Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1992"

Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller

Abstract: The original "Regency romances"-arguably the first best sellers in the modern sense of the term and the remote ancestors of our perennial drugstore paperbacks-were the so-called "silver fork" or fashionable novels, which invaded the literary marketplace during the socially and politically volatile interim of the 1820s and 30s. While England witnessed the death of the last of the four Georges and debated the Reform Bill, such highly spiced titles as Th e Exclusives, The Divorced, The Victims of Society and The Diary of a Disennuyde poured from the presses, most of them under the imprint of a single enterprising promoter by the name of Henry Colburn.' Their fictional territory was the exclusive and self-enclosed world of aristocratic high society during the Regency and its prolonged aftermath. Their typical characters were the dandies, rakes and women of the world who populated the town houses and the country estates, congregating in Almack's assembly rooms on Wednesday evenings during the London "Season," retreating to the select men's clubs that lined St. James's Street or to the Regent's private enclave at Carlton House. Their treatment of this specialized subject matter was appropriately mercurial, by turns supercilious or witty, disenchanted or exuberant. Benjamin Disraeli, who began his varied career under Colburn's aegis, encapsulates the patented ingredients of the vogue in his playfully self-reflexive "receipt" for writing a novel from The Young Duke (1829):

The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of "Persuasion"

Abstract: Persuasion is a novel constructed around what was, for its time, a radically unusual narrative premise: the love affair that should have culminated in a marriage to end a conventional romance novel has gone bad, and the heroine of the piece must begin again, eight and a half years later, on her quest for narrative closure. It is a story of lost love regained, of oppositions reconciled. Feminist readers in the 1990s may wish, like Anne Elliot, to reclaim an old attachment. Is it time for feminist critics to stop worrying and learn to love Jane Austen again? According to Julia Prewitt Brown, feminist readers of Austen are often among the novelist's detractors. Brown has recently taken to task such influential feminist critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nina Auerbach, Mary Poovey, and Claudia Johnson for having misprized Austen's politics by taking too literally (and too ahistorically) Austen's insistence upon marrying off her heroines. Brown's "polemical reading" suggests that "a feminist literary criticism that is worthy of the name" (313) would take a socio-political approach different from the one that has so far dominated Anglo-American feminism. Brown finds "the true philosophical basis of feminism in Mary Wollstonecraft," not in J. S. Mill; she privileges a communityor global-based ideal over individualism, and implies that anyone reading from this more genuine feminist angle will come to appreciate Austen properly. Positioning herself as taking a broader view than Austen's "feminist detractors," Brown concludes that "we can only be grateful that Jane Austen's place in history is not dependent on the narrow approach of feminists writing today" (313). What could be more narrow, though, than an approach that identifies one "true" philosophical basis for feminism, or, for that matter, than a call for revising reading strategies that limits the available possibilities to variations among ways of looking at heroines as if they were historical figures subject to the socio-political constraints of their author's era? The kinds of feminist-historicist criticism that delimit Brown's horizons tend to treat characters as if they were "real people," whose marital fate depends upon their situation in history. But what happens when a feminist resists the powerful temptation to think of Jane Austen's heroines as persons, and scrutinizes them as functions of texts, instead? Feminist narratology (the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender) provides a method

Sentimental Daughters@@@Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel: The Sentimental Romance of Heterosexuality

Abstract: \"Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel\" is a provocative study of the father-daughter story - a relatively neglected dimension of the family romance. It has important implications for the history of the novel, for our understanding of key texts in that history, and for theories concerning the representation of gender, family relations, and heterosexuality in Western culture. In the English and American novel, argues Zwinger, the \"good woman\" is a father's daughter and constructed to the very particular specifications of an omnipresent and unvoiced paternal desire. Zwinger supports her case with an analysis of both \"high brow\" and \"low brow\" novels and with brilliant textual analyses of five novels in particular: \"Clarissa Harlowe\", \"Dombey and Son\", \"Little Women\", \"The Golden Bowl\" and \"The Story of O\". In the dominant discourse of Anglo-Saxon culture, the father's daughter figured sentimentally, simultaneously provides alibi and cornerstone to the patriarchal edifices of domesticity and desire. Zwinger's analysis of the sexual politics embodied in the figure of the sentimental daughter raises compelling critical and cultural issues. In her conclusion, Zwinger offers a broad overview of the 19th-century novel, asking what difference it makes when the writer is a daughter. She shows how the daughter's family romance pictures the father as inadequate, ironically requiring the sentimental daughter as patriarchal prop. She develops a useful concept of hysteria and argues that generic \"disorder\" and hysterical \"intrusions\" mark the family romantic novels of Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. And finally, she makes the case that the daughter's choice to stay home is not necessarily an act of simple complicity: for, by staying home, she comes as close as she can to disrupting the father-daughter romance.

From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference

Abstract: there occurred a cataclysmic event, far more dramatic than anything that happened in England, a very short geographical distance away, whose consequences were directly governed by the established order of the English state. That was, of course, the famine in Ireland--a disaster without comparison in Europe. Yet if we consult the two maps of either the official ideology of the period or the recorded subjective experience of its novels, neither of them extended to include this catastrophe right on their doorstep, causally connected to the socio-political processes in England.'

Private Gardens, Public Swamps: "Howards End" and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt

Abstract: "Reality" and "realty" derive from the same root word, so it is not too surprising that the Schlegel sisters' premium on personal relationships, the "real life" named by Helen, reveals itself to be equally preoccupied with the business of real estate. Of what, after all, does the "real life" consist? Friendships or property? The question is never put quite that baldly, and Forster endows it with equally serious, equally comic proportions. But such a query goes to the heart of what has been variously called the liberal "dilemma," "paradox," or, as pejoratively denoted by marxist critics, "the liberal confusion."2 Through Margaret and Helen, Forster succeeded in delineating the most comprehensive picture of liberal guilt in this century. As an Edwardian, however, Forster was by no means alone in this obsessive desire to reconcile liberalism's commitment to the

Emily's Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and Photography

Abstract: This essay will read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as part of a process that redefined the way in which educated Englishmen and women understood their place within a modern nation. The cultural change on which I want to focus occurred during the 1830s and 40s while Bronte grew up and did her writing. According to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall as well as E.P. Thompson, the same period saw the entrenchment of the modern middle classes and established the way they would deal with an organizing urban proletariat.' During this period, according to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and many others, English people also began to reconceptualize their relationship as a race to the peoples of Africa and Asia.2 Historical scholarship has given us two separate narratives to account for these changes in the semiotic behavior of class and race respectively. One narrative describes the class struggle that took place within England as the nation underwent industrialization, and the other tells of Western Europe's attempt to dominate nations that we now locate in the Third World. Bronte's novel, as I am going to read it, took part in a regional or ethnic remapping of British culture that is essential to both narratives and yet can be explained by neither one. This remapping divided the British Isles into a modern literate urban core and what sociologist Michael Hechter refers to as a celtic or ethnic periphery.3 To suggest how Wuthering Heights fit into this long-overlooked chapter of modern cultural history, let me turn to an example of a popular Victorian genre called spirit photography (figure 1). Now any photograph, as Roland Barthes

Getting Fixed: Feminine Identity and Scopic Crisis in The Turn of the Screw

Abstract: Like narrative, the "gaze" has become an object of suspicion, especially within feminist discourse. One source of this suspicion has been Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," which argued that narrative in classic Hollywood cinema works together with cultural and cinematic codes of looking to sustain a phallocentric cultural unconscious.3 Foucault's discussions of surveillance, "panopticism," and the "clinical gaze" have from another direction contributed to more general suspicions of what is being called the "gaze."4 In a critical climate that frequently represents the gaze as something sinister, as a sign of power and a means of control, it is easy to forget that being the object of someone's look can in some circumstances be pleasurable--even sustaining and necessary. What makes this easy to forget, at least for those of us concerned with the position of women in society, is that women (according to Mulvey's influential argument) have been tethered to the passive side of looking. As Mulvey observes, "[i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female," a "division of labour" that defines woman as spectacle, man as bearer of the look. Others have argued that in various forms of representation (novels, film) and in the discourse of psychoanalysis, women's active participation in looking is represented as castrating or otherwise threatening to male subjectivity and is therefore

Virginia Woolf's Elegiac Enterprise

Abstract: John Mepham writes that Virginia Woolf's "insight into the connections between literary form and forms of mourning ... has cultural and historical rather than purely personal significance" (143). Victorian mourning rituals obeyed the "Victorian game of manners," which is "founded on restraint, sympathy, unselfishness-all civilized qualities," as Woolf describes it in "A Sketch of the Past" (150-51). But for Woolf, the rules of mourning did not allow for sincere expression of, or recovery from, grief. Traditional Victorian aesthetics, it could be argued, similarly deprive the writer of elegy of an appropriate form of expression,' and Woolf's response to both restrictions was to experiment with the genre of elegy. The fictional form as developed by such modernist writers as Woolf provides a public forum for the staging of their "general cultural malaise" (Mepham 143), as well as more personal grievances. Woolf comments on the experimental potential of the novel in "The Narrow Bridge of Art" (1927):

James, Degas, and the Emersonian Gaze

Abstract: and perhaps most enduring sensibilities. Back in the late 1970s, and again in the early 1980s, Fredric Jameson in very few words redocumented the Jamesian aesthetic and brought it under the aegis of Jameson's own brand of marxism1 which was then emerging as a dominant critical force here in America and vying for currency elsewhere. Despite a plethora of analyses representing a wide range of feminist and poststructural positions, counterclaims of any serious threat to Jameson's marxist grasp on the ideology of Jamesian aesthetics were slow in coming. Then in the late 1980s Harold Bloom edited two collections of essays: Henry James and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. Obviously meant on the one hand to supersede William Stafford's 1967 New Critical collection, Perspectives on James's The Portrait of a Lady, these essays add up on the other hand to a strong anti-marxist, deconstructionist intervention-one that deals with Jameson's earlier appropriation largely by ignoring it, meanwhile hammering home the Emersonian origins of the Jamesian tradition and reconceptualizing James's narrative consciousness as an allegorical aesthetic that shows up first in Portrait.2 Both these latter maneuvers supposedly render moot any question of history or even memory in James, thereby wiping out all marxist entitlement and leaving James safely in the hands of American deconstruction.

Morrison, Gissing, and the Stark Reality

Abstract: Finally, in the early 1890s, the urban poor acquire a voice. Not the ventriloquized voice of Henry Mayhew, but the voice of one who was born in the East End of lower working-class parents, grew up there, worked there, and chose it as his subject. Arthur Morrison was born in Poplar in 1863, the son of an engine fitter who worked on the docks. His father died of consumption when Arthur was a boy, and his mother raised the three children by running a haberdasher's shop in Grundy Street. Arthur himself took a job early as office boy in the architect's department of the School Board of London at a weekly salary of seven shillings, and moved up to junior and then "third class" clerk in 1886, when he left to become secretary of the Beaumont Trust, which administered Besant's People's Palace. There he started a Dickensian kind of journalistic ascent, publishing pieces on the East End in the Palace Journal, honing his journalistic skills at the evening Globe, and finally attracting attention, like Boz, with the publication in Macmillan's Magazine (October 1891) of his sketch of "A Street" in the East End.'

"Take Me Anyplace You Want": Pynchon's Literary Career as a Maternal Construct in "Vineland"

Abstract: It is impossible to read Vineland and not wonder about its author, still alive, somewhere. So he was indeed actually alive, one exclaims, during the seventeen years between Gravity's Rainbow and this new novel, which it often seemed would never appear. These years constitute, I want to argue, an active element in our response to Vineland. But what sort of literary career can such an author be said to have, now that we have a text to demonstrate that it is not over? This is another question with which I want to concern myself. My paper will be in two parts. First, and more briefly, I want to consider how the tantalizing lack that is Pynchon's personal life functions in the presence of critical discourse about him. No author tests how we actually abide in our critical practice with respect to the widely theorized notion of "the death of the author" better than Pynchon. Certainly no other living author reveals how his own particular "death" conspires with our need for authoritative life as his readers. How does Vineland address this state of affairs, and how might it be construed as a construction not only about its author's felt relation to his own literary career but also about his own reception as an author after so many years without the publication of a novel? Secondly, I will offer a reading of Vineland that focuses on what the fact of Pynchon's having "delivered" a book after so many years might resemble. I use the word "delivered" advisedly. My reading will center on the authority of maternity in the novel. Vineland seeks a biological grounding for at least two reasons. Maternity provides a figure for the production of something that is and is not an author's-i.e., is and is not something original. Moreover, maternity offers a convertible term for a literary career; both, no matter how experiential, are subject to the demands of social and cultural institutionalization, which therefore makes the subject of each, mothers and authors, vulnerable to a more powerful, specifically male replicative agency that acts to incorporate the reproductive fact of birth.

Subaltern Consciousness and the Historiography of the Indian Rebellion of 1857

Abstract: My interest in the 1857 rebellion is more than academic. It has to do partly with the story of how my great-grandfather Baba Karaak Singh was awarded a jagir (an estate and its revenues) by the British for "loyalty," in the midst of a "contagion" of betrayal and treachery by mutinous sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected landlords, magnates, and peasants. Faithful to his masters, the old man, so the family legend goes, rode like the wind on a dark and moonless night to bring to the officer in charge details of the secret military plans of the rebels. My great-grandfather's name does not appear in any official roll-call of heroes or villains, pre-independence or post-independence; he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by history. But he was remembered very well by his children and their children for the ill-gotten land that he left them, which grew sugar-cane that share-croppers planted and harvested and paid one-third as revenue to him, and the freshness and sweetness of which my mother could still taste in her mouth years later when she spoke of Baba Karaak Singh and his family jagir. So much for innocence. But I tell this story less as a confession of complicity by inheritance than as an explanation of the initial enthusiasm with which I read in the early 1980s the first essays in Indian social history by a group of post-independence historians in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, the first volume of which appeared in 1982 under the general editorship of Ranajit Guha, Australian National University, Canberra. "The historiography of Indian nationalism," Guha states in the first essay of the volume, "has for a long time been dominated by elitism--colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism" ("Historiography of Colonial India," Subaltern Studies I, 1)-an elitism which saw the making of the Indian nation, predominantly, as the achievement of ruling-class ideas, institutions, and personalities.

Fattening up on Pickwick

Abstract: What if we said that The Pickwick Papers was not so much a book to read as to relish? What use might we make of such a suggestion and the possibility that the novel opened up for us a series of secret, half-shameful indulgences? For one thing, we might explore more openly the regressive tendencies of the novel, of key words and images like the "cozy," the "comfortable," the glowing fire inside and the raging cold without. Everyone knows that this is the novel which tells us all we know about Christmas. And what it tells us is that Christmas represents a movement inward and backward: to "the delusions of our childish days."2 It carries us back to old juvenility, allows us to bask in the warmth of pure puerility. The Pickwick Papers makes no demands on us; it does not push us into a strenuous adult world, all sweat and muscle and cartilage. It gives us a world of infinitely yielding, cushiony flesh.

"Strung into the Apollonian Dream": Pynchon's Psychology of Engineers

Abstract: It is a curious fact that Gravity's Rainbow, a novel famous for its treatment of science and technology, should include amid all its technical detail so much that is dreamlike, spiritualistic, or in some other way "non-scientific." For every equation or popularization of science cited in the text, there are again as many references to tarot cards, witchcraft, and primitive religion, while more often than not Pynchon's most complex technical excursions are embedded within dreams, hallucinations, or psychic transactions among the living and the dead. The book's central symbol-the rocket-might be described equally by mandalas as by ballistics, and that unimaginable corporate totality-the Firm--seems to employ as many psychics as scientists. To the reader looking to sort out the significance of Pynchon's many technological metaphors, analogies, and images, this is all very disconcerting. One can try to ignore the extraneous details, but sooner or later the most single-minded investigator into the novel's technological material must be "thrown back," like Tyrone Slothrop at the height of his quest, "on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drugepistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity" (Gravity's Rainbow 582). This is more than ironic contrast, more than a playful addition of fantasies and occult themes that divert us from the book's "serious" subject matter. The deeper we get into Pynchon's novel, the less we are likely to distinguish between "scientific" and "non-scientific" models of representation, and the more integral the dreams and fantasies come to seem. As Kathryn Hume points out in the most comprehensive attempt yet to uncover a coherent mythic pattern in Gravity's Rainbow, much of Pynchon's spiritualistic material is presented "as if it were as real as V-2s" (47). The rocket itself can often seem an almost mystical entity, especially to the various sects and communities within the Zone who worship it as their "Holy Text." Technology, more than a mode of apprehending the world that modern readers can believe in, is in fact fraught with the mystical and religious qualities it is generally supposed to have supplantedour collective adherence to an ideology of progress and scientific discovery having taken the place of an earlier, theological commitment. This is a common enough way among contemporary mythologies of expressing a truth about the course of secular history, and if the rocket were only an external symbol of technology and the Faustian desires it enacts, few readers would have difficulty assimilating its more mystical attributes. But the rocket in Gravity's Rainbow is more than symbolic: first and foremost, it is "raw hardware," a concrete assemblage of parts and functions whose details are too profuse, and too firmly rooted in technological fact, to have been introduced solely

The Woman (In) Question: Gender, Politics, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "Lucretia"

Abstract: There was no single, universally recognized "Woman Question" in the England of the 1840s, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Lucretia: or, the Children of Night (1846) was published. Another decade at least would slip by before William Greg identified the excess of unmarried women revealed by the 1851 census as "the problem to be solved." Similarly the issue of women's suffrage raised for a small audience in 1825 by Anna Wheeler and William Thompson's "Appeal of One Half the Human Race" would not enter the wider arena of parliamentary politics until the 1860s.' (As we shall see later on, Anna Wheeler herself would meanwhile serve as Bulwer's satiric model for his heroine Lucretia.) Yet in a period marked by working class radicalism, urbanization, and the reorganization of both public and private life, the question of woman's place was crucial. The female subject occupied a privileged position in the ideological construction of middle-class subjectivity in the nineteenth century. As a naturalized source of peace and love whose ostensible freedom from the degradation of the public sphere was a measure of the moral superiority of English civilization, the Victorian female subject was a logical site for the exploration of the corrupting effects of modern society. In Bulwer's novel, Lucretia Clavering's disruption of the moral sanctum of the Victorian family and her desire for power outside the confines of the home participate in the Victorian debates about the refashioning of modern society and the popular concerns about the effect of industrialization on the moral and ethical structures