Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1982"

The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel

Abstract: At some point during the eighteenth century, the cultural climate in England was right for the novel to begin its rise to a prominent position in the hierarchy of genres. The same conditions also made it possible for women's lore, taste, judgement, feeling and words to become, for the first time in history, the fit matter for literature. Despite the scholarly attention that has been devoted to each of these groundbreaking events, there remains the obvious question of what the one literary phenomenon had to do with the other, or how together they participated in a larger cultural change. It is Ian Watt's well-known contention that the popularity of such writers as Defoe and Richardson-and the subsequent rise of the noveldepended on the economic individualism and the Puritan ethic they shared with a substantial portion of the new reading public. But as his study of the eighteenthcentury novel comes to a close, Watt seems to realize that a notion of literary production based on shared social values and inside knowledge of commercial life fails to explain "the majority of eighteenth-century novels," namely, those written by women.1 To account for the conspicuous appearance of a woman writer on the literary scene, he falls back on a nineteenth-century commonplace and, speaking of Jane Austen, claims, "the feminine sensibility was in some ways better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal relationships and was therefore at a real advantage in the realm of the novel." 2 Surely this will not do as the explanation for why women gained the authority to write literature and have it received as both female and literary, nor does it indicate why female literary authority coincided with the emergence of the novel as a literary form. Lest we dismiss Watt's theory too quickly, we should note that feminist critics also have difficulty in correlating the social and literary changes that occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Watt's theory of the text as a reflection of socio-economic interests on the part of the new middle classes derives from his study of the readership and the conditions for literary reception. In contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's definitive study of nineteenth-century women novelists concentrates on the authors and the conditions in which their works were produced. On this basis, they argue that the author's sex is far more important than class affiliation, nationality, or matters of personality.3 Since so many novelists were women by fact of nature, and since

Penelope at Work: Interruptions in A Room of One’s Own *

Abstract: In The Odyssey, as so often elsewhere throughout our culture's poetic text, one encounters moments of abyssal self-representation when the poem tries to occupy a place in two different and mutually exclusive spheres, that is, when it slips between representing something and being the something represented. One such moment occurs in Book I where it happens to coincide with the first direct representation of Penelope. Whether to construe this as simple coincidence, however, seems a pertinent question since Penelope enters the scene of narration in order to interrupt it. In the passage to which I refer, Telemachos and the suitors are gathered in front of the palace where they are listening to "the famous singer... [who] sang of the Achaians' bitter homecoming/ from Troy" (325-27). Penelope, who "heeded the magical song from her upper chamber," is drawn down the stairs, and, in tears, begs the singer to choose another song to sing. At this point, Telemachos takes the floor, reproaches his mother for her intervention and says to her: "'Go therefore back in the house, and take up your own work,/ the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens/ ply their work also; but the men must see to discussion,/ all men, but I most of all. For mine is the power in this household.'/ Penelope went back inside the house, in amazement." (356-360) Much later in the poem, at a crucial moment which prepares Odysseus's attack on the suitors, Telemachos again sends his mother out of the room, using almost the same terms but with one important change. Instead of the poem or discussion, it is an instrument of force-Odysseus's famous bow-which Telemachos orders his mother to leave in men's hands. He says: "'Go therefore back into the house, and take up your own work,/ the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens ply their work also. The men shall have the bow in their keeping,/ all men, but I most of all. For mine is the power in this household.'/ Penelope went back inside the house, in amazement." (XXI, 350-354)

Narrative Transaction and Transference (Unburying "Le Colonel Chabert")

Abstract: Burial alive offers a version of ultimate horror that has a rich literary career, at least from M. G. Lewis' The Monk through the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. As a nightmare responding to our most primitive fears, beyond its specifically Gothic manifestations burial alive may evoke ancient punishments for the transgression of impurity (as with sinning vestal virgins, sealed alive in the tomb) or indeed the entire mechanism, and burden, of repression, burying and encrypting a past which insists on continuing to live: the "archeological" image of repression which Freud found so well represented in the Pompeii of Jensen's Gradiva.' The fascination exercised on the literary imagination by burial alive may point to a specifically literary obsession with the buried utterance: the word, the tale, entombed without listener. The work of Balzac, for instance, includes several tales about discourses blocked in the telling or the listening: the visionary masterpiece of Frenhofer in Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, which never can be represented in the artist's "syntax"; the blind Facino Cane's tale of lost riches, described as a buried Odyssey; or, perhaps most radically, Stephanie de Vandieres' love story, in Adieu, condemned to an amnesia and aphasia lifted only by a cure that at once proves mortal. Here and elsewhere in Balzac, we have tales which contain within their frames stories that never manage to be fully told, that are somehow blocked in the process of transmission or realization, that remain inaccessibly buried. The most haunting case of all may be Le Colonel Chabert, which offers a literal instance of burial alive, a fully-detailed enactment of the nightmare. Yet Chabert escapes his bodily entombment, digging his way out of the mass battlefield grave with a dead comrade's detached arm-has escaped it prior to the opening of Balzac's narrative. The true horror of the text lies in a yet more painful analogue and product of his living entombment: the possibility that his story may remain buried; the nightmare of a certain narrative situation and the vicissitudes of the narrative desire. Chabert, we may remind ourselves, was a colonel in Napoleon's armies. Victim of a deep headwound at the battle of Eylau, he is judged dead, and buried in a mass grave on the battlefield. Regaining consciousness in the silence of the tomb, he manages to dig his way out and to emerge, naked, in a second birth, to be cared for by Prussian peasants, until one day he remembers who he is, or was. Returning destitute to Paris, he finds that, since his death was recorded in the official Bulletin of the battle, his wife not only has inherited his property and received his death benefit but also has remarried, to a Faubourg Saint-Germain aristocrat,

Mary Wollstonecraft: The Gender of Genres in Late Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: Today, Mary Wollstonecraft is best remembered for her forays into that most "masculine" of all late-eighteenth-century genres, political disquisition. But her two vindications suggest that, while that genre allowed her to voice her considerable intellectual insights, it did not accommodate her equally adamant emotionsor, to use eighteenth-century terminology, her "sentiments." Moreover, partly because her two political vindications were considered both "unladylike" and politically volatile, Wollstonecraft may have feared that her message would not reach those who most needed to hear it. In Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft set out to remedy both of these problems, to reformulate the insights of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in a genre she felt certain could articulate her own emotion and attract a female audience-the sentimental novel. But the attempt to fictionalize "the peculiar Wrongs of Woman" afflicted Wollstonecraft, for perhaps the first time in her life, with what seems very like writer's block. Whereas she had composed The Rights of Men in less than a month and The Rights of Woman in six weeks, she spent a year working on Maria-only to leave the manuscript less than a third finished when she died. Godwin's description of the composition of Maria reveals that the work induced insistent anxiety:

The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction

Abstract: In this essay I want to describe and try to account for two important, interrelated qualities of black American fiction. The first is a tendency toward an indirect or muted depiction of anger, the most "irrational" of emotions. The second is a noticeable-and I think strategic-emphasis on literary structure, perhaps the most rational of literary qualities. Considered together in the context of nineteenth-century slave narratives-the first black American narrative genre-these characteristics reveal the outlines of a distinctive black narrative tradition in

Gothic Ghosts at Large@@@The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction@@@Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence

Abstract: In a fascinating study of what, during the last decade, rekindled an avid readership, Judith Wilt proposes a new theory of Gothic fiction that challenges its reputation as merely a formula to be outgrown or a stock of images for the creation of terror. Emphasizing instead its status as an enduring component of the imagination, she establishes the Gothic as the mothering\" form for three other popular genres--detective, historical, and science fiction.Originally published in 1980.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Aesthetics and the Psychology of Control in John Hawkes's Triad

Abstract: The formal elements, the structures and patterns, of John Hawkes's novels have been from the first a salient and identifying component of his writing. He has himself said, "My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they're elaborately structured .... Structure-verbal and psychological coherence-is . . . my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing." 1 If anything, Hawkes's interest in structure and pattern has intensified since he so defined his literary character in 1965. The formal organization of his triad of novels-The Blood Oranges (1971), Death, Sleep & the Traveler (1974), and Travesty (1976)-attests to the manner in which such interests have become more absolute and self-referential than ever before. In part because of the greater economy and simplicity of composition (Albert Guerard has called his prose in these novels "classical"),2 the patterns are more striking and unmistakable than in his earlier fiction. Moreover, the novels themselves self-consciously call attention to their intricate and exact design in a manner and to a degree unpracticed before by Hawkes. This movement toward a highly self-conscious art, studying itself, has been observed by various critics and is something of which Hawkes himself is clearly aware. For instance, in his analysis of Death, Sleep & the Traveler, Frederick Busch has noted that Hawkes seems "engaged in the most profound examination of his own writings" as if he were "intently . . . studying himself" as an artist,3 while Marcus Klein, writing about Travesty, has more centrally noted that novel's thematic concern with the imposition of form and composition on the rough materials of life.4 Indeed, as its title suggests, Travesty is in some manner a parody of the earlier two novels, making more explicit the concern with form which the two earlier novels also embodied. Hawkes himself suggests this function of self-analysis to the novel in his statement that Travesty is "not just a completion of the triad . .. [but] a comment on ... . my entire writing life so far." 5

Remythologizing Arnold Bennett

Abstract: Arnold Bennett's reputation is surely one of the curiosities of literary history. Built up in the first quarter of the century-"according to plan," as the famous Beerbohm cartoon says-it was shaken in the second by a few choice words from Virginia Woolf; and though by the fifties and sixties her own reputation had reached its lowest point, she continued to exert a mysterious influence on Bennett's. Even James Hepburn, whose edition of Bennett's letters (1966-1970) would be indispensable to scholars, deferred to Mrs. Woolf in his earlier book about Bennett's novels, published in 1963. One of Hepburn's aims in his critical study (The Art of Arnold Bennett) was to demonstrate the "modernity" of Bennett's fiction. Defined in those days by psychological realism, irony, image and symbol, "modernity" was not hard to find in Bennett's best work. But in an appendix to his book, as if to temper his high praise of a problematic writer, Hepburn predicted that Bennett's great "unevenness" probably meant he would not be "moved forward . . . in the near future" from the second or third rank he was then occupying with the majority of the social realists. "Final judgment upon an artist," he continued, "rests on something more profound than critical analysis. Although Virginia Woolf fails to perceive the depths of Bennett's characterization, fails to grasp his ironical perspective, fails to recognize his coherent imagery and symbolism, fails to discern his disinterested compassion, she may have judged him rightly: he may not have been worth her serious attention." One can readily agree that during their lifetime Virginia Woolf was incapable of attending seriously-consciously, that is-to Arnold Bennett or to any of the Edwardians for that matter, mainly because, as she herself said (with her tongue in her cheek and her youth on her sleeve), they were her "elders and betters." Insisting on her birthright as a Georgian, she emphasized her total rejection of the Edwardians by calling herself an orphan. But this does not seem what James Hepburn meant when he said that Bennett "may not have been worth her serious attention." Perhaps he was suggesting that Bennett had nothing to teach her. Yet one of the magical moments in her best-known novel (the lighting of the candles at Mrs. Ramsay's dinner) probably originated in Bennett's own most famous novel, when Sophia gives the signal at her pension dinner-table to light the gas-jets. As for "final judgment," do we believe it possible? With critical perspectives in periodic flux, not only are there always works that become too familiar and need to be set aside for a generation or two, but there are also those that cannot be attended to in one's own day until they have achieved exactly the right distance in cultural and psychological time, until they are cut off from the living (and dying) presences of their authors, until new myths have sprung up around them or old ones been refashioned. Bennett's novels-in their

Proustian Old Age, or the Key to Time Recaptured

Abstract: Old age, like most realities found within vaguely delineated and often shifting confines, can perhaps best be defined in medical terms-as a weakening of muscle responses, or circulatory impediment, or glandular disfunction. To the naked eye the process of aging depends on individual perception, and objectivity is held in check by personal experience. For a ten-year-old his thirtyyear-old mother may appear venerable, while those who will never see forty again must think differently. The perception in Remembrance of Things Past is of course that of the narrator, whose sense of time is so permeated with emotions as to reside almost totally outside the realm of calendars. Readers do not know how many years have lapsed when Marcel meets again, at the end, all the people whose existence had seemed so important to him in the past. One may account for the intervening war years, but that would not in itself justify the dramatic changes he finds in everyone upon returning to Paris. How long he has remained confined in a nursing home remains unclear. What is unquestionable, however, is the overwhelming shock at that sudden confrontation with time, after several or many years spent away from his circle of acquaintances. Time is visibly reduced to space now, through a kind of satanic masquerade that appears more like a danse macabre than a big festivity. A life span can be measured by the signs of age evident upon all faces-and envisioned like a line, all too brief, that lacks a mere dot or two before completion. The masks that whirl by-for masked they appear to be, all those unrecognizable people with parchment features and staccato movements, and with only retrospective nuances, once their names are announced, reminiscent of the bright smiles of their youths-advance toward Marcel as ineluctable forces. They threaten to upset the orderly world of his memories, the stages that brought him on wings of fantasy along gilded paths of wonderment and adulation. Here are the very people who had set him to dream, with their feet of clay all too visible beneath distorted bodies. Time is suddenly dislocated, lacking for him the harmony necessary to retain his past, his illusions, expectations, and disappointments. The ghosts that now crowd that great hall glide by like accomplices of deeds untold to him. Their hands stretch back and demoniacally try to reach toward his cherished images, to contaminate and reduce them too into mere ghosts. Marcel's shock is not so much linked with old age per se, as with death, with the shadow of nothingness that looms beyond all those figures. His own