Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2000"

Writing the Imperial Imaginary@@@Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War

Abstract: 1. The war at home 2. The concentration camps controversy and the press 3. Gender ideology as military policy - the camps, continued 4. Cannibals or knights: sexual honor in the propaganda of Arthur Conan Doyle and W. T. Stead 5. Interpreting South Africa to Britain: Olive Schreiner, Boers, and Africans 6. The imperial imaginary: the press, empire, and the literary figure Notes Works cited.

Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image

Abstract: Whoever would paint portraits perfectly must so paint that each spectator may, with truth, exclaim, This is indeed to paint! This is true, living likeness; perfect nature; it is not painting!-Outline, form, proportion, position, attitude, complexion, light and shade, freedom, ease, nature! Nature! Nature in every characteristic disposition! Nature in the whole! ... Evident to all men, all ages, the ignorant and the connoisseur, most conspicuous to him who has most knowledge; no suspicion of art; a countenance in a mirror, to which we would speak, that speaks to us, that contemplates more than it is contemplated; we rush to it, we embrace it, we are enchanted! -Johann Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy 176

When Bad Things Happen to Bad People: Liability and Individual Consciousness in Adam Bede and Silas Marner

Abstract: A large portion of George Eliot's first full-fledged novel Adam Bede (1859) is devoted to recognizing and adjudicating the ways in which individuals can be held responsible for their actions. It is, perhaps, needless to say that Eliot falls heavily on the side of accountability. The outcomes of the novel's major plot points-Adam's guilt about his father's death, Arthur's carelessness with Hetty, and Hetty's murder of her child-all illustrate one of the novel's underlying premises: people eventually pay for their wrongdoing. Despite its centrality to the plot, however, Eliot's credo of personal responsibility has generally received only glancing critical attention. This apparent lack of interest in debating Eliot's criteria for a liable act (or for retribution) seems to derive from the ease with which the novel makes and unmakes its guilty parties.1 That is, because Eliot presents the reader with a seemingly self-contained and coherent account of the novel's own methods for doling out rewards and punishments, the novel itself licenses an unproblematized critical attitude towards the function of liability. Ultimately, bad actions are punished; characters pay for their moral infractions-through the judicial system, through more local forms of social censure, or by way of internal rituals of self-condemnation. Conversely, good actions are rewarded; virtuous characters get married, prosper, and enjoy the admiration of their communities. The proportionality of these end results helps the reader feel satisfied that the characters "got what they deserved." How Eliot administers such doses of moral castigation and approbation, not the logic of liability that underwrites it, has been the focus of critical debate. Critics tend to identify two separate, and seemingly incompatible, projects at work in this novel: first, a realistic depiction of the chain of cause and effect within a social community, and, second, the representation of a moral system that sees beyond the external world of cause and effect in order to identify and punish the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Accordingly, critics have poured their energy into reconciling Eliot's moral commitments with her deterministic or "realistic" ones. For those concerned with Eliot's desire to depict a world rigorously regulated by laws of cause and effect, the imposition of a moral order at the end of the novel seems to fly in the face of the realistic project. For those who

Creole Family Politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Abstract: Domestic ideology in American fiction is a slippery thing, possibly because it is so closely linked to the debates over American slavery. Take, for example, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that George Sand proclaimed to be admirably "domestic and of the family" (Review 4).1 In recent years, scholars have (re)discovered that Stowe's brand of sentimentalism was a radical revision of family ideology of the patriarchal sort, and they have praised it for subverting the "domestic institution" of American slavery.2 Yet Sand's review ought to remind us that Uncle Tom's Cabin was no work of avant-garde subversion, but rather, a successful bid for national (and even international) prominence. Uncle Tom's Cabin represents a crucial moment in the United States, when debates over slavery in the expanding territories came to redefine the American family and the American nation. In order to repudiate slavery and render it foreign to the sentimental core of her imagined community, Stowe worked hard to disassociate it from another "domestic" institution that the break-away colonists had inherited from their colonial forefathers: that of the colonial family. In the process, as I will argue, Uncle Tom's Cabin fundamentally restructured the American family by separating settlers from slaves in American households, assimilating French colonial others, and effacing the colonial family's origins as a settler-and-slave formation. To understand just how Stowe restructures the American national home in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is crucial to decipher her use of Louisiana Creole characters and settings. This is a challenge that even our most celebrated thinkers have failed to meet. In his survey of the black characters in the novel, for example, James Baldwin simply discards those blacks who pass as French or Spanish, "since we have only the author's word that they are Negro and they are, in all

Austen’s Powers: Engaging with Adam Smith in Debates About Wealth and Virtue

Abstract: I argue here that in her novels Austen participates in the longstanding debate about the choice "between virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion," a debate that has been engaged in "every phase of Western tradition, [where] there is a conception of virtue-Aristotelian, Thomist, neoMachiavellian, or Marxian-to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat" (Pocock 123, 104). As Pocock goes on to explain, the radical contribution that eighteenth-century political economists like Hume and Smith made to this discussion was to argue that the pursuit of wealth could itself be virtuous, providing benefits to commercial society as a whole and to the individuals living within that society. While Smith was perhaps the single most famous advocate for the expansion of commerce, he was also extremely troubled by the effects on the individual of a culture where money was increasingly becoming the dominant social power. As Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff note, "it is not an easy task to reconcile his evident distaste for the vulgar materialism of the 'great scramble' of commercial society with his clear endorsement of economic growth" (8-9). Smith articulated this ambivalence most powerfully when revising The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1789 after writing The Wealth of Nations to which he added a passage to the effect that the

The Make-Up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction

Abstract: Not long ago, the familiar rift between academic and grassroots or public feminism was rehearsed once again.' This time, it took the form of a retort against one strand of postmodernism, that is, a postmodern feminism that Martha Nussbaum critiqued because, in her view, it turns its back on the material ("real") side of life and turns instead, or retreats into, the verbal or symbolic. In Nussbaum's formulation, there is only the "flimsiest of connections" between the verbal and symbolic and the real situation of real women (38). In one swift assertion, Nussbaum seemed to eschew not only postmodern feminism but the whole project of New Historicism and any school of critical thought (marxism, psychoanalysis, structural anthropology) that argues for the connections between the verbal and the symbolic, on the one hand, and the material and real, on the other. Championing "concrete projects" and citing Catherine MacKinnon as an exemplary academic feminist because every one of her pages gets the reader's hands dirty in the "real issues of legal and institutional change," Nussbaum's specific target is Judith Butler. Butler, Nussbaum claims, leads a generation of feminists into a "proud neglect of the material side of life" (43). This is odd, given that Butler's Gender Trouble sets out explicitly to redress a problem especially relevant to movement politics and messy legislatures: the presumption that the term "women" denotes

A Victim in Search of a Torturer: Reading Masochism in Wilkie Collins's No Name

Abstract: "You planned this marriage of your own free will," pursued the captain, with the furtive look and thefaltering voice of a man ill at ease. "It was your own idea-not mine. I won't have the responsibility laid on my shoulders-no! ...." "Look at these," pursued Captain Wragge, holding up the envelopes. "If I turn these to the usefor which they have been written, Mrs. Lecount's master will never receive Mrs. Lecount's letter. If I tear them up, he will know by tomorrow's post that you are the woman who visited him in Vauxhall Walk. Say the word! Shall I tear the envelopes up, or shall I put them back in my pocket?" ... She raised her head; she lifted her hand and pointed steadily to the envelopes. "Put them back," she said.

Curiosity as Didacticism in the Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract: Charles Dickens was both a frequent critic of didacticism in fiction and a novelist widely perceived in his time as a didactic writer. An anonymous reviewer for the monthly Metropolitan Magazine wrote in 1840 that Dickens "is now performing most efficaciously the office of a moral teacher" and related this impact to Dickens's provision of morally instructive literature for the newly literate among the poor: "There are even millions who are just emerging from ignorance into what may be called reading classes; all of whom Mr. Dickens is educating to honesty, good feeling, and all the finer impulses of humanity. He is the antidote, and a powerful one too, to the writers of the Jack Sheppard school [of popular Newgate crime fiction]" (93-94). Just after Dickens's death in 1870, a minor working-class satirical periodical, the Tomahawk, writing in a serious vein, called Dickens "not only a romancer" but a "mighty preacher"(qtd. in Ford 80). John Forster, Dickens's close friend, editorial advisor, and biographer, also attributes a reformative effect to The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), particularly in its depiction of Little Nell's death, describing its impact in personal terms as "a kind of discipline of feeling and emotion which would do me lasting good, and which I would not thank you for as an ordinary enjoyment of literature" (Letters 187n4). These accounts of Dickens's moral impress as a novelist suggest that it combined the different but analogous kinds of influence exerted by the educator, clergyman, and liberal parent. An even more pertinent analogue to Dickens's influence implied in these contemporary assessments was the project of moral tutelage claimed by the writers of religious tracts for the poor. In Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Dickens attacks the premises of didactic religious fiction for children, describing the kinds of stories read by Charley Hexam in a London Ragged School:

The Road Out of the Black Belt: Sociology’s Fictions and Black Subjectivity in Native Son

Abstract: After his infamous break with the Communist Party in 1942, Richard Wright wrote, "I was a Communist because I was a Negro. Indeed the Communist Party had been the only road out of the Black Belt for me" (qtd. in Hutchinson 151)' Commentators have frequently made mention of Wright's battle with Party orthodoxy, while also acknowledging the appeal that Communism held for black Americans in imagining alternatives to Jim Crow society. What remains compelling about Wright's statement, however, is not the way that it attempts to explain or justify his "Red past," but rather the teleological narrative of development in which it places race, class consciousness, and black agency. For Wright, Communism represented a necessary stage in the reform of racial inequality and the emergence of black consciousness. His description of the Party as the passageway through which he was able to leave the "Black Belt," the space assigned to blacks under racial segregation, can be read as a metaphor for the process that enabled him to envision himself in terms other than those prescribed for blacks within the racial discourse of the thirties.

Towards a Genealogy of Intellectual Life: Olive Schreiner’s the Story of an African Farm

Abstract: Like her female contemporaries in Victorian England, when Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) contemplated participation in intellectual life, she found it not only dominated by men in fact, but also imagined as male sociality. At certain institutional nodes, this hegemonic imagining developed into a conception of the intellectual life modeled upon love between men. At nineteenth-century Oxford, as is well known, liberal university reformers mobilized under the banner of a secular Hellenism. This Hellenism, with Benjamin Jowett its main proponent, was subsequently taken up by J.A. Symonds, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde, who, as Linda Dowling has shown, drew from Plato's dialogues to identify the life of the mind with male homosexual eroticism. Styled after ancient Greek paiderastia, as an affective model for the intellectual life it appeared to do little to facilitate participation by women. Juxtaposing modem Europe and ancient Greece, Schreiner's later writing tacitly protests this foreclosure. Footnoting Jowett's translation of Plato's Symposium in Woman and Labour (1911) Schreiner attributes the decline of Greek civilization to the marginalization of women from public life, their consequent intellectual etiolation, and its effects on the education of young children. Drawing upon Jowett's commentary to the Symposium, Schreiner writes that "[t]he abnormal institution of avowed inter-male sexual relations upon the highest plane was one, and the most serious result, of this severance" (Woman 85). Although Jowett alludes to "the greatest evil of Greek life" (Plato 534), he never reduces the erotic to the sexual, and takes care to underline that, among the Greeks, homoeroticism was not an abnormal institution.1 If Schreiner's feminist historicism in Woman

Progress, Labor, Revolution: The Modern Times of Antebellum African American Life Writing

Abstract: In his influential study of black modernity, The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy writes that "[i]n many respects" white and black inhabitants of the antebellum plantation "live[d] non-synchronously" (57) Taking Gilroy a step further, I want to argue that non-synchronicity characterizes antebellum literature and life, traversing what have come to be viewed as discrete identity-based communities The antebellum African American life narratives I will consider in this essay desire temporal homogeneity and yet still articulate time's actual variety, teaching us that time not only differed across the divide separating whites from African Americans but also differed elsewhere In that the profound non-synchronicity that has been shown to define modernity under capitalism characterizes antebellum American literature as well, that literature is a literature of modernity1 Even more importantly, this non-synchronicity of time in the African American life narrative, the definitive American and African American narrative genre, belies the canonical notion that in the antebellum US, identity evolved away from the local and particular toward the more general and abstract Insofar as the literature of this period proposes that time fosters the emergence of national identity, racial identity, gender identity, and the like, literary history has mistaken this powerful rhetoric for a description of time's actual character and effect Put another way, this literature argues that in its raw state time is singular and favors progress, which both allows for and necessitates the emergence of an abstract identity that binds individuals together as a group and at the expense of other local and individual features For its part, literary history assumes that antebellum time was and did just these things and that as a result the antebellum US saw a flowering of such an identity2 Yet, once we look past this literature's manifest commitment to imagining a causal relationship between time and generic identity, we see antebellum writing, including the life narrative,

Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade and David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress

Abstract: In the fall of 1999, U.K. Channel 4 presented another season of its "untold stories." Throughout October (Black History month in the U.K.), the story told on four consecutive Sunday nights was that of Britain's role in the circum-Atlantic slave trade.1 Produced by notable U.K. journalist Trevor Phillips and by Philip Whitehead, the series was handsomely presented, accompanied by an extensive web page and a bound volume. "Britain's Slave Trade" took as its topic the dark side of Britain's glorious imperial past. To an audience accustomed to gazing upon the monuments of empire, whether as tourists to Georgian cities like Bath, as visitors to great houses like Blaise Castle, or as consumers of yet another film about Jane Austen's England, the series had a simple message: the money for all this splendor came from somewhere. And in eighteenth-century England, far too often the origins of such wealth lay in the traffic in black slaves. As a "private vice" made into "public benefit" (Mandeville), the circum-Atlantic slave trade has at last been brought forth as a topic for British prime-time debate. But what does it mean to tell an untold story? The phrase implies that the story preexists its telling, that it waits not to exist, but only to be enunciated. The series thus teased out the untold, articulating a story that apparently only awaited its own telling. The film crew skirted the circum-Atlantic, traveling to the former Gold Coast of Africa, to the Caribbean islands of Jamaica and Barbados, to Welsh estates, to the cities of Bristol and Liverpool, gathering both personal and academic testimony. The camera followed a white woman in search of her black slave ancestors and a black theologian seeking a white ancestor he believed to have existed. "Britain's Slave Trade" displayed nostalgia for a point of origin at which, for better or worse, everything would be perfectly clear. At such a moment, ancestors would be clearly recognized, whether in their perfidy or in their bondage, in their acts of complicity or their acts of resistance. At such a time, both doers and deeds could be clearly labeled. Individuals would be named, singled out, made culpable when necessary. Looking back at such a moment with the benefit of our hindsight, we would recognize at last the damage done and we would know what form reparation should take. The desire to tell the untold is also the desire to reach closure, and closure is construed as the therapeutic coming to terms with dark secrets once repressed but now brought into

Popular Anxieties Revisited@@@Modernism, Romance, and the fin de siecle: Popular British Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914@@@Reproductive Urges: Popular Novel-Reading, Sexuality, and the English Nation

Abstract: Reproductive Urges challenges traditional and Marxist accounts of the oppositional relationship between "production" and "reproduction" by focusing on "reproduction" as one of the most widely used and highly contested concepts in modern culture. Although it appears to refer only to the most obvious of biological facts, Anita Levy contends that "reproduction" includes a diverse field of cultural and social practices. Levy looks to the writings of Charlotte Lennox, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde, among others, to explain both conceptual changes in notions of "reproduction," and the acute anxiety about controlling it still dominant in contemporary debates concerning the individual, the family, and sexuality.