Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 1996"

Reading Irish Culture@@@Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture

Abstract: When James Joyce called the Irish "the most belated race in Europe", he stated a complex truth about the history of his people and the nation they had been creating since the 18th century. The Irish would, in Joyce's liftime, write many of the masterpieces of modernism in English, while at the same time forging a nation-state in many ways still backward-looking and traditionalist. The paradox of Irish history is one of the many topics addressed in this book. It explores the interrelation of Irish political history and Irish literature, and reconfigures the contours of Irish cultural history. Including an examination of the Anglo-Irish novel from Swift to George Moore, the book discusses a host of unusual topics, from Shaw and science and Irish attitudes, to nature and the question of language, and a full-scale investigation of the Celtic revival. Terry Eagleton is the author of "Ideology", "Marxism and Literary Criticism", "Criticism and Iedology", "Walter Benjamin" and "Literary Theory: An Introduction".

The Clinical Novel: Phrenology and "Villette"

Abstract: For medicine may be regarded generally as the knowledge of the loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is required, and can reconcile the most hostile elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is a skillful practitioner. Plato, Symposium 36

Girl Talk: Jane Eyre and the Romance of Women's Narration

Abstract: With the childhood declaration, "Speak I must" Jane resolves to narrate her own story (68), to explain and vindicate her life, to exercise her voice and participate in the "joyous conversational murmur" (198). In spite of her extreme youth, her habits of quiescence and submission (resistance was "a new thing for me," she readily admits [44]), her need to be loved and approved, even if only by her oppressors, Jane stands up for herself and for fairness. "I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale," Jane warns Mrs. Reed. "People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!... If any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty" (69, 68). Jane experiences her first moment of self-narration, in conflict with the official version of her life given by Mrs. Reed, as a moment of "unhoped-for liberty," "the first victory I had gained," "the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt" (69). No wonder, then, that Jane Eyre has come to occupy a position of privilege in the feminist canon.' The novel is read as a "revolutionary manifesto of the subject" (Cora Kaplan 173). Jane's value as a feminist heroine is "figured in the ability to tell (if not direct) her own story" (Poovey 140; see also Homans, Peters). The story of Jane's voice, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued, is "a

Acts of Custody and Incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract: If perversity were not so often the defining mode in Bronte criticism, it might seem perverse to assert that Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are family plots, in fact, stories about custody. Literary criticism-not to mention, in the case of Wuthering Heights, Hollywood and a fiercely held popular opinionhas insisted on these novels as romantic fictions about the couple. And there is ample reason for critics to repeat an attention that the novels themselves would seem not only to invite but to demand. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall offers not just one couple in its effort to demonstrate the lurid brutalities of marriage, but pair after pair of ill-suited (we might as well say violently opposed) mates. In fact, the overdetermined quality of nuptial impossibility among these couples, and the determination with which the novel nevertheless reproduces them, is suspicious. As for Wuthering Heights, the endurance of a single unkillable couple becomes a novelistic obsession similar to the endlessly repeated duos in Wildfell Hall. Not only are Cathy and Heathcliff unable to exit the narrative decently even in death, they are forced to endure the unimaginable horror of an interminable courtship carried on (and on) over supernatural terrain, and apparently reproduced with modifications in the various unions that the novel offers as distorted reflections

Engendering Naturalism: Narrative Form and Commodity Spectacle in U.S. Naturalist Fiction

Abstract: In a well-known passage from Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the eponymous heroine, Carrie Meeber, "an apt student in fortune's ways," learns a lesson from her lover in the art of feminine public appearance. Carrie, a young woman from the countryside recently arrived in Chicago, walks with her lover, Drouet, and "pick[s] ... up" from him the trick of attentively watching women who pass along the street:

Conjugal Love and the Enlightenment Subject: the Colonial Context of Non-identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda

Abstract: The publishing history of Maria Edgeworth’s second novel, Belinda, registers the anxieties of a society intensely involved in debates over the abolition of slavery and the proper management of British colonies in the West Indies. By the time the novel went into its third edition in 1810, the depiction of interracial marriage in the previous two editions (1801 and 1802) had been all but erased, principally at the suggestion of Edgeworth’s father.1 In these earlier editions of the novel Juba, the African servant of a Jamaican plantation owner, marries an English farmer’s daughter and settles with her as a tenant on an English estate. The 1810 text removed the trauma of miscegenation for a reactionary audience not by omitting the Juba character completely, but by replacing him in this conjugal scenario with the ubiquitously named James Jackson. As Suvendrini Perera points out, this alteration appeased the most recalcitrant antiabolitionist fears about racial mixing and the integrity of British women in a metropolis overrun by freed slaves.2 The revisions do not efface Edgeworth’s own abolitionist sympathies, which are evident elsewhere in the novel, but they do affect the politics of the text in ways that might at first seem unexpected.

The Financial Imp: Ethics and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract: Economic issues have never been far from British fiction. Indeed, as literary historians have often pointed out, the rise of the novel in Britain in the eighteenth century itself closely paralleled the emergence of the new science of political economy in the period.' Similarly, during the Victorian era, while the novel reached new heights of popularity in England, political economy was the main source of philosophical debate. In British philosophy at the time the standing of political economy was quite clear: it marked the sharp separation of moral philosophy into utilitarian and anti-utilitarian schools. The critical point here was the validity of applying the methods of political economy to moral questions, and this point effectively divided moral philosophy into two schools. There were, on the one hand, those advocating the exercise of economic or financial reason in ethical deliberation-the calculation of the moral profitability of an action-and, on the other, those who held that ethics was a matter beyond calculation, the result, not of calculation, but of a human endowment or gift (an "intuition," as they said). The main currents of this debate over political economy in Victorian philosophy can also be discerned in British fiction at the time. Harriet Martineau's decision in her Illustrations of Political Economy to use fiction to bring political economy into the British mainstream (xi-xii) and Dickens's efforts two decades later in Hard Times to stem the tide of political economism are only two of the most obvious, if ultimately unsatisfying, attempts to produce narratives that would argue for one side or the other in the conflict. Some works of fiction at the time, however, rather than choosing a side in the debate, perceptively confused its entrenched positions and managed to avoid becoming bogged down in the stagnant arguments for and against political economy. Especially telling in this context, I would argue, was the reflection on the key question of finance, which can be found at the center of certain works of British fiction during the period. What follows here is an attempt to sketch an approach to this reflection on finance in Victorian fiction, first by outlining the importance of finance in the debates dominating moral philosophy at the time and then by considering this question in the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose contribution to the debate over ethics and economics in the period has yet to be appreciated.

Inter-Nationalism: "Castle Rackrent" and Anglo-Irish Union

Abstract: By the Act of Union of 1800, Ireland merged with Great Britain to form one United Kingdom. To mark this change, a proclamation issued the day the Union took effect added the Cross of St. Patrick to the British flag, where it appears to this day as a red cross saltire (X-shaped cross) broken up, or "surmounted," by the Cross of St. George (Barraclough 22). This choice of the Cross of St. Patrick to supplement the flag was "curious," as the editor of Flags of the World mildly puts it, since "the Irish have never used this cross as a national emblem," preferring the shamrock or the golden harp. In fact, because St. Patrick was not a martyr, he "was not entitled to a cross as his badge" at all. It is true the Cross of St. Patrick was not concocted on the spot; at the same time, however, it was not exactly the Irish themselves who had invented it, but rather, "the powerful family of the Geraldines, whose presence in Ireland as representatives of Henry II was due to the efforts of the English sovereign to subjugate the country" (Barraclough 22). The ironies accumulate rapidly here. First, in claiming to add something Irish to the ostensibly British flag, the proclamation in fact added something AngloIrish. Second, by giving St. Patrick a cross and thereby making him, as it were, a posthumous martyr, the new flag changed-murdered-something Irish. Third, in the process of symbolizing a larger British national identity, it created a symbol of Irish identity. Fourth, also in the process of symbolizing this larger identity, the changing of a flag that had been the same for almost two hundred years (since 1606) made newly visible the constituent parts of the flag (that is, the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew) and, by reducing the amount of white (which is to say, of the Scottish cross) and breaking up the Cross of St. Patrick, the new flag visually and cognitively foregrounded the English cross. In claiming to make Irishness part of a larger Britishness, then, the modification of the Union Jack simultaneously ignored, killed, and created Irishness; equated Irishness with Anglo-Irishness; and emphasized Englishness. The vehicle and emblem for these seemingly contradictory maneuvers is a cross or X. A similarly curious X-shaped cross appears as the only non-linguistic, graphic mark in Castle Rackrent, a novel by the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth which was published in 1800, on the eve of Union. An Irish landlord, Sir Conolly Rackrent, decides to flip a coin to determine whom he will marry: Isabella Moneygawl, the daughter of a neighboring landlord, or Judy M'Quirk, a local peasant. Taking a halfpenny,' Sir Condy first "makes a cross on the smooth side," saying "Judy M'Quirk, her mark" (45). An "editorial" footnote inserted into the text at this point informs the reader that "It was the custom in Ireland for those who could not write, to make a cross to stand for their signature, as was formerly

Narrating Hysteria: "Caleb Williams" and the Cultural History of Nerves

Abstract: England experienced an epidemic of nerves in 1800. As one physician noted, "nervous diseases make up two-thirds of the whole with which civilized society is infested" (Trotter, View viii).2 He could make such a claim because "nerves" was a broad, undifferentiated disease that took on the appearance of other diseases. Every complaint was potentially nervous in origin, and so nerves became the leading category of illness in the late-Georgian period. The explanation for this epidemic was social. Since the physician George Cheyne, in The English Malady (1733), had tied the stereotypical gloom of the English aristocracy to England's "wealth and abundance," rather than to an intrinsic defect in the upper-class body, the nervous complaint was viewed as the disease of civilization (i). The late-Georgian epidemic was explained in similar terms. Medical writers pointed to the continued accumulation of British wealth since Cheyne's day, and its diffusion among the growing middle class explained the apparent growth in nervous disorders.

The Institution of the English Novel: Defoe's Contribution

Abstract: Astute and careful readers, even when acknowledging that what we now call the novel did not then exist, proceed as if Daniel Defoe were seized by the dynamics of the genre he unselfconsciously employed. Indeed, arguably none of us has been free of the platonic ideality or natural/supernatural power of form in our reading of Defoe, and it is this insistent force of genre that has given us the picture of the bumbling, artless, near illiterate, political journalist/hack, chronic liar, who stumbled into the invention of the novel somewhat on the model of the man

The Modernist Matrix@@@Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture

Abstract: Throughout literary history, the figure of the mother has been the subject of much critical attention. While traditional studies have focused on women writers and the maternal, Laura Anne Doyle pairs literary movements not often considered together-Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance-to show how the figure of the mother haunts modern novels from their very opening pages. Figures such as the slave mother in the Prologue to Invisible Man, Lena Grove in Light in August, and Sethe in Beloved, Doyle shows, form a tradition that marks the tip of a cultural iceberg, the peaking expression of a cultural matrix at once racial and sexual, literary and scientific. Exploding the assumed persona of the mother, Doyle formulates a theory of \"racial patriarchy\" in which the circumspection of reproduction within racial borders engenders what she calls the \"race mother\" figure in literary and cultural narratives. Making use of heterogeneous materials, ranging from kinship studies to histories of slavery, Bordering on the Body traces the symbolic operations of the \"race mother\" from Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology to eugenics and twentieth-century fiction. This newest title in the Race and American Culture series offers a breakthrough in race and gender theory, a racial reconfiguration of modernism, and a reinterpretation of discourses of nature since Romanticism.

Kiss Me, Stupid: Sophistication, Sexuality, and "Vanity Fair"

Abstract: At the end of Vanity Fair (1847-48), Becky Sharp hires solicitors to challenge the insurance company that, suspecting her of having killed Jos Sedley for his life insurance policy, refuses payment of it. Since the challenge succeeds, we are led to conclude that Becky not only gets away with murder, but profits from it. The fact, however, that her solicitors are "Messrs Burke, Thurtell, & Hayes" (796)the names of three notorious murderers--doesn't just make Becky look even guiltier: it signals the murderousness of the law itself, its implication in the violence it seeks, if not to punish, then to excuse or deny. But if the law's violence thus gets figured as a killing literality, the end of the novel merely thematizes the subtler brutality of a law that pervades, even constitutes, Vanity Fair as a whole: the brutality that, while seeming to assume the mitigating disguise of sophistication, more fundamentally is sophistication, the fatal sophistication of the novel's narrator, the man about town whose famous irony extends an iron fist all the more powerful for being inseparable from the velvet glove that covers it. That sartorial image suggests the mode in which Thackeray's narrative violence most tellingly operates: the mode, in fact, of la mode. Enforcing the law of sophistication with a vengeance, the Thackerayan narrator reminds us that the most sadistic of the police, if not the most abusive, are the fashion police, those arbiters of taste whose profit, that is, whose cultural authority, doesn't come without a certain risk of its own: the risk of a distinctly problematic relation to the norms of middle-class heterosexual masculinity. Is there something "inherently gay" about the role of arbiter of taste? Without unpacking the question's numerous historical and theoretical implications, and without addressing the more local issue of Thackeray's sexuality, I would simply point out that he was obviously not "gay-identified" and-as my second

"Love Is Home-Sickness": Nostalgia and Lesbian Desire in "Sapphira and the Slave Girl"

Abstract: The winding country road which climbed from the post office to Timber Ridge was then, and for sixty years afterward, the most beautiful stretch in the northwestern turnpike.... The road followed the ravine, climbing all the way, until at the "Double S" it swung out in four great loops round hills of solid rock; rock which the destroying armament of modern road-building has not yet succeeded in blasting away. The four loops are now denuded and ugly, but motorists, however unwillingly, must swing round them if they go on that road at all. In the old times, when Nancy and Mrs. Blake were alive, and for sixty years afterward, those now-naked hills were rich in verdure, the winding ravine was deep and green, the stream at the bottom flowed bright and soothingly vocal. A tramp pedlar from town, or a poor farmer, coming down on foot from his stony acres to sell a coonskin, stopped to rest here, or walked lingeringly. When the countrymen mentioned the place in speech, if it were but to say: "I'd jist got as fur as the Double e-S-S," their voices took on something slow and dreamy, as if recalling the place itself; the shade, the unstained loveliness, the pleasant feeling one had there. (170-71)

Persuading the Navy Home: Austen and Married Women's Professional Property

Abstract: ... it seems an ungracious task to attempt to rouse [English young ladies] from their summer dreams; and were it not that wintry days will come, and the surface of life be ruffled, and the mariner, even she who steers the smallest bark, be put upon the inquiry for what port she is really bound-were it not that the cry of utter helplessness is of no avail in rescuing from the waters of affliction, and the plea of ignorance unheard upon the far-extending and deep ocean of experience, and the question of accountability perpetually sounding, like the billows of this lower world-I would be the last to call the dreamer back to a consciousness of present things. (17)

A Modern Odyssey: Realism, the Masses, and Nationalism in George Eliot's "Felix Holt"

Abstract: Within realism's impulse or dynamic toward the representation of the masses lies the search for the ever more novel or strange, the desire for the discovery of new aesthetic material with which to work. Citing the Goncourts as exemplary of this driven fascination with the common people, Auerbach quotes Edmond de Goncourt himself, who articulates this appeal in terms that strongly echo those of the imperial or colonizing impulse, seeking adventure in foreign places: "the people, the mob, if you will, has for me the attraction of unknown and undiscovered populations, something of the exoticism which travelers go to seek" (498). For our purposes here what is important are the textual and aesthetic determinants of such an attitude. Auerbach argues that this attitude necessarily excludes from its representation "everything functionally essential, the people's work, its position within modern society, the political, social, and moral ferments which are alive in it and which point to the future" (498, emphasis added). Given this, one may well ask, what then can or does the so-called industrial novel do? If, indeed, the impetus motivating its representational concerns functionally precludes the representation of its supposed subject matter-the working people and their work-what does the industrial novel in fact represent? Raymond Williams, in his ground-breaking work Culture and Society, reads the industrial novel as a genre defined by its conflicting concerns (99-119). On the one hand, these novels embody a critical response to industrialism, with, in some cases, genuine sympathy for the plight of the working class. On the other hand, in the face of the actual conditions of the working class, they back down from any serious involvement out of fear, opting instead for a backdoor exit of sorts involving either the death or the emigration-to a new world, often the New World--of their politically engaged and potentially militant protagonists.