede has been argued by Charles C. Walcott, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 75. That the failure of understanding is a fault of the others has been argued by Joseph N. Satterwhite, "Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel': The Failure of Understanding," Modern Fiction Studies 2 (1956-57)· 238—241. That the Easterner is not reliable as a source of the reader's comprehension has been argued by Stanley B. Greenfield, 'The Unmistakable Stephen Crane," PMLA 73 (1958): 562-572. That the Easterner is reliable has been argued by Donald B. Gibson, "The Blue Hotel' and the Idea of Human Courage," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6 (1964): 388-397; included in Gibson, The Fiction of Stephen Crane (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968). And James B. Colvert, in "Structure and Theme in Stephen Crane's Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies 5 (1959): 199-208, has identified blinding delusion as the culprit in such mistaken apprehensions. As with every other issue touched on by Crane and his critics, this debate rages on. I share Edwin Cady's succinct observation that in 'The Blue Hotel" ambiguity pervades all perspectives, all points of view {Stephen Crane, pp. 156-157)·

182

Notes to Pages 120-133

14. See Nagel, Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism, p. 71. 15. Edmund Pearson, Dime Novel; or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1929), p. 93. 16. In Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966) Eric Solomon notes that 'The Blue Hotel" parodies the traditional setting and characters of Western fiction (p. 260), but he does not specify the dime novel or the ethos of reading as key concerns in the story. Solomon, however, does intimate that Crane's Maggie (1893) was influenced by the dime novel (pp. 24-25). 17. In The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983) Chester L. Wolford reads 'The Blue Hotel" as exposure of the western myth of the heroic individual (pp. 101—114). 18. On the debate over whether Crane's story is a comedy or a tragedy, see (representatively) Marvin Klotz, "Stephen Crane: Tragedian or Comedian: The Blue Hotel,'" University of Kansas City Review 27 (1961): 170-174; and Bruce L. Grenberg, "Metaphysics of Despair: Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel,'" Modern Fiction Studies 14 (1968): 203-213.

19. Crane, Works 6:186. 20. Just as the question of whether 'The Blue Hotel" is a comedy or a tragedy (see note 18) has arrived at no critical resolution—and probably is not supposed to, in my opinion—the issue of whether Crane's work advances an argument for environmental determinism or for human choice has gone unresolved in critical discourse—and probably is supposed to. For a review of this extensive debate, see Max Westbrook, "Stephen Crane's Social Ethic," American Quarterly 14 (1962): 587-596, which finally emphasizes human capacity despite environment. In contrast, I suggest that Crane seems to treat the question as a permanent metaphysical ambiguity experienced as if the origin of human behavior infinitely regresses before any inquiring mind that tries to comprehend itself. 21. David Halliburton, The Color ofthe Sky: A Study ofStephen Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 206. 22. Austin, Earth Horizon, p. 230. 23. Wells, Works, 13:479. 24. In both The Beloved House (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1940, pp. 64-77) and Mary Hunter Austin (New York: Twayne, 1965, pp. 19—23) Τ. Μ. Pearce documents Austin's early mystical experiences. 25. Mary Austin, The Basket Woman: A Book ofIndian Tales for Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), p· iii- Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 26. T. M. Pearce, ed., Literary America, 1903-1934: The Mary Austin Letters (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979), p. 10. 27. That she cannot escape this pattern in her own approach to nature is argued in my "Mary Austin's Disfigurement of the Southwest in The Land of Little Rain," Western American Literature 27 (1992): 37-46. 28. Stineman, Mary Austin, p. 79. Unfortunately, aside from this observation, Stineman says little of The Basket Woman. 29. The feminist perspective of Austin's Land of Little Rain is emphasized by Ammons, Conflicting Stories, pp. 86—97. This feminizing of art's reclamation of humanity's natural heritage amounts to a revision of the masculine emphasis of such

Notes to Pages 133-136

183

Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who otherwise "remained a model for Mary's own work" (Stineman, Mary Austin, p. 12). On the place of Transcendentalist tradition in Austin's work, see Henry Smith, 'The Feel of the Purposeful Earth," New Mexico Quarterly 1 (1931): 17-33; and on Austin's departure from systematic Transcendentalism, see Dudley Wynn, A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hunter Austin (New York: Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University, 1941).

7. The Art of Life: London, Stevenson, Cholmondeley, and Kipling 1. Earle Labor et al., eds., The Letters of Jack London, Volume One: 1896-190S (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 53. 2. Jack London, "Getting into Print," Editor (March 1903): 81; Richard O'Connor, Jack London (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. 114. London, however, capitulated to editors throughout his career: Susan Ward, "Jack London and the Blue Pencil: London's Correspondence with Popular Editors," American Literary Realism 14 (1981): 16-25.

3. Richard Gid Powers, ed., The Science Fiction of Jack London: An Anthology (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975). The story does appear in Isaac Asimov Presents: The Best Science Fiction of the 19th Century, ed. Isaac Asimov et al. (New York: Beaufort Books, 1981).

4. Edwin B. Erbentraut, "'A Thousand Deaths': Hyperbolic Anger," Jack London Newsletter 4 (1971): 126; O'Connor, Jack London, p. 114; Earle Labor, Jack London (Boston: Twayne, 1974), p. 44; James I. McClintock, White Logic: Jack London's Short Stories (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wolfhouse, 1975), p. π; John Perry, Jack London: An American Myth (Chicago: Nelson-Hale, 1981), p. 81; James Lundquist, Jack London: Adventures, Ideas, and Fiction (New York: Ungar, 1987), p. 40. 5. That London used the devices of popularfictionto convey ideological messages has been argued by Susan Ward, "Social Philosophy as Best-Seller: Jack London's The Sea-Wolf," Western American Literature 17 (1983): 321-332. 6. Erbentraut, "'A Thousand Deaths,'" pp. 125-129. 7. Pertinent to reading this story as an allegory is Donald Pizer's description of London as a writer of parables and fables: "Jack London: The Problem of Form," Studies in the Literary Imagination 16, no. 2 (1983): 107—115. 8. In "The Tools of My Trade3': The Annotated Booh in Jack London's Library (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986) David Mike Hamilton reports that London had cursorily read Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto by 1894 and had perused Marx's Das Kapital by 1896 (p. 7). On conflicts in London's socialistic thought, see, for example, Paul N. Siegel, "Jack London's Iron Heel: Its Significance for Today," International Socialist Review 35 (1974): 18-29. That London's thinking is conflicted as well by egotism, racism, and afixationon money and that his writing nonetheless merits serious study is most recently reiterated by William E. Cain, "Socialism, Power, and the Fate of Style: Jack London in His Letters," American Literary History 3 (1991): 603-613.

9. O'Connor, Jack London, p. 66. 10. Labor, Jack London, pp. 43,48. On London's use of male archetypes, see James G. Cooper, 'The Womb of Time: Archetypal Patterns in the Novels of Jack Lon-

184

Notes to Pages 136—141

don," Jack London Newsletter 12 (1979): 12-23. On the archetype of rebirth in "A Thousand Deaths," see Gordon N. Blackman, Jr., "Jack London: Visionary Realist," Jack London Newsletter 13 (1980): 87. 11. Jack London, Stories of Adventure, ed. Frank Oppel (Secaucus, N.J.: Casde, 1980), p. 29. Page references to subsequent quotations from this facsimile of the Black Cat version are included parenthetically in my discussion. 12. On the response in 1890 to the perception that the birthrate among the elite was falling behind the birthrate of the working class—a response that attempted to transfer female reproduction from biology to scientific and industrial reproduction—see Susan L. Mizruchi, "Reproducing Women in The Awkward Age" Representations 38 (1992): 101-130. Pertinent here, as well, is Louise J. Strong's "Unscientific Story," noted in my Introduction. 13. Francis Lacassin has noted the function in London's fiction of a violent apocalypse as the precedent for the possible emergence of a socialist utopia: "Jack London between the Challenge of the Supernatural and the Last Judgment," Jack London Newsletter 8 (1975): 59-65. 14. Labor, Jack London, pp. 12-13. For a discussion of London's integration of Darwinian theory and socialism, see Conway Zirkle, Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 318-337; and Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981), pp. 184-214. 15. That Kipling served London as a model is noted by McClintock, White Logic, pp. 21-25. 16. Stevenson's contemporaries dismissed the story as lacking in purpose: see, for example, Maixner, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 411-422. For the background and history of this story, see Roger G. Swearingen, The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), pp. 178-180. An earlier version of my comments here appeared in 'The Ethos of Stevenson's The Isle of Voices,'" Studies in Scottish Literature 27 (1992): 1-6. 17. In Fictional Structure and Ethics I emphasize Stevenson's management of narrative structure as a means of instructing his readers on the impulses of the self and the therapeutic value of community (pp. 5-6). 18. See, for example, Katherine Bailey Linehan, 'Taking Up with Kanakas: Stevenson's Complex Social Criticism in The Beach of Falesá,'" English Literature in Transition 33 (1990): 407-422. 19. In Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction ofAdventure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) Robert Kiely specifically situates Stevenson's artistic consciousness in the late work, where early sleight-of-hand entertainment progresses to "adventure as a symbolic chart of the formidable risks" of life (p. 268). 20. Julia Wedgwood, "Ethics and Literature," Contemporary Review 71 (1897): 65. She does admit that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an exception, Stevenson's "one parable" that is (she wittily observes) "the result of a chance collision, as it were, between his unrivalled power of expression and an idea . . . we may call a commonplace" (p. 65). 21. Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 4:153. 22. On dualism in Stevenson's writings, see Eigner, Stevenson and Romantic Tradition.

Notes to Pages 142-156

185

23. Robert Louis Stevenson, "Preface," in Island Nights' Entertainments (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. viii. Page references to subsequent quotations from this "Biographical Edition" of 'The Isle of Voices" are included parenthetically in my discussion. 24. Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. 335. 25. Stevenson, In the South Seas, pp. 94-100. 26. See, relatedly, Joseph J. Egan, "Grave Sites and Moral Death: A Reexamination of Stevenson's The Body-Snatcher,'" English Literature in Transition 13 (1970): 9-15. 27. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, pp. 93, 97,106, 235. 28. Vineta Colby, "'Devoted Amateur': Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage," Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 213-228. 29. Rainwater and Scheick, "Aliens in the Garden," pp. 103—121. 30. Mary Cholmondeley, Moth and Rust, and Other Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902), p. 235. Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 31. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903—1904), 3:8. 32. Rainwater and Scheick, "Aliens in the Garden," p. 121. 33. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage (New York: Penguin Books & Virago Press, 1985), p. 335. 34. J. I. M. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966), p. 56. 35. Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1920), pp. 121-122. 36. See, for instance, Louis L. Cornell, Kipling in India (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), pp. 161-164; Bonamy Dobrée, Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 156; Elliot L. Gilbert, The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 190; McClure, Kipling and Conrad, pp. 24, 50—55; and James Harrison, Rudyard Kipling (Boston: Twayne, 1982), pp. 40-41. Several complexities in Kipling's attitude toward imperialism are noted by Shamsul Islam, Kipling's "Law": A Study of His Philosophy ofLife (London: Macmillan, 1975)· 37. Jeffrey Meyers, for example, claims that Kipling "fails to maintain a consistent moral perspective in the story": 'The Idea of Moral Authority in The Man Who Would Be King,'" Studies in English Literature 8 (1968): 722-723. 38. Rudyard Kipling, "The Man Who Would Be King," The Wntings in Prose and Verse ofRudyard Kipling (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905), 5:171· Page references to subsequent quotations from this edition are included parenthetically in my discussion. 39. Another contemporary of London and Kipling specifically remarks the way in which the narrative technique of 'The Man Who Would Be King" manages to "arrest" the "curiosity of the reader": Edmond Gosse, "Rudyard Kipling," Century Magazine 42 (October 1891): 901-910; expanded as "Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Short Stories," in Gosse, Questions at Issue (London: Heinemann, 1893), PP· 255-293. 40. Thomas A. Shippey and Michael Short pertinendy note that the events in the story seem far removed from the world or the readers, and that this discrepancy

186

Notes to Pages 156-162

between worlds is never resolved: "Framing and Distancing in Kipling's 'The Man Who Would Be King,' "Journal of Narrative Technique 2 (1972): 75-87. 41. See, especially, Paul Fussell, Jr.,"Irony,Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics in Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King,'" English Literary History 25 (1958): 216-233. In "Kipling and the Hoax" Phillip Mallett argues that the "moral problem"—Kipling's secret that the home nation is decadent—fails to surface in the story because the colonists are shown to attain the high moral standards of loyalty and self-management through the attempted subjection of others: Kipling Considered, ed. Phillip Mallett (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), pp. 102-106. 42. Manfred Drandt aptly raises this question and suggests that the audience is also challenged to doubt its own gullibility: "Reality or Delusion?: Narrative Technique and Meaning in Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King" English Studies 65 (1984): 316-326. It is doubtful, however, that the narrator's silence at the end of his account indicates his burgeoning awareness of being deluded (Drandt, "Reality or Delusion?" p. 325). 43. However, Tim Bascom says, "we can trust the narrator" as "a representative of our self" who "invites us to become insiders" in allowing us to "make the same distinction[s] as the narrator": "Secret Imperialism: The Reader's Response to the Narrator in The Man Who Would Be King,'" English Literature in Transition 31 (1988): 162-173. It is also doubtful that the narrator has been sympathetic with the two adventurers from the first (Bascom, "Secret Imperialism," p. 172, note 14). 44. On the vulnerability of the imperialist who depends on ritual in Kipling's "Return of Imlay" (1890), see McClure, Kipling and Conrad, pp. 37-42. 45. Kipling's voice may be, as Phillip Mallett indicates ("Kipling and the Hoax," p. 106), "insistently masculine . . . preoccupied with the topic of authority." However, in light of his management of the conventions of the imperialist romance in this story, some qualification seems in order. Concerning Kipling's long friendship with Haggard, inaugurated at least by 1898, see "Mr. Rudyard Kipling," African Review, 21 May 1898, pp. 311-313; Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937), pp. 85, 92-93,192-193,195; and Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, ed. Morton Cohen (London: Hutchinson, 1965). 46. Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia" and 'The Greek Interpreter" (1893), in Sherlock Holmes, pp. 22, 30,527. See also 'The Second Stain" (1904), 'The Dying Detective" (1913), and 'The Valley of Fear" (1914). In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Stècle(New York: Viking, 1990) Elaine Showalter reads the description of an adulterous woman undergoing surgery in Doyle's 'The Case of Lady Sannox" (1893) as a striking instance of symbolic sexual mutilation representing male contol and punishment. 47. Nora Crook has observed that Dravot's decision is that of the imperialist "woman-enslaver and woman-hater" who "metaphorically sacrifice[s] women to achieve [his] god-like ambitions": Kipling's Myths ofLove and Death (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), p. 60. 48. It is a broad universal compassion, I believe, that the story urges, as does Kipling's different management of detached narrative voice in the revised version of 'The Phantom 'Rickshaw" (1888): see Scheick, Fictional Structure, pp. 9-18. It is doubtful that Kipling intended a local "pity—for a Kingdom and a Kingship that

Notes to Pages 162-164

187

can never be entirely grasped, but which . . . existed in full power at least in one man's mind" (Shippey and Short, "Framing and Distancing," p. 85). That the trickery of the two adventurers reveals a lack of universal brotherhood is remarked upon by Meyers, "Idea of Moral Authority," p. 722. 49. This reading is implied in Carnehan's crucifixion for being only a "Son of Man," not a god; he survives by "a miracle" (his captors say with unintentional irony), only to die broken in body and spirit, unredeemed by the "golden crown" of glory (pp. 168, 170). Whereas Meyers ('The Idea of Moral Authority," pp. 711— 723) sees sympathy for the adventurers that, in his opinion, "obscures the moral issue" of the story, Fussell ("Irony, Freemasonry, and Humane Ethics," pp. 216—233) stresses the irony of the biblical motifs in the story. On Kipling's critique of Christianity, see Sandra Kemp, Kipling's Hidden Narratives (London: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 82-100. 50. Wells, Experiment, pp. 106-107. In applying Plato, however, Wells enstated another set of hierarchic assumptions: Michael Draper, "Wells, Plato, and the Ideal State," Wellsian, n.s. 5 (1981): 8-14. 51. Kim Stanley Robinson, "Vinland the Dream," in Remaking History (New York: Tor Books, 1991), pp. 117-118. On Robinson as an ethical romancer, see William J. Scheick, "Continuative and Ethical Predictions: The Post-Nuclear Holocaust Novel of the 1980s," North Dakota Review 56 (1988): 61-82.

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Index

Abraham (biblical character), 37,137 Across the Plains (Stevenson), 121 Adventures ofa Solicitor, The (Hyne), 1791122

Age of Reason, 24 Alger, Horatio, 99, 116 Allegory, 5,40, 89,111,113,136-140,158 Ambassadors, The (James), 67 Anarchism, 5,136-138 Anderson, Ada Woodruff, 13 Argosy, The (periodical), 26 "Art of Fiction, The" (James), 61, 64 Athenaeum (periodical), 25 Atlantic Monthly (periodical), 25,127 Adantis, 89 Atoms ofEmpire (Hyne), 88 Austin, Mary, 2,16, 26-27, 30, 32, 110—111, 125-134 "Awful Reason of the Vicar's Visit, The" (Chesterton), 107

"Basket Woman, The" (Austin), 111, 126-134

"Beach of Falesá, The" (Stevenson), 141 "Beast in the Jungle, The" (James), 68 Beerbohm, Max, 79 Bellamy, Edward, 6, 32 Beneath Tour Very Boots (Hyne), 88 Bennett, Arnold, 94, 116 Bible: Numbers, 38; Isaiah, 38; 1 Cor., 143; 1 Tim., 116; Revelation, 139, 143 "Birth-Mark, The" (Hawthorne), 136 Black Cat Magazine (periodical), 135 "Blue Hotel, The" (Crane), 110-111, 118-125, 170n12

Booth, Wayne, 8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 102 Brontë, Emily, 81 Brown, Charles Brockden, 24 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 97

Caricature. See Characterization "Case of Lady Sannox, The" (Doyle), 186n46 Bangs, John Kendrick, 2,11-12,16, Characterization, 2, 5, 21, 28, 57, 60, 66, 20—22, 96-102,112,116 71, 78-81, 102, 124-128, 136 Baring-Gould, Sabine, 5 Charles Dickens (Chesterton), 21 Barrie, J. M., 12, 27 Basket Woman: A Book of Indian Tales for Chesney, Weatherby (pseud.). See Hyne, C. J. Cutcliffe Children, The (Austin), no, 125-134 189

190

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

Chesterton, Gilbert K., 2, 4-5, 11-22, 27, 29-30, 33, 41, 57, 68, 76-78, 126-127, 145, 163; and The Club of Queer Trades, 102-109,113 Cholmondeley, Mary, 2,16, 20,146-153, 156,159,162-163 Christ, 162 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 96 "Christmas Tree, The" (Austin), 128—129 Club of Queer Trades, The (Chesterton), 21, 30,102-109,113

Collins, Wilkie, 81 Comedy, 78, 81—82,111,120,123,126,157 Congreve, William, 24 Conrad, Joseph, 32, 45 Conversations with an Uncle (Wells), 90 "Coyote-Spirit and the Weaving Woman, The" (Austin), 127-128, 132-133 Crane, Stephen, 2,12,16, 32, 99, 110-111, 118-127,131

Critique of Judgment (Kant), 59 Darwin, Charles, 88-89,119,139 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 32,41 Davis, Richard Harding, 2,12,14-16, 27, 32,41,127,131; and In the Fog, 110-118,121-125

"Dead Finger, A" (Baring-Gould), 5 Defoe, Daniel, 19 De Morgan, John, 44 "Deserter, The" (Davis), 113 Dickens, Charles, 21, 78, 96 "Dignity of Dollars, The" (London), 116

Dime novels, 121-125. See also Penny dreadfuls; Shilling shockers Dormer, Philip, 24 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 17, 31, 41, 44, 55, 102,108,113,153. See also Holmes, Sherlock Dream, 29, 75, 77, 79, 81, 85, 87, 98-99, 104-108,111;in The Basket Woman, 127-134; in 'The Isle of Voices," 142-146

Eco, Umberto, 9 Eliot, George, 80-81,151 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 34-36,151 Engels, Friedrich, 80 "Ethics and Literature" (Wedgwood), 16

Ethos of storytelling, 93, 95-96, 109-139 Euphuism, 91-96,109,1791126 Eve (biblical character), 53 "Fame's Little Day" (Jewett), 14 Fathers and Sons (Turgénev), 80 Fish, Stanley, 43 Forster, Ε. Μ., 88 Forsyte Saga, The (Galsworthy), 80 Fourierism, 151 Frazer, Sir James, 52 Freedman, Jonathan, 59 Freemasonry, 157 Gale, Theophilus, 24 "Gallegher" (Davis), 14 Galsworthy, John, 80 Ghosts I Have Met and Some Others (Bangs), 96 Ghost Story (Straub), 62 Glasgow, Ellen, 97 Glorious Revolution, The, 24 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 52 Gosse, Edmund, 178n14,185n39 Grand Babylon Hotel, The (Bennett), 116 Haggard, H. Rider, 1-3, 8,17, 25-26, 72; and King Solomon's Mines, 44-56, 58, 62, 71, 82,134,158,160-161 Hardy, Thomas, 80 Harper's Monthly (periodical), 96 Hartmann, Eduard von, 99 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 4, 22, 25, 27, 29, 31-32, 41,57, 99,136,158; and "Roger Malvin's Burial," 33-40,44, 65-66, 68, 74-78, 84, 97 Hawthorne (James), 22 Hawthorne tradition, 2, 31-33, 41, 65, 75,105

Index He, A Companion to She (De Morgan), 44 Hearst, William Randolph, 13,115 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 45 Hegel, Georg, 80,132 Hieroglyphics, 34-35, 37, 40 Holmes, Sherlock (fictional character), 43, 55, 79,102-104,108,111,113,161 Hopkins, Pauline E., 5 Howells, William Dean, 22, 61, 97 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Pound), 27 Hyne, C. J. CutcliflFe, 2, 88-89, 95,102, 1791122 Imagination, 19, 23-24, 29-30, 39-40, 64-67, 75-78, 85, 87, 98,124,131, 133-134,164; in The Club of Queer Trades, 103,105-108 Imperialism, 42-56,128,134-163; in "Let Loose," 149-151, 153 Impressionism, 77,104, no, 123—124 Intentions (Wilde), 61, 64 "In the Abyss" (Wells), 89-90 In the Fog (Davis), 110-118,121-125 In the South Seas (Stevenson), 142,144 Isaac (biblical character), 37-38 Isaiah (biblical prophet), 38 Iser, Wolfgang, 7-8,43 Island Nights' Entertainments (Stevenson), 141 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells), 25-26, 80,110 "Isle of Voices, The" (Stevenson), 141-146,148,153,156,162 "It.". . . A Haggard Conclusion (De Morgan), 44 James, Henry, 2-5,12,15-17, 21-22, 25, 29-30, 33, 41, 57-74, 77, 80, 82, 84, 105,108,116 James, William, 63 Jameson, Fredric, 22 Jerome, Jerome K., 14,1691159 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 14 Johnson, Samuel, 24

191

Journalism,11-22,78, 83, 87, 93-96, 109, 113-114,156,158 "Journey, A" (Wharton), 20 Joyce, James, 19 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 80 Kant, Immanuel, 59-60, 62, 66, 68, 73 Keats, John, 61 King Solomon's Mines (Haggard), 44-56, 58, 62, 71, 82, 86,134,158, 160-161 King Solomon's Treasures (De Morgan), 44 Kipling, Rudyard, 2, 7-8, 11, 13,16-20, 22, 27, 30, 32, 80, no, 141,153-163 "Kiss of Niño Dios, The" (Austin), 128 Kuerten, Peter, 114 Land ofLittle Rain, The (Austin), 129 "Let Loose" (Cholmondeley), 146-153, 156,159-160,162 Literary realism, 18-22, 29, 77, 80, 97, 103, no, 141,145,163 Little Minister, The (Barrie), 12 "Lizard, The" (Hyne), 88-90, 95,102, 179n23 London, Jack, 2, 6-8,14,16, 22,32, 84, 110,116,135-148,153,155,161-163 Looking Backward 2000-1887 (Bellamy), 6 Loring, F. G., 147 Lost Continent, The (Hyne), 88 Manchester Guardian, 25 Manifest Destiny, 128 "Man Who Would Be King, The" (Kipling), 146-153 Marius the Epicurean (Pater), 92 Marvell, Andrew, 24 Marx, Karl, 80,136-138 May, Philip, 79 Melville, Herman, 4, 27, 34 Memories and Portraits (Stevenson), 12 Meredith, George, 4 Miller, J. Hillis, 9,103 Möbius strip, 143-144 Moses (biblical character), 38

192

The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century

Mossesfroman Old Manse (Hawthorne), 33-34 Moth and Rust (Cholmondeley), 146-147 Munsey, Frank Α., 26 "Mystery of My Grandmother's Hair Sofa, The" (Bangs), 20 "Mystery Within, The" (Hopkins), 5

Quakers, 23-24

Racism, 45-56 Ragged Dick (Alger), 99 "Rappaccini's Daughter" (Hawthorne), 136 Readers, 3, 6 - 9 , 4 2 - 4 4 , 58-61, 66, 69, 75, 79-87,105-111,120-121,130, 138-141,145,160-161; and "Let Nabokov, Vladimir, 102 Loose," 146-153; and "Thurlow's Naulahka, The (Kipling), 53 Christmas Story," 97,100-102; and New Eden, The (Hyne), 88 The Turn of the Screw, 70-74 New Humanism, 68 Red Pottage (Cholmondeley), 20,146, New York World, 14 151-153 Reflexivity, 6, 9, 34, 40, 44, 48, 58, Olney, Richard, 14 71-73, 76, 81, 87-88, 93,104,110-111, "On Greenhow Hill" (Kipling), 53 122-125, 131-132, 138,145, 148; in 'The "Open Boat, The" (Crane), 119 Man Who Would Be King," 158,160, Orthodoxy (Chesterton), 29,103 163; in "Thurlow's Christmas Story," Out West (periodical), 128 96,101-102 Republic, The (Plato), 88,163 "Painful Fall of a Great Reputation, Restoration, The, 24 The" (Chesterton), 106 "Return of Imlay, The" (Kipling), Passage to India (Forster), 88 186n44 Pater, Walter, 4,15,19,57, 59, 92 Riffaterre, Michael, 7-8, 33, 43 Pathos, 78, 81-82,111,126 Rim of the Desert, The (Anderson), 13 Penn, William, 23 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 163—164 Penny dreadfuls, 4,113-115,117,121. See "Roger Malvin's Burial" (Hawthorne), also Dime novels; Shilling shockers 33-40, 44, 65-66, 68, 74, 76, 78, 84, Peter Pan (Barrie), 12 97,153 Petite mart, la, 52-53 Romance: aesthetic, 3,57-74, 76, 81"Phantom 'Rickshaw, The" (Kipling), 87,104,109,151-153,156; ethical, 2 - 9 , 1861148 40-41,44,56, 62, 65, 69, 75-114, Philosophy of the Unconscious, The (Hart145,150-154; eventuary, 3,42-62, 6 9 mann), 99 72, 76—88,102,104,109,124; percepPicture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 58, tion of, 23-29, 42-43, 113-115,12160—61, 64 126; province of, 29-30; Utopian, Plato, 88,163 5-6. See also Allegory; CharacterizaPoe, Edgar Allan, 4, 24, 27, 31, 34 tion; Dream; Imagination; Readers; "Poet, The" (Emerson), 150 Reflexivity; Structure; Tone "Point in Morals, A" (Glasgow), 97 Roosevelt, Theodore, 14 Pomeroy, Jesse, 121 Ross, Robert, 69 Pornography: adolescent, 45-56 Sampson (biblical character), 161 Pound, Ezra, 27 Scholastics, 125 "Princess Aline, The" (Davis), 180n36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 97,125 Pulitzer, Joseph, 13,115 Scott, Sir Walter, 2, 61 Puritans, 23-24

Index "Self-Made Man, A" (Crane), 99 She (Haggard), 55 Sherman, Stuart, 68 Shilling shockers, 25,114—118,121-122. SeealsoDime novels; Penny dreadfuls Society for Psychical Research, 63 Something of Myself (Kipling), 11 Spectator (periodical), 1 Sterne, Laurence, 112 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 12,16-22, 27, 32, 41, 45, 49, 79-81, 99,163; and 'The Isle of Voices," 141-148,153,156, 162

Strange Case ofDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The (Stevenson), 12, 99,141 Straub, Peter, 62 Strong, Louise J., 5 Structure, 2, 28 Swinburne, Algernon, 60 Swinnerton, Frank, 19

193

Tragedy, 78, 81-82,114,120,123,126,157 Transcendentalism, no, 151,1821129 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 45 'Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown, The" (Chesterton), 105-106 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 112 Troppmann, Jean-Baptiste, 114 'Truth about Pyecraft, The" (Wells), 90-96,102,104,109,141 Turgénev, Ivan, 80 Turn of the Screw, The (James), 57, 62-74, 82, 86, 96,105,108 Twelve Stories and a Dream (Wells), 90, 94 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne), 33, 65 Two Magics, The (James), 62 "Unscientific Story, An" (Strong), 5 Velásquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y, 21

Tattered Tom (Alger), 99 Temple Bar (periodical), 146 'These Bones Shall Rise Again" (London), 6-7, 84 Thoreau, Henry David, 34-36 'Thousand Deaths, A" (London), 135-141,143-144,148,153,162

"Thurlow's Christmas Story" (Bangs), 96—102,104,112-113

Time Machine, The (Wells), 92 Times (London), 25 Todorov, Tzvetan, 4 'Tomb of Sarah, The" (Loring), 147 Tone, 78-83, 87-88, 97,101,104,108, 111, 117,126,143,148; in 'The Blue Hotel," 123-125; in "A Thousand Deaths," 138,141 T o Whom This May Come" (Bellamy), 6

Virginibus Puerisque (Stevenson), 12 "Virtue of War, The" (Crane), 123 Voltaire, 78 Waldstein, Dr. Louis, 64, 67 Wallace, A. R., 115 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 17 Wedgwood, Julia, 16, 41 Wells, H. G., 2, 8, n-22, 25-26, 28, 32, 41, 61, 64, 68, 76, 79-80, 88-89, 110, 112,126,163; and 'The Truth about Pyecraft," 90-96,102,109,141 Wharton, Edith, 20 Wilde, Oscar, 15-16,19,41, 43, 58, 60-61, 64, 69, 77, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 16 Woman in White, The (Collins), 81 Woolf, Virginia, 28, 80 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 81