Victoriana - Histories, fictions, criticism

Victoriana - Histories, Fictions, Criticism

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages

  Kaplan, Cora ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

^b QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 77649204429     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (272)

1. Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection (London: HarperCollins, 1994). First published by Jonathan Cape in 1975, The Great Victorian Collection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
2. Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973) pp. 219-54; Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976); Jean Baudrillard, 'Simulacra and Simulations', in Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988) pp. 166-84. Benjamin suggests that today the work of art 'by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value... becomes a creation with entirely new functions', p. 227. Baudrillard invents the term 'hyperreal' for simulation which dissolves the 'distinction between the real and the imaginary'. Benjamin s the invention of film as changing both visual perception and attitudes towards art; Baudrillard argues that 'Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation'. Moore's location of his surreal fiction in California suggestively aligns his story with both these analyses.
3. Andrew Davies has been responsible for some of the most successful adaptations for television of Victorian fiction and Victoriana. for example his versions of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Sarah Waters's self-styled 'lesbian romp', Tipping the Velvet, both from 2002. His 2005 version of Charles Dickens's Bleak House with actor Gillian Anderson was especially memorable.
4. Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, I: 146, July-August 1984, pp. 53-92.
5. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff (eds), Victorian Afterlife: postmodern culture rewrites the nineteenth century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) highlights the Jamesonian position in its introduction and some of its essays, but the volume as a whole, as the editors say, 'stages a debate' rather than takes a position about the loss of historicity in what they call the 'post-Victorian', p. xxv.
6. The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, Liz Stanley (ed.) (London: Virago Press, 1984).
7. also the accompanying book by the presenter. Adam Hart-Davis, What the Victorians Did for Us (London: Headline Book Publishing Ltd, 2002).
8. Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 2001) p. 227.
9. For a discussion of Kingsley's views, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830-1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) pp. 438-40.
10. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: how the British saw their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2001). Cannadine argues that questions of race were less important than the class dynamics of Empire, while Niall Ferguson, in Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power (London: Allen Lane, 2003) p. 358, makes a much fuller defence of Empire, arguing that 'liberal capitalism' exists around the world because of 'the spread of British rule', which 'pioneered free trade, free capital movements, and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour'. Gordon Brown, The Daily Mail, 15 January, 2005. For an illuminating response to these views Geoff Eley, 'Beneath the Skin. Or: How to Forget About the Empire Without Really Trying', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 3: 1, Spring 2002, and for an alternative view of the effects of Empire, Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects.
11. the special issue on 'Conservative Modernity', David Glover and Cora Kaplan (eds) New Formations, 28, Spring 1996.
12. Andrew Bennett, The Author (New York: Routledge, 2005) for a short, clear account of the debates on authorship.
13. John Lanchester, The Guardian, G2, 12 July 2005, pp. 1-3.
14. Dickens told his friend Miss Burdett-Coutts that if he were Commander-in- Chief in India he 'should do his utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested... to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth...', cited in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991) p. 844. Ackroyd, typically, reads Dicken's genocidal 'rage' as more to do with his personal frustrations at the time than his political beliefs.
15. Henry James, The Sense of the Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945) p. 295. James is mingly using 'uncanny' in its more traditional sense as simply the fear of strangeness, but the situation he describes comes nearer to Freud's emphasis on fear caused by the mix of familiarity and strangeness.
16. the treatment of a similar theme in Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), a book James is very likely to have read.
17. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910), in James Strachey et al. (eds), The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957) pp. 16-17.
18. Laura Mulvey, ' "It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession": The Melodrama's Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory', in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994) pp. 126-7.
19. Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams, 3 April 1848, in Margaret Smith (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume Two, 1848-1851 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 50.
20. Virginia Woolf, 'Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights', in The Common Reader, First Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1925) p. 198. This essay incorporates material from an article on Charlotte Brontë in The Times Literary Supplement, 13 April 1916.
21. Virginia Woolf, 'Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights', p. 196.
22. Virginia Woolf, 'Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights', p. 199.
23. Virginia Woolf, 'Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights', pp. 199-200.
24. For a better sense of Charlotte Brontë's breadth of reading and cosmopolitan sensibility one must turn to her letters: Margaret Smith (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, vols 1-3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995-2004).
25. Virginia Woolf, 'Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights', p. 201.
26. Virginia Woolf, 'Women and Fiction' (1929) reprinted in Virginia Woolf, Michèle Barrett (ed. and intr.) Women and Writing (London: The Women's Press, 1979) p. 47. This essay first appeared in The Forum, March 1929.
27. my earlier discussion of Woolf's treatment of Jane Eyre in 'Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism', Sea Changes: essays on culture and feminism (London: Verso, 1986) pp. 170-6.
28. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1957) pp. 72-3.
29. Virginia Woolf, 'Women and Writing', p. 48. Lest it m that I am arguing that Jane Eyre's ability to provoke the displacement and projection of female anger is particular to Woolf, I would point out that my own heated response to Woolf's treatment of Charlotte Brontë/Jane Eyre is equally symptomatic of the defensive and accusatory feelings that circulate around Brontë's text. In my case, my encounter, as an American expatriate in the 1960s, with the remnants of the British class system surely informs my account of Woolf's mandarin attitude to Charlotte Brontë.
30. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) pp. 84-5.
31. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, p. 85.
32. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, pp. 85-6.
33. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, p. 85.
34. Raymond Williams, 'Charlotte and Emily Brontë', The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970) p. 52. For a longer discussion of Williams's treatment of Victorian women's writing, my essay ' "What We Have Again to Say": Williams, Feminism, and the 1840s' in Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Cultural Materialism: on Raymond Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). I have drawn some of my argument from this earlier essay.
35. Raymond Williams, 'Charlotte and Emily Brontë', The English Novel, p. 70.
36. Raymond Williams, 'Charlotte and Emily Brontë, p. 73.
37. Raymond Williams, 'Charlotte and Emily Brontë, p. 61.
38. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British women novelists from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago Press, 1977) p. 112; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth century literary imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) p. 370.
39. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 370.
40. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a political history of the novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 8.
41. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 3.
42. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, p. 187.
43. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 200-1.
44. Elizabeth Rigby, The Quartely Review, December 1848.
45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' in Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), 'Race', Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) p. 263.
46. for example, Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: race and Victorian women's fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Elsie Michie, 'From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester, and Racial Difference', Novel, 25, 1992, pp. 125-40; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: the figure of woman in the colonial text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Cora Kaplan, ' "A Heterogeneous Thing": Female Childhood and the Rise of Racial Thinking in Victorian Britain', in Diana Fuss (ed.), Human, All Too Human (New York: Routledge, 1995) pp. 169-202.
47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism', p. 263.
48. A related response has been the debate around Edward Said's essay on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which, like Spivak's interrogation of Brontë, focuses on the way the text negotiates slavery and empire.
49. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (eds), In Dora's Case: Freud, hysteria, feminism (London: Virago, 1985). The 'rewriting' of Freud's Dora by late twentieth-century commentators might be n as another example of Victoriana, as I have defined it.
50. Armstrong uses Foucault also, but to make exactly the opposite case about Brontë's work.
51. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 5.
52. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 182.
53. Glen has also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), which, except in the bibliography, does not highlight the imperial and racial themes in their work.The relatively stronger and longlasting influence of postcolonial criticism of Brontë's work in the United States is reflected in Elsie B. Michie (ed.), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: a case book (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), which foregrounds this critical perspectives, and excerpts Sharpe's Allegories of Empire. Its editor is US based.
54. Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: the imagination in history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 2.
55. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), and Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: the cultural dissemination of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' (London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996).
56. Marina Warner, 'Introduction' in Paula Rego, Jane Eyre (London: Enitharmon Editions, 2003) p. 13.
57. Marina Warner, 'Introduction', Jane Eyre, pp. 9-10.
58. Paula Rego, Jane Eyre, pp. 20-1.
59. Samuel Johnson, 'Biography' in The Rambler, 60, Saturday, 11 October 1730 in Richard Holmes (ed.), Johnson on Savage (HarperPerennial: London, 2005) p. 112.
60. Sigmund Freud to Lytton Strachey, 25 December 1928, cited in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1973) vol. ii, pp. 615-16.
61. The displays have recently shifted. Life writing now occupies much of the third floor, and in spring 2006 the long ground floor sweep was devoted to 'London', including a big section on 'London Lives'.
62. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Richard Miller (trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) p. 27.
63. Jacqueline Rose, 'Feminism and the Psychic', Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986) p. 23.
64. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: habit of stories (London: Faber & Faber, 1993); Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: a literary biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994); Juliet Barker, The Brontës (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1994); Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: a passionate life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994); Julia Markus, Dared and Done: the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (London: Bloomsbury, 1997); Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: a biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995); Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: a life (London: Allen Lane, 1996); Kerry McSweeney, George Eliot: a literary life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: the last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
65. Iain Finlayson, Browning (New York: HarperCopllins, 2004); Clyde de L. Ryals, The Life of Robert Browning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Sarah Wood, Robert Browning: a literary life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Peter L. Shillingsburg, William Makepeace Thackeray: a literary life (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); D. J. Taylor, Thackeray (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999); James Pope-Hennessy, Anthony Trollope [1971] (London: Phoenix Press, 2001); Victoria Glendinning Anthony Trollope (London: Hutchinson, 1992).
66. Tennant's Felony also deserves analysis as part of the phenomenon, but the focus of this essay will be on male authors' representation of Victorian male writers.
67. Spivak's discussion of the need for, and the problems with, 'strategic essentialism': the first in, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: essays in cultural politics (New York: Routledge, 1987) p. 205, and the second in a later interview with Ellen Rooney. In the interview she points out that 'Identity is a very different word from essence. We "write" a running biography with life-language rather than only word-language in order to "be." '. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993) p. 4.
68. Samuel Johnson, 'Literary Biography', The Idler, 102, Saturday, 29 March 1760, in Johnson on Savage, p. 126.
69. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale (London: Vintage, 2001) p. 1.
70. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale, p. 5.
71. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale, p. 257.
72. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: the creation of modern masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Herbert L. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: manhood and masculine poetics in early Victorian literature and art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 15. For a longer account of the evolution of modern masculinities David Glover, 'Masculinities', in David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 56-85.
73. Samuel Johnson, 'Biography', Johnson on Savage, p. 111.
74. A. S. Byatt, The Biographer's Tale, p. 5.
75. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London: Macmillan, 1995) pp. 8-9.
76. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p. 9.
77. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p. 9.
78. Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman, p. 9.
79. John Barrell, 'Inside the Head', London Review of Books, 22:21, November 2000.
80. John Barrell, 'Inside the Head'. also Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflection (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
81. Samuel Johnson, An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers in Richard Holmes (ed.), Johnson on Savage (London: HarperPerennial, 2005) pp. 301-5.
82. David Glover, 'Masculinities', pp. 73-4.
83. Alison Light, 'Writing Lives' in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 759-60.
84. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Minerva, 1991). All references to this edition.
85. M. M. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel' in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981) pp. 301-8.
86. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 610-45.
87. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 622.
88. especially Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' (1968) in Stephen Heath (ed.), Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author?' (1969), in D. F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
89. For the evolution of the idea of genius as a masculine attribute Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: towards a feminist aesthetics (London: The Women's Press, 1989).
90. Thomas Carlyle, 'The Hero as Man of Letters: Johnson, Rousseau, Burns' in Carl Niemeyer (ed.), On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1966) p. 154.
91. Fichte quoted by Carlyle, 'The Hero as Man of Letters', pp. 156-7.
92. Thomas Carlyle, 'The Hero as Man of Letters', p. 156.
93. Thomas Carlyle, 'The Hero as Man of Letters', p. 155. But Carlyle, Past and Present (1843), book 4, chapter 7, for a more unambiguous use of 'genius'.
94. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, book 4, chapter 7, cited in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 320.
95. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 319.
96. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 320.
97. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 320.
98. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 1025-6.
99. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 321-2.
100. Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics in T. M. Knox (trans.) and Charles Karelis (intr.) Hegel's Introduction to Aesthetics: being the introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820s (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979) p. 39.
101. Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 39.
102. Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics, p. 39-40.
103. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 146.
104. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 322.
105. Cited in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. xi.
106. Thomas Carlyle to John Foster, cited in W. Forbes Gray, 'Carlyle and John Forster: An Unpublished Correspondence', Quarterly Review, 268, January-April 1993, p. 280.
107. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. xv.
108. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 324.
109. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 324-5.
110. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. xv.
111. The Mystery of Charles Dickens opened in London's West End in 2000. It has toured England and the United States, played briefly on Broadway and, lately, been shown on TV. It is available on DVD.
112. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: towards a gay hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 62.
113. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, p. xv.
114. the Thomas Hood poem, 'Silence', that is the epigraph to Jane Campion's film The Piano, discussed in 'Retuning The Piano', p. 150.
115. For this discussion David Glover, 'Masculinities', pp. 74-8, and Norma Clarke, 'Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as hero', in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 41.
116. James wrote that Our Mutual Friend was 'the poorest of Mr Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion', cited in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 1021-2. In the late 1880s and early 1890s James would write a series of short stories that play with the theme of the 'exhausted' or played-out great writer. 'The Lesson of the Master', 'The Middle Years' and 'The Death of the Lion' in Henry James, Selected Tales (London: Penguin, 2001).
117. Leon Edel was a one-man James industry. His five-volume Henry James (London: Hart Davis, 1953-72) was compressed into a two-volume The Life of Henry James (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Edel edited the fourvolume Letters of Henry James (London: Macmillan, 1953-74). There is not yet a complete edition of James's letters. I recommend Philip Horne (ed.), Henry James: a life in letters (London: Penguin, 1999) for an excellent synoptic view of James's writing life.
118. Cited in Philip Horne's 'Introduction' to Henry James: a life in letters, p. xx.
119. Jonathan Freedman, 'Introduction: The Moment of Henry James', in Jonathan Freedman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 1.
120. Jonathan Freedman, 'Introduction', p. 1.
121. Jonathan Freedman, 'Introduction', pp. 18-19.
122. Cambridge University Press has med determined to corner the James industry. Titles from 1991, excluding the Cambridge Companion cited above, are: Judith Woolf, Henry James: the major novels (1991); Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the philosophical novel (1993); Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James (1993); Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Henry James: the contemporary reviews (1996); Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (1996); Gert Buelens (ed.), Enacting History in Henry James: narrative, power, and ethics (1997); Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997); Beverly Haviland, Henry James's Last Romance (1997); Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (1998); Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience (1999); Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2001); Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure (2002); Andrew Taylor, Henry James and the Father Question (2002); Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003); Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the 'Woman Business' (2004).
123. My summary of James's critique of the project of writing an historical novel is drawn from two sources: Henry James, 'American Letters', Literature (1898) and Henry James to Sarah Orne Jewett, 5 October 1901 in Philip Horne (ed.), Henry James: a life in letters, p. 360.
124. Adam Mars Jones, 'In his master's voice', The Observer, Sunday, 22 February 2004.
125. Michael Wood, 'What Henry didn't do', London Review of Books, 26: 6, 18 March 2004. Martin Ryle hit upon 'abstention' as the theme of The Master in a conversation on 4 March 2006.
126. Wood, in his review cited above, comments on Tóibín's use of style that: Language is taken away from James rather than given to him, which brings him closer to us than he might otherwise be. Not that Tóibín's language is jarringly contemporary or slangy. It is just not an imitation; it is lighter and less ornate than the Master's own.
127. Colm Tóibín, The Master (London: Picador, 2004) p. 16.
128. Colm Tóibín, The Master, p. 20, p. 19.
129. David Lodge, Author, Author (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004) 57-62 and pp. 284-5.
130. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 58.
131. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 62.
132. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 3-4.
133. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 375.
134. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 375.
135. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 382.
136. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 382.
137. David Lodge, Author, Author, p. 382.
138. Colm Tóibín, The Master, p. 359.
139. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004).
140. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, p. 312.
141. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, p. 54.
142. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, pp. 396-7.
143. In Andrew Davies's adaptation of The Line of Beauty for BBC2, broadcast in May 2006, this ambivalent ending is left in place, with perhaps less foreshadowing of positive (i.e. fatal) results since we don't have access to Nick's dark thoughts. The results of Nick's third blood test which is shown, is, as in the novel, in the future.
144. Reviewing Lodge's The Year of Henry James (London: Harvill Secker, 2006) in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 2006, p. 40, Henry Hitchings concludes that Lodge's story of professional disappointment is also an act of self-exculpation and self-consolation, and it never takes account of the very real possibility that Author, Author was simply not as accomplished as The Master - or indeed as his own best work.
145. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
146. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, vol. 2, pp. 615-16.
147. Anthony Storr, 'Psychiatry and Literary Biography', in John Batchelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) p. 74.
148. The novel, with James's notes for its completion, was published posthumously in 1917. Henry James, The Sense of the Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945).
149. Stephen Marcus, The Other Victorians: a study of sexuality and pornography in mid-nineteenth-century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964), bookjacket blurb.
150. Henry James, in 'American Letters', Literature (1898) and Henry James to Sarah Orne Jewett, 5 October 1901, both cited in Philip Horne (ed.), Henry James: a life in letters, p. 360.
151. A. S. Byatt, Possession: a romance (London: Vintage, 1990) unnumbered prefatory pages.
152. As cited in Byatt's epigraph to Possession.
153. For an excellent analysis of the interwar 'sex-novel', Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: flappers and nymphs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988).
154. Elizabeth, Fowles's first wife, was initially a very active editor of his work, arguing successfully that 'one big love scene should be used in place of several smaller ones', and that 'hinted sexuality is much more exciting than the full treatment'. After 1971 he cut her out of the process, 'out of pique', and more full-frontal erotica returned to his work. Eileen Warburton, John Fowles: a life in two worlds (London: Viking, 2004) pp. 251 and 330.
155. The four pages of critical excerpts that appear before the title page of the paperback cite Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian, suggesting that it is the 'novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely'. Conversely, The New Zealand Herald thinks it is 'like Dickens with an added dollop of very un-Victorian sex', implying the absence of sex, rather than its representation, in the period. Many critics praise its skill with pastiche and storytelling - Kirkus Review grants it 'the irresistible narrative drive of the Victorian three-decker'. While Faber is at times a very skilful stylist, I found the novel overlong, poorly plotted and tediously told by its intrusive narrator, who has none of Fowles's idiosyncratic interest. Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003).
156. David Lodge, Nice Work (London: Penguin Books, 1989) p. 48.
157. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 43.
158. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 48.
159. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 46.
160. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (London: Triad/Granada, 1977) title page and p. 16.
161. Introduction, pp. 1-2 and note 2.
162. For Byatt's fascinating account of the genesis of Possession, and its literary and philosophical influences, which include Swedenborg, Henry James and the proposals to dig up George Eliot's letters, buried with her, 'Choices: on the writing of Possession', http://www.asbyatt.com/oh_Possess/.aspx.
163. Discussing the composition of Christabel LaMotte's poems in Possession, Byatt says that 'the nineteenth-century poems that were not nineteenthcentury poems wrote themselves, hardly blotted, fitting into the metaphorical structure of my novel, but not mine, as my prose is mine'. They 'came to her' almost as Roland's modern verse does at the end of the novel. http://www.asbyatt.com/oh_Possess/.aspx.
164. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 'An Introduction', Robert Hurley (trans.) (London: Allen Lane, 1979).
165. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 397.
166. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 393.
167. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 394.
168. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, p. 398.
169. Eileen Warburton writes that 'both John and Elizabeth had read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. When they quarrelled on the subject, Fowles rebutted: "I don't believe all the feminist argument (Betty Friedan's) about unfulfilled women. There are just as many unfulfilled men because fulfillment is a comparative thing" '. John Fowles: a life in two worlds, p. 267.
170. A. S. Byatt, Possession, p. 506.
171. A. S. Byatt, Possession, p. 507.
172. 'Nice Work If You Can Get It', words and music by Ira and George Gershwin, recorded by Fred Astaire, 1938. From the 1937 film Damsel in Distress.
173. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 40.
174. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
175. David Lodge, Nice Work, pp. 61-2.
176. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 113.
177. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 200.
178. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 184.
179. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 83. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
180. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 75.
181. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 133.
182. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (eds) (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1967). In Chapter 92, 'Ambergris', Melville celebrates the substance that is 'found in the inglorious bowels of the sick whales'. In Chapter 96, pp. 353-4, 'The Try-Works', Melville describes the industrial process by which the blubber is rendered in the overheated bowels of the ship by the 'Tartarean' 'pagan harpooneers'. 'Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth'. But Melville, unlike Lodge, cautions against an association of such non-white labour with barbarity, shit or Hell. His 'savages' are the unsentimental heroes of Moby Dick.
183. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 384.
184. In Sybil, the eponymous heroine turns out not to be a working-class but an aristocratic woman. Disraeli's 'solutions' to the problem of the 'Two Nations' are reliant on upper-class hegemony and semi-feudal paternalism. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: or the Two Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
185. David Lodge, Nice Work, p. 133.
186. A. S. Byatt, Possession, p. 470.
187. A. S. Byatt, Possession, pp. 470-1.
188. A. S. Byatt, Possession, p. 471.
189. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Richard Miller (trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) pp. 10-11.
190. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 58.
191. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 14.
192. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 14.
193. note 13. Byatt, in 'Choices: on the writing of Possession' reminds us that there 'have been serious proposals to dig up George Eliot'.
194. Sarah Waters's comments on her faux Victorian fiction cited in this essay are drawn from interviews available on line: with Ron Hogan at www. booksense.com/people/archive/waterssarah.jsp and from an interview on Thursday, 24 October 2002 by 'Linda' on www.moviepie.com/filmfests/ sarah_waters.html and from her own website www.sarahwaters.com/ ints.htm.
195. Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet (London: Virago Press, 1999).
196. Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago Press, 2000).
197. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (London: Virago Press, 2003). Fingersmith has won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South Bank Show Award for Literature. It was serialised on television in 2005.
198. For the flavour of this debate Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds) Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).
199. Sarah Waters, Affinity, p. 7.
200. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, pp. 62-3.
201. Mort Gerberg, The New Yorker, 24 January 1994.
202. The Piano has generated wide critical debate, especially but not exclusively about its colonial and postcolonial narrative and treatment. For a sense of its contours, Harriet Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion's 'The Piano' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and 'Special debate: The Piano', Screen, 36:3, Autumn 1995.
203. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, melodrama, and the mode of excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) preface, pp. ix-xvi.
204. Jane Campion, The Piano (New York: Miramax Books, 1993) p. 9.
205. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 56.
206. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 22.
207. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'Minnelli and melodrama' in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart is: studies in melodrama and the woman's film (London: British Film Institute, 1987) p. 73.
208. Peter Brooks, 'Melodrama, Body, Revolution' in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: stage, picture, screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994) pp. 11-24.
209. The Melodramatic Imagination, chapter 3, 'The Text of Muteness',
210. 56-80, passim.
211. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 206.
212. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 206.
213. Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales include The Pioneers (1823); The Last of the Mohicans (1826); The Prairie (1827) and The Pathfinder (1840). Herman Melville's relevant fiction includes Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847); White- Jacket: or The World in a Man-of-War (1850); Moby Dick (1851).
214. especially Ann Hardy, 'The Last Patriarch' in Harriet Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion's 'The Piano' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 62.
215. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 140.
216. Jane Campion, The Piano, pp. 121-43.
217. For a discussion of the response to The Piano, Barbara Johnson, 'Muteness Envy' in Diana Fuss (ed.), Human, All Too Human (New York: Routledge, 1996) pp. 141-7.
218. Max Weber, 'The History of the Piano', in W. G. Runciman (ed.), trans. Eric Matthews, Weber: selections in translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) p. 379.
219. Max Weber, 'The History of the Piano', pp. 381-2.
220. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) p. 61.
221. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, pp. 61-2.
222. This crucial insight I owe to anthropologist Professor Ann Whitehead of Sussex University, with whom I discussed this section of the essay.
223. Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) pp. 187-213.
224. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 9.
225. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 65-8.
226. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 9.
227. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 9.
228. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Selected Tales, Thomas E. Connolly (ed.) (London: Penguin, 1986) p. 104.
229. in addition to Hester Prynne, the exotic Zenobia, based on the writer Margaret Fuller, in The Blithedale Romance, but also the doomed women in his stories, 'The Birthmark' and 'Rappaccini's Daughter'.
230. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, pp. 78-9.
231. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, pp. 266-8.
232. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 17.
233. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in Anthony Curtis (ed.), The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw (London: Penguin, 1986) p. 262.
234. chapter 6, 'Henry James and the Melodrama of Consciousness', in The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 153-97.
235. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 122.
236. On the history of deafness and sign language Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: a history of the deaf (New York: Random House, 1976) and Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American culture and the campaign against sign language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Two very different but equally important analyses of deafness and sign language are Oliver Sachs, ing Voices: a journey into the world of the deaf (Basingstoke: Picador, 1991) and Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: disability, deafness, and the body (London: Verso, 1993).
237. Charles Dickens, American Notes For General Circulation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 82.
238. Charles Dickens, American Notes, p. 91.
239. White-Jacket is also evoked in the first ending of The Piano. Near the end, in chapter 42, its sailor protagonist falls from his ship, the Neversink, into the sea; he is wearing the white jacket that has become his protective covering, a second self like Ada's piano. Heavy with water, it threatens to become his shroud. Only by taking it off is he allowed to surface and survive. Herman Melville, White-Jacket: or The World in a Man-of-War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 395-9.
240. Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger, The Piano: a novel (London: Bloomsbury, 1994).
241. There are several scenes in Moby Dick of death or near-death by drowning, but most notable is the accident that befalls the black child Pip, who, like Ada, is first saved after being caught in the line and pulled overboard, and later, when he falls a second time, almost abandoned. He goes mad, Melville suggests, from ing the indifference of God. Herman Melville, Moby Dick Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (eds) (New York: Norton, 1967) chapter 93, pp. 344-7.
242. Jane Campion, The Piano, pp. 142-6.
243. Mitchell Breitweiser, 'False Sympathy in Melville's Typee' in Myra Jehlen (ed.), Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994) pp. 15-26.
244. Mitchell Breitweiser, 'False Sympathy in Melville's Typee', p. 22.
245. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 142.
246. especially Stella Bruzzi, 'Tempestuous petticoats: costume and desire in The Piano', Screen, 36:3, Autumn 1995, pp. 257-66; and Linda Dyson, 'The return of the repressed? Whiteness, femininity and colonialism in The Piano', Screen, 36:3, pp. 267-76.
247. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (London: J. M. Dent, 1993) pp. 138-9.
248. Jane Campion, The Piano, p. 76.
249. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992) and 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature', Michigan Quarterly Review, 28, Winter 1989. Samuel Otter argues that 'Melville offers neither a transcendent critique nor a symptomatic recapitulation of racial beliefs [...] Melville both inhabits and manipulates contemporary racial discourse, giving a material sense of its structures and functions'. ' "Race" in Typee and White-Jacket' in Robert S. Levine (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 12-36.
250. Jane Campion, The Piano, pp. 135, 138.
251. Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, I: 146, July-August 1984, pp. 53-92. 51. Thomas Hood, 'Silence' in Walter Jerrold (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood (London: Henry Frowde, 1906) p. 196. The poem was first collected in The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur, and Other Poems (1827). The final lines of the sonnet, suggesting that 'true silence' 'self-conscious and alone' is to be found not under water or in deserts but 'in green ruins, in the desolate walls of antique palaces, where Man hath been', speak to the
252. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London: Penguin Books, 1997).
253. Jean Rhys: Postures (later known as Quartet), (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928); After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930); Voyage in the Dark (London: Constable, 1934); Good Morning, Midnight (London: Constable, 1939). All these novels were reprinted by Andre Deutsch in London and W. W. Norton in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following the success of Wide Sargasso Sea.
254. Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (London: Faber, 1997). Hermione Lee, The Observer, 28 September 1997.
255. for example D. M. Thomas, Charlotte (London: Duckworth, 2000) with its modern Charlotte Brontë figure, and Lynne Truss, Tennyson's Gift (London: Profile Books, 2004).
256. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' in Henry Louis Gates, Jr (ed.), 'Race', Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 271-3; Leonie Pihama, 'Ebony and Ivory: Constructions of the Maori in The Piano', in Harriet Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion's 'The Piano' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 114-34; Lynda Dyson, 'The Return of the Repressed? Whiteness, femininity and colonialism in The Piano', Screen, Summer 1995, pp. 267-76.
257. Jane Campion, The Piano (New York: Miramax, 1993) pp. 138-9.
258. He uses this strategy again to great effect in two recent novels, My Life as a Fake (2003) and Theft: A Love Story (2006), both of which are concerned with Australia's sense of its subaltern status in class and cultural terms and, like Jack Maggs, challenge the discourse of authenticity and integrity for art and artists.
259. for example David Dabydeen, The Harlot's Progress (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999); Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992).
260. Dinah Mulock Craik, Olive: The Half Caste, Cora Kaplan (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Craik capitalises on the success of Jane Eyre (1847) by reworking the themes of race and empire in this novel and related short story.
261. Some of this sources in this debate can be sampled in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: a reader (New York: Palgrave, 2001). For a multi-faceted view of the Empire at home, Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home With the Empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
262. Julian Barnes, Arthur & George (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005) p. 217.
263. Julian Barnes, Arthur & George, p. 266.
264. Barnes quoted in Stuart Jeffries, 'It's for self-protection', The Guardian, Wednesday, 6 July 2005.
265. Natasha Walter, 'Our mutual friends', The Guardian, Saturday, 2 July 2005; Terry Eagleton, 'The Facts', The Nation, 20 February 2006.
266. Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, Barnes wrote Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987), evocative London thrillers with Duffy, a bisexual private detective, as their protagonist.
267. Barnes quoted in Stuart Jeffries, 'It's for self-protection', The Guardian, Wednesday, 6 July 2005.
268. Julian Barnes, Arthur & George, p. 359.
269. Julian Barnes, Arthur & George, p. 316.
270. Barnes quoted in 'It's for self-protection', The Guardian, Wednesday, 6 July 2005. As I have suggested in 'Historical Fictions', David Lodge expresses the anxiety about cultural and racial difference as unassimilable and dangerous in Nice Work.
271. John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) p. 3.
272. John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction, p. 3.