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Content CIRCULATION AND CONTAGION: TRANSGRESSION AND
POPULAR NOVELS BY VICTORIAN WOMEN
by
Pamela K. Gilbert
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1994
Copyright 1994 Pamela K. Gilbert
U M I Number: DP23192
All rights reserved
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This dissertation, w ritten by
Pamela K. Gilbert
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Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C T O R OF PH ILO SO PH Y
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M ay 5, 1994
D a te ..................................
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
\
ii
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
I. "In The Body of the Text": Metaphors of Reading
and the Body 25
II. Genre: The Social Construction of Sensation 108
III. M. E. Braddon: Sensational Realism 170
IV. Rhoda Broughton: Anything But Love 210
V. Ouida: Romantic Exchange 262
Conclusion: The Other Victorians 345
Bibliography 376
1
INTRODUCTION
Hayden White, among others, observes that the narration of
history is determined more by the needs of the historian than
intrinsic properties of historical data. Regarding the burgeoning
critical fascination with transgression and boundaries, as evidenced
by the work of Stallybrass and White, Haraway and others, it is
justifiable to ask, not only why boundary transgression is such a
central metaphor in the periods we study, but why it is such a
central-almost obsessive-concern to us now. We see it, most
obviously, in the discourse on AIDS. Yet it is prevalent everywhere,
from abortion rights (where does the individual body end and the
social body begin?) to information security (in what consists the
boundary between private and public?) In the rapidly shifting
international political climate as in the multicultural U.S., we see it
in the obsessive attempts to categorize and rename, adding strings of
adjectives in an attempt to "get it right," only to discover that
identity is fluid and multiple, and resists naming. From national
boundaries under dispute to the attempts of multi-national
corporations to disentangle their agendas from other interests, from
feminist attempts to speak for "all women" to the efforts of women
of color and lesbians to be heard as distinct, but still collective
voices, identity politics consist of a quest to distinguish the self from
the Other, only to discover a multitude of others and a myriad of
selves. In a global economy and ecology, wherein cultural and
communicative structures become ever more immediate and diffuse,
the terms "national" and "individual" lose meaning as rapidly as do
terms like "private" or "woman." Perhaps this is why such terms are
so highly charged. In the "loss" of these "clear" definitions (which
after all were never really all that clear), we fear the loss of an
identity that, however inadequately, worked for us. As these easy
distinctions are divested of their perceived clarity, and therefore,
their utility, they are invested with all the energy of a nostalgia for a
loss not yet fully actualized, but dimly foreseen.
We are and have been in the midst of a paradigm shift. As
boundaries between constructed categories (self/other; man/woman;
history/fiction) become more permeable, and therefore more visible,
our attention is drawn to those boundaries. Their very
insubstantiality buttresses their importance, calls forth our anxiety.
Our need to define is driven by their insusceptibility to definition.
We "poke" obsessively at the walls we have erected in order to test
3
their strength, and are both thrilled and appalled when "all that was
solid melts into air." From metaphors of depth, we move to
metaphors of surfaces, a fascination with transgression. The body,
our most basic cultural unit of enclosure and difference between self
and other, is a text in which this drama of colliding and blending
surfaces is written and read. The attention in recent films given to
interracial and other "forbidden" sexual relationships (Jungle Fever,
the interracial affairs in the tv series In the Heat o f the Night and A ll
My Children) demonstrate this, as does the concern with image and
substance, body and machine in films as diverse as Terminator,
Lawnmower Man and Sex, Lies and Videotape. These are hardly
new themes; indeed, it is their very centrality to contemporary
cultures that makes them effective. They are basic concerns which
are periodically foregrounded, coming into sharper focus in periods
of particular tensions. This very current interest focuses historians’
critical attention on earlier cultures’ perceptions of boundaries, their
constructions of transgression and its gains and costs.
Mid-Victorian imperial Britain, intensely insular, constructed
its identity as active, healthy and masculine versus foreign identities
which were passive, fevered or feminine. Yet Britain, in order to
define its culture in this way, required Others: its colonial
possessions and its ancestral continental rivals. Imperial ambition
coupled with nineteenth century capitalism, however, created a
trans-class and transcultural "circulation" which threatened to break
down the barriers of easy distinctions between upper and lower
classes, British and foreign, colonizer and colonized. Like Rochester
and the Creole madwoman, the upper class Englishman faced the
terrifying prospect of difference, not merely in the West Indies, but
in his own home, perhaps in his own mirror. The rhetoric of
inviolable British domesticity becomes both the parent and
opponent of sensational fiction, drawing together concerns of
national identity, the inviolability of the body and the clarity of
gender and class distinctions.
The urban space is a space of "promiscuous" intercourse
between the classes. Geographical boundaries between "Master"
and "Man" become less distinct, and that blurring of class distinctive
space becomes impossible to ignore under the pressure of sanitary
and personal safety concerns. Literacy, no longer itself a clear
indicator of class, is redefined as prose fiction becomes a major and
largely urban industry, marketing across the class spectrum. The
5
classed topography of genre replaces and reproduces the classed
geography of rural space; the hierarchy of "taste" which anticipates
modern day "canonical" discussions replaces the somewhat simpler
distinctions of literate vs. illiterate. The blending of boundaries and
the shrinkage of previously "inviolable" spaces heightens— as conflict
always does— awareness of boundaries: contact becomes associated
with contagion, which, as Stallybrass and White write, "become [s]
.... [a] trope . . . through which city life is apprehended" (135).
The equally promiscuous exchange of intellectual and cultural
material in literature provokes a similar anxiety regarding the
contagion of ideas, dangerous infections in the body politic. The
domestic space comes to represent an isolated enclosure, a "pure,"
closed, middle class English body and mind embattled against the
encroaching forces of disease, revolution, and worst of all, "silly
novels by lady novelists." This body was female, but as a male
possession represented a point of entry through which the
patriarchal body might suffer disease and ultimately emasculation,
just as the erring wife represented a threat to the purity and control
of the patrilinear transfer of name and wealth.
6
In the 1860s, the sensation genre, it’s construction and the
novelists and novels identified with it, provides one clear and
historically well documented instance in which the movement of
these anxieties and the rhetorics which encode and construct them
can be traced in the construction of genre and the gendered and
classed author, reader and text. This movement can be traced both
within the novels themselves and other cultural discourses which
parallel and interpenetrate them (critical reviews and general
literary discussions as well as non-literary articles concerned with the
body and wellness, both individual and cultural). Genre is a
category that has less to do with intrinsic properties of particular
texts than the needs and concerns of readers reading those texts-a
particular era and cultural group, its concatenation of fears and
desires and market forces which take shape from and feed those
trends. The sensation genre is a category of readings particularly
concerned with violation of the domestic body, with class and gender
transgression, and most importantly, with the violation of the
privileged space of the reader/voyeur, with the text’s reaching out to
touch the reader’s body, acting directly "on the nerves."
7
In the following pages, I follow a "top-down" approach,
beginning with an investigation of the role of the middle-class
popular novel and attitudes toward reading, a broadly ranging
discussion of attitudes toward the book, the body, the industry of
culture and cultural health, as they are discernable in popular
middle class journals such as the Athaeneum, The Spectator, and
Blackwood's. The theory of the body which I have found most
productive is that of the Bakhtinian tradition, as developed by
feminist and poststructuralist thinkers— fundamentally a social-
constructionist view of the body as a text and gender as a reading.
Some readers may find incongruous, then, my references to Kristeva
or even to Lakoff and Johnson, whose "emergent metaphors" may
seem suspiciously essentialist, or my frequent borrowings of
psychoanalytically based frameworks for the discussion of Self and
Other. However, I find these frames not basically incompatible.
The body and its gender are texts which have been read in certain
ways for a very long time in what we loosely term "Western culture";
psychoanalytic thought has provided compelling and profoundly
useful bases for metacommentary on that reading. If that reading
has become so powerful an institution as to acquire the privileged
8
status of "nature," then so much more does such a reading demand
our attentive critique. The status of ultimate ontological truth-
claims of any theoretical perspectives, no matter how much or how
little we cherish them, should not distract the feminist from her or
his bricolage, from the quest for the perspectives, however multiple,
most presently productive. In a work and era that celebrates
transgression, surely there must be some latitude for theoretical
miscegenations and their odd progeny.
The body has been our most basic text for the reading of self,
and the boundaries of our bodies are our primary loci for
distinguishing self from not-self. Ingresses and egresses of the body
are points of contact between self and not-self, places where we
interact with Otherness in the dangerous process of becoming self,
or vice-versa. Other, less concrete, kinds of contact-the exchange of
ideas, for example— are figured forth as and metaphorically aligned
with the transgression or crossing-over of the body’s boundaries.
Since bodies are gendered, aged, classed, and so forth, these
metaphors participate in these entailments; thus, for example, if
reading provocative articles for pleasure is made analogous to
promiscuous casual intercourse with delightful, seductive partners,
9
the other entailments of this metaphor (moral judgements, for
example) may be quite different if the reader is envisioned as a
young, aristocratic man from the way they might be were the reader
seen as a young, unmarried, middle-class woman. It is almost
impossible to imagine a mid-nineteenth century critic portraying a
young woman reader favorably as the central figure of this analogy.
Having explored a discursive arena within which the spectacle
of the body and the body reading may be interpreted, I define
transgression, its relation to disease and the metaphors of space and
movement which order it. I then place the social construction of
genre within this arena, examining its power to produce readings
consonant with the demands of a particular cultural moment,
through its actualization of powerful discursive structures
(metaphors of disease, for example.) If the definition of a genre,
and of certain texts as generic, is a social construction, i.e., a
reading, then it participates in all of the entailments of readings as
defined in Chapter One-genres, like texts, authors, and readers, are
gendered, classed, and so forth. A genre is a meta-reading, or a set
of reading instructions, that coexists with a text and limits the range
of its multiplicity. One productive way to expose both the
10
imperatives of a genre and their roots in social values and concerns
is to seek a different generic reading of the same text; an extended
example is given in Chapter Three, Section I, dealing with Lady
Audley’ s Secret. Impossible though it may be to read beyond or
"outside" of any set of reading instructions, by shifting to another set
of instructions-in effect, an alternate subject position-while
maintaining awareness of the difference between that reading and
the reading framed by the original genre, the reader enables her-
/him self to see that set of instructions at work, much as one brings
to view the normally hidden formatting commands in a word-
processed text file.
We move from the general discussion of genre as concept
and social phenomenon to a discussion of three very diverse sub
genres of the sensational period, three novels and authors who
particularly exemplify them, and why and how this was so. Through
close analysis of each of these novels and the ways in which they are
positioned within their discursive environment, it is possible to
discern the social forces which constructed the sensation movement,
and the ways in which issues of "high" vs. "low" culture (or canonical
vs. non-canonical texts) are defined on bases other than "intrinsic"
11
textual properties. Analysis of one later (post-sensational) popular
novel by each of the three authors provides both opportunities for
comparison and examples of how authors who made their debuts in
the sensational movement and were defined by their association
with it later attempted to control the positioning of the texts within
the marketplace.
The sensation genre, a category of reading which spanned the
decade of the 1860’s, is a topic of growing interest to literary
scholars and feminist scholars across the disciplines today.
Dominated by women writers, as much of the popular fiction market
in the Victorian period was, the sensation novel generated a great
deal of critical opprobrium and reader interest in its time. Many
sensational novels written for the middle class audience became
runaway best sellers. Overnight successes like Lady Audley’ s Secret
had also the distinction of remaining bestsellers over time. Yet they
were designated "trash" by critics then and that apellation stuck.
The process by which these texts have been rendered non-canonical
has, in fact, much to do with the perception of their genre as a
"feminine" one.
M. E. Braddon is the author most familiarly identified with
sensation. Rhoda Broughton and Ouida (Louise de la Rame), each
writing very different kinds of novels, had first successes in this same
period (i.e., the early sixties), and were lumped together with other
novelists deemed "sensational" because of similarities which today
would strike readers as quite superficial, but which then were seen
as definitive shared traits: setting which was both domestic and local
and/or a perceived emphasis on women as actively desiring, for
example. After the sixties, Broughton and Ouida were perceived as
working in two separate genres, still recognizable today: the
romance (love story) and the society novel, also known as the novel
of high life. Braddon’s Lady Audley’ s Secret (1862) is the novel
conventionally credited with launching "sensation," and, although it
is possible to debunk the perception of that novel as the "start" of
the new genre, let alone its quintessence, the fact that it has been
perceived that way has a certain significance.
In fact, Lady Audley’ s Secret is primarily comprised of three
narratives: the moderately "sensational" narrative of Lady Audley’s
rise and fall; the traditional male coming-of-age story of Robert
Audley’s rise to adult status, and the detective plot which connects
13
the two "main" narratives. By shifting the generic focus to read as
primary the second of these narratives, we are able to trace
Braddon’s ironic revision of The Odyssey, and her suggestion that the
coming to manhood of the male character is mediated and made
possible by the often unremarked destruction of female power and
subordination of women’s sexuality to the homosocial (and
homosexual) male bond. The first of the narratives is a "low
culture" genre, as is the third; the second is a "high culture" genre.
Sexuality, represented as a contagious disease, is the force that
draws the narratives together and causes them to lose distinctness.
The public’s reading of Lady Audley’ s Secret, therefore, as a
sensational novel works in exactly the same way as the multiple plot
does— it provides a clear working example of how interests, issues
and themes gendered female are subordinated and sacrificed in
order to maintain a classed and gendered hierarchy: Lucy’s values
are repudiated in order to allow Robert to adopt "appropriate" adult
male values; the masculine-genre coming-of-age novel, with its
implicit self-critique, is elided in favor of the less complicated
reading of a feminine-genre low culture sensation novel by a "hack"
lady-novelist.
14
In The Doctor’ s Wife, an adaptation of M adame Bovary
published only two years after Lady Audley’ s Secret, Braddon
deliberately attempts to establish the novel, and herself as its
author, in the high-culture genre of realism by positioning the novel,
through internal textual cues, against sensation fiction. In typical
Braddon fashion, however, the novel critiques the legitimacy of the
very distinctions which Braddon is seemingly attempting to use.
Although the authorial voice bluntly states "this is not a sensation
novel," and a character in the novel, who is himself a sensation
author, repeatedly defines sensation in order to contrast it with the
"real life" of the characters in the novel, Braddon uses Isabel, her
protagonist, to collapse the borders between the low culture novels
(which Isabel reads), the "realism" in which Isabel lives, and the
superior degree of reality in which the reader exists. As in Lady
Audley’ s Secret, female sexuality is the magnetic force which causes
worlds to collide and to blend, which blending is always damaging
and draining, though strangely appealing. Isabel becomes a
vampiric figure living in the borderlands between life and art, high
and low culture, upper and lower class--a diseased space which is
fatal to the men drawn into that space by their attraction to her, but
15
in which space only, like Rappacini’s daughter’s, Isabel’s existence is
viable. Within that space, Isabel, defined as a "reader," meets up
with the "real reader" of the novel; within that same space, the
reader of the novel must reorganize her or his perceptions of reality
and fiction just as Isabel is struggling to do. Because of her
"readerliness," Isabel is both more naive and more sophisticated
than the other characters in the text: naive, because she fails to read
her reality by cues other than those of popular fiction; sophisticated,
because she refuses to be read on those other terms, and ultimately
is the only survivor of the multiple misreadings which surround her.
The Doctor’ s Wife, as a popular novel, inverts and comments upon
social "reality" as well as "realism," transforming both into texts to be
read from within the text-world of popular fiction.
Rhoda Broughton, a writer who seemed comfortable with her
career-long identification with the genre of romance, was also first
identified as a sensation novelist in the 1860s, largely because the
protagonists of Cometh Up as a Flower and Not Wisely But Too Well,
her first bestsellers, described their passion in terms of its physical
effects upon them-which evidently caused a corresponding shock to
the decorous reader’s nerves. In retrospect, it is difficult to see any
similarity between these stories, generally dealing with conventional
romance thwarted in merely conventional ways, and the hidden-
body, switched-identity stories of sensational magazines. But
Broughton’s heroines were bold and bad (within limits), and that
aligned them with "lovely furies" like Aurora Floyd. One of these
bold and almost-but-not-quite-too bad women is Kate Chester of
Not Wisely But Too Well. Kate’s exploration of her own sexuality
and surrender to strong attraction has disastrous consequences, as
her attraction to big, bold and really-bad Dare Stamer is foiled,
unconsummated, by the traditional Victorian inconvenience of a
previous wife still living. As Kate works to control or eliminate the
passion within herself, she undertakes a series of activities, finally
ending her days as a Sister of Mercy. Again, as in Braddon’s
Doctor’ s Wife, passion is represented as a disease, here literally as
fever, which spreads throughout the community and to which Kate is
drawn. Kate’s status as ministering angel is complicated by the
metaphor which links disease to the sexual passion figured as
resident in her own body. Kate, as passionate female body,
becomes a vector for disease, which is figured as foreign invasion,
class blending, and the subversion of high culture literature by
17
popular forms, such as the romance novel itself. Her victories over
her sexuality and closure of her own body by overcoming her sexual
attraction are undermined by Broughton’s presentation of her as a
danger to the community in which she attempts to expiate her "sins"
through service. The dualism that is present in Kate is disruptive;
through it, Broughton suggests the presence of that dualism within
all cultural forms--just as Sister Kate carries with her the seeds of
passionate "fever," the religious tracts which Kate drops into the
gutter when she is frightened by rude men making sexual comments
carry their own critique— they are created in reaction to the "low"
and therefore cannot exist without that context. Like Isabel, Kate is
a liminal creature, an inhabitant of in-between spaces, who refuses
to be contained, even within the fairly impassable boundaries of the
novel-world itself. Through the agency of a narrator given
privileged status of someone "more real" than the characters he
describes, who refers to but does not explain "another story" that
involves a relationship between himself and Kate, she escapes the
containment of the "story" to inhabit, however partially, the
privileged space which the reader shares with an omniscient narrator
who addresses the reader directly. Perhaps the most sensational
18
element of Kate’s story is that it, like the Braddon novel of domestic
subversion, makes the reader less sure of or comfortable with her or
his own personal boundaries and classed and gendered space.
In The Beginner, twenty-seven years later, the love story is
subordinated entirely to a critique of the publishing industry, and
the roles of gender, class and sexual politics within it. By this time,
Broughton’s genre conventions are so well established that she need
only include a few textual cues for the novel to be "placed"
generically within the class of "love stories," thereby giving
Broughton complete freedom to virtually ignore the love story in
favor of a witty, sharp satire on the roles of popular fiction and the
pretensions of high culture. By the end of the novel, the
transgressive elements have all been elim inated-to no one’s
satisfaction-stripping the reader of any comfort in the assumption
that the boundaries threatened and then reinforced are valid or
worthwhile. By calling into question the integrity of the culture
industry, Broughton simultaneously undermines the claims of the
"body of culture" to represent and legitimate social concerns. The
body, she suggests, is a deceitful signifier, and its doctors are too
preoccupied with their own desires and needs to read its symptoms
19
aright anyway. The subversive quality of the novel is centered in
precisely its plot-level upholding of ideological standards as the
reader’s confidence in those same standards is destroyed.
Unlike Braddon, whose protagonists are women preoccupied
with carving out and maintaining a social identity, or Broughton,
whose almost entirely female group of protagonists focus on
pursuing love and defining meaningful labor (writing, charity work,
etc.), Ouida’s protagonists are as likely, if not more likely, to be men
as women, who are focused on maintaining a position which is
initially given to them but must be perpetually earned and defended.
The "good" women work against an erosion of power, as the "bad"
women work to accrue and maintain power; men work against the
social (and often specifically female) forces which conspire to place
them in a false or compromised position. The values which work
for these characters are a strong sense of gender and class status
which guides them in their reactions and actions as this status is
constantly attacked and undermined.
Under Two Flags, like Braddon’s Lady Audley’ s Secret, pits
different genres against each other. The novel of high society
intrigue abruptly becomes an adventure-war story, which is in turn
20
used as a setting for a Bildungsroman. Romance completes the
cycle and allows the hero to return to the domestic space; the
catalyst for this generic transformation is another adventure story-
one in which the ending is tragic because the "hero" is the wrong
sex. However, this "unsexed" hero makes a triumphant return both
to woman’s estate and to the heroic status by becoming the sacrifice
which enables the male hero to complete his quest and marry the
more eligible domestic heroine. The containment of the masculine
adventure drama within the encircling feminine narratives of the
romance and high society story provides an ironic commentary on
what it takes to produce "good husband material." Within this
panorama of genres and settings, the characters engage in a constant
struggle to maintain an appropriate position in respect to one
another, a struggle that is marked by gift offering and refusing,
surreptitious bestowals of favors and goods, and other attempts to
manipulate or affirm identity through patronage. The exchange of
capital in its many forms represents a kind of dangerous intercourse,
in which uneven or inappropriate exchanges can infect or damage
the participant, metaphorically defined in explicitly sexual terms.
Capitalism, in short, is figured as the disease which attacks the
21
autonomy of classes and genders, through compromise of the
boundaries that should exist between categories. The fragility of
these roles and the boundaries between them is underscored by
Ouida’s displacement of identity-and the work of maintaining it— to
the realm of capital exchange, in which one’s identity can be
irredeemably undermined if one becomes the victim of a chance
bestowal. The relentless demand placed on the characters to attend
to the maintenance of their identity highlights identity’s socially
constructed status, its delicacy and ephemerality.
As if in response to the need to explore the limit of identity’s
capacity to maintain itself in the world of capital exchange, Ouida
wrote Folle-Farine in 1871. Folle-Farine, a woman, is systematically
stripped of all power to maintain her own ego boundaries and
identity. Her integrity as a Self— both in the social and personal
arena— is made dependent on her ability to defend her physical
chastity. Ouida’s use of this theme mirrors, and then parodies, the
traditional melodramatic seduction plot. The reader, as voyeur, is
drawn into the ranks of the social forces that wish to transform
Folle-Farine into a commodity, thus stripping her of her identity
separate from the realm of exchange-that is, her essential identity.
22
Ouida shifts from melodrama to tragedy, however, in order to both
destroy Folle-Farine’s physical chastity and leave her identity intact,
while calling upon the reader to confront her or his own sadistic
alliance with the forces of capital. Folle-Farine’s ability to elude the
reader’s rape of her identity, however, paradoxically rests on her
status as abject— as having no identity and no measurable worth and
therefore remaining outside the realm of the commodity. This
abjection is based on her existence as a woman, who can find an
appropriate and heroic role by sacrificing herself for the man she
loves. Her triumphant assertion of identity in the cold chastity of
death, therefore, is problematized by her status as an identity based
on the absence or denial of identity-a Self of Selflessness. For the
reader, already indicted as implicated in the realm of exchange,
from which s/h e can only take on a partial identity, entirely
constructed by and dependent upon capital— and therefore false-this
character holds out little real hope for the possibility of constructing
an identity beyond exchange, in the realm of the absolutist moral
framework that Tragedy depends on. Folle-Farine may live (or at
least die) there, Ouida seems to imply; ours, however, is the world
of the partial, the socially constructed, and the economically
23
interested, and we either must construct an identity within and from
it or die trying. In both works, women’s heroic sacrifice of the
physical body and successful struggle to remain essentially outside
the realm of exchange even as their bodies are inexorably drawn
into it enable the male heroic quest. However, since that sacrifice
is, in a sense, bestowed upon the hero, his victory is tainted by the
patronage of these women. The woman’s body, in death and in sex,
becomes a conduit through which male identity is connected with
and made vulnerable to the forces which surround it, forces which
he rules but must also be ruled by.
All of these novels feature women characters whose bodies
are defined by degrees of openness and contamination, whose
identities are defined by mystery and mutation, whose locations,
within the logic of the text and in setting, are marginal and
indeterminate. As their identities are defined and redefined, as the
boundaries of gender, race and class, of author, text, and reader, are
demolished and rebuilt, undermined and reinforced, we see the
cultural work of identity politics collide with the personal work of
self-construction. Critics reading woman reading woman writing
woman’s body becomes the body of culture, observing itself clinically
24
for signs of disease, voyeuristically for signs of pleasure, censoriously
for signs of rebellion, above all anxiously for signs of vulnerability.
Reading becomes a quest to define and extend surfaces— to take into
the self while still asserting impermeable invulnerability— a quest
which is enacted with and on and through the levels of discourse in
and around the popular novel. The appeal of the novel lies
precisely in both its promise and its evasion of that promise to
confirm the boundaries of the Self, in its ability to evoke desire and
anxiety while sustaining the illusion of fulfillment.
25
CHAPTER ONE
"In the Body of the Text": Metaphors of Reading and the
Body
The police and soap . . . were the antithesis of the
crime and disease which supposedly lurked in the
slums . . . [but policing is effected through the gaze
of the bourgeoisie, which is then implicated in its
object:] If the dominant discourses about the slum
were structured by the language of reform, they
could not but dwell upon the seductions for which
they were the supposed cure. . . . Thus, even as a
separation of the suburb from the slum established
certain class differences, the development of the
city simultaneously threatened the clarity of that
segregation. . . . and the fear of that promiscuity
was encoded above all in terms of the fear of being
touched. ’Contagion’ and ’contamination’ became
the tropes through which city life was apprehended.
(Stallybrass and White 134-135)
I. Reading, Eating and Sex
Mikhail Bakhtin has defined the grotesque body celebrated in
carnival as a body defined in terms of its openings and its "lower
strata": digestive, excretory, genital and reproductive (Bakhtin,
Rabelais 317). In other words, it is a body defined by its liminal
structures and states in which inside and outside merge. In carnival,
this liminal aspect of the grotesque body is presented directly to
26
view, challenging ideologies which privilege orderliness and
authority/ownership, with their doxa of the closed and impenetrable
body dominated by reason and will. In the Victorian era, two kinds
of bodies definable as grotesque were the diseased body and the
body of the prostitute-often one and the same. Both were defined
chiefly by their permeability, and both became the objects of the
gaze. However, they did not do so only in the context of carnival,
but in the context of policing and the reinforcement of the
boundaries they threaten; in lock hospitals, cordons sanitaires, blue
books and clinics, the grotesque body was segregated from society,
measured and weighed, sometimes destroyed.
Bakhtin argued that the carnival was a transgressive action,
challenging the authority of class divisions and affirming liberty.
Yet, as many have since argued, the carnival’s reversals of class
roles depend so heavily on the order they parody that they may
simply serve to reinscribe those boundaries while providing a "safety
valve" for class tensions. Victorian portrayals of disease and
prostitution among the poor do not simply act as carnivalesque
denials of order and control; they desperately seek to assert the
boundaries of the classes which, through various media of exchange,
27
sexual, intellectual, and monetary, have been eroded at the same
time they have become more outwardly visible than ever.
In the literary marketplace, the carnivalesque popular
cultural forms of the broadsheet and the ballad begin to give place
to half-penny and penny-dreadful literature which cannot be
separated in content from the circulating library novels of the
middle classes, although the packaging remains ostentatiously
distinct. The carnival of the folk and the high culture of the
aristocracy are both displaced in favor of a proto-mass cultural form
for the bourgeoisie— a form which has always existed, but which now
is accorded economic and cultural pre-eminence across most class
boundaries, from the aristocracy through the literate working classes.
This promiscuous literary intercourse gives rise and expression to
anxieties which are expressed in the fascination with the grotesque
body and the disease which is disseminated by it; the "body of
literature"-indeed, of culture-becomes grotesque, permeable, and
the popular novel is carefully monitored and evaluated as the
product and the outward and visible sign of disease. In the
metaphors of reading and authorship which passed current in the
literary journals of the day, and, less subtly, in the concern for the
28
capacity of the actual commodity to spread infection, we can trace
the movement of this anxiety, and the desire which engenders it.
Finally, when the grotesque body itself becomes the object of
policing, rather than the symbol of liberatory potential, the
transgressive act that remains is to seduce the reader by offering the
body up to the gaze as an object without resistance, and then to
remind the reader that s/he is implicated in the medium of
exchange-that is, that s/h e is "touched” by the object in the process
of objectifying it. In other words, in getting the commercialized
"formula" novel the reader desires, while being reminded that this
novel is the result of the reader’s manipulations of the modes of
production, the textual voyeur is also reminded that s/h e has
created the object of his or her gaze, in the same way the middle
class who polices the prostitute’s "product" provides, so to speak, the
context of production.
Catherine Sheldrick Ross describes two dominant metaphors
of reading, both of which are very much in evidence in the
nineteenth century: reading as eating, and reading as a (moral and
intellectual) ladder. The reader is to "climb the ladder" repudiating
"sugary" romances and "highly spiced" fictions and developing the
discriminating palate necessary to appreciate better imaginative
works such as poetry and nonfiction histories and scientific treatises.
Although Ross does not observe it, other related ways that reading
is figured forth are as sexual intercourse and as the ingestion of
drugs, particularly the reading of novels. Books, then, are presented
alternately as food and poison, medicine and illicit drugs, and finally
the erotic body and the contaminated body. In all of these
metaphors, the text is a substance that enters the reader and has an
effect on him or her. The text is not an inert thing to be merely
manipulated, it is active— even opportunistic. In the context of the
nineteenth century’s twin terrors-epidemic disease and revolution,
the disintegration of the physical and social body— these metaphors
took on a particular role, one in which they were able to body forth
the Victorians’ fear of biological and social dissolution. Metaphors
of ingression and ingestion rebounded upon the aggressor,
emphasizing the reciprocity of the boundary transgression implied.
The reader who devours the text is in some sense inhabited by that
text.
The metaphor of reading as sexual intercourse is related to
the eating metaphor most crucially in that it deals with the
30
transgression of physical boundaries, just as eating itself often is a
metaphor for sexual activity. It is convenient in this case to use
Ross’ example:
The reader of novels only, especially if he reads
many, becomes very soon an intellectual voluptuary,
with feeble judgement, a vague memory, and an
incessant craving for some new excitement. . . . An
inveterate novel-reader speedily becomes a literary
roue, and this is possible at a very early period of
life. It now and then happens that a youth of
seventeen becomes almost an intellectual idiot or
an effeminate weakling by living exclusively on the
enfeebling swash or the poisoned stimulants that
are sold so readily under the title of tales and
novels. An apprenticeship at a reform school in
literature, with a spare diet of statistics and a hard
bed of mathematical problems, is much needed for
the recovery of such inane and half-demented
mortals. (Noah Porter, 1877, in Ross 149)
I have excerpted this from a larger excerpt quoted in Ross’s article
to show the mixture of sexual and food-oriented metaphors. Ross
uses the excerpt to exemplify the hierarchy of ingestion implied by
"poisoned stimulants", "spare diet" and many other food references
not shown here. However, she fails to comment on the implications
of references such as "intellectual voluptuary," "effeminate weakling"
and "hard bed." Clearly the danger here is not merely that of
becoming a gourmand, but of recklessly expending "spermatic"
31
energy. Effeminacy, loss of intellectual powers, and intellectual and
physical enfeeblement all were the hallmarks of the dreaded disease
"spermatorrhea," brought on by excessive discharge of semen
through masturbation or other sexual activity. (Youths of seventeen,
needless to say, were among the principal victims of this complaint.)
Hard beds, exercise and study were the prescriptions then,
antecedents of the cold shower, hard work and exercise regimen
even now recommended as a defense against the temptation to illicit
sexual activity. Of course, there were those who took a different
point of view. In an 1887 Blackwood’ s article, we are told:
Perhaps the greatest pleasure in life is an ill-
regulated passion for reading. Books are the best
of friends, the most complacent of companions. In
that silent, though eloquent and vivacious company,
there can be no monotony as there are no
jealousies and indeed inconstancy becomes a duty
and a virtue, as with the sage King Solomon among
his hundreds of wives. ("Literary Voluptuaries" 805)
Although the moral argument is precisely the opposite of the
previous passage, the metaphors are identical: reading is equal to
sexual activity, and reading for pleasure is equal to illicit and
promiscuous sexual activity.
32
Eating, as Maggie Kilgour has noted in a different context, is,
psychoanalytically speaking, an aggressive move, but one not without
certain dangers in that eating is the activity which first demarcates
the boundaries between inside and outside, and yet perennially
destabilizes them. The child first becomes aware of the non
sufficiency of the self when s/h e cries for the breast and it does not
appear. One eats to incorporate that which one lacks into oneself,
to become sufficient to oneself, unified once more, but what one
eats then is not only changed into one’s own substance, but in fact
changes that substance in turn. With every attempt to make
ourselves whole, therefore, we make ourselves other, not self
identical, and therefore merely succeed in affirming our neediness as
we satisfy our desire. As Kilgour puts it:
To imagine knowledge as tasting or eating is to set
up an epistemology in which subject and object are
strictly differentiated and yet finally totally
identified. As it seems most people would rather
be a subject than an ob ject. . . such total
identification is seen with a great deal of
ambivalence . . . Intellectual taste is associated
with choice and control, the mastery of what is
eaten by the eater. (9)
Using Kilgour’s insight as a point of departure, we may see that in
the case of the nineteenth century popular fiction market, the
33
expression of that mastery is the intellectualizing discourse
surrounding the body of culture. Food is primarily associated with
the female body and breast; in this case, desire for an
"uncomplicated" gratification is mediated by fear of subjectivity of
the text, the capacity of the female body to transform its consumer.
A hierarchy of literary taste emerges in which the most female-
identified is considered the most dangerous and degraded. This
marginalizing strategy is deployed through a veritable cordon
sanitaire of critical discourse in journals, reviews and the like which
surrounds and contains the body of popular literature, and which
defined literary "food" as healthy, unhealthy, sweet, highly spiced
and so on.
In the mid-nineteenth century in particular, the concern with
ingestion became central to British Victorians as the food
adulteration issue took center stage in the popular press. Food and
water contamination became an even more central issue as the
terrifying and inexplicable outbreaks of epidemic disease were
traced to such contamination as well as to waste disposal. In this
way, the desirable, socially acceptable, commercially and culturally
reified substance of food was brought both literally and figuratively
34
into proximity with the undesirable, socially unacceptable, end
product of consumption. The primary concerns of the food
adulteration investigations were two: foodstuffs adulterated with
additives for gain (poisonous colorings added to tea, for example)
and filth-ridden substances added either for gain (to add bulk) or
inadvertently, through carelessness. One principal focus of the
parliamentary investigations in this matter was the domestic
production of milk and its adulteration with water, the condition of
which would depend on its source. Several engravings in Punch
target bake-shops, particularly in terms of bread and sweets. Bread,
milk and tea were staples, of course, which is one reason they
received so much attention, but the connection of the adulteration
of foods and the image of women unknowingly poisoning their
young children with adulterated milk and sweets is very strong in
much of the journalistic treatment of the subject. The juxtaposition
of motherlove/nurturance with the threat of harm was particularly
poignant because it hinged upon the fascinated fear of what was
lurking beneath the smooth surface of angel-in-the-house-ism— an
interest which Braddon would parlay into a fortune with Lady
Audley’ s Secret. In any case, food became the focus of anxieties
35
about the invasion of the body by dangerous substances through the
wife and mother, the principal food preparer/overseer of the
household. These associations became negative entailments of
references to food, just as pleasure, community, domesticity and
wealth were positive entailments.
The metaphor of reading as eating or ingestion has a special
significance in this era of preoccupation with the boundaries of the
body and their violation. The Temple Bar asserts: "people are not
satisfied even with reading worthless novels; they must then read
still more worthless notices of them in the papers. It is the
drunkard, not only draining his glass, but licking it out" (author’s
emphasis, "The Vice of Reading" 256). Not only is the text here to
be devoured, it is a drug (alcohol) which has a specific negative
moral effect-that of rendering the consumer bestial, like an animal
in his or her consumption. A common opener for articles on
literature in general or review articles about particular books or
authors was to bemoan the proliferation of "worthless" literature,
following the disclaimer with a statement of this sort: "But, for good
or evil, the novels we read are becoming as important to us as the
water we drink or the food we eat. It is as desirable that we should
36
be supplied with the best possible quality, and protected, by all
legitimate means, from the danger of adulteration" ("Literary
Exhaustion" 290). In 1870, when this particular essay was published,
the food adulteration scare was at its height; the author’s reference
to it once more invokes the anxiety of "poisonous" physical invasion
in which an unwitting "consumer" gets more than s/he, literally,
bargained for. The apparent mismatch in the analogy is, of course,
that one "sees" what one is getting in a text in a way that one might
not be able to "see" arsenic in a cake; however, the repeated use of
similar images makes quite clear that these writers (and presumably
their readers) saw texts as potentially deceptive, slippery substances
which could affect the reader without the reader’s knowledge or
consent, like a poison— or a disease.
Reading "bad" texts, thus, consists of a self-poisoning which
can become addictive. In "The Vice of Reading," a Temple Bar
essayist compares indiscriminate reading with dram drinking and
condemns it in the terms of strongest opprobrium:
Reading, so long a virtue, a grace, an education,
and, in its effects, an accomplishment, has become
a downright vice,-a vulgar, detrimental habit, like
dram drinking; an excuse for idleness; . . . a cloak
thrown over ignorance; a softening, demoralizing,
37
relaxing practice, which, if persisted in, will end by
enfeebling the minds of men and women, making
flabby the fibre of their bodies, and undermining
the vigor of nations. (251)
A number of shallowly submerged concerns collide (and collude) in
this passage. Reading is "vulgar," i.e. common, plebeian, like dram
drinking, a habit principally associated with the lower classes. Like
dram drinking, it is addictive, and has a degenerative effect upon
the organism. It also softens and relaxes-that is, feminizes and even
castrates. Finally, it enfeebles both mind and body of men and
women, making them unfit for the business of production and
reproduction, lastly undermining the readers at a national level—
reference here perhaps both to Darwin’s theory of degeneration and
Britain’s uneasy consolidation of power over her empire. In the
reading process, then, the text is seen as actually entering the body
(like alcohol) and corrupting it from within ("relaxing the fibers")
causing a sort of decomposition in the reader as the text is
"digested" or decomposed by the reader. It also may contaminate
the class characteristics of the reader, causing him or her to revert
to lower class, degenerate practices. It also "excites" and
"stimulates" the body, appealing, even in the "intellectual" pursuit of
38
reading, to our bestial selves. A Quarterly Review essayist advises
against reading "trash" such as H. Rider Haggard, warning that,
[although] the ’aboriginal democratic old monster,’
not by any means extinct in the classes which wear
silks and broad-cloth . . . likes sensation; strong
waters, not diluted, to warm his digestive apparatus
and make his eyes blink, [be warned that] Plato has
observed that every man keeps a wolf within him.
It is advisable to hold that sanguinary beast by the
ears, but not to charm and excite him until his
teeth begin to glisten. ("English Realism and
Romance" 486-488)
Of romances, the reviewer’s opinion is harsher still:
The ’everlasting pantomime’ of rose-pink virtue
squinting across the pages of its Prayer book at
vice, while it gambols within the measure of police-
morality, is very laughable. . . should we not send
for the ’common hangman’ if his hand be not
entirely out, and bid him make an auto da fe in
front of Mudie’s, with the feminine public looking
on, agonized and much sobbing, but learning in this
wholesome manner their first profitable reading
lesson? (470)
This pits an image of "masculine" light reading as something that
excites the beast within-a beast, the author implies, unworthy of the
upper classes— to hunger, against an image of "feminine" light
reading as associated with sexual vice, vice unnatural enough to
warrant burning as a witch or a heretic. The critic collapses eating
and sex metaphors into the larger metaphor of reading as
39
consumption. In each case, the text becomes a (female) body,
either to be devoured by the wolfish reader or by the "purifying"
flames.
II. A Complicated Affair: Gendered Authors, Texts and Readers
In addition to the fear of "contamination" and the attempt to
legislate against the diseased erotic body that marked the latter
portion of the nineteenth century, gender issues surrounding the
interaction of author, text, and reader must be considered. The
excerpts above display a relatively uncomplicated scenario including
a male reader and a female text. This posits a masterful and
exploitive reader who need only be careful not to allow the wanton
text to drain his virility through overindulgence. However, the
typical novel reader was female. So was the typical novel writer.
Indeed, as Catherine Gallagher argues, two principal competing
metaphors for authorship in this period are those of the male
inseminating the text with his ideas, and the woman who prostitutes
herself. The female reader on the other hand, complementing the
"lascivious" male, is the "passive" reader who is "drugged" or seduced
40
by literature— literature which can figuratively "enter" her
imagination and corrupt her.
Gilbert and Gubar have certainly amply demonstrated the
association of authorship with paternity, of the pen with the penis.
Gallagher points out, however, that this metaphor coexisted with
many competing ones; one in particular with which female authors
struggled in the nineteenth century, was the metaphor of the author
as whore. Gallagher notes that this metaphor was particularly
debilitating to women precisely because prostitution was female-
identified, therefore allowing male authors to remain personally
untouched even when defined by this metaphor, whereas women
were, both as authors and as individuals, essentially defined thereby:
The whole sphere to which usury belongs, the
sphere of exchange as opposed to that of
production, is traditionally associated with women.
Women are items of exchange, a form of currency
and also a type of commodity . . . the prostitute
never makes this transition from exchange to
production [as wife and mother]; she retains her
commodity form at all times. Like money, the
prostitute, according to ancient accounts, is
incapable of natural procreation. For all her sexual
activity, indeed because of all her sexual activity,
she fails to bring new substances, children, into the
world. Her womb, it seems, is too slippery. And
yet she is a source of proliferation. What
multiplies through her is not a substance but a sign:
41
money. Prostitution, then, like usury, is a metaphor
for one of the ancient models of linguistic
production: the unnatural multiplication of
interchangeable signs. (40-41)
Thus, explains Gallagher, the paternity metaphor involves itself in
the production of worthwhile substance, the privileged text, and the
whore metaphor with the proliferation of useless signs.
The question remains, how can literature as food be
reconciled to an image of the male author, since food and
nourishment are traditionally the purview of the female breast
rather than the penis? However, just as parenthood is appropriated
to the male and the name of the father, and the mother becomes
merely a "midwife" to the child, nurturing and giving re-birth to the
male’s substance, food is provided (produced), in the patriarchal
family structure, by the male "breadwinner" and then prepared
(reproduced) by the mother. We may speculate, then, that the good
mother and bad mother who provide good food and poisonous food
(or withheld food) are split, the role of the good mother being
either usurped by the patriarch as the artist that generates literary
children/nourishment or by the "domestic" female author who
(re)produces ideologically correct family-oriented literature, often
42
for children, leaving the bad mother to be the prostituted author of
the commercial novel, who produces only filth and falsehood. The
male imagination produces true ideas, the female "fancy" reshapes
those ideas and impressions as the housewife reshapes the substance
that the male brings home, nourishing her family with male
substance through her female artifice. Naturally, as we move away
from the privileged origin of thought and imagination and into the
sphere of replication and re-production, there is an increasing
potential for contamination and distortion. Further, the capacity for
minute description of everyday detail which was requisite in the mid
Victorian novel was supposed to be the particular strength of the
woman, grounded in the body and in the concern with the ordering
and reproduction of the physical world, while the male imagination
was better suited to the abstract, the conceptual. Thus, male writing
produces the world of ideas, in history, philosophy, and the like,
whereas female writing reproduces the physical world, more or less
accurately, through meticulous recording of sense impressions.
Obviously, this is only a simple and schematic explanation of
a much more complex issue. The interaction of the specific
gendered text, reader and author is rarely straightforward; when
43
competing gendered cultural icons of the Text, Reader and Author
intrude themselves, it becomes evident that categorical analyses
must be viewed skeptically. Yet, there are discernible consequences
to particular constellations. As Susan Stanford Friedman notes of
the metaphor "writing is giving birth," the gender of the writer using
this metaphor— one which has been used by authors of both sexes
throughout literary history-does affect the use to which the
metaphor is put. Friedman notes that men use the "female"
metaphor of childbirth to express the "ethos of their times" whereas
women use it to reflect their personal experiences and concerns.
Extending this analysis, we can see precisely why the image of the
author-prostitute was so crippling to women, and why the concept of
paternity excluded them so effectively. In either case the text is an
extension of the woman’s body-either the prostitute’s or the
nameless mother’s— in either case it is the physical substance of a
woman that is exposed in the marketplace. Thus, when Frederic
Harrison cautions,
we forget the other side to . . . literature:--the
misuse of books, the debilitating waste of life in
aimless promiscuous vapid reading, or even, it may
be, in the poisonous inhalation of mere literary
garbage and bad men’s worst thoughts. For what
44
can a book be more than the man who wrote it?"
(491)
we might substitute "bad women’s worst sensations" and gain a good
sense of the subtle difference in audience perceptions of the
gendered author. The author-ity of the woman is based on her
feelings, her intuitions, her connection with the earth and nature
(see Griffin), in short, on her reproductive body; the authority of
man is based on his will, his reason, his name which both identifies
him with the patriarchal god and distinguishes him from other men,
in short, his productive mind. Note that the thoughts of bad men
are "poisonous inhalations", miasma, and morally contagious. In
both cases, it is important to note the equation of the book with the
author; here, the male author’s mind, by extension, the female
author’s body.
Novels, as the popular "mass market" literary form, fall into
this metaphor of literary production-authorship as prostitution, the
text as commodified body--almost automatically, and as Gallagher
notes, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" are almost sure to be
devalued as illegitimate— often with particular severity by the women
authors struggling to distance themselves from the commercial
45
metaphor, like Eliot. (Oliphant has perhaps the most troubled
relationship with this metaphor, alternately railing at women authors
like Eliot, whom she perceives (erroneously) to have been free of
financial need as "kept" women, for their freedom, and money
hungry "hacks" like Braddon, for catering to "low" public tastes.)
Both Oliphant and Braddon are examples of authors who were
frequently told that their immense production disallowed them from
writing any truly great work, and both apparently accepted this
verdict while excusing themselves from greater efforts by stating that
they had to value quantity over quality to support their families, thus
both emphasizing the financial nature of their authorship, and
deprecating their desire for it in favor of a domestic, noncompetitive
image.
Gallagher does not, however, mention the other substance
that prostitutes are charged with the proliferation of in the
nineteenth century, another intangible sign multiplying itself into
infinity and attacking and contaminating the sacredness of paternity
and the social body: disease. The disease enters the body through
intercourse, sexual and economic, multiplying itself inexplicably and
invisibly. The intangible substance of syphilis eventually yields the
46
sign of its presence upon the body of the consumer of the
adulterated and adulterous body of the prostitute— and upon those of
his wife and children. The danger of diseased text-the apparently
innocent book carrying a hidden dose of "moral contagion"— bears
vigilant scrutiny. Of all the harsh criticisms Braddon’s work
received, none stung her so as the charge, levied by an anonymous
assailant later identified as Mrs. Oliphant, of indecency. Through
all the murders, bigamous unions, and forged identities of her
sensation novels, she indignantly claimed, there could not be found
one hint of an illicit passion. Charles Mudie based his considerable
fortune on his claim that, as patrons of a "select" circulating library,
his readers could feel safe from the exposure to immorality usually
associated with such libraries since the eighteenth century. In
Colman’s Polly Honeycombe (1760), a character states that he
would rather expose his daughter to Covent Garden, a gathering
place of prostitutes, than to a circulating library (in Erickson). Even
in the late nineteenth century, the faint scent of impropriety lingered
on; in Braddon’s Joshua Haggard, a minister states his belief that
only married ladies and elderly spinsters could "safely" read novels.
Sometimes, also, the precise nature of the transgression is vague; it
47
is a discriminating critic indeed who can safely "diagnose" the
problem. Nineteenth century critic A. Strahan quotes a story from a
"family paper" to illustrate the subtlety of the symptom:
’While Lutie and the young trustee were together in
the little parlour, they had no end of fun about
something-laughed till Madame, in desperation,
opened the door and found them confronting each
other so gravely, that she apologized and went
away.’
We do not know anything more ingeniously
prurient than this, and yet where is an indecent
word? The last few sentences are very vulgar, and
that is all. The pruriency is to be felt, rather than
defined. (Strahan 981)
The critic-as-doctor or critic-as-policeman here indicates his superior
"sense" of what is wholesome and what is prurient-itchy, unhealthy.
A pruriency such as this one is very dangerous precisely because it
cannot be defined or diagnosed through reason, it must be felt,
experienced-contacted or contracted directly to be noticed at all.
By that time, the damage is done. The critic sets him- or herself up
as a buffer between the law abiding, healthy but vulnerable public
and the subtly adulterated goods of the criminal, diseased vendor of
popular fiction.
A perpetual drain on the spermatic economy of inspiration,
as well as on the economic domain of legitimate (male) earnings,
48
the independent authoress is, in effect, a "loose woman" independent
through economic parasitism on the male. There is an analogy here
to the sexual activity of the prostitute; two reasons drive women to
such extremes: financial hardship and unnatural desire. Although
women who have been "driven to" authorship by financial necessity
are to be pitied, they clearly cannot claim the respect due to the
properly domestic woman, and as for the woman who is financially
secure and still ventures to write, no scorn is too scathing:
In the miscellaneous hosts of the novel writers, the
fair sex very largely predominates . . . they have far
more leisure and fewer ways of disposing of it to
their satisfaction . . . They can’t well carry a gun,
and they have neither nerve nor inclination for the
hunting field . . . There is the grand alternative Of
matrimony, of course . . . [but] the lady may be
fastidious, or possibly unattractive. ("Contemporary
Literature" 323)
The writer goes on to note, however, that writing novels as a
distraction rarely occurs to "real men";
In fact, the youth who betakes himself to poetry or
novel writing, is likely to have a strong dash of the
feminine in him. He wears his hair long, taking
exquisite care of it in its studied disorder . . . it
must be confessed that he shows his appreciation of
the suitable and of the essential elements of the art
of dress. For he shrinks with a womanly
sensitiveness from the rougher masculine nature; he
is scared by the stories which enliven the smoking
49
room . . . though there may really be no great harm
in them . . . he gives himself effeminate airs of
intellectual superiority. (323)
It would seem that the novelist cannot win; the male who writes is
an "invert" who shuns masculinity, yet the woman who betrays
knowledge of masculine nature is indelicate and lower class:
At the very best, her range of actual knowledge
must necessarily be extremely limited . . . or if she
be better informed than we are willing to believe,
her delicacy binds her to a double measure of
reserve, unless, indeed, she have the shameless
assurance to unsex herself. (325)
The woman who writes is shameless, unsexes herself— which,
paradoxically, defines her primarily by her sexuality. Naturally, no
novel can be excellent without that knowledge of human nature
which decent women perforce lack, and which the male novelist
described above understands even less. In a somewhat contradictory
passage, the critic laments that novel-writing "must long ago have
made its way even below the middle strata of the middle classes. At
least it would be difficult otherwise to account for the repulsive
coarseness of style, and the grosser vulgarity of thought, which
would shock any woman with the slightest pretensions to
50
refinement" (326). An angry Temple Bar writer responds tartly to
this sort of criticism, repeated ad nauseam:
you are gravely told that it is absolutely impossible
that a woman can know anything about a man--
about his habits, his thoughts, his life. As the
majority of men spend a full half of their time in
the company of women, the consequence which
follows from this statement is a little curious, and
must create a vague and horrible doubt in the
minds of women which it is uncomfortable to
contemplate. They are taught to believe that they
never see their brothers, their fathers, their
husbands, or their friends, without the covering of a
mask so artfully constructed that it suffers no
indication of the features beneath it to appear. . . .
We can imagine the possibility of doubt arising in
the feminine mind whether that particular part of a
man’s life which is so carefully concealed from her,
does always furnish the noblest materials for Art.
But of course this is a profane thought, and one
which a critic could never entertain for a moment.
("Class Criticism" 238-239)
Apparently very few critics did entertain these profane thoughts.
Throughout this period, feminine literature— particularly the
"romance"— is associated with ill health and passivity, whereas
morally and ideologically correct literature is "thoroughly healthy
and masculine" ("Penny Fiction" 169). Masculine literature is
"wholesome physic"; feminine literature is comprised of "poisonous
51
sweets." The novel in general is feminine, effeminate; this
perception did not change until the advent of modernism.
Indubitably, therefore, a great portion of the hostility toward
literature as a commodity stems from ambivalent attitudes toward
imaginative literature (particularly the novel) as art on the one
extreme, and effeminate perversity on the other. Art, like
domesticity and other fundamental values, were not compatible with
commodification; they inhabited a separate sphere. On the other
hand, there was such a thing as wholesome "rational" amusement,
which was masculine and therefore could safely inhabit the realm of
commerce. Critics seemed to largely agree that the novel was
entertainment rather than art, and could not be compared with, say,
the epic as a literary form. On the other hand, there were clearly
some rather good novels and novelists, and that must be recognized.
And finally, there were some critics, particularly toward the end of
the century and the beginning of modernism, who recognized the
novel’s potential and that the novel, for good or ill, was the peculiar
hallmark of the nineteenth century period. Victorians denigrated
novels, execrated their proliferation-and read them constantly. In
52
1891, the Quarterly Review speculates on the role of the novel as
literature:
The Novel might amuse, might serve as a pastime
to make the idle crowd laugh, and, in general, play
the merry-andrew to our earnest energetic strivings
of every day; but mount the throne and assume the
robes of heroic literature?-not until we had
forgotten our Chaucers, Miltons, and Shakespeares!
. . .[Yet] When literature is called upon to balance
the conquests of science, must we not understand
by literature the novel? . . . [But] there are eight
hundred Novels a year published in England! Of
which, how many survive the year after? . . . The
staple English commodity which circulates in three
volumes is a conventional product, an institution
like Saturday excursions to Brighton and Margate
for half-a-crown, a refuge for distressed
needlewomen, a thing as native to our shores as
Britannia metal and afternoon tea. The Homeric
epithet, dedicated by long custom to its service, is
’trashy’. ("English Realism and Romance" 469)
Thus begins the review of the collected novels of H. Rider Haggard,
Robert Louis Stevenson and George Meredith. It is interesting to
note exactly what these reviewers felt were these multifold dangers
of novel reading per se. Over and above the censorious concern
over particular kinds of content which we might expect and which
persists in our culture today, there is anxiety over the effects of
reading for entertainment at all. Many felt that it would cause
people to dislike more difficult, intellectually engaging reading.
53
There were outcries against the lack of physical exercise encouraged
by "unhealthy" novel reading. Most seemed concerned about the
passivity of it, and its addictive quality— arguments reminiscent of
twentieth century indictments of television. The Temple Bar
accuses:
Novels intensify and encourage all the other foibles
of the time. We are passionately addicted to
excitement, and novels excite us. . . . Akin to this
craving is a preference for quantity over quality,
and our novelists strive to load the palate rather
than to stimulate its tasting and discriminating
power. There exists a marked tendency in favour
of pleasure that shall be unintellectual and even
lazy, and novel-reading is for the most part the
idlest and most vacant of pastimes. . . . This quality
of narrow curiosity, which is the paralysis of all
wide and noble interest . . . the novel stimulates
and feeds. . . . Other and nobler branches of
literature necessarily catch the infection, or are
doomed to neglect for want of the interesting
malady. ("The Novels of Miss Broughton" 198-199)
There is a kind of despairing admiration, a fascinated panic in the
way some reviewers refer to the proliferation of the novel. "One
half of the world . . ." begins one reviewer "has now been written
over" ("On the Reading of Books"). In a thirteen page (favorable)
review of Rhoda Broughton’s work, four full pages are devoted to a
54
harangue against novels and novels’ readers, who are, as the article
explains, absolutely everybody:
It is the age of novels. Novels, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; aye, and
Sunday too; novels, not only every day of the week,
but every week of the month, and every month of
the year, every year of the decade, and then da
capo; novels, morning, noon, and night, novels here
there and everywhere. . . . They come out in bits, in
parts, in chapters, in serials, in one volume, two
volumes, three volumes. They are thrown at our
heads, they are stumbling blocks . . . they abolish
thought, and even compete with slumber . . . The
world is one big circulating library (to us), and the
circulating library is the novel. ("The Novels of
Miss Broughton" 199-201)
There is a mesmerizing quality to this tirade which can be only
faintly suggested in this brief excerpt, a schizophrenia which can be
only partially dismissed by the author’s humorous transition,
wherein, after asserting that novels are causing the rapid decline of
the British empire, s/h e urges "let us hasten to recognize the fact
that there are novels and novels, and that there exists the widest
distinction between them." (Frederic Harrison, in a different article,
helpfully quantifies this distinction: "as much as diamonds differ
from sand on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from
a dead rat" (497).) Miss Broughton’s novels, we are told in this
55
review, are "fresh and sweet" and presumably may therefore be
enjoyed without endangering the nation. Still, there is never any
attempt to identify them as art, merely as a more wholesome
consumable commodity. If masculine literature, such as the history,
the epic, etc. represent the mind of the age, the romance, indeed,
the popular novel as a genre, represents the body of culture, a
female body, to be alternately viewed with horrified fascination and
obscured by a compulsive analytical discourse.
It is the conflicted understanding of the novel, its value and
purpose, that characterizes many pieces of general criticism
published in this era. If the novel aspired to the status of art, was
the primary purpose of the novel to please (feminine) or to teach
(masculine)? And whom was it to please or teach? Should it aspire
thus? This confusion is exemplified in the tendenz novel controversy
toward the end of the century, some critics praising a novel for
being obviously written to a moral, others condemning the same
work for that very characteristic. General within this discussion of
the purpose of belles lettres is a strong awareness of the potential of
the novel, serialized or otherwise, as a medium for propaganda. For
such critics, novels were measured largely against a standard of
56
ideological confirmation. The purpose of the novel, therefore, was
ultimately to reconcile dissonance and to laud conformity.
III. The Commodification of the Text
In our time the material facilities given to
production have multiplied mediocrity as heat
multiplies carrion flies; it should have no quarter
shown to it; it is a ravaging pest. (Ouida, Views 82).
Nineteenth century critics perceived their era as a turning
point in terms of the commodification of literature, and their
denunciations of commercial literature pit the hack or prostituted
author that writes to order (and therefore seldom well) against a
Romantic image of the bardic artist who writes only when he (and I
use the pronoun advisedly) has something he must communicate, a
literary paternity gestating irresistibly. Many essayists felt that there
had been a recent and radical reduction in the value of reading, and
that this shift could be traced to the production of literature as a
commodity by "hacks." "The author who refuses to spice his dish for
the jaded palate of the multitude has usually the satisfaction of
finding that it remains untasted" complains a Temple Bar essayist.
Mark Pattison writes:
57
Literature is a commodity . . . Certainly authorship
is a profession . . . demand creates supply, and
prescribes its quantity and quality. You see at once
how vital to literature must be the establishment of
this commercial principle as its regulator, and how
radical must have been the revolution in the
relation between writer and reader which was
brought about when it was established. (660-1)
The three assumptions that most commonly surface in
reference to the commodification of literature are first, that
proliferation indicates inferior quality, second, that the "professional"
status of the author causes him or her to create texts to suit the
taste of the consumer, rather than the author’s own, and third, that
this creation to order, inevitably, leads to a decline in quality. The
first assumption rests on the conviction that art cannot be forced
without reducing its quality, and more obliquely on the belief that
art is something that the author has within him (or her) in a certain
am ount-if expended too profligately, it will be exhausted early in
the author’s career. This assumption links artistic inspiration
squarely with the metaphor of capital that dominated the perception
of both the social and the physical body (e.g. the spermatic
economy.)
The second assumption rests on the conviction that the
"mass" public has, collectively, degraded tastes. Certainly, critics
evidence a distaste for the financial issues surrounding authorship
which don’t seem to extend to any critique of the old patronage
systems under which earlier authors labored. Yet, the question
remains, why would the "tyranny of the consumer" be so much more
repugnant in this case than it is in any other? No one debates the
buyer’s right to demand that his or her furniture be made to certain
specifications; why should the buyer not dictate the specifications of
the literature he or she will read? The reasons behind the
devaluation of the reading public’s taste are complex. Part of it no
doubt stems from the spread of literacy across class barriers. Some
critics complained that the mass public (presumably the "great
unwashed") is dictating the standards for literature. Yet, if this were
true, then the mass public must largely have been composed of the
middle to upper middle class, for these were the primary patrons of
the circulating libraries which largely dictated the terms of novel
production. Although the servant classes often were beneficiaries of
circulating library memberships of their employers, the employers
were still the ones selecting the books, and thus, helping Mudie and
59
Smith to articulate standards. Of the working classes, most
apparently contented themselves with penny publications until the
public library movement began to grow toward the end of the
century. The penny press came under scrutiny as well, but great
care was taken to distinguish it from the circulating library novel—
although with rather equivocal success (perhaps this is why M.E.
Braddon was never forgiven for republishing one of her penny-
numbers thrillers in the guise of a respectable three decker.) One
salient change is that control of the market standards had been
permanently wrested from the few who had shaped it in earlier
times and delivered into the hands of the many, over whom little
control could be exercised in turn. However, the real revolution is
in the creation of a large class of producers and consumers of a
culture industry which is neither high nor low, neither
transcendental nor ephemeral, neither articulated by the supreme
ruling classes nor against it by the exploited lower ones. The
popular novel in the nineteenth century was a truly middle class,
bourgeois, consumer oriented literary product, which quickly
demonstrated its potential by promiscuously seducing readership
across most class boundaries.
60
And, of course, the circulating library system was frequently
indicted as encouraging a "cookie cutter" approach to the production
of books, and a collapsing of critical standards by, on the one hand,
encouraging publication of works of little merit, and on the other,
encouraging Procrustean censorship of the new, exciting, and
different in literary work. Some of the evils attributed to the
circulating library characterize any mass market system, yet others
were particular to the unique market conditions of the time.
Guinevere Griest points out that the circulating library, with its
guarantee to buy so many copies of just about anything in the three
volume form, so long as it was not offensive, provided publishers
with a no-risk situation (56). The positive side of this system is that
it provided a market for young hopefuls who couldn’t break into the
demanding periodicals market. However, although these are
certainly the explanations with which publishers defended or derided
the circulating library system, with its stranglehold on the full-book
publishing market, the fact was that even with the guarantee of
Mudie and Smith to purchase a cautious number of copies of a new
novel, the publisher would be lucky to break even on a library
edition of a book by a no name author that was reviewed badly.
61
Therefore, the "young hopefuls" often had to resort to a "Vanity
Press" system, subventing all or a large part of the production costs,
in order to enjoy a percentage of possible profits later (profits that
often either did not materialize or mysteriously melted into so much
red ink on the left side of the publisher’s ledger). Although libraries
like Mudie’s did "push" certain authors, recommending them to
patrons, and although the public was, in fact, sensitive to critics’
comments, particularly about an unknown and untried author,
finally, the consumer exercised his or her right to choose.
Established authors sold heavily regardless of the critics (witness
Ouida’s sales), and authors who weren’t well-liked went unasked for
at the library counters. Although rural customers had to accept
whatever books the library chose to send, they were not forced to
read them. In fact, the circulating libraries did not really account
for the ongoing support of very many truly unpopular authors (as
Miss Broughton’s book A Beginner humorously illustrates). And as
George Moore’s Literature at Nurse demonstrates, there was
relatively little censorship for established authors as well; certainly
the passage from Ouida that he cites is much "warmer" than
anything in his banned book-but Ouida’s books were bestsellers and
62
his was not. Clearly, the stipulations both on form and content
applied much more strictly to new authors or authors of uncertain
popularity than to authors with a following.
Still, it would be unwise to underestimate the effect of the
circulating library, particularly in terms of the structure and length
of novels. Broughton suffered tremendously under the stipulation
that novels must be long, as her fast paced but not heavily plotted
romances were ill sorted for the long format. Her fees were
significantly reduced on occasion when she simply couldn’t stretch
her story sufficiently (Griest 55). Ouida, who loved the wide canvas,
arguably improves in the tighter one volume form, wherein her
tendency to prolixity is restrained. Certainly, authors frequently
elongated or foreshortened parts of their work in order to build in
the requisite balance of completeness and suspense in each volum e-
enough to satisfy until the next volume arrived, but also to maintain
interest until its arrival, the volumes being circulated separately to
maximize profits (Griest 52). In some sense, the three volume
structure was a larger, more accommodating version of serial
publication; even though they were published at the same time, they
were rarely available at the same time to the same reader. (Of
63
course many novels underwent both modes of publication.) In this
sense, indeed, the circulating library dictated the terms of
production to authors, and also provided a showcase for "first
novels" and other work that would otherwise probably not have seen
the light of day in a direct sales market. But for the "proliferation
of worthless trash" of which the critics accuse the system of
responsibility, we must look elsewhere for explanation.
In the 1890’s, the three volume "library edition " which
circulated through the great commercial libraries of the nineteenth
century fell out of favor with a rapidity that has startled many
historians. However, the evidence suggests that the form had
actually been losing readership (and therefore money) for several
years, which is precisely what motivated the interdiction. Historians
have cited the drop in production figures as evidence of the power
of the libraries to dictate product standards; in fact, it merely
demonstrates their ability to artificially extend those standards, at a
crippling cost, for a brief time. It is the reading public that was no
longer satisfied with the form. Although some felt that the length of
the older novels was no longer appealing, in fact, they were little
reduced in length; instead they were reduced in print and margin
64
size to accommodate more text on fewer pages. The establishment
of free libraries may have had something to do with a decline in the
attractiveness of subscription libraries, but it does not truly explain
the decline in the three volume form. I would suggest that out of
many possible reasons for the change, two stand out. First, the
commodification of literature as item of mass production, so long
bemoaned in the journals, had indeed finally taken place. That is,
the readers, probably influenced in part by those very journal
articles, had finally come to see novels as truly disposable, and
demanded a cheap and disposable form for them. Second, the
British finally became a book buying public instead of a book
sharing public under the impetus of the kinds of anxieties partially
expressed in the facets of the disease scare discussed above.
Desiring to be less connected to other people, other bodies, in the
processes of consumption, readers preferred to purchase rather than
borrow, to read books which were complete rather than handle
three different volumes at different times. Readers withdrew from
the community of readers reading texts in process, and devoured
books in solitary, sharing opinions after the fact. It is no
coincidence that we see the decline of the serial form in this period,
65
and the rise of the short story as a dominant literary form in
periodicals. Readers may have been more comfortable with a text
which could be consumed in one sitting, a text which was already
finished and therefore did not require the shared speculation of a
community of readers, the contamination of ideas shaping the
reading and writing process. The new forms were complete in and
of themselves, self contained. They do not suggest openness,
periodicity, the permeable body, the shared experience, as readily as
do earlier forms, although it is, of course, in the nature of text itself
to do so.
IV. Contagion and Class: The Doctors and the Critics
In all of the discourse surrounding the popular novel,
whether savagely denunciatory or ruefully indulgent, there is a
strong sense of critical surveillance, a need to categorize, to name
and contain. Since the rhetoric of literary surveillance and reform
was motivated by precisely the same terrified fascination with
transgression as that of sanitary surveillance and reform, it is not
surprising that we find the two discourses becoming confluent.
Fiction, like contagion, might become the vehicle by which
66
important physical boundaries were breached: distinctions subject
and object, upper and lower bodily strata, upper and lower class,
masculine and feminine, food and filth, mother and whore.
Certain kinds of fiction were naturally targeted for more
surveillance than others; much of this was class based and perhaps
the strongest censure was reserved for morally unacceptable
literature with blatantly "lower class" properties which had yet
infiltrated middle class markets. The sensation novel controversy is
the most dramatic example, the sensation story having existed for
years in broadsheets and penny papers as a lower class amusement
before Brad don was credited with introducing it in Lady Audley’ s
Secret. Just as the genre’s name derives from the physical
"sensation" of excitement that the story was to produce, the
condemnations of the genre are set in extremely physical language:
sensation would "breed a pestilence so foul as to poison the very
lifeblood of our nation" (Murray 935). Earlier (1863) the Quarterly
Review wound down a lengthy and generally hostile analysis of
"Sensation Novels" with this dark observation:
Regarding these works merely as an efflorescence,
as an eruption indicative of the state of health in
the body in which they appear, the existence of an
67
impure and silly crop of novels, and the fact that
they are read, are by no means favorable symptoms
of the conditions of the body of society. But it is
easier to detect the disease than to suggest the
remedy" (512)
Lower class literature, in particular, was associated with both
vice and the incitement to criminal behavior (which, in turn, was
often figured forth in terms of disease, as readers of Erewhon will
doubtless recall). A. Strahan of the Contemporary Review writes:
Many a time have we heard a shopkeeper declare
’Hard as it is to have an errand boy who cannot
receipt a bill, or even read one, I would rather
mine could not read at all.’ . . . ’Here is a girl of
twenty, who has learnt to read at Sunday School,
talks good Evangelical, and yet reads the vilest
penny trash, steals in order that she may dress like
a prostitute, gets into the company of young roughs
who have fed full fat upon just the same kind of
reading, and before she has had time to learn what
household decency is, she is gone to the bad.’ ("Bad
Literature for the Young" 986)
The two types of stories offered in the penny magazines for young
people were primarily "highwayman stories"-- descendants of the
Newgate broadsheets-and romances, usually of the Pamela type, but
often "of high life." The Quarterly Review laments the existence of
the penny dreadfuls, giving voice once more to the apparently
general conviction that such stories were turning their young readers
68
into criminals: "When it is remembered that this foul and filthy
trash circulates by thousands and tens of thousands week by week
amongst lads who are at the most impressionable period of their
lives, . . . it is not surprising that the authorities have to lament the
prevalence of juvenile crime" ("Penny Fiction" 154). Here we have
the suggestion, with "foul and filthy trash," of a reference to the
corruption of the body through improper cultural sanitation. But
the Edinburgh Review makes the most heartrending plea against
"penny dreadfuls." In "The Literature of the Streets" (1887), the
reviewer apologizes to his or her readers, promising not to make
them "wade through such a nauseous mass" of penny literature, but
"to select from the whole heap a few specimens" to illustrate the
"mental diet" of poor children. The writer singles out for particular
opprobrium the "small but pestiferous class of weekly publications
which pander to the worst tastes of readers . . . the so-called ’Society
journals’ . . . all relying on the same poisonous condiments to season
every dish. . . No one scavenger could alone and single-handed
contrive to amass such a wealth of unsavory refuse" (55-57).
Although the reviewer somewhat confusingly concedes that s/h e can
69
remember finding in all these pages "no one single indecent phrase
or illusion (sic)" (63), s/h e declares that
the feast spread for them (poor readers) is ready
and abundant; but every dish is poisoned, unclean,
and shameful. Every flavour is a false one, every
condiment vile. Every morsel of food is doctored,
every draught of wine is drugged; no true hunger is
satisfied, no true thirst quenched; and the hapless
guests depart with a depraved appetite, and a
palate more than ever dead to every pure taste, and
every perception of what is good and true. (65)
The author asks, once again, for better penny fiction: "They ask for
bread of some kind; it will not do to give them a stone. That which
they now eat is of adulterate, poisoned flour, and no other is within
their reach. . . . To do this is no less than to deliberately poison the
springs of a nation’s life" (61). Once again the metaphor of reading
as ingestion is in play, with its contemporary reference to the
adulteration issue. Significantly, adulteration is linked, through
subtle imagery, to the sanitary issue of "nuisance abatement," an
issue of established and perennial interest to journal readers since
the 1850s. (The "scavenger" that amasses a "wealth of refuse" must
indeed garner his specimens from the "nauseous mass" of the
dungheap: Mayhew’s "pure" finders come to mind.) The suggestion
is that the children are literally being fed excrement— like the waste
70
which was often found to have leached through the soil and into the
"springs," wells, and other water sources which supplied drinking
water and incidentally cholera— a theory which, even as early as the
fifties, had begun to find an interested, if skeptical audience.
Obviously, for a number of reasons, this is a powerful
metaphor. For the contemporary reader, each carefully chosen
word would have called to mind, not merely a vivid image of the
city streets around him or her, but the endless controversy, fear and
suspicion of disease and contagion surrounding human waste.
Certainly the children of the poor were literally being fed human
wastes in their food and in their water. But, once again, this is an
unpleasant reminder of the vulnerability of the upper classes to
those same wastes, and perhaps to those same poisonous influences
on a mental level. Secondly, it invokes the kind of repulsed
fascination that begins with the anal phase equation of fecal
material with wealth which initializes the theme of class conflict so
powerfully in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. The fools’ "gold" that the
poor are getting, particularly in ersatz "society journals" and
sensation novels of "high life" may foment a revolutionary attitude:
first, by eroding the poor’s perception of the upper classes as
r ~
71 I
different from themselves in kind, rather than merely in degree, and i
secondly, by leading the reader to believe that it is possible for him
or herself to become upwardly mobile, thus possibly leading to envy
and resentment if the reader’s hopes are disappointed. j
1
A. Susan Williams comments on both the undeniable !
I
association of the poor with disease and filth and the forced
recognition of the "two nations" connectedness in their human j
vulnerability to a disease which could be communicated "upward."
i
This consciousness was evident enough in the days of the miasma i
I
theory, but at least one could identify and take steps to avoid bad ]
I
smells, and deodorization was considered tantamount to disinfection. ;
t
With the germ theory, however, the enemy became invisible, j
unavoidable. Middle class readers were encouraged to think of the i
i
poor and diseased not only in terms of physical proximity (D o they i
live close by?), but in terms of actual physical contact through ;
i
microorganisms (Have they infected articles which I have j
purchased?). Tracts like Kingsley’s "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," in
which the feverish sweated tailors or sempstresses pass deadly
disease to rich buyers who do not even know of their existence, ;
emphasized the human bond between the clean middle classes and
72
the filthy and dangerous poor. Germs, like literacy, redefined class
boundaries. When, in his 1895 article "The Microbe as a Social
Leveller" Cyrus Edson reminds his readers:
We cannot separate the tenement house district
from the portion of the city where the residences of
the wealthy stand, and treat this as being a separate
locality. . . . a hundred avenues afford a way by
which the contagion may be carried from the
tenement to the palace . . . This is the socialism of
the microbe, this is the chain of disease, which
binds all the people of the community together,
he is merely repeating a rather hackneyed commonplace. What
bears noting is that it depends more obviously than most on the
motif of socialism and revolution and, as Williams argues, the social
violence of the "dangerous classes" was a common association with
their capacity for spreading disease— an association inseparable from
the guilt and responsibility of the upper classes for the condition,
both sanitary and economic, of the poor. The association of
cleanliness with morality (and dirt and disease with immorality) is
still too much a current part of our culture to require much proving.
Dirt was not only thought intrinsically immoral, but would cause an
otherwise moral person to degenerate (Williams). Both the
conditions of mortality and morality which afflicted the poor and
73
made them dangerous to the rich were often attributed to the
inadequate Christian stewardship of the wealthier classes and their
laissez-faire economics. Prostitution was often (inaccurately)
explained as being caused primarily by the seduction of working
class women by middle and upper class men (see Walkowitz); the
myth which accounts for the fall of individual women, although
generally untrue, accurately represents the larger social truth that
the conditions of poverty which drove many working class women to
prostitute themselves was a direct result of middle class exploitation.
Thus the syphilis that the middle class man contracted from
prostitutes was often seen as poetic justice or divine retribution for
poor economic and moral stewardship. On a broader scale, the
danger from the filth and fevers of the poor were similarly an ever
present reminder of not only the failure of Victorian society to care
for its less fortunate members, but of its active and culpable
exploitation of their weakness. The fascinated horror of the
Victorian reader "insatiably devouring" endless "sanitary ramblings"
in the journals, and tract after tract of harrowing descriptions of
dwelling houses and rookeries seems motivated, not only by fear of
the danger, but, as Williams makes clear, partially by desire to
74
atone. The filth that is being generated is as truly a middle class
product as the commodities which the middle class also produce
through the bodies of the poor in factories. Kingsley writes:
The social state of a city depends directly on its
moral state, and I fear dissenting voices, but I must
say what I believe to be the truth— that the moral
state of a city depends . . . on the physical state of
that city; on the food, water, air and lodging of its
inhabitants. . . . When we examine into the ultimate
cause of a dangerous class; into the one property
common to all its members . . . we find it to be this
loss of self-respect . . .whatever may be the fate of
virtuous parents, children brought up in dens of
physical and moral filth cannot retrieve self-respect.
They sink, they must sink, into a life on a level with
the sights, sounds, aye, the very smells, which
surround them. . . . And remember, that these
physical influences of great cities, physically
depressing and morally degrading, influence, though
to a less extent, the classes above the lowest
stratum. ("Great Cities . . ." 195-205)
In this passage, we see several pairings at work: the social body and
the individual physical body, physical health and moral integrity,
mental impressions and physical effects. The compliance of the
reader with the directive of the text-to support reform -is motivated
in two fairly direct ways: fear of the "dangerous classes," and fear of
contamination or moral "contagion" moving upward through society,
with its hint of disease (the "very smells"). The less obvious appeal
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is to the guilt and sense of responsibility of the reader, reminded
that the antecedents of the "submerged" classes were probably
"virtuous parents" who have suffered an unknown fate.
However, we must take care not to ascribe this concern with
disease, poverty and filth entirely to a sense of social responsibility,
or merely to fear. In the endless and detailed accounts of sanitary
"nuisances," of the appalling condition of "rookeries" and slums
offered up to the middle class reader in the great quarterlies and
fortnightly journals, there is a sensuality and wealth of physical
detail that make the strongest "sensationalism" seem pallid indeed.
In fact, the rhetorical strategy of authors of articles on "bad
literature" and on sanitary issues are remarkably similar: both
generally start with an apology to the reader for bringing such
disturbing and unpleasant material to his (or, less probably, her)
attention, an encouragement to steel oneself to the unpleasant task,
followed by pages and pages of detailed descriptions or excerpts,
closing with a brief exhortation to support change. The object of
concern becomes the subject and substance of the text. There is a
pleasure being derived from the supposedly necessary scrutiny of
such horrors; in some sense, these textual re-productions of the
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literal and figurative "refuse" of society are being packaged and sold
to an eager middle class consumership-in short, not to put too fine
a point on it, shit makes good copy. Thus the misery of the
exploited classes itself can be exploited and turned to account.
(Writers like Dickens both exploit this market and critique it with
their harrowing and graphic accounts; consider the equation of the
dustheaps with gold in Our Mutual Friend.) The prostituted body
and the diseased, contagious body have much in common; both are
grotesque, that is, defined by their openings, their lower bodily
strata, their discharges. One of the most "sensational" moments in
the testimony of Mr. Barr, a Lock Hospital inspector, during the
Parliamentary investigations on the Contagious Diseases Acts, was
his statement that many prostitutes were so wretched that they lived
in drains, and his example, "This [sixteen year old] young girl had
only been seduced about three weeks, and was found living in a
drain under the turnpike road, where she had been for a fortnight,
the vermin were in myriads around her" (.Parliamentary Papers 727).
In this way the prostitute to be placed under surveillance is allied
with sewage, with its connotations of fever, as well as the venereal
disease for which she is admitted, and simultaneously dehumanized
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into a kind of sexual troll, waiting for victims beneath the roadway.
Three days later, the commission was still referring to this anecdote
in their examination of other inspectors: "Dr. Barr spoke to us about
some of those unfortunate women who live neither in rooms nor
brothels, nor public houses, but absolutely in drains" (750). Through
this discourse, any subversive potential of the grotesque body is
dissipated. The diseased body, the prostituted body are regulated,
placed under a "kind of surveillance" (PP 46) in lock hospitals and
fever wards. The horrified delectation of the dirty details is the very
conoisseurship of exploitation, a kind of abstract class sadism
masking itself as humanitarian concern. A s Jessica Benjamin states
of the nature of sadism, it is in many ways a self protective gesture
on the part of the sadist, who wishes to exert control by eradicating
the subjectivity of the Other. Regrettably, once this is accomplished,
the Other ceases to hold any interest for the sadist— because, in fact
s/h e ceases to be Other. In the case of Sanitary Ramblings or
Gatherings From Graveyards (evocative titles!), the utter helplessness
and degradation of the victim manages to maintain a frisson of
interest in the oppressor, since the victim’s powerlessness
paradoxically provides the very power to retaliate, through
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contagion. (The possibility of actual revolution, of course, is
somewhat less erotic.)
V. The Body and Metaphor
The word "transgression" comes from Latin and meant a
crossing, passage, or other movement across space; it also meant a
transposition of words. In English, it retains the connotation of
crossing over, but usually the boundary crossed is the invisible one
of a rule, law, or social code. The word has come to have an
association of sin or criminality; it has lost the innocence of its Latin
childhood. Transgression, then, is a movement, but a specific kind
of movement, one in which boundaries are crossed which are
supposed to remain inviolate. If all desire is movement (of which
more later), illicit desire is that which leads one to transgress, to
move out of the approved space assigned and into other spaces.
Braddon’s novel The L ady’ s Mile is based on this metaphor; the mile
long carriage track is symbolic of the restrictive social codes that
enclose middle class women within a needlessly small space in which
to move. However, those women who go beyond the boundaries of
The Lady’s Mile are socially condemned and lost to sight forever.
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Social codes of conduct are envisioned as physical boundaries
("You’ve gone too far— you had better watch your step"), as are class
and gender distinctions, which are also codes of conduct. These
codes are often metonymically identified with reified geographical or
functional spaces (the East End, Angel Meadow, Belgravia, or
conversely, the Public vs. the Domestic Sphere). In this manner,
transgression may be assigned both physical and metaphorical
spaces, so that when Nancy of Oliver Twist goes into the upper
middle class hotel, the significance of her entry clearly goes beyond
the matter of the few feet between street and parlor; she is "out of
her element." Because it is precisely at the border, or the moment
of crossing, that transgression takes place, it is the liminal space that
is most highly charged, particularly if the possibility of transgression
is immanent but not yet actualized.
The possibility of transgression is based on duality. The
notion of the boundary acknowledges that there is an Other; the
notion of transgression acknowledges that the boundary between
Self and Other can be collapsed, at risk to both identities.
Transgression is alienating because it re-creates the transgressor as
Other than him- or herself. Desire is alienating, because in desiring
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an Other, one moves toward transgression; therefore, desire must be
"contained" by law and custom, or sublimated.
The body is constructed as the most irreducible physical
space of the Self. There is an inside and an outside, and various
liminal structures which connect the two, and elaborate cultural
rituals attend the proper utilization of those structures. Physician
Jacques Sarano notes that even though Western culture is marked
by self-body dualism, that dualism only becomes conscious during
times of illness or discomfort; in other words, the healthy person
identifies totally with his or her body, without being aware of the
body as such, but pain or discomfort makes us aware of our bodies,
and in those moments we construct ourselves as alienated from
them. The product of this consciousness, which Sarano calls the
"body-object" is also body-as-spectacle:
[One feels that] I am not my body; I have a body. It
is one thing or another. I look at it; I touch it. I
am the spectator of my body . . . The body object is
also rightly called ’the-body-for-the-other,’ precisely
because others take, vis-a-vis my body, the same
position as spectator and utilizer. (53-54)
I would add to Sarano’s analysis that the female body as commodity
and the desiring (needy, incomplete) body are consistently
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constructed in this way. If, as Sarano argues, "the ambiguity of the
subject-object body bursts out in full in sickness," then illicit desire is
aligned with sickness in its effects; both succeed in alienating the
healthy, complete, socially approved self from the part of the self
that is unhealthy, incomplete, socially transgressive. Yet it is the
body that unites all these selves; a character in a sensation novel
may have multiple identities, but the body betrays their unity— a
birthmark, perhaps, or the physical impossibility of being in two
places at once, or, even more poignantly, a fingerprint will testify to
the uniqueness of the body and the oneness of all those selves. It is,
then, not surprising that we find disease used as a metaphor for
other, often less avowable transgressions, and that disease is framed
in the competing models of a personally uncontrollable attack from
without and the direct and controllable result of sin. Often, these
two are reconciled within the opposition of the individual and social
body, e.g. Esther Summerson of Bleak House is the innocent victim
of a disease which the larger social body of English society has
brought on itself with its greed and callousness. (It is in this way,
also, that twentieth century moralists reconcile a reading of AIDS as
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a heavenly punishment on the homosexual community with the
existence of AIDS infected children.)
The body then, as a semiotic unit which encodes similarity
and difference, self and other, is a metaphor. And this metaphor is
extended throughout human experience of difference-within-unity.
Society is a body, a community is a body, a corporation is a body, as
is a family, political group, or geographical feature. So too is the
complete production of a single author, reference to whose "corpus"
may have an unpleasantly moribund connotation, yet serves the
purpose of indicating its readiness for critical dissection. O f course
an individual "body of work" is only part of the body of culture,
which, like the physical human body-object, both expresses and
betrays (which is to say, expresses too well) its subject, and is
scrutinized anxiously for signs of dis-ease.
The cultural body "betrays" the subject when it expresses
internal difference-that is, the possibility of transgression. Who is
this betrayed subject, since a culture is made up of many
individuals? Obviously, tastes differ, but in the body of a
society/culture, there is a "head" or group wherein power is highly
concentrated, and, in accordance with this metaphor, it is usually
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this head that speaks for the rest of the body, and interprets the
inarticulate signs of the betraying body: the patient tells the doctor
about the feeling generated by the ulcer within the outraged
stomach; journalists and members of Parliament interpret the Hyde
Park riots.
It is a cliche that the head of society in Victorian Britain was
comprised of fairly conservative white imperialist males of the upper
classes, and this cliche is, like most cliches, both highly accurate and
egregiously oversimplified. Power in Victorian England was, of
course, not solely wielded by person fitting this description, and
there was far more multiplicity of values than the "head" metaphor
allows for. (The goal of all body metaphors is to collapse
differences into unity.) Yet, finally, power does tend to be deployed
in measures that favor its continued distribution along previous
lines— that is to preserve the status quo wherever it is feasible to do
so, for the understandable reason that persons and groups that have
power tend to deploy their resources in keeping or enhancing it.
And, except in periods of severe social upheaval, differences
between members of a power group do not overshadow the
similarities that uphold this shared aim. It is in this sense that we
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can say, for example, that Victorian England was imperialist even
though members of that society expressed widely differing opinions
on the subject, or that the critical establishment expressed anxiety
over the sensation novel in the sixties, although some individuals
defended it.
The growth of the popular literary market, the advent of
inexpensive printing and the spread of literacy in the nineteenth
century accomplished a revolutionary feat: it gave several previously
mute parts of the social body voice and an arena in which to be
heard. Although popular cultural forms had always expressed the
perspectives of these groups, such forms had generally been
ephemeral and restricted in locality and could therefore be ignored
or patronized by power groups as the situation warranted. The
popular literary industry diffused the power to speak for the culture
downward and outward to a limited, but significant degree, allowing
the vast range of the middle classes and semi-marginal voices such
as the middle class woman and, to some extent, the foreign or
religiously radical to be heard. The task of the cultural power group
became then, no longer only to express the culture, but to organize
and control these other voices and determine their presentation
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both to the culture itself (British readers of various classes) and to
others (French readers, for example). Thus, a hierarchy, built on
existing hierarchies of values, is established and enforced through
ideological institutions such as critical discourse or educational
curricula. The criteria of such a hierarchy, then, is based on the
extent to which the "head" of society feels that it is being expressed
and not betrayed by the cultural production. If a cultural
production is unified, "healthy" and not overtly evocative of dualism
and transgression, in other words, what Bakhtin identifies as epic, it
will be accorded high status as "serious" literature. Literature that
betrays dualism, evokes the specter of transgression, is polyvocal and
therefore "unhealthy" will be accorded low status as frivolous or
even dangerous literature, which marginalizing practice will
somewhat neutralize its enormous popularity-inevitable because it
appeals to the concerns of the large proportion of the body of
society. Most circulation library novels were a mixture of
transgressive elements veneered with an epic storyline, often glued
together with a moralizing narrative voice which counterpoints the
presentation of transgressive events and actions with a pious "party
line" interpretation of those actions. Mrs. Henry W oods’ famous
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narrative intrusion in East Lynne— a plea to her reader never to
consider doing what the protagonist, in fact, does--is an excellent
example.
Because disease is so expressive of the dualism of the
Subject-object, it is both a semiotically charged phenomenon in itself
and a powerful metaphor for Othering. Transgression of
boundaries— which are always the boundaries between subject and
object, self and other-is expressed as the parallel scission of disease,
and the desire that creates it is presented as corrupt, unnatural,
insane, even murderous.
VI. The Outward Movement of Desire: Colonizing the Body of
Culture
Let us examine for a moment the nature of the desire
illustrated above. Desire is movement. It is movement toward an
"object," just as repulsion or disgust is movement away from an
object. Both have this in common; they depend on the existence of
the object for their motive force, and in that sense they are
interchangeable. Gaining or utterly losing the object have the same
effect— invalidating and excluding movement. Both movements
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affirm the incompleteness and dependency of the subject— its non
self-sufficiency, its non-closure. In another sense, disgust is often
the direct product of desire, as food is turned to excrement,
exploitation of surplus value to slums, etc. In this sense, disgust is
part of the process of satisfying a desire that yet affirms the
separateness of the object, the non-permanency of satiety. Because
the subject is dependent on the object, there is an element of
repulsion in desire, and of desire in repulsion; therefore the aim of
the subject is not so much to incorporate the desired object or to
exclude it entirely, as to neutralize it as a source of anxiety, to exert
power over it.
The body is the ultimate referent for the state of desire,
permeability, non-completion. The condition of life is one of
uncertainty, movement, continuation of the body with the
environment, and of vulnerability as an entity to that "external"
contact. The body is read as a signifier which communicates the
condition of that continuation with the environment (the body looks
healthy, emaciated, pregnant) and the environment itself is read as a
continuation of the body through metaphors that have their roots in
the way humans physically experience the world (what Lakoff and
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Johnson call "emergent" metaphors). However, as Haraway and
other postmodernists have noted, the way we read the world is not
only conditioned by our bodies, the way we read our bodies
themselves is conditioned by the discursive environment in which
our bodies become known to us. In that sense our bodies are not
only continuous with a physical environment, but a discursive one,
into which collapses other discourses-legal, political, moral, etc.
The tendency to think of our bodies and our selves as distinct, even
if related phenomena encourages a sort of blindness to the powerful
ways in which the discourse of the body is used to condition
perceptions in discursive arenas which seem to be separate, in which
the discourse of the body seems to be a "harmless" metaphor (e.g.,
the body of culture). As Stallybrass and White argue,
cultural categories of high and low, social and
aesthetic . . . also those of the physical body and
geographical space, are never entirely separable.
The ranking of literary authors or genres in a
hierarchy analogous to social classes is a
particularly clear example of a much broader and
more complex cultural process whereby the human
body, psychic forms, geographical space and the
social formation are all constructed within
interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and
low. (2)
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Along with desire comes the need to police the object of
desire— to control without simply eradicating it. Whether policing
the rioting workers in Hyde Park or the contagious prostitute at the
waterfront, the object is to make possible the enjoyment of their
object value without the contamination of their subjectivity— for such
is what their power (to be violent, to spread disease, in short to
contribute something to the act of their own consumption)— comes to
mean. The object is to enjoy without being touched, to incorporate
without being connected to, and therefore dependent on, the object.
It is precisely the impossibility of this that lends piquancy to desire,
and precisely the anxiety occasioned by this impossibility that creates
the cordon sanitaire around the diseased body, the policing critical
discourse around the body of culture, the panoptic gaze that
contains the prisoner. The novel must, to hold the reader’s interest,
contain the possibility that the reader/voyeur will be seen, touched-
wili be incorporated into the novel in the act of "devouring" it. D.A.
Miller identifies this crucial elem ent in the "sensation novel:"
Perhaps the most fundamental value that the
Novel, as a cultural institution, may be said to
uphold is privacy, the determination of an integral,
autonomous, "secret" self. Novel readers take for
granted the existence of a space in which the
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reading subject remains safe from the surveillance,
suspicion, reading, and rape of others. Yet this
privacy is always specified as the freedom to read
about characters who oversee, suspect, read, and
rape one another. . . . ever reader must realize the
definitive fantasy of the liberal subject, who
imagines himself (sic) free from the surveillance
. . . The sensation novel, however, submits this
panoptic immunity to a crucial modification: it
produces repeated and undeniable evid en ce-’on
the nerves’— that we are perturbed by what we are
watching. . . . The specificity of the sensation novel
in nineteenth century fiction is that it renders the
liberal subject the subject of a body, whose fear and
desire of violation displaces, reworks, and exceeds
his fantasy of intact privacy. (162-163)
Miller’s brilliant analysis admits of little improvement, yet I would
slightly recast his observation to note that the sensation novel was
not so much capable of "doing" this as of being constructed so— as I
would argue any novel must do precisely this-m ust titillate the
desire of the reader with that frisson of fear, of non-closure, of
mystery wherein the reader may be constructed as open to and
continuous with the text, rather than its closed and sovereign
overseer. The "popular" novel (vs. the "classic") is more susceptible
to construction as a discourse that "touches" the body-that is, that
clearly participates in discursive structures aligned with the "lower
strata," the feminine, etc. In a heavily policed popular market,
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"light" novels are tolerated, even patronized, so long as they comply
with authority— demonstrate submission to the critical gaze and
compliance with certain standards, just as "light" women might be
tolerated who submitted to medical examination and did not dress
ostentatiously as such. The seductive/transgressive gesture that
remains— and transgression must be defined as the destabilization of
heavily policed, highly charged boundaries such as those between
reader and text, masculine and feminine, upper and lower class,
healthy and diseased, etc.-is to apparently submit to the gaze, while
occasionally, rebelliously "looking back," reminding the reader of his
or her desire, neediness, of his or her status as a participant rather
than mere consumer. To such an end, in romances, virtue "gambols
within the limits of police morality" while "squinting across the pages
of its Prayer book at vice"-the police in this case being the critics,
the librarians, the readers, and perhaps even the litmus paper cheek
of the Young Person.
Because desire is expressed in movement (the movement of a
body toward food, for example), it follows that this movement takes
place in space, and the measure of the movement is the distance
covered, the boundaries crossed. The point at which desire
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intersects with fear, then, is in the crossing of the boundary, the
moment of contact with the object. The movement of imperial
desire is traced in countless travel articles, anthropological studies
and adventure stories, and the twin tropes of exploration and
conquest became dominant metaphors for understanding the
movement of desire. In this way the object of desire (and of the
journey) is both made central and neutralized by the clinical
discourse of the scientist/military administrator who is the colonial
equivalent of the urban doctor/policeman. Nancy Aycock Metz
points out that the literature of sanitary reform pointed in two
rhetorical directions: the literature of exploration, with its "emerging
cliche of ’deepest, darkest London’" and to sensation fiction, with its
sense of hidden secrets in the midst of respectability. She concludes
that there was a crossover between fictive and non-fictive prose
forms in terms of "vocabulary, dominant tropes and rhetorical
stance" (65). Doubtless, this is true; an even more interesting
question is why it did so. Certainly the lower classes and the
indigenous populations of the colonies had much in common in
terms of their roles in supporting the industrial capitalism of empire.
What is striking is the double gesture of othering the human and
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geographical objects of "clinical" interest and of calling attention to
their proximity, centrality, their at-oneness with the reading subject.
The expression of that double gesture is the invitation to the reader
to go on "expeditions"--to take "rambles", traversing distance while
insisting to the reader that there is simultaneously no real distance
involved. There is a desire to "go see" and a fear and repulsion that
one may already be in that place.
The writers of many articles indicate a paternalistic interest
in controlling the reading of the working classes, the presumed first
and most numerous group of penny fiction consumers, and obviously
expect their own readers to be as concerned as they. George R,
Humphery writes in The Nineteenth Century "No class of the
community has had such paternal and patronizing care bestowed
upon it as the class of working men," but he laments that although
one would think that working men would take direction in their
choice of reading material, in fact "They are very suspicious of
recommendations to read certain books. The librarian has to be
very careful not only what he recommends, but how he suggests the
advantages of reading any particular books" (692). This, although
the librarian only has the working man’s best interests at heart and
\
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is trying to steer him away from "lectures and articles which contain
broad denunciations of other classes of society" (692). The Quarterly
Review is even more blunt:
The British workingman, in short, will neither buy
tracts nor read them. For the first time, perhaps, a
good many people saw him in his true colours
during the late strikes— suspicious, haughty, jealous,
irritable, and resenting above all things the very
appearance of patronage and condescension. If we
wish to improve the literary food that he will
accept, we can only do so by offering him better
things. ("Penny Fiction" 170)
There is an almost subterranean imagery associated with this
examination of the "workingman" whom one so rarely sees, imagery
that would later be more explicitly treated in novels like W ells’ Time
Machine, in which the worker became a literally subhuman,
subterranean dweller. The writer invites his readers to examine the
British workingman rather as an entomologist might invite a class of
naturalists to inspect a rarely seen and particularly voracious locust.
In each of these examples, the concern is to pacify and "improve"
the workingman with "better literature" than he reads-even against
his own will and better judgement. And in both, the threat that
goads this manipulation if the fear of class violence and revolution.
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The workingman is "othered" through strategies like the one
demonstrated here, (Arens and others have noted that a typical
strategy for "othering" is to accuse the target group of cannibalism;
Time Machine readers will recall that this is precisely the charge
levelled against the Morlocks.) Better literature, thus, is that which
upholds and reinforces class boundaries and middle class values.
These same attitudes are expressed in responding to the
classed and generic "topography" of reading. Just as the lower
classes were portrayed as alien barbarians and animals in the
sanitary literature, the reading of the literate lower classes was
regarded with great suspicion— even greater because literature was a
definitive connection between classes. With terms such as the
"Unknown Public (of readers)" and descriptions of the "nauseous
mass" of penny dreadfuls, reviewers discussed lower class literature
in exactly the same terms as the literature of exploration or sanitary
reform: a physical "descent" into an unknown "space" wherein the
local fauna are clinically classified and described. As in the
literatures of exploration, what follows description of the terrain is
the impulse to "improve" it— civilize, sanitize and regulate.
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The distrust of literature’s— particularly fiction’s— power to
seduce and corrupt is a complex phenomenon and resists a simple
explanation. But some partial explanations may be tentatively
essayed. In addition to the obvious low Church distrust of the
desecration of the sacred word through frivolous use, there is also
an evident movement to reevaluate and protect class boundaries by
the upper middle classes in the face of a growing literacy, and in a
period of domestic restlessness and the threat of revolution. Text
itself thus becomes the vehicle of class boundary transgression, and
thus, violence against the social body. In addition to the fear that
literacy will foster discontent in the lower classes, there is also the
anxiety that the literature of and for the lower classes will "flow
upward," like a miasma, and contaminate the literature of the
morally upright middle class. The infiltration of their own class by
decidedly "lower class" literature was therefore an important concern
to the middle class. Thomas Wright of The Nineteenth Century notes
"I have seen the penny fiction journals in the cottages of gentility. I
have seen ’fashionably attired’ young ladies . . . reading the penny
journals in sight of every passerby. I have seen the journals in
parlours that were dignified with the name of drawing rooms" (283).
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Although Wright’s notice of this phenomenon was actually rather
indulgent, many were less so. Their anxiety is evidenced not only by
the association of novels with moral contagion, but, later in the
century, by the fear that library books were physically spreading
disease. The association of books with contagion, always identified
as a lower class evil, reveals an interesting facet of the middle class
Victorian ambivalence toward the circulating library and also
illuminates the other metaphors of reading which we have identified.
Andrew McClary speculates on the reasons behind the germ
scare in America:
the older miasmic gases were inert, passive.
Germs, however, were disturbingly different— they
were alive . . . A constant war was waged between
body and germ and as one writer in Colliers put it,
we must therefore fight a great battle throughout
life against invading germs, which lurk, ’ever ready
to step in and take possession of the body’. (41)
Many authors have noted the essential similarity of the miasma
theory— the dominant theory of how fevers were transmitted-to the
later germ theories. In fact, it almost seems strange to us today that
there was so much resistance to the germ theory, since the
difference is so slight. However, McClary’s observation illuminates
the one new feature that is truly significant. J.K. Crellin mentions in
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another context that in the late 1860’s, speculations on germs tended
to emphasize their invisibility. In 1887 "Robson Roose" summed up
the current debate in laymen’s terms for readers of the Fortnightly:
There is strong evidence in favor of the view that
these contagia are actual living things . . . ordinary
poisons . . . have no power of increase and
propagation . . . the poisons of infectious disease
must be something of an entirely different nature.
We know that they multiply in the system to an
almost infinite extent, and that every one of the
myriads of atoms thus developed is as potent for
evil as the atom from which it originated. The
possession of this and other properties clearly
indicates that the contagious agencies are
independent living organisms. (253)
That notion of germs’ invasiveness, with its suggestion of
intentionality about it, and the notion that germs might somehow
change the victim, "take possession" like an evil spirit, is also
common to nineteenth century writers’ concern with reading
material. The wrong literature, with its questionable moral intent,
could plant seeds of discontent in the pleasure seeking reader—
seeds which might bear poisonous fruit. In Braddon’s The Doctor’ s
Wife, the heroine lives her life according to notions derived from
romance novels, destroying the man she loves and her own
happiness. In Broughton’s A Beginner, the silly friend of a budding
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novelist is inspired to infidelity by the heroine’s literary efforts--an
effect which the dismayed novelist little intends, but texts, she finds,
have lives-and perhaps m inds-of their own.
The similarity of the social concerns surrounding disease and
text, and the conjunction of the key notions of invisibility and
invasiveness in both make a convergence between the two rhetorics
inevitable. It is instructive to examine some of the connections
made by health writers between the moral and the physical in
regard to the theoiy of disease. Germ theory, for example, retains
enough similarity to the miasma theory to inherit some of its
associations. Health is aligned with morality, disease and dirt with
evil. The Greek root of the word "miasma" has a connotation of
"evil, corrupt" and germs were perceived as "microscopic
abominations" {Science 119). Disease is aligned with poverty and
moral corruption. Health was not only associated with wealth, it
was interchangeable with it, as we see in the title of Edwin
Chadwick’s popular book The Health o f Nations (1887), the slight
substitution calling attention to the equivalency of terms.
Health, of course, was not purely an affair of physical
dimensions. As the health of the body could be infected by
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contagion, the health of the mind could be harmed by negative
impressions or "moral contagion." Indeed, the connection between
the tangible and intangible, the mental impression and the physical,
was not so neglected as we, in our rediscovery of holistic healing,
would like to believe. Benjamin Ward Richardson, one of Britain’s
most prolific health writers for popular journals, articulates this
connection forcefully in his essay "The Health of the Mind":
We are conscious that the food of the body
influences the health of the mind . . . But we do
not recognize with like readiness and in the same
way the effect of the foods of the mind on the mind
and its health; nor is this remarkable, for the body
feeds perceptibly, and by one stomach alone, whilst
the mind feeds imperceptibly, by five stomachs, by
every sense . . . Common foods and drinks must be
healthy in order that the material of the body may
be good; and the impressions which enter the body
by the senses, the foods and drinks of the mind,
must also be healthy in order that the mind may be
good. . . . the coming school of sanitarians will
take up a new sanitation. . . . as uncleanliness of
mind is the most obvious cause of mental disease,
and cleanliness the surest indication of mental
health. (148-149)
Further, he warns the reader, the mental food taken in repeatedly
or in youth will permanently shape the mental tastes of the
individual. The mind must be trained to only pure and rational
discourse, in order that it may detect and avoid "false and foolish"
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words that make for mental uncleanliness. Many writers of the
period, medical and otherwise, comment of the liability of the body
to disease engendered by "mental shocks” and any reader of
Victorian fiction will recognize the familiar disease of "brain fever"—
a disease not to be found in any modern medical book— which often
attacks a character after a severe emotional shock of any kind.
Books, of course, comprise this mental food in very large part.
1879 seems to have been the first time that the question of
books and physical contagion was raised in a significant public
forum, at a meeting of the directors of the Chicago public library.
W.F. Poole quickly took steps to defuse the scare, which was an
immediate threat to the public library movement, with a
meticulously researched report published in The Library Journal
entitled "The Spread of Contagious Diseases by Circulating
Libraries" which deprecated the danger of infection. Nonetheless,
the subject immediately caught the imagination of the public and by
1888, during a smallpox epidemic, many libraries in Britain were
taking steps to disinfect books (Greenberg 283). In 1889, the
"Infectious Disease Notification Act" specified "a long list of
diseases, including all fevers" which had to be reported to health
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authorities. The names of the sufferers were sent to the local
libraries who destroyed or disinfected all books loaned to those
households (Jones 37).
Immediately following the initial panic, experiments were
begun to see if germs could indeed live inside books. Books were
"inoculated" with pus and "in a short time the books were full of
germs of measles, scarlet fever, smallpox and other diseases"
(Boyer). Similar experiments were made wherein consumptives
were encouraged to spit upon the pages of books, the pages then
being ground up, a "wash" made and injected into guinea pigs ("No
Infection in Library Books"). Not surprisingly, the guinea pigs
languished under this treatment, confirming the public’s worst fears.
More interesting is the popular reporting on the treatment of
circulating books. Naturally, there were many articles on effective
disinfection, the public being interested and the libraries being
motivated to reassure their patrons. For a time, the most popular
method was to leave the book in an enclosed space with a solution
of formalin. A competing method was to expose the book to live
steam, which had rather obvious drawbacks— ditto the autoclave.
There is a certain Puritan spirit of vengeful glee in the descriptions
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of these processes; I would like to cite one particularly apt passage
at some length:
a large volume of 1300 pages was selected for
experiment. One of the middle pages was
saturated with pus and another was soiled with
fecal matter. . . . The volume was then placed in
the disinfecting oven, and heated for about two
hours and fifteen minutes to about 180 F. . . .
Unfortunately, the treatment slightly injured both
paper and binding. . . . In the improved process, the
books first go through the beater. This machine is
a long box connected at one end to an ordinary
stove, and provided at the other end with a door
through which open racks containing the books are
introduced. Inside the box wooden rods are caused
to rise and fall, alternately, by cams placed on a
cylinder which is turned by a crank. . . . When the
crank is turned, the rods strike the covers of the
books and dislodge the dust. The heavy dust falls
into the drawer upon a mass of sawdust, saturated
with a powerful disinfectant, while the lighter dust,
carried off by the air current, is consumed in the
stove. After this treatment, the books are
suspended singly by pincers from a series o f open
metal racks, the covers of the book being bent
back. Thus the pages are freely separated, and give
easy access to the antiseptic vapor. These racks
are mounted on rails, on which they are run into
the disinfecting oven . . . The ovens are sheet iron
boxes, hermetically closed. . . . In the center of the
oven is a vessel filled with formic aldehyde, into
which dips a strip of felt, which can be moved up
and down from the outside of the oven. The ovens
are heated, by steam pipes placed below them, to
122 degrees F. The irritating vapor of formic
aldehyde makes its escape through a pipe at the
top of each oven. The operation of disinfection is
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simple. . . . This improved process of disinfection
does not injure either paper or cardboard. (Boyer
60-61)
I have cited this passage at length because the language, a unique
combination of technical and pornographic rhetoric, cannot be
effectively paraphrased. To highlight, however, the dirty book is
first beaten by wooden rods (Marcus’ comments on the eroticism of
flagellation come to mind) and then hung from "pincers," the covers
"bent back" to "freely separate" the pages, exposing them to an
"irritating vapor." The image evoked is a cross between the rites of
a penitential religious order and of the Lock Hospital. An
interesting comparison can be made with the treatment of venereal
disease in prostitutes; from the British Parliamentary investigations
into the CD acts (1865), we have the testimony of a Dr. Nelson:
[W]e always cured gonorrhea in the female in 48
hours . . . my teacher merely secured about an inch
of lunar caustic to a quill, an assistant stood on
each side and opened the lips of the vulva and
introduced it up as far as the os tinci, and then very
slowly and deliberately brought it downwards, so as
to touch as much of the mucous membrane of the
vagina as he could, bringing it slowly out and laying
it aside. (113)
Note that both are treated with the application of caustic or
escharotic— a usual procedure to "cauterize" a suppurating sore, but
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not to treat systemic or "constitutional" infection. Both the
prostitute’s body and the book are presented primarily as objects of
concern in terms of their use in circulation, and interestingly,
primarily in terms of their surfaces. Both the vulva and the book
have hidden surfaces that must be held open to access, but more
importantly, both are seen as slick attractive surfaces coated with
disease. Another physician, Mr. Cutter, testified at the same
hearing, that two men had sickened with syphilis while the prostitute
that was the vehicle for the transfer of the disease remained
untouched: "both of the gentlemen had primary sores and
secondary symptoms, and the woman never had anything the matter
with her. I infer, therefore, that the man at 11 o’clock left the virus
on her vagina, and that the man at 2 o’clock rubbed off the virus,
thereby saving the woman" (Parliamentary Papers 430). An article in
The American Journal of Pharmacy in 1910 even credited several
cases of gonorrhea to infected books! (in Greenberg, 288). In these
examples, the book is analogous to the "circulating" woman, whose
erotic body is a source of delight, but whose commensurate danger
to the patron must be controlled through medico-legal channels.
Both the Act which mandated informing libraries and the later Act
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which imposed a fine on any diseased person who loaned a book
were, of course, part of the controversial series of Contagious
Diseases Acts, two of which in the 1860’s mandated the registration
of prostitutes and the forcible examination and imprisonment of
diseased "public women." The fear of the physical contamination of
books by germs is an expression and crystallization on a physical
level of anxiety related to a less specifically designatable agency of
moral contamination in the text. Text, which exists only after its
enablement by the reader, which in fact inhabits a non-space
between the author/other in the outer world and the inner domains
of the ingesting reader is assigned the physical space of its tangible
m edium -the book— and addressed in terms of a physical contagion
which can be localized, measured, experimented upon, and
expunged through proper rehabilitative (punitive) treatment. The
book becomes a body to be cured (or exorcised), with the sole
caveat that a cure which destroys the host body is undesirable. (It is
interesting to note that the only defense of the three volume form
offered by the society of authors following the edict of the libraries
was that there would always be a market for a small edition of the
three volume form because invalids would want them! The
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identification of the circulating library three decker with the
sickroom was clearly, at least to this professional in the publishing
industry, a matter of course.) The circulating book disease scare
serves as evidence of the depth and importance of many readers’
fear of moral "contamination" through "adulterated" text, and
highlights the libraries role in policing text circulation.
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CHAPTER TWO
GENRE: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF
SENSATION
The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism
clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion
of a genre, which allows the coordination of
immanent formal analysis of the individual text with
the twin diachronic perspective of the history of
forms and the evolution of social life. (Jameson The
Political Unconscious 105)
I. The concept of Genre
In a work of this nature, it becomes necessary to address and,
to an extent, to problematize the concept of genre. Braddon, Ouida
and Broughton are identified as the chief exponents of certain
genres or subgenres of the popular novel: roughly, the sensation
novel, the novel of high life and the domestic romance. Critics
identified them as authors of books, usually early in their careers,
that "fit” these definitions, and then read their subsequent works
against those generic designations, often regardless of how far afield
the texts themselves wandered from those definitions. Yet, upon
close examination, even the early texts may be read "outside" of the
genre which they supposedly, to perfection, exemplify.
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Consequently, a working definition of "genre," although necessary, is
elusive.
Formalist definitions of genre rely on a permutation of the
natural sciences model, creating a taxonomy of texts by family
resemblances. These definitions rely on three assumptions: that
resemblances between texts are more pertinent than differences;
that there is a natural hierarchy of textual characteristics (a book is
assigned its genre often on the basis of plot, rarely on the basis of a
"minor" character) and genre is based on the ones at the "top" of
that hierarchy; and that genre is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, to
any given text. These assumptions are all questionable, and, in
addition to ahistoricizing the text, tend to force it into a critical
Procrustean bed. In any text, there will be as much or more that
falls outside a particular generic category as within.
My purpose, however, is not to abolish the category of genre,
but to relocate and redefine it. Although genre is not an important
structural feature of particular texts, it is a crucial feature of
reading. Genre acts both as a topographical feature of the terrain
of the marketplace and as a set of reading instructions anterior to
the text itself. It is produced discursively as a social category and is
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aligned with other social categories such as gender and class; indeed
specific genres are assigned gender and class, according to perceived
author, perceived textual characteristics, and perceived readership.
Like other social categories, genre is perpetuated by the tendency of
subjects to re/produce themselves ideologically. Thus, once an
author/text is established within a certain generic domain, that is,
coming from a certain "location" within the marketplace and
appealing to a certain consumership, critics, publishers, authors and
readers will enforce, through master-readings (reviews), packaging,
textual references and reading assumptions, a reading of that text
which is congruent with its assigned generic pedigree. This serves
both to secure the text’s position within the marketplace and,
crucially, to limit the play of the text’s multiplicity, both "vertically"
(within the social hierarchy of the marketplace) and "horizontally"
(within the range of possible meanings and significances assigned to
various elements of the text).
If genre serves as a set of reading instructions, a meta-text
situated in social discourses, then genre itself becomes a dialogical
process. Kristeva poses the problem this way:
Ill
One of the problems for semiotics is to replace the
former, rhetorical division of genres with a typology
of texts: that is, to define the specificity of different
textual arrangements by placing them within the
general text (culture) of which they are part and
which is in turn, part of them, (author’s emphasis,
Kristeva, Desire in Language 36)
Presumably, then, this would include the historical specificity of the
social discourses surrounding the text itself, which Kristeva defines
as a "productivity." Confusingly, however, Kristeva accepts Bakhtin’s
distinction between the epic and the dialogic text, which would seem
to obviate her own definition; a text as productivity must include
both epic and subversive tendencies (to oversimplify, in a hopefully
productive manner, the term "dialogic"), as every utterance contains
its own repressed semiotic content. The principal difference
between the epic text and the dialogic text and even the
carnivalesque text is merely the degree to which one ubiquitous
feature is elevated and the others submerged; all are present,
however, in every text, or, even more precisely, in every reading.
On the level of popular generic labelling, calling a particular novel a
"love story" does not mean that there is not a social-problem novel
lying between the same covers; it merely means that the social-
problem novel shall remain invisible. In this way, genre produces
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coherence within the multiplicity of the text; in some sense, it
produces the text (the reading) itself. Again, the point here is not
to render the category of genre inoperative, but to render its
operations suspect, and to redefine it as a dynamic process in
discursive production rather than a static inclusion within a product.
Unfortunately, to date, no one has effectively taken up the
gauntlet that Kristeva cast before the scholarly community in 1969.
Other attempts to deal with genre have inevitably defaulted to
increasingly subtle and sophisticated taxonomies, useful in their
ways, but not essentially helpful to the process of historicizing
generic categories, particularly categories subsequent to the larger
formal designations "poetry and prose," "epic, lyric and dramatic" or
"fiction and nonfiction." Some of the most illuminating work has
been done by critics who recognize genre as a kind of implicit
contract between the audience’s expectations from the work and the
artist’s concept of how the work is to be received (Frye, for
example, or Pearson) yet they do not explain how these contracts
are initially inscribed, and the issue of popular literature and its
subgenres is beyond the scope of their concern. Those who have
addressed the issue of popular literature have generally done so
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either by uncritically accepting the labelling process (Nye) or by
invoking the "formulaic vs. non-formulaic" distinction (Cawelti).
Cawelti clearly recognizes the difficulty in his system, and yet fails to
transcend it. His work is hampered by the critical embarrassment
typical of the literary critic working with devalued popular culture in
the seventies; his book valorizes the study of formula fiction and yet
still apologizes for choosing it as his object. (In his
acknowledgement, he thanks his family and then absolves them of
any responsibility for his "taste in literature.") H e accepts that there
is "a kind of artfulness" in popular fiction, but believes that it is "a
different kind" from better literature (4). H e states that rather than
refer to high and low culture, he wishes to distinguish between
mimetic and formulaic literature. Beyond the obvious reinscription
of the initial set of terms posed here, this is a distinction that is
highly problematic, as Cawelti eventually recognizes several pages
later when he cautions that there are mimetic elements in most
formula fiction. He further posits that mimetic fiction confronts us
with reality as we know it and that formula fiction provides us with
the escapism of an ideal world. However, beyond the problem that
reality as we know it may be intensely formulaic, more recent work
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on formula fiction suggests both that it is in some ways radically
mimetic in structure and may express the destabilization of the ideal
even in the act of inscribing it (see Modleski on that most formulaic
of all current popular fiction, the Harlequin romance). Despite
these unresolved issues, however, Cawelti’s work is useful in that it
identifies and explores a phenomenon that does exist in the
perception of both the critical and popular readership (and in that
his praxis is generally more historically grounded than his theory
would suggest). What we must discard is the suggestion that the
distinctions are somehow intrinsic to literature itself rather than
social constructions within which literature is produced, as much in
the reading as in the writing of it, if not more.
Todorov, in Genres in Discourse, argues that genres are
"codifications of discursive properties" which are repeated in any
given sociohistorical framework. Because genres, for Todorov, are
"the meeting place between general poetics and event based literary
history" the interesting question is why and how particular speech
acts are chosen by a particular culture at a given historical moment,
to be perceived as genres (18-20). Todorov’s purpose here is to
introduce an alternative narratological code by which texts may be
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read, and he presents three structures, which may all be present in a
particular narrative, but of which one may be in the ascendant:
mythological, gnoseological, and ideological. Briefly, the first is
based on temporal or causal linkage between successive events in a
narrative, the second depends on the changing perception of events
through the narrative as an organizing principle, and the third relies
on an abstract rule or ideological principle to produce coherence
within a narrative which contains diverse and perhaps even
apparently unrelated events. Todorov does not intend this to be an
exhaustive or rigid system of classification, but he suggests that it is
helpful to "look for the qualitative or quantitative predominance of
certain transformations," such falling within one of the three
categories.
Although, from a narratological point of view, these three
distinctions are indeed useful, in the discussion of genre as historical
rather than textual category which I am advancing here, it is helpful
to collapse this distinction in a way that Todorov does not exclude.
All three narrative structures may be subsumed under the
ideological, since the first two are organized by time, causality, and
the concept of knowledge, which are all ideologically and historically
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determined. What is an appropriate cause, what is worth knowing
and who is to know it— these are logical relationships which are
naturalized within the whole discursive universe of a particular time-
space of a culture. It is in this sense that all three organizations are
ideological in content. What arguably changes is the way in which
the reader’s interest is maintained. Todorov tells us that the
mythological organization keeps the reader’s attention with the
question "What happens next?" and the gnoseological text asks
"What is the nature of what is, or what has happened?" H e does
not provide an explanation of the lure of the ideological text per se;
but based on the work of Jameson and others, let us assume it is a
systematic working out of anxieties in order to achieve confirmation
of the ideologically constituted subject (which of course applies to
the first two categories as well), in this case by presenting a series of
ideological contradictions in order to finally resolve them.
Todorov’s initial questions are extremely useful, although his
answers are, for our purposes, less so. Interestingly, Todorov
himself noted in his study of Bakhtin that Bakhtin’s work moves
from a "strong systematic" approach to genre which is extremely
problematic to a much more clearly sustained discussion of
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particular subgenres by chronotope that implies no overriding,
essential system of genres (Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical
Principle). As always, we return to the core problem; any taxonomy
of genre can be reduced to distinctions which are social and
historical, rather than "purely" formal. Although those categories
may be useful as "tools" with which to handle given texts in a
particular period for a given purpose, those tools are only truly
useful to the extent that we keep their non-innocent, historically and
ideologically specific nature in mind.
Given these cautions, it is helpful to conflate Todorov’s
"ideological" structure (as I have redefined it) with Bakhtin’s "epic,"
not as a category of given texts, but as a historically determined
property of all texts, which is then designated as genre. Genre then,
is determined by the topical properties of the text that provide
ideological confirmation; in turn, the generic designation serves as
reading instructions that occlude properties of the text that invoke
ideologies contradictory to the dominant imperative of the reading.
Thus a marriage plot like the one in Broughton’s A Beginner,
although a negligible feature of the novel, becomes the dominant
feature of the reading (after all, it is a woman’s novel, written by a
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woman known for her love stories, etc.) and eclipses the critique of
market conditions that charts the failure of a woman novelist to
transcend them. We shall trace this process in more detail below
(See Chapter V, Section II, below). A text which is so aggressively
multiple as not to allow its reading within its assigned genre will
either be redesignated, (perhaps by an alternate readership) or
simply declared hysterical or unreadable-and consequently, left
unread. A high-culture novel may perhaps be distinguished from
the "low" popular novel simply by the amount of play the text seems
to its readership to invite, or that its readership will tolerate,
popular texts traditionally being accorded a fairly narrow range.
If genre is a socially constructed category, the question then
becomes, as always, a question of power, its source, its strategies,
and its opposition: "Who speaks that name?" Since the system of
genre categorization "works," this question rarely arises. Readers,
critics, authors and publishers in the nineteenth century (as in the
present) colluded to naturalize the "boundaries" of genres.
Predictably, however, these boundaries were destabilized at the
precise locations that parallel discourses were disrupted: those of
gender, sexuality, and class, among others. In these cases, the onus
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of classification devolved upon the "master readers" of the
marketplace-review critics. Different reviewers would struggle to
"place" the text, and that placement might depend on such factors as
the perceived sex of the author and his or her class as much as on
the structure or subject matter of a novel. Yet the critic was not all
powerful; after all, a critic who constantly and radically disagreed
with his or her readership would lose currency rapidly. To be
effective, the critic must act as the representative of an "interpretive
community" of readers with shared values and assumptions. Yet
within the limits of that community’s values, the critic did wield
some power to direct the flow of consumption by shaping reader
attitudes and book borrowing patterns (which in turn affected the
sale of editions directly). One way in which such suasive rhetorical
acts are accomplished is by referring to (and thus borrowing
authority from) existing and highly charged discourses, such as the
discourses of disease, gender, etc. The placement of a text, in other
words, was (and is) constructed from existing discourses.
Genre operates not only as a way of binding the reading
process, but of locating the text within the "boundaries" of a "space"
within the marketplace. This is particularly important in
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constructions of the popular literatures, which are, as we have seen,
devalued with the label "commercial," distancing them from the
"aristocratic" pursuit of literature for the sake of knowledge, beauty
or social good, which is the purview of those who do not have to
worry about making a living. The marketplace is commercial, and
therefore, both plebeian and morally suspect, and is associated with
vulgarity in language and action. The literary marketplace is textual
and discursive, consisting as it does of books, reviews, serials, and
salons, rather than geographic, but it participates metaphorically in
many of the same processes as any other nineteenth century
marketplace, both in that there is a geographical center of
production (London) and distribution (e.g., Mudie’s of London) and
in that desirability of a given product determines and is determined
by its location (in this case, metaphorical) in the marketplace and its
contingency to other desirable goods/locations. In this same way,
genres were, to an extent, considered spatially contingent to one
another, and this partially determined their status. Thus, devotional
poetry is "closer to" the religious tract (high status) than to the
sensation novel, which itself is "closer to" the half-penny broadsheet
(low status). Genre is often assigned according to what is perceived
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as the dominant (or most relevant) topic of a text, and it is no
accident that topic and topology are derived from the same root.
This spatial analogy serves an important purpose. If genres
are envisioned as occupying physical spaces, some contingent upon
each other, others widely separated, it becomes possible to think of
genres as having discrete boundaries which are either not to be
crossed, or, if crossed, only to be crossed into "adjacent" areas. In a
review of Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well, an anonymous
Athenaeum critic concludes "Worse than even the immorality of the
whole novel are the stupid, misplaced attempts at sermonizing
throughout. They might be very well in another work, but being
where they are they simply disgust. We need say no more" (Review
of N ot Wisely But Too Well).
Although this critic is clearly offended by the perception that
the sacred and profane are being inappropriately joined, there is
also a sense that the "sermonizing," which, we must note, is
intrinsically unoffensive, is "misplaced" (the spatial metaphor that
runs through the passage is significant)-in other words, that in
"another work"--in another genre, another location, it would be
appropriate. It is not only that Broughton has "stepped over the
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line," so to speak, it is perceived distance she has traversed that
upsets the reviewer; a novel that "panders to the gross tastes of the
day" (569) is, or should be, far removed from one that "sermonizes."
The religious novel and the sex novel are not contingent genres, and
Broughton is out of her neighborhood. Put another way, the "epic"
is always central, spatially and ideologically; the further the distance
of other elements in the text from the epic/center, the more that
center is destabilized. When it is sufficiently destabilized
(sufficiency being relative to historical, social, and individual
sensitivity), the text’s dialogism enters the realm of the
carnivalesque.
Perhaps the reason that this crossover is so upsetting in the
case of Not Wisely But Too Well is precisely because of the
disruptive potential of sex in the marketplace. In anathematizations
of the social evil, one of the most telling points is the frequent
repetition of the horrified observation that prostitutes might be seen
openly practicing their trade in the best of neighborhoods. The text-
trade and the sex-trade have this in common: "quality" or "purity" in
the traditional sense are not indices of desirability— in fact, there is
often a negative correlation. In this way, they both violate the
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spatial norms of the classed marketplace; lower class wares, perhaps
repackaged, perhaps not, are unabashedly vended in upper class
neighborhoods. This violation of space takes place on the
metaphorical level as well. The sensation novel was said to be
offensive partially because it located crime-traditionally located in
the margins of society-in the heart of the middle class
neighborhood and even the family itself. In the pamphlet wars, the
most devastating insults to the Roman Catholic Church figured the
church as a whore; what is horrifying is the proximity of degraded
sexuality and religion, because these are traditionally considered
"widely separated," even opposite concepts. Broughton attempts to
reconcile these opposites to make N ot Wisely But Too Well a "moral"
novel (the heroine never does run off with her lover, but becom es a
Sister of Mercy and decorously dies a virgin); the reviewer finds
their proximity intolerable and indefensible.
It is, of course, precisely this proximity of the hierarchically
(spatially) opposite that constitutes the carnivalesque. Ironically, the
purpose here is apparently, in the Bakhtinian sense, epic, or
normative (the heroine is "reclaimed"), yet the critic usurps the epic
purpose to him/herself:
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The great object of books like these is apparently
to teach immorality by representing it in an
interesting and seductive form . . . If this is not
their object, we can assure their authors that it
must inevitably be their effect . . . It is time, then,
for critics to speak out boldly, and to declare in
plain language what they think of the tendencies of
these books, and see if by so doing whether they
cannot put a stop to their production. (569)
The critic reserves to him /herself the role of master-reader and
moral censor for the public good; amusingly, the critic admonishes,
"If any one doubts this [opinion], let him take the book we are now
reviewing and read it coolly and critically, and ask . . . what
impression on the mind of an ordinary reader it is calculated to
produce" (569). Since the Athenaeum is precisely the type of survey
that "ordinary readers" went to in order to make their reading
choices, this distinction between the review’s reader and the
ordinary reader whom the critic must protect is somewhat unclear.
Clearly, however, the intention is to leave nothing to chance— if the
reader insists on reading the novel, the reading is to be dictated by
the critic. The critic seeks to distance the reader from the
carnivalesque, turning her or him into a spectator rather than a
participant, thus "sanitizing" and domesticating the text within a
cordon sanitaire of surrounding critical text-through which the
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reader only experiences the novel as a sort of Blue Book example.
Notwithstanding, Not Wisely but Too Well became one of
Broughton’s most popular novels. (Perhaps there was even a causal
connection; many critics spoke of their fear of condemning a
particular novel by name, since it was "as good as an
advertisement.") Yet, the critical interdiction may have had its
effect after all; such novels became popular precisely as "improper"
novels, readers taking delight in transgression just as we do today
(consider the success of Satanic Verses).
Ironically, in many ways, such criticism depended
symbiotically on the existence of such texts to denounce, just as the
"Water Police" depended on prostitution for their own livelihood.
Often, in their essays, Cato seems to play Pandarus. For example,
Mrs. Oliphant’s 1867 denunciation of sensation novels declines to
name the titles of certain books, in the interest of leaving the very
"objectionable still untouched" (274); these same titles are helpfully
provided in the footnotes, a practice which arguably draws more
attention to them than if they were simply mentioned in passing in
the text! Yet even if the critics did not stem the popularity of these
novels, they determined how the books should be approached, which
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may be an even more effective censorship. If the carnivalesque
reconciliation of opposites in Broughton’s novel is seen as
blasphemous and disgusting, even if intriguing as a result of that
perception, then it is effectively contained as spectacle.
II. Sensation
The nineteenth century sensation novel has attracted a good
deal of critical and historical attention in the past decade; two of the
most interesting long studies have been Winifred Hughes The
Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels in the 1860s and Thomas
Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers o f Hampstead: Beneath the Surface
o f Victorian Sensationalism. Hughes sees the sensation novel as a
"literary upstart" that arose in the 1860s, and, although she
acknowledges its indebtedness to the Newgate genre, recognizes it
as a thing unto itself: "What distinguishes the true sensation genre,
as it appeared in its prime during the 1860s, is the violent yoking of
romance and realism, traditionally the two contradictory modes of
literary perception" (16). It is based on "propinquity" (18), that is,
the setting is in the time and place of the intended reader. Hughes
argues that the sensation novel is a sort of antidote to the stodginess
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of Victorian respectability, and that it is radically subversive by
virtue of its deconstructive "yoking of opposites." Boyle, however,
finds less distinction between sensation fiction and its contemporary
discourses of reality. H e writes of his surprise, in the early stages of
his research, to find that the average Victorian newspaper "was
sensational to say the least, [and] certainly not supportive of an
image of domestic tranquility" (3). His work documents what Reade
and his contemporaries insisted— that the sensation novels were, to
an extent, "studies from the life," extending from the discourses of
the newspapers. If so, these novels hardly owed their attractiveness
to their status as the sole respite from mid-Victorian respectability.
One must question why a genre of literature that was a mere
extension of existing news items gained such popularity. I would
suggest that, rather than the directly subversive purpose that Hughes
assigns it, a primary purpose was to shape and provide coherence
for that barrage of information. Far from bringing the terrifying
into the midst of the middle class neighborhood, as Hughes asserts,
the sensation novels purpose was to remove it and frame it, so that
it might be perused safely and at some distance. A novel about a
bigamist or a child murder in a fictional middle-class neighborhood
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is far less immediate than a newspaper which places such events a
block and a day away. Also, whereas news items appear without
prior warning, with limited explanation and often, without
resolution, the novel provides all of these, bounding the uncanny
within the conventional strictures and structures of plot development
and denouement, in which conventional values are, at least
nominally, upheld. Yet perhaps this is the real outrage to which the
critics were reacting. It may very well be subversive to suggest that
there can be order and reason within such "pathological" social
dysfunctions. Perhaps in the very act of providing a structure within
which such actions are naturalized and explained, the sensation
novel provided a radical critique of a society in which such actions
could be explained and assigned motive.
Where the sensation novels are most subversive, however, is
in the reading practices which they support. Hughes remarks this:
the threat to literary standards is only exceeded by
the threat to social ones. Reading sensation novels
becomes a subversive pursuit because it brings the
middle and lower classes together over the same
printed page .... The blurring of social
distinctions, remarked in actual life in the mild
form of a shared literary taste, becomes more
flagrant and disquieting in the world of the novels
themselves. Not only do the middle- or upper-class
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characters mingle a little too freely with their
inferiors, they begin to imitate lower-class behavior.
(42)
Jonathan Loesberg argues that the defining characteristic of
sensation fiction— a phenomenon he correctly argues to have been
constructed by critical reception in the sixties-is the loss of class
identity on the part of the characters, a concern which he relates to
the Reform Bill debates. I would shift the grounds of his argument
to suggest that the Reform debates and the class anxiety displayed
in the novels emerged from and expressed the same complex set
anxieties; however, the fact is that popular literature continued to be
attacked long after the sixties for exactly those same concerns after
"sensationalism" ceased to define those types of literature (for
example, the novel of high life). However, the emphasis on the
blurring of class boundaries in reading is an important feature of the
popular novel, sensational or otherwise.
This emphasis on proximity correlates to the metaphor of
genre as topography. On the level of content, the truncation of
distance is a key feature in the mid nineteenth century popular
novel. Winifred Hughes identifies one of the key elements in
sensational fiction as "proximity"; that is, the novels are set in
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contemporary times in neighborhoods like the reader’s own. As
Hughes notes, earlier "romance" (not to be confused with the later,
more restricted use of the term to mean "love story") was
distinguishable by setting. Usually, it was displaced in time and set
in som e exotic location. The local, the mundane was reserved for
the more privileged realist novel, generally novels of what Frye
terms the high mimetic mode. To import the extraordinary events
of romance into the ordinary reality of quotidian existence was
generic miscegenation of the worst kind. Had the content of
sensation fiction remained marginal to the central and domestic
concerns of middle class society, it might well have been permitted
much more outrageousness, just as Ouida’s sexually liberated
European characters were permitted to circulate through Mudie’s
while George M oore’s tamer but more localized fictions were firmly
declined. Precisely because it is domestic in its content, the genre is
figured forth as a foreign invader, both of the body (as a disease)
and of the nation (as a foreign plague). Boyle notes that
sensationalism was aligned both with disease and racial "blackness,"
but does not pause to elaborate on these interesting observations:
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There is a racial undercurrent near the surface of
many of the discussions of sensationalism
throughout the 1860s. Images of disease, bestiality,
and sex occur and recur in the context of
’blackness’ . . . [Boyle quotes an 1866 Westminster
Review article:] ’as those diseases always occurred
in seasons of death and poverty, so does the
Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in
times of mental poverty and afflict only the most
poverty-stricken minds.’ Now the mania for
Sensation seems to have changed from ’epidemic’
to ’endemic.’ (225)
Boyle does not remark at length upon this disease imagery, and,
although Hughes observes that the "imagery of disease becomes
prominent as critics of sensationalism describe the unnerving
progression by which this ’ virus is spreading in all directions, from
the penny journal to the shilling magazine, and from the shilling
magazine to the thirty-shillings volume’" (42), she does not pursue
this observation either. However, the quoted reference to epidemic
and endemic in conjunction with race is extremely meaningful within
the context of the medical concerns of the 1860s. The sixties saw a
determined, even a desperate attempt to control the ravages of
cholera which had repeatedly decimated urban England. Cholera
was particularly associated with impoverished immigrant workers
(since they were most frequently the principal residents of the
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poorest, hardest hit areas), and was considered by most medical
experts to be not native to Britain. In 1867, the Quarterly Review
published an article on "The Cholera Conference," which principally
concerned itself with tracing the progress of the disease from various
other locations, most notably India and the Mediterranean, to "the
present year [in which] it has overrun the whole of the continent,
and has attacked England" (30). Fixing responsibility for cholera
seems to have been a primary concern: the French are said to have
blamed the English for its presence in India, but the English
disproved this to their own satisfaction, pronouncing it, with relief,
endemic to the region: "[T]he whole odium of being cholera
producers has been thrown on our Indian possessions" (43).
Although the cholera was supposed to have come originally from
India, many physicians believed that the disease lived in "the
subsoil," and, if established long enough in a given location, could
get into its subsoil and thus, become endemic to the location.
Naturally, the English wished to prevent this, although some feared
it had already happened. The rest of the article evaluates the
Conference’s recommendations for containment, using specifically
military terminology, planning to "attack" the "enemy" "at a
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distance"--in the Red Sea, in fact (50). (Parliamentary Records
confirm this preoccupation with the "naturalization" of the cholera in
Britain. It continued to be a frequent topic of discussion for some
time.) The disease is an alien enemy from the colonial lands which
attempts to "penetrate" and lodge itself in domestic soil. By
referring to sensationalism as an epidemic which threatens to
become endemic, the critic aligns the sensational novel with the
foreign, with disease, with filth and refuse, with poverty, and with
invasion— in fact, with the unpleasant underside of industrial empire.
It is curious how frequently popular literature is constituted
as a risk specifically to the imperial subject. A n 1874 Temple Bar
review sermonizes:
Indeed we have been, since the Romans, the only
truly imperial people. We have embraced the
globe with the arms of our ambition; we have
scoured every sea; we have colonized every sphere.
But the insularity with which we were once unfairly
rebuked is at last becoming . . . our characteristic
and opprobrium . . . We are determinedly insular,
and we find even the island too big . . . ’our
neighborhood’ is the most delightful and absorbing
thing in life . . . It is this quality of narrow curiosity
which is the paralysis of all wide and noble interest,
which the novel stimulates and feeds . . . these are
the main concerns of a once imperial people.
("The Novels of Miss Broughton" 198-199)
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And the Edinburgh refers to Newgate Novels as a deliberate attempt
"to poison the springs of a nation’s life" ("The Literature of the
Streets" 61).
The great danger of such fiction is that it renders the reader
passive and of narrow interests. The imperial subject is active,
masculine and moves outward; the novel reader is passive, feminine
and receives inward movement, is female and colonial rather than
male and imperial. Mark Pattison identifies novels as a sort of
sedative to ease the transition from imperial to non-imperial subject:
The mind of the English reader is not, as in the
southern man, torpid, non-existent; it is alive and
restless. But it is not animated by a curiosity to
inquire, it is not awakened to the charm of ideas, it
is only passively recipient of images. An idea is
excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind.
An image is a sedative. . . . There must be no reflex
mental action. Meditation is pain. Fresh images
must flow as a continuous douche of tepid water
over the mind of the reader, which must remain
pleased but passive. Books must be so contrived as
to produce and sustain this beatific self
forgetfulness. (677-79)
The drugging of the mind produces a self that is defined as a passive
body, and this self, like the lotos-eaters of The Odyssey, is a self that
forgets its duty and obligation to a "restless" journeying. The
definition of sensation novels as a stimulant, as a "hot and strong
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. . . dram or . . . dose," would seem to contradict Pattison’s
characterization of popular literature as an opiate, and perhaps we
should separate the anaesthetized mind from the body of the reader.
Indeed, the whole notion of a sensation is a physical one, and the
effects of sensation fiction is generally defined in physical terms.
The Quarterly Review defines sensation novels as novels which
produce "excitement, and excitement alone" by "preaching to the
nerves" (481), that abound in "action, action, action!" The effects of
this action upon the reader are physical:
A great philosopher has enumerated in a list of
sensations ’the feelings from heat, electricity,
galvanism, &c.’ together with ’titillation, sneezing,
horripilation, shuddering, the feeling of setting the
teeth on edge, &c.;’ and our novels might be
classified in like manner, according to what
sensation they are calculated to produce. There
are novels of the warming pan, and others of the
galvanic battery type-som e which gently stimulate a
particular feeling, and others which carry the whole
nervous system by steam. ("Sensation Novels" 487)
The tone here is satiric, of course, but the treatment is fairly
consistent across a number of reviews; the core of the sensation
novel is the activity of the text in producing a physical sensation, an
activity which is complementary to the passivity of the reader in
whom the sensation is "produced."
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Not surprisingly, then, sensation novels as a genre are
perceived as feminine, despite their murders, plots and generally
very active characters, which would seem to align them with the
"masculine" adventure novel. And, also unlike the adventure novel,
the sensation novel generally features a female protagonist. As
Hughes points out, "Even the sensation novels written by men focus
on the feminine point of view; both Reade and Collins draw
effortless portraits of mature, sophisticated, sexually aroused women,
heroines as well as adventuresses" (30). Blackwood’ s is very clear on
the point that sensation novels are written primarily by women.
Ironically, after lambasting sensationalism for no less than nineteen
pages, Oliphant holds up as two models of excellence in literature,
presumably comparable to one another, Anthony Trollope and
Charles Reade! It would surely be pardonable to think of Reade, as
Hughes does, as the purest distillation of sensationalism, in whose
work madmen, murderers and mistaken identities congregate with a
kind of baroque density, yet we are told by this despiser of
sensational fiction that Reade has
become one of the greatest artists in the realm of
fiction . . . His power is of the kind which will
always seem coarse to a certain class of minds
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unable to discriminate; for he is very apt to call a
spade a spade; and among the minikin
performances of the day, his strong and genuine
mastery over human characters and passions shows
out with a force of outline which may possibly, in
some cases, look exaggerated. (Oliphant 280)
Possibly. Yet, even a cursory study of R eade’s work will
reveal that the sexuality demonstrated by his rather remarkable
women (see Hard Cash) make Broughton and Braddon seem tame
indeed. Still, it would seem that, in Reade’s case, it is not only not
coarse, but not sensational either. Clearly, the fact that the critic
defends Reade from "misunderstanding" demonstrates that this is
not a unanimous opinion. Yet, just as clearly, for this critic, what is
"sensational" and reprehensible in a novel written by a woman
becomes realism in the case of a man, especially a man whose
central characters are often male. The critic attacks Braddon,
Broughton, Ouida and Mr. Y ates-a diverse group of novelists, but
all ones with active, aggressive heroines, and lionizes Trollope and
Reade. (Strangely, of Wilkie Collins, there is no mention.)
Another, later Blackwood’ s piece ("Contemporary Literature:
Novelists") asserts that the sensational writers are "for the most part,
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feminine, and their pens go dashing along with true feminine
volubility."
Perhaps more importantly, sensation novels undermined
conventional notions of causality and motivation; in their
dependence on incident and "surprise" or chance happenings, they
rely on associative (il)logic that is often defined as specifically
female. Loesberg identifies the "nonseriousness" of thematic
connections as the disruptive element of the sensation novel:
Characterizing sensation fiction as emotional
evocation without thematic correlative is not merely
a judgement upon it but also a virtual description
of how it operates. The plot operates through
various forms of transference and reversal to isolate
the moments when it produces the sensation
response apart from any thematic readability,
insisting almost on the nonseriousness, even the
illicitness, of the response it calls forth. (18)
It is disruptive because it treats serious matters— like the loss of class
identity-in a "nonserious" manner. In essence, I agree with
Loesberg’s assessment, but I take exception to his use of the term
"nonserious." The notion that "sensational" occurrences might
happen without clear, and therefore controllable causality may
indeed have been terrifying, but it is anything but nonserious.
Nancy K. Miller argues that plots which lack plausibility-defined as
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the "effect of reading through a grid of concordance" with social
doxa of "appropriate" causalities, defined as masculine linear logic—
are labelled as "arbitrary narrative'-women’s literature, and largely
excluded from the canon on that aesthetic basis. With Miller’s
argument in mind, we may return to Loesberg’s analysis to see, not
a readership that perceived "nonseriousness," but a critical
readership that was highly motivated to reject any alternative logic
in addressing "serious" issues, and to marginalize it as nonlogical and
feminine.
Another nineteenth century critic, somewhat less idiosyncratic
than Oliphant in his/her delimitation of the genre, argues that the
sensation novel is, in fact, a disease arising out o f market conditions
and lower class refuse:
A commercial atmosphere floats around works of
this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop
. . . There is something unspeakably disgusting in
this ravenous appetite for carrion, this vulture like
instinct which smells out the newest mass of social
corruption, and hurries to devour the loathsome
dainty before the scent has evaporated . . . [Penny
publications] are the original germ, the primitive
monad, to which all the varieties of sensation
literature may be referred . . . In them, we have
sensationism [sic] pure and undisguised, exhibited
in its naked simplicity, stripped of the rich dress
which conceals while it adorns the figure of the
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more ambitious varieties of the species.
("Sensation Novels" 483, 502, 505-06)
This critic moves through a dizzying number of images, touching on
the commercialism of the novel, linking it to refuse (implying that
commercialism produces "carrion"); as carrion produces disease, so
social corruption produces sensationalism, which is a lower class
commodity at its root, but, like the lower class prostitute, it can be
given a "rich dress" to lure the upper class consumer. Although
these metaphors may be, on a literal level, "mixed," on a logical
level, they are rather perfectly coherent within the discursive
frameworks of 1860’s social concerns. Dangerous refuse was linked
primarily to poverty stricken neighborhoods with high population
and poor sanitation, and to industrial areas, particularly those with
slaughterhouses and tanneries. Such areas produce disease both
directly and through the commodities they export into better
neighborhoods-cheap clothes and nasty women, to name a few; in
fact, the critic compares sensation novels to cheaply produced fabric,
"so many yards of printed stuff, sensation pattern [which] . . . rank
with the verses of which ’Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day’"
(483). The association with cheap fabric aligns sensation to the
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production of impoverished, "sweated" women, who were associated
both with disease because of their unhealthful working conditions,
and with seasonal prostitution which received attention during the
sixties investigations of the Contagious Disease Acts (see Acton for
more on this). The critic aligns him /herself with the sanitary
inspectors whose purpose it is to police consumption and make the
commodity safe for the middle classes.
The sensation novel is in a most peculiar position. Having a
female author, text, and reader, it is similar to the romance.
However, in the romance, the heroine is generally active only in the
luring of the male, whereas in sensation novels, the protagonist
often takes on very "masculine," active traits. Hughes sees this
content as subversive, as do most current feminist critics, and
Natalie Schroeder notes that these women characters often use their
sexuality in their bids for power, power being the real subject of the
narratives. Yet although these critics see the sexuality of the
content of this fiction, they do not concern themselves with the
equally threatening sensuality of the reader-author-text interchange,
an interchange which is as homo- as auto-erotic. Boyle points out
that "the ’referent’ of the author of ’Philosophy of Sensation’ [a critic
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who denigrated the sensation novel] is his personal terror of a
female sexuality that is both voracious and bestial . . . women are
seduced by the stories into inattention to the would-be dominant
male, or they are metamorphosed into man-eaters" (137). It is not
the rivalry of another male that produces the monstrous female,
with her characteristically fishy extremities. Whether lesbian or
heterosexual nymphomaniac, the transformative seduction of the
middle class woman comes about through her association with
another corrupt female— the prostituted hack paid to produce a
sensation.
The sensation novel, then, is a novel which dangerously and
inappropriately excites its readers, appealing to the "lower" tastes
(feeding the lower mouths/openings of the body, which are
supposed to be, in the upper or middle class woman, closed and
impermeable). It is defined in opposition to the discourse of the
master reader/critic, the critical struggle being, not to abolish the
carnivalesque, but to reduce it to an object for the consumption of
the middle class gaze, rather than an opportunity for participation
and exchange, so that the novel’s subversive potential is effectively
contained by the discourses of the marketplace which define it as a
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commodity/spectacle. And it is so defined, precisely within the
terms of parallel medico-legal and journalistic discourses.
What novels, then, fit this category? After all, given that any
successful novel must interest the reader, and that any interesting
event might be said to cause a sensation, why is not all literature
sensational? And, even if those interesting events are limited to
those of a sexual, violent, or criminal nature, many novels not
normally considered sensational would fall under this designation.
Certainly Hetty’s last minute rescue from the gallows in Adam Bede
is sensational, as are, earlier still, any of the Brontes’ books. And of
the Scenes From Clerical Life, Janet’ s Repentance is clearly
sensational through and through. Why did these authors escape the
charge so entirely, and why were Charles Reade and Mrs. Henry
Wood sometimes included in this category and sometimes not? The
critics who excuse the last mentioned authors generally do so on the
grounds of their morally irreproachable message. Yet Braddon
generally included the appropriate obeisance to middle class values;
indeed, Ellen Miller Casey sees it as her worst weakness as an
author. Oddly, although both Ouida and Broughton are identified
by Mrs. Oliphant as sensational, few other reviewers defined
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Broughton that way, and Ouida was rarely identified as sensational
by reviewers after the 60’s. Ouida and Broughton both dealt with
women’s passion, often straining or, in Ouida’s case ignoring
altogether the bounds of middle class propriety. Yet Braddon is the
most traditionally sensational novelist, especially in reference to
Lady Audley’ s Secret and Aurora Floyd, neither of which refer
directly to sexuality. Instead, they portray their female protagonists
as aggressive and capable of unexpected, even criminal action.
Interestingly, although contemporary critics tended to agree that the
sensation novel was founded on incident and abounded in murders,
crimes, secrets, etc., in each of these two novels there is only one
murder and one secret— and Lady Audley’s bigamy is a "secret"
which is known to the reader almost from the novel’s inception.
These aggressive female characters seem to be the real key in
defining the novels as sensational, and it is indeed this element that
current critics identify as the subversive feminist appeal of these
novels.
In addition to blurring the distinction between passive
heroine and active villainess, these female texts, like prostitutes,
circulate freely across the boundaries between the lower and middle
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classes. Braddon wrote penny-dreadfuls, and at the height of her
popularity, republished one as a three-decker for the circulating
libraries (The Trail o f the Serpent). Several critics refer to both
Braddon and Ouida as authors who maintain a following in both the
lower and middle classes. In "Concerning the Unknown Public"
that is, the penny serials readers estimated at five million people,
Thomas Wright identifies the chief readers of these serials as the
"young lady" classes (shop girls and the like), a kind of grey area of
working women between the servant and middle classes, refuting the
often repeated statement that such journals were mainly read by
domestic servants and barely literate laborers. This article was
published in 1883, and Wright notes that while Braddon was "first
favourite" with this readership until "the last few years" and that
One (presumably) favourite novelist of the Known
Public there is who holds a place apart in relation
to the unknown public. And that novelist is Ouida!
. . . Their belief in her is not a matter of reason but
of faith. . . .Though it does not appear in penny
serials, Ouida’s writing is essentially the acme of
penny serial style . . . The difference between the
serials and Ouida’s works, though great, is one of
degree only, not of kind. The transition from one
to the other is easily made, and the writings of the
author of Moths do the State some service in that
they materially help to bridge the gulf between the
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generally inane fictions of the penny serials and the
better classes of fiction. (290)
This was two decades later than the 1860’s denunciations of
sensationalism, and Wright is an openminded and favorable
reviewer of penny fiction who confesses to reading it himself as a
youth. H e sees the bridging of the classes as a "service" to the state.
But even in the late eighties, this was not a majority or even a
common opinion; in fact, even in the nineties, the Quarterly Review,
The Edinburgh and The Nineteenth Century were bewailing the
corruption of the lower classes with "penny trash" and, to the extent
that they believed such literature was being read by the middle
classes, they denounced the overlap heartily.
In short, we are left with two questions about the sensational
novel in the 1860’s: why did it spring into being at that time, as
many critics argue it did, and why was it labelled in the way it was?
The answer to the first question is that it did not. There have
always been novels with aggressive heroines, novels with sex, novels
with crimes, etc., although they may have taken a particular turn
toward the setting of everyday middle class domesticity at this time,
partially because of the "boom" in journalistic information from
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which the sensation novel took its substance, as Boyle argues. The
second answer, I would suggest, is that the qualities of sensational
literature mentioned above, which have always been characterized
as "trash" literature by gender and class characteristics, collided head
on with the discourses of disease and contagion which they had
paralleled for some time. "Sensation" becomes a thinly veiled
literary euphemism for the action of disease upon the body; spurred
by economic and social anxieties, women’s popular novels became
re/presentations of the grotesque social body and critical discourse
became the speculum with which to achieve surveillance and
containment.
The mid-Victorian period was a time of large contradictions.
The balance of the age of equipoise may well have been maintained
by the tension of these contradictions. This was an era which saw
an increasing fear of the lower classes, and an increasing concern
for their well-being. The upper classes resisted contact with the
laboring classes and yet mingled with them in the Crystal Palace and
other public amusements. Denial of lower bodily function and
obsessive interest in sanitary improvements flourished
simultaneously. The expanding crinoline both grotesquely
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exaggerated the lower bodies of women and prevented casual
contact by mandating a clearly defined circular space between the
wearer and the nearest person or object. The cultural production of
this period is profoundly evocative of the interrelationship of this
contradiction in several discursive fields. Genre arises out of a
particular confluences of discourses emerging out of certain
historical conditions; in this case, imperial and domestic economic
and sanitary concerns combined with public and critical response to
literature to produce the category "sensation." Although in the
seventies and eighties the category continued to be used, it was
restricted to include principally the domestic crime melodrama,
whereas in the early 60’s, the category was often used as an
indiscriminate label for popular literature, usually by women, that
seemed in any way transgressive. By the mid seventies, the
sensation genre is redefined with more specificity, and other
subgenres that previously were lumped in with it gain their own
identities and are each targeted for critical surveillance by different
issues (class, sexual transgression), which yet contain the trace of the
ineradicable connection of those issues in the permeability of the
body.
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III. Generic "Transition"
Ouida provides us with an interesting example of this
transition. We have said that Ouida was, at one time, considered
sensational, yet later this gives way to her placement in the slightly
less uncertain and shifting category of the novelist "of high life."
Indeed Ouida’s early novels included a little of everything:
adventure, romance, intrigue and sentiment, just as her later novels
privileged a mixture of sentimentalism and political critique similar
to Dickens, although without his humor. However, her wildly
successful early novels, including Strathmore and Under Two Flags,
were notable for their improbable aristocratic heroes, heroines,
villains and villainesses living large with an opulence and an utter
disregard for middle class values as unlikely as their Herculean
strength and their fierce adherence to an aristocratic code of
Ouida’s own manufacture. Her characters were sexually active, and
the males (good, bad or indifferent) and the villainous females are
adulterous and promiscuous as well.
From the very beginning, critics showed at least equal
concern with Ouida’s representation of the upper classes as with her
dubious morality. Sixties reviews were amusedly patronizing,
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pointing out the flaws and errors in her already thoroughly
unbelievable characters, or they were furious with her attribution of
amorality to the aristocracy. In 1873, Vincent E. H. Murray
somewhat contradictorily denounces Ouida’s novels for their lack of
fidelity to social reality and then states that their principal danger is
that they both reflect and encourage a licentiousness that is a social
truth. For Murray, they are dangerous precisely because they are
read, not by "those whom it is customary to call ’the people’, . . .
These books are issued by one of the first houses in the trade; they
are written for and read by society" (935). Ouida’s novels, Murray
informs his readers:
throw an evil light on the social corruption of which
they are an exhalation . . . Precisely as certain
diseased conditions of the body give rise to a
craving after unnatural food, so do certain morbid
conditions of the mind produce an appetite for
literary food which a sound mental organization
would reject. . . we believe further that the society
which reads and encourages such literature is a
’ whited sepulchre’ which, if it be not speedily
cleansed by the joint effort of pure men and
women, will breed a pestilence so foul as to poison
the very life-blood of our nation. (935)
Murray’s denunciation of Ouida uses the combination of offal and
food imagery typical to the critical treatment of sensation literature
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("unnatural appetite"), although he does not classify her novels
specifically in this way. It shifts, though, at the end (this is, by the
way, the conclusion of the article) to incorporate contemporary
imagery from another area of the sanitary crusade— that of the
graveyard. Articles abounded on inadequately interred bodies that
bred pestilence, church walls that oozed pus and other interesting
images. By shifting from the image of drugged or adulterated
(unnaturally stimulating) food to the parallel threat of the diseased
cadaver, Murray identifies Ouida’s readers as subhuman, literally
ghoulish, and a threat to an entire nation of "pure" men and women
who must prevail in purging their society of its degenerates.
This is strong "medicine" indeed, but Murray addresses his
directive to a class/body which shall purge/medicate itself. H e is
quite clear on the belief that this is a problem internal to one,
classed readership, which is to be handled within that social body.
Yet not all reviewers were as comfortable with Ouida’s supposed
containment within middle class markets. By the late-seventies, as
Ouida’s novels grew less admiring of her own creations and more
censorious of their behaviors, some critics began to see real danger
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in her portrayal of a decadent aristocracy. O f Ouida’s novels,
Blackwood’ s says:
The mischief they must answer for is likely to
survive the unnatural excitement and the extreme
absurdity which were their redeeming virtues ....
Stories written for the gratification of the ordinary
subscribers to Mr. Mudie, are passed on in due
course to be devoured by the milliners’ apprentices
and lawyers’ clerks. There seems no reason why
the young lady who admires her beaute du diable
daily in the looking-glass should not make the
acquaintance of one of these noblemen . . .
Whether she may have to make away with him
afterwards or no is a question she may postpone for
the present . . . These stories are circulated or
imitated in the columns of the ’penny dreadfuls’
[and are dangerous like] the demagogues who get a
living by stirring strife between classes.
("Contemporary Literature" 355)
In the passage above, we see that the danger is not only that the
lower class woman may prostitute herself or be seduced through her
vain ambition, but that she shall become murderous if she does
infiltrate that higher class. There is the underlying threat of
revolution and sexual transgression in that "unnatural excitement."
The critic moves on to make this connection explicit, imagining a
working class reader coming to his own conclusions after reading
stories like Ouida’s:
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You see that they are not only effete but rotten to
the core; they batten on the sweat and blood of the
people. Depend on it, the only things to agitate for
are abolition and confiscation; and if we don’t send
these curled heads of theirs to the guillotine, by —,
Sir, they may be grateful to the clemency of the
people! (335)
Confusingly, in this 1879 review, Ouida’s work is referred to both as
"sensational" and as "novels of society that are as frivolous [as
sensation] though less harmless" (355). The distinction is already
being made between the two genres, but they are clearly contingent,
perhaps even overlapping.
Why the emphasis on class tensions is foregrounded in this
period is uncertain. Certainly such tensions always existed, but were
less visibly in evidence in the late seventies than they had been in
the Reform Bill period of the late sixties. On the other hand, we do
see an emerging tendency toward sustained surveillance of class
boundaries at this time; in the absence of the threats of continental
revolutionary activity and Reform Bill riots which had plagued
Britain a few decades earlier, and which called for event-specific
action, we see the emergence of the detective division of the
metropolitan police, partially under the impetus of Fenian activity
(Smith). The preventive visibility of the street patrolman and the
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definition of the police’s role as "keeping order" on the streets
evolved into one which privileged clandestine surveillance and more
active covert operations as well. S.J. Davies also notes that a "basic
change took place in policing in the 1870s. This was the final shift
away from preventative policing to detection" (38). Whether this is
seen as a response to the political climate, as Smith argues, or as an
outgrowth of the consolidation of wealth during the prosperous
seventies, it is clearly significant in terms of class attitudes. Smith
also notes, in an unrelated passage, that before the 1880’s property
offenses (theft, etc.) tended to be more prevalent in times of
economic depression, whereas after the 1880’s, the opposite was
true— more property crimes occurred in periods of economic strength
(11-12), which would also seem to indicate a difference in class
relations. Again, the causes are less important to this argument
than the fact that such a change occurred. The "criminal" or
"deviant" classes— which were discursively aligned with the so-called
"dangerous classes" of the ’40s, that is the impoverished, the casual
laborer, etc.— were constructed as the object of a discourse of
surveillance in much the same way that Foucault identifies sexuality
as being constructed. Like the discourse of sexuality, this, too, offers
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opportunities for intervention, and those opportunities existed in the
classed geographical spaces between the criminal and the upper
classes whom the police protected (the protection of other members
of the underclass being a sort of by-product of this action): "The
heaviest concentrations of police seem to have been in those
’border’ neighborhoods that separated rich and poor areas . . .
There was more than a little truth to the police axiom ’You guard
St. James by watching St. Giles.’" (Smith 42). Critics were equally
vigilant in their surveillance of the classed borders of fiction; the
lower orders were ever likely to be incited to some desperate deed
by fiction that either presented the upper classes as too accessible
(to the sexuality of the lower class female) or as physically or
morally vulnerable to the lower classes (through the infiltration of
false heirs, blackmailing lower class witnesses to upper class crime,
or direct revolutionary action). The "bridges" that Ouida was
building between classes of readers not only threatened to breach
those borders, but also offered the uncomfortable possibility of the
object of surveillance "looking back" by taking such an intent interest
in the Ouida’s fictive upper tenth. If such promiscuous reading
habits weren’t bad enough, there was also the actual content of the
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novels— the characters and their actions. In Ouida’s early work the
successful border crossers are of two types: the lower class woman
who becomes a courtesan and ensnares a noble, but erring man of
"race" (the nobility) or the artist, who alone is allowed to transcend
to restraints of class and gender through creative genius. (Although
not infrequently, the penniless peasant artist is also discovered to be
a displaced scion of "race.") Conversely, her aristocratic women
occasionally succumb to the influence of less than blue blood in
their family trees and degenerate to the vulgar. The men, however,
never do; heroes and villains alike take lower class mistresses, marry
out of season, and misbehave themselves in a host of other light
hearted ways, and yet even the villains remain ineffably noble in
their fastidious villainy. Ouida’s outrageously bald exploitation of
the double standard for sexual conduct drew shocked condemnation,
as did her portrayal of aristocratic women taking lovers and living
lives of pleasure, especially since, no matter how much she
condemns these women, they remain among her more lively and
appealing female characters. In this way, she both exposes the
upper classes to criticism for their sexual morals and seals them off
from such criticism (they are members of "The Order"; they are not
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comparable to or understandable by other mere mortals). In the
troubled sixties, when upper class Britons were being circumspect
with their displays of wealth, Ouida set her characters in absurdly
lavish scenes of conspicuous display. Interestingly, in her later
novels, although she never quite loses her sense of the mystical je ne
sais quoi of the aristocracy, she turns to savage denunciation of the
morals of the wealthy and takes up the cause of the abused
peasantry in Italy, exchanging, in the words of one Spectator critic
"the role of an Ovid for that of a Juvenal" ("Review of The
M a s s a r e n e s Regardless of this critique, though, Ouida never loses
sight of the need to preserve class distinctions. Her virtuous
peasantry are always those who keep their place, and social
ambition in the lower classes is always criminal. The same Ouida
who defended the peasants came out vigorously against socialism,
fighting for the rights of the wealthy to their property even as she
died of starvation. She repudiated her own British, middle-class
roots and claimed a continental, aristocratic identity (in fact, she
often dressed as her characters, apparently assuming their roles for
months at a time). Her radicalism was aesthetic; beauty, and the
artist’s capacity to create it, was the one characteristic that could
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transcend class and national boundaries, conferring natural
aristocracy on anyone. Ouida refused any identification with
commercialism. She saw herself as an artist, constitutionally above
such petty concerns, and let her mother handle the bills. In contrast
to Braddon, who saw herself as a professional businesswoman
attempting to supply a demand, and who accepted criticism on those
terms, Ouida’s self-mystifying celebrity refused to acknowledge the
critics’ charges of crass commercialism, aligning herself instead with
the icon of artist-as-bard, dispensing truth through art. Her
residence on the continent probably also lent itself to glamorous
interpretation; it certainly made it harder for her critics to attack
her personally in the absence of a concrete presence in England.
Although it is not clear that her imitators in this genre presented the
same persona, their identification of themselves as writing from
within the wealthy aristocratic milieu (and implicit generic
identification with Ouida herself) may have communicated,
particularly to the penny audiences, a disregard for the commercial
aspect of publishing. This may have made the trath-claims of the
genre seem more potent for evil to the watchful critics, who wished
to disassociate it from privileged literary forms and realign it within
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the discourse of the popular, which was inextricably tied to the
image of the novel as commercial article of (domestic) manufacture.
Also in contrast to Braddon, who attempted to control critical
discourse from within by founding her own journals and contributing
reviews like everyone else, Ouida refused to play by the rules,
responding directly and imperiously to her critics rather than using
the usual circuitous countermoves. Ouida, in other words,
aggressively claimed the space of high culture while exploiting the
marketability of the popular; her "very fine and nasty books"
(Oliphant) were critically deported from that high-cultural space by
force, and under protest from the author, and it is not clear to what
extent the critics’ opinion was the one that prevailed among Ouida’s
multiple readerships. At the end of the century, appropriate tribute
to Ouida may be found in the gorgeous but short-lived Yellow Book.
G. S. Street takes her on her own terms, very appealing to the
decadents:
I acquit myself of impertinence in stating what I
find to like and to respect in the novels of Ouida.
For many years, with many thousands of readers
they have been popular, I know. But ever since I
began to read reviews, to learn from the most
reputable authorities what I should admire or
avoid, I have found them mentioned with simple
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merriment or a frankly contemptuous patronage.
One had, now and then in boyhood, vague ideas of
being cultivated, vague aspirations towards
superiority: I thought, for my part, that of the many
insuperable obstacles in the way of this goal, this
contempt of Ouida’s novels was one of the most
obvious. . . . [yet] the two qualities, I think, which
underlie the best of Ouida’s work, and which must
have always saved it from commonness, are a
genuine and passionate love of beauty, as she
conceives it, and a genuine and passionate hatred
of injustice and oppression. (167-75)
Beauty of medium and quality of message— these are the
characteristics of high art. In view of these pretensions, it was
doubly intolerable that Ouida should appeal so persistently to the
hoi-polloi.
Additionally, most novels of high life, especially as the
appeared in penny and sixpenny numbers, were either love-stories
or, less frequently, crime stories. Yet, although Ouida’s novels often
contained a love-interest, they frequently focused on adventure; in
her best selling Under Two Flags, her focus directly recalls the
adventure novels of Dumas pere, as she tells of the triumphs and
travails of a British aristocrat displaced into the French foreign
legion in Africa. Her lead characters in these early stories are
always male, and she follows them where no lady should have dared
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go. To facilitate realism in this process, Ouida gave all male parties
for members of the Guards, at which her guests were required to
smoke cigars, in the belief that they would speak freely in front of
her if they were smoking. In regard to her highly irregular conduct,
Ouida’s only defense was that she was an artist, and, as an artist,
transcended her sex. Her mother, who chaperoned at such
gatherings, helped Ouida in her note-taking, out of which she was
able to create the slang and sporting references that gave her
characters distinctiveness, if not complete credibility.
Ouida flouted gender conventions openly, both in her
personal life and her writing, and the critical countermeasure
categorized her, first as a sensationalist, then as the chief example of
another existing genre (the romance of high life, descended directly
from Pamela and Clarissa) which represented only one facet of the
stories she was actually writing. In fact, her writing is much closer
to what we refer to today as society novels, by Danielle Steel or
Harold Robbins, blending sex, romance, political and economic
intrigue with elements of mystery and adventure— what Cawelti
identifies as social melodrama (263). She violates the boundaries of
the romance of high life in that love is not necessarily the dominant
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force in the story, she often focuses on action in preference to
character, and even when love is a key feature, the good heroine
often fails to get the hero (as in Two Little Wooden Shoes or Folle
Farine for example).
Ouida’s work is quite different from Braddon’s or
Broughton’s, in that the setting is displaced from the middle class
urban or suburban domesticity characteristic of the latter two
authors. Perhaps because of this, Ouida had no trouble gaining
entry to the circulating library market, despite her characters’
explicit improprieties. (Ironically, it would be the public libraries at
the turn of the century, who were more free from market pressures
than the private ones, who would fail to stock Ouida, probably on
moral grounds. Simon Eliot found that fully one third of public
libraries excluded Ouida, although her sales were still very strong.)
These novels could never be accused as re-presenting the middle
classes to themselves; they were clearly about the fatal attraction of
the Other. In all Ouida’s range of characters, from the fabulously
wealthy to the starving Breton peasant, the middle classes and the
urban poor are conspicuously absent. Even Britain itself rarely
appears and then is scarcely recognizable. Indeed, the opposite of
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the sensation stories of Braddon and Wood is not, as is usually
stated, the realist novel; it is the novel of high life by Ouida.
If the sensation novel may be seen as a structuring container
for anxieties focused on the domestic, perhaps the novel of high life
was indeed a sort of adventure story for women, in which readers
could vicariously experience the joys of being, in a couple of senses,
an adventuress, while comfortable in the knowledge that it was
acceptable to enjoy this sort of behavior, because it belonged to a
different world with different standards— and one that was in no
danger of intruding on domestic reality. Ouida’s evil adulteresses
are rarely punished, as sensation villainesses always are, while the
"good" women are as often sublimely martyred as rewarded.
Sensation stories provoked "horripilation" because they were stories
about the dark side of real life; Ouida’s stories, no matter how
heart-rending, always had the glow of fantasy. Their radical
component was the way they structured the reader’s interest around
class tensions, evoking envy, admiration, disgust and even hatred by
turns.
Rhoda Broughton is best known as a writer of romances,
usually concentrating on the love interest of a middle class woman.
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The stories are told in a lively and humorous style, with much
badinage; the plots are simple and the stories usually focus on the
development of the primary character. Whereas Braddon and
Ouida may employ a whole unpredictable range of plots, characters,
and motivations, often multiple, Broughton’s choices were more
limited. Although more unpredictable than today’s Harlequin style
romance (Broughton’s did not always end happily), there is an
essential similarity of concerns: a woman is in love with a man;
there is some obstacle to their union; a final resolution takes place.
Broughton’s stories were always set in the world she knew— the
world of middle to upper middle class domestic life, and her main
characters were conventional young women who sometimes lapsed
into unconventional behavior. Broughton’s pages are conspicuously
devoid of the swashbuckling aristocrats of Ouida or the calculating
criminals of Braddon, and the most devastating secrets her
characters conceal are unhappy or illicit past love interests.
Broughton’s initial generic "placement" was firmly in the
sensation genre, apparently because of her female characters’ rather
frank acknowledgement of desire and physical stimulation. Her
work, however, shows none of the other trademarks-secret
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marriages, changes of identity, or class slippage— that show up so
abundantly in Wilkie Collins or Braddon. A reader today would
have some initial difficulty determining how Broughton came to be
placed in that category at all. I would argue, however, that
Broughton’s work is consistent in that first decade with one
overriding concern shared with other "sensation" novels-that its
"feminine" nature as romance written by a woman author and its
focus on the bodies of young women characters allows readers to
construct those bodies as vehicles for the expression of desires and
anxieties regarding class, gender and national identity expressible in
terms of contagion. After the anxious sixties, Broughton was
redefined as a writer of love-stories, a move which elided the social
content of her novels from critical commentary, even though many
of her later novels were organized around specific social questions.
Broughton’s especial trademark was the use of the third
person present tense in her narratives, a feature that was much
imitated by her followers. Critics who admired her wrote of the
"lightness and vivacity" of her touch and her charming if rather
wayward female characters. Those who disliked her found her
stories "coarse," largely because her heroines confessed to passionate
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feelings for men, and often came close to what the Temple Bar
called "the abyss." ("Miss Broughton’s Novels" 206) Blackwood’ s
elaborates:
Now it is no knight of romance riding down the
forest glades, ready for the defence and succour of
all the oppressed, for whom the dreaming maiden
waits. She waits now for flesh and muscles, for
strong arms that seize her, and warm breath that
thrills her through, and a host of other physical
attractions, which she indicates to the world with a
charming frankness . . . were the sketch made from
the man’s point of view, its openness would at least
be less repulsive. The peculiarity of it in England
is, that it is oftenest made from the woman’s sid e-
that it is women who describe these sensuous
raptures— that this intense appreciation of flesh and
blood, this eagerness of physical sensation, is
represented as the natural sentiment of English
girls, and is offered to them not only as the portrait
of their own state of mind, but as their amusement
and mental food. (Oliphant 259)
Curiously, the point that the critic returns to over and over in this
article is that such representations are not unusual, but frequent,
that they have been adopted rather than denied by the classes whom
they supposedly represent (i.e., middle class women readers), and
that they are yet utterly untrue. (Oliphant is adamant on this point,
adducing support from her own knowledge of the middle class to
assert that this is so.) The critic’s concern is not merely with the
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misrepresentation of English women to English women, however;
the real issue is that other nations, most notably the French, will
consider Broughton’s work representative of the best in English
fiction: "We confess to having felt a sense of injury in our national
pride when our solemn contemporary, the ’Revue des Deux
M ondes,’ held up in one of its recent numbers the names of Miss
Annie Thomas [Broughton] and Mr. Edmund Yates to the
admiration of the world as representative novelists of England" (260-
261).
Here we see, once again, the reference to books as food, but
perhaps more importantly, the notion of fiction as something that
shapes the nation through its representation of the nation to itself
and to others; clearly, a woman’s fiction that does not reflect reality
has the power to corrupt that reality, creating a new and worse one,
especially through women readers-the seduction of the wife and
betrayal of the family patriarch is equal to the traducing of the state:
It is a shame to women so to write; and it is a
shame to the women who read . . . Women’s rights
and women’s duties have had enough discussion . . .
we have most of us made merry over the Dr Marys
and Dr Elizabeths (sic); but yet a woman has one
duty of invaluable importance to her country and
her race which cannot be over-estimated-and that
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is the duty of being pure. There is perhaps
nothing of such vital consequence to a nation. . . .
There can be no possible doubt that the wickedness
of man is less ruinous, less disastrous to the world
in general, than the wickedness of women. (275)
It is clearly the sexual purity of Englishwomen with which the critic
is concerned, that the representation of sexual activity in the text
will be "ingested" (as contaminated food) and, like a germ,
reproduce itself within the reader, who will in turn reproduce the
text as an "illegitimate" national reality. The metaphor of reading as
sexual activity is not overt here, but the critic’s sense that such texts
would be less offensive if written by men strongly suggests that
sexual activity represented to women by women is a dangerous
liaison indeed. A subsequent comparison to the fall of Rome
(which Oliphant, somewhat inexplicably, blames on the impurity of
Roman women) "cinches" the connection— imperialism depends on
the impermeability of women’s minds and bodies to subversive
sexual forces, on their attraction to "the wholesome" rather than the
"hectic" (275), sexual fever being comparable to that caused by
contagion.
Broughton, of course, never allows her women to go over the
edge of that "abyss"; they die, realize their errors, become social
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workers, or marry the "right" man who has been patiently waiting in
the sidelines for the demise of the more glamorous but morally
inappropriate suitor. Always, finally, traditional values are
reaffirmed. Yet, the refusal or interrogation of those values which
takes place in the unfolding of the story leaves its trace, even if the
heroine herself is brought to a problematic acceptance. Broughton
uses current events and popular discourse to highlight her thematic
concerns; in N ot Wisely but Too Well, she uses the current concern
with fever and sanitation to underline her treatment of Kate’s
sexuality, and in A Beginner, the publishing market itself becomes a
vehicle for the implication of the reader in the suppression of
wom en’s creativity in the very consumption of the commodity of
women’s writing.
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CHAPTER THREE
M. E. BRADDON: SENSATIONAL REALISM
I. Lady A udley’ s Secret
Lady Audley’ s Secret is often accused of or credited with
laying the foundation for the sensation novel, and yet the text
undermines that foundation at the same moment. Lady Audley, her
secret and her deeds form the sensational story that mark the
novel’s genre, yet the forced growth of Robert Audley and the
masculinization of his character constitute an equal and
complimentary counternarrative to Lady Audley’s tale, which itself
subverts the "return to order" which marks the sensation story and
relocates the source of sensation from the disordered and alien
individual female body to the male social body of the patriarchal
sociolegal institutions. These elements coexist in the text, yet only
the former structure was "selected" by readers as a generic property;
critics expressed outrage over the portrayal of the alienated woman
and entirely missed the much more subversive portrait of alienated
patriarchy. Robert Audley, the Temple Bar lawyer who has never
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submitted a brief, Lieutenant Maldon, who sells his daughter to the
highest bidder and drinks the proceeds, George Talboys, who
abandons his wife and baby son, and even Sir Michael Audley,
whose love-"fever" drives him to take a wife who admittedly does
not love him— these are the aristocratic and generally privileged men
who set the events of the story in motion. Robert Audley finally
rouses himself from his habitual lethargy to pursue the "madwoman"
and himself becomes mad in the process. This madness is "healed"
when he takes as a wife Clara, George’s sister. The mad wife is
replaced by the mad husband, whose madness is more acceptable to
society, but it is made perfectly clear that the social order is both
artificial and a mere mask for the chaos or "madness" beneath.
Thus the story is less one of Lady Audley’s disguised madness (as
Dr. Mosgrave says, "There is no madness in anything she has done"
(377).), than one of Robert Audley’s recognition of his own insanity
and of the mad nature of his society, and of his subsequent informed
choice to remain complicit in that madness and to become active in
supporting it.
Throughout the novel, Braddon offers observations on the
nature of insanity. Although she gives the reader current medical
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and scientific information about madness through the voice of Lady
Audley, she reserves comments regarding the ubiquitous nature of
madness to her own narrative voice, linking madness and violence
specifically to calm, placid surfaces and idealized images:
We hear every day of murders committed in the
country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow,
protracted agonies from poisons administered by
some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by
cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some
spreading oak, whose very shadow promised— peace.
In the county of which I write, I have been shown a
meadow in which, on a quiet summer Sunday
evening, a young farmer had murdered the girl who
loved and trusted him; and yet even now, with the
stain of that foul deed upon it, the aspect of the
spot is— peace. No crime has ever been committed
in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has
not been also done in the face of that sweet rustic
calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a
tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with—
peace. (54)
Here is clearly one characteristic of sensational literature— the
location of crime and intrigue in the idealized domestic setting. The
explosion of distinctions between the "degenerate’ ’ urban and
"idyllic" rural landscape, however, and explicit association of evil
with male violence against women are not as often remarked, yet
Braddon repeatedly refers to them, as when Phoebe explains that
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she must marry Luke because she is afraid that he will kill her
otherwise (107).
When Robert Audley begins to have hallucinations,
immediately after incarcerating Lady Audley, Braddon speaks
directly again:
D o not laugh at poor Robert . . . There is nothing
so delicate, so fragile, as that invisible balance upon
which the mind is always trembling. Mad today
and sane tomorrow. . . . Who has not been, or is
not to be, mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is
quite safe from the trembling of the balance? (404)
At the very point at which the madness is contained, the Lady
locked away forever (in France, amusingly enough, surgically excised
from the "clean and proper" body of England), Braddon speaks
directly to shatter that containment, reminding us that not only is
madness ubiquitous, but that the very man who judges Lady Audley
is himself mad, placing him and the reader and the Lady in the
same category, "trembling on the balance."
As Robert Audley journeys toward knowledge, and suspects
that the aunt with whom he has fallen in love is a murderess, like
Hamlet he comes both to denounce women and to associate them
with evil:
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The Eastern potentate who declared that women
were at the bottom of all mischief should have
gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is
because women are never lazy. They are
Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs,
Queen Elizabeths, and Catherine the Seconds, and
they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and
desperation . . . To call them the weaker sex is to
utter a hideous mockery . . . I hate women. (207)
The more he misses George, and is attracted to George’s lookalike
sister Clara, the more he rails against women in general. One irony
in his growing animosity for women is that it is his own femininity
that he is rejecting, and must reject, in order to take on the active
masculine role as judge of Lady Audley, head of household,
husband, etc. To become a fit husband, he must come to associate
femininity in an active state with evil, since women are to be passive
and let men act out social ambitions. Thus, it is through Clara
Talboys’ strength that Robert pursues Lady Audley; her strength is
precisely that she can drive a man to do what she wants to do while
she remains ostensibly passive under the rule of a dictatorial father.
For Robert, women are evil when they have masculine ambitions
and take on masculine roles; paradoxically, it is precisely because he
does not have these characteristics that he finds them hateful. Yet
the wom en who really do evil in Lady Audley’ s Secret— Lady Audley
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and Phoebe— do not do so out of a desire for leadership, but out of
a desire to avoid the pain inflicted by an active masculine element
(Captain Maldon, Luke) and to seek passive comfort in the socially
and financially secure role of wife. Thus, contrary to Robert’s
perception, Lady Audley’s story shows that women are most evil
when they conform to social expectations— a lesson which Robert
must deny if he is to take his place as an active male member of the
ruling class. By the end of the novel, he has successfully done both.
Thus, the novel simultaneously presents and validates two
contradictory points of view, in two complementary storylines: the
coming-of-age and social integration of Robert Audley, a traditional
high-culture theme, and the decline and fall of the scheming
adventuress, a popular culture melodrama. This second plot
exceeds the bounds of the usual "adventuress" narrative in that the
lady speaks for herself, and in that she does not present herself
wholly as a villainess. Together, these two narratives create a
dramatic tension born of the ideological contradictions in their
mutually exclusive portrayals of feminine evil, a third rhetorical
space in which the coherence of the oppositions which drive either
of the first two narratives unravel into incoherence, the madness
176
which is finally located and at least superficially contained in the
imprisoned bodies of the Maldon women.
Critics have often noted the detective plot in Lady Audley’ s
Secret, setting up the opposition between Robert and the Lady as
detective and arch-criminal. There are, however, important
distinctions between Robert and the traditional detective. The
detective is usually an outsider, who represents an objective
principle of justice and is unwavering in his quest. Perhaps because
of this quality, the detective is usually a static character, who does
not change or learn in the process of his pursuit, and to the extent
that he does, such growth is subordinated to the reader’s interest in
the unfolding of the mystery which is the object of his detection. H e
uses his will and his reason to pursue his cause. In Lady Audley’ s
Secret, however, the reader knows almost from the beginning the
general solution to the mystery, if not the details, and Robert
Audley changes and grows considerably in the course of the novel;
in fact, Robert’s growth is one of its primary foci. He is motivated
by a personal interest and often questions both the means and the
ends of his detecting. Finally, his detection is based on chance and
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what he calls "Providence" and what Braddon frankly labels
monomania.
If we ignore the Lady Audley storyline momentarily, and
consider only the Robert Audley storyline, the pattern of the
coming-of-age story appears clear. Braddon uses the traditional
model of The Odyssey, first referring to Odysseus explicitly to set the
stage, and then interpreting the story loosely to fit her needs,
combining Telemachus’ character with Odysseus’ journey. A young
male character on the brink of manhood has not yet accepted adult
responsibilities. He is called a barrister, yet has never submitted a
brief. H e prefers the company of his male schoolfriends to women,
and regards marriage with consternation. He is content to "play"
and let others manage the serious business of life. Into this Edenic
peace comes conflict. The boy must take adult responsibilities, must
act and make decisions. The hero’s descent into hell is represented,
as it often is in modern literature, by a crisis of values, an episode of
« •
madness. At the story’s end he has withstood the temptations of the
mermaid, come through the dark night of the soul, rescued the
patriarch of his family and returned home to take his own place as
husband, father and powerful leader of the community,
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(distinguished by his successful prosecution of a breach of promise
case—a typical bit of Braddon irony). In short, Robert Audley is a
Telemachus of recognizable form, if diminutive proportions, faithful
himself to the social order and ready to punish those who stray from
the code.
Braddon makes the Odyssey comparison early in the story.
George Talboys’ first description of his wife to Robert describes her
playing a guitar and singing: "She’s for all the world like one of
those what’s-its-names, who got poor old Ulysses in trouble" (35).
Throughout the novel, Lady Audley is associated with the ocean,
and we are informed that George first met her at the end of a pier
(247). It is perhaps not coincidental that she pushes him into a well,
(a pocket-version of the ocean which he crosses to find her,) which
he survives largely because there is no water in it. Robert dreams
of Audley Court "threatened by the rapid rising of a boisterous sea
. . . the sleeper saw a pale, starry face looking out of the silvery
foam, and knew that it was my lady, transformed into a mermaid,
beckoning his uncle to destruction" (246). Although mermaids are
not unique to The Odyssey, the initial comparison recalls their
function specifically as impediments to the hero’s journey. (For
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more on literary and artistic manifestations of the mermaid in
Victorian and fin-de-siecle culture, see Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of
Perversity.)
However, Robert Audley’s story does not stand alone; it runs
alongside the story of the "syren" he must overcome. Braddon’s
radical departure from tradition is not in presenting the evil
mermaid, but in giving her a voice which does not only sing sweet
lies for men but tells them unpleasant truths. Lady Audley’s secret
is that evil does not originate in the mermaids or the Clytemnestras,
but in the system of representation which makes mermaids and
Clytemnestras out of the Melanthos who are pretty enough to attract
male attention and unfortunate enough to have no other source of
security.
When women like Lucy Audley are not singing and amusing
men, however, they speak truths that destroy the idyllic
representations of rural feminine beauty and domestic tranquillity as
surely as Braddon’s murder in a quiet meadow does. When Lady
Audley is exposed, she speaks of her childhood:
’I was not happy, for the woman who had charge of
me was a disagreeable woman . . . who was
irregularly paid; and who vented her rage upon me
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when my father was behindhand in remitting her
money. . . at a very early age I found out what it
was to be poor’ . . . H e [Sir Michael] sat silent . . .
he . . . had believed . . . as he had believed in the
Gospel. . . a very brief story of an early orphanage,
and a long quiet, colourless youth spent in the
conventual seclusion of an English boarding school.
(349)
Her story is most horrifying because it violates a previous narrative
which is consonant with the ideal of the unsullied woman. Lady
Audley goes on to discuss her fear of poverty and understanding of
"what every schoolgirl knows" but none discusses— that her future will
depend on a good marriage. The institution of marriage is exposed
as founded on the helplessness and fear of women, rather than on
love. In another scene, Phoebe is frank with Lady Audley about her
own motivations for marrying: " I daren’t refuse to marry him. . . .
When he was a boy he was always violent and revengeful. I saw
him once take up that very knife in a quarrel with his mother. I tell
you, my lady, I must marry him" (107). Throughout the novel,
women express a clear understanding of the relations of power
which underlie cultural representations while male characters prefer
the "pretty stories" themselves. The contrast is neatly set up in the
second chapter of the novel, "On Board the Argus." George and a
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"pale governess" are discussing their reasons for returning to
England, and the governess explains that she has worked for fifteen
years in Australia to save up enough money for her marriage to her
English fiancee, who has not done well financially. She fears,
however, that he may have died, or that his feelings might have
changed, or even that he may marry her only for her savings.
George is horrified, because, although he had abandoned his wife
and never written her, these possibilities had never occurred to him.
With great pride, he explains to the governess that he has worked
for three and a half years to make his fortune, and finally struck
gold. "How brave you were!" she responds (22). Although Braddon
presents the governess as sincere in her admiration, surely the
reader must sense a rich irony in the disparity between the woman’s
fifteen years of toil and realistic assessment of the possibility of
change in her fiancee, whom she recognizes as a subjectivity distinct
from her own, and George’s blithely unconscious self-
aggrandizement and conflation of his wife’s subjectivity with his two
dimensional image of her. The male’s "coming of age" therefore, is
based on his ability not only to assume the masculine role of hero in
the epic narrative that patriarchy approves, but to enforce the
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subordination of other voices and other subjectivities to their
supporting roles in that same narrative. If Melantho’s had been the
narrative voice of The Odyssey, how differently might the story have
been told!
It is, of course, sexual attraction which brings the two
storylines together; first, Sir Michael’s attraction to Lucy and later
his nephew’s. Characteristically, sexual passion is defined as a
"fever," and in Lady Audley’s case, great care is taken to distinguish
this diseased attraction from a more ordinary, healthy love:
What had been his (Michael Audley’s) love for his
first wife but a poor, pitiful, smouldering spark, too
dull to be extinguished, too feeble to burn? But
this was love-this fever, this longing, this restless,
uncertain, miserable hesitation; this sick hatred of
his white beard; this frenzied wish to be young
again . . . Sir Michael Audley had fallen ill of the
terrible fever called love. (7)
Lucy, source and object of this affliction, lives as the governess to
the local surgeon’s children. In the governess position, as Mary
Poovey has noted, many oppositions meet: family and not-family,
lady and working woman, mother-figure and domestic servant. In
Lucy Audley’s case, the undomesticated woman is naturalized within
a domestic setting; thus, her true nature is disguised and she is
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enabled to make contact with "good society" like Sir Michael. The
source of disease is disguised within the surgeon’s home, the very
hearth of health. This disease is infectious; Sir Michael
wondered why Robert failed to take the fever from
the first breath of contagion that blew towards him.
H e forgot that there are men who go their ways
unscathed amidst legions of lovely and generous
women, to succumb at last before some harsh-
featured virago, who knows the secret of that only
philter which can intoxicate him and bewitch him
. . . H e forgot that love, which is a madness, and a
scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is
also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by
everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes
under its tortures . . . who lies awake at night until
he loathes his comfortable pillow and tumbles his
sheets into two twisted rags of linen in his agonies,
as if he were a prisoner and wanted to wind them
into impromptu ropes . . . He ignored all those
infinitesimal differences in nature which make the
wholesome food of one man the deadly poison of
another. (332)
In this interesting series of images, we move from the disease
metaphor, to a food-consumption image (the philter, the ’wholesome
food’) to a more specifically sexual image of nocturnal crisis.
Material is taken into the body, initiating an illness that cannot be
healed without releasing it from the body, in this case a desire for
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sexual fulfillment that can only be "healed" by ejaculation into the
body of the Other. Despite Sir Michael’s bemusement, however,
Robert has indeed been "infected."
The progress of this infection is a most curious one. Robert
Audley, indolent and comfort loving, presented as something of an
exquisite, is first presented as largely unmoved by women, especially
his pretty cousin, Alicia, who annoys him with her exuberant energy
and strong affections. Robert affects foppish "turn-down collars,"
surrounds himself in his rooms with flowers, songbirds, and stray
dogs, and rides the fringes of the hunt to avoid being in at the
death. This portrait borders on what Freud would later call
"inversion," and is certainly at the very least laced with feminine
characteristics. In fact, the person Robert Audley resembles most is
not any of his blood relatives, but his relative by marriage, Lady
Audley, vain, comfort loving, lazy and an avid reader of French
novels, as is Robert. The first person for whom we see Robert
Audley having real feelings is a male, his old Eton schoolmate,
George Talboys. When George discovers that his wife is dead,
Robert takes him into his home and nurses him, and they become
constant companions. Although Robert twice claims that he is
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falling in love with his aunt, and compares himself to the hero of a
French novel in so doing, all his concern is for George:
If anyone had ventured to tell Mr. Robert Audley
that he could possibly feel a strong attachment to
any creature breathing, that cynical gentleman
would have elevated his eyebrows . . . Yet here he
was, flurried and anxious, bewildering his brain by
all manner of conjectures about his missing friend ,
and, false to every attribute of his nature, walking
fast.
’I haven’t walked fast since I was at Eton,’
he murmured. (82)
Robert marvels on the strength of his emotions— "To think that it is
possible to care so much for a fellow!" (89) and determines to go to
"the very end of the world" if he must, to find him. It seems evident
that Robert does not so much love Lady Audley as he is like Lady
Audley— even the object of his "affection" was once the object of
Lady Audley’s similar care as her first husband.
Braddon is clearly on dangerous ground here; she can allow
Robert, as a "good" character, to pursue neither his aunt nor his
childhood pal. Oddly, however, instead of taking the ready-made
alternative and matching him to his cousin, as foreshadowed
throughout the text, she introduces another character in the second
volume: Clara Talboys, George’s lookalike sister. This woman acts
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as a substitute for George, as Robert muses, "It’s comfortable, but it
seems so d— d lonely tonight. If poor George were sitting opposite
to me, or-or even George’s sister— she’s very like him -existence
might be a little more endurable" (208).
Ultimately, Robert will marry this acceptable substitute, and
George, found again, will live with the couple. In all ways, Robert
replaces Lady Audley— as George’s companion, and as the ostensibly
normal center of a normal family group whose mind has yet
"trembled on the balance" between sanity and insanity. In fact,
Braddon takes great pains to show the similarity of Lady and Robert
Audley’s natures and tendencies; it is the circumstances, not the
individuals, which are different. Robert, a privileged male brought
up with a great deal of freedom and luxury, is tolerated as a likeable
eccentric, and never faces any circumstances which would make him
liable to unacceptable behavior. Lady Audley, on the other hand,
has little freedom and faces great hardship, and, had the crisis of
George’s unexpected return never occurred, would probably, as she
says to Sir Michael, have been "a good woman for the rest of my
life" (354). She does exactly as she is supposed to do, marry well,
and for this she is abandoned, penniless, with a young child. She
187
attempts to work to support her family, and her drunken father
gambles her earnings away. Desperate, she leaves the child with her
father, runs away to earn her living independently under a different
name, and sends money back to support her child. These might be
read as the actions of a hero, not a villain. (It is, in fact, quite
parallel to George’s abandonment of family in the "heroic quest" for
success.) Believing herself widowed, she marries again without
disclosing her true identity, which is her first crime, and one which is
at least explicable within the mores of middle class society, if not
entirely morally justifiable. It is not until her new identity is
threatened that she becomes a true villain, and resorts to attempted
murder. Between the law as represented in the person of Robert
Audley and the chaotic madness of Lady Audley lies only a
difference of circumstance; their natures are the same.
Braddon’s purpose in drawing the characters so identically
becomes clear in light of her references to the role of the artist.
Several times, Braddon refers to the Pre-Raphaelites and their
paintings in characterizing Lady Audley’s appearance; the most
pointed of these is her description of the full-length portrait by
which George first recognizes her. The portrait is a perfect likeness,
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and yet seems very unlike the Lady in its hard, cruel, almost
demonic expression. Alicia suggests that,
sometimes a painter is in a manner inspired, and is
able to see, through a normal expression of the
face, another expression that is equally a part of it,
though not to be perceived by common eyes. We
have never seen my Lady look as she does in that
picture; but I think she could look so. (72)
Robert responds with a plea not to be so "German . . .I’m not
metaphysical; don’t unsettle me" (72). The upsetting metaphysical
truth here is that the artist is indeed exposing a hidden reality;
underneath the "normal" face of society and its laws is another
visage, one normally hidden from the gaze of people like the
Audleys, but one that the poverty stricken and the dispossessed
know only too well. In Lucy A udley/H elen Maldon, the two faces
really do coexist; in Robert Audley, the potential lies just below the
surface, unrealized because of his masculine and class entitlements
to security and luxury.
It is this coexistance that cannot be tolerated. If one reads
Lady Audley’ s Secret as a coming of age novel the hero of which is
Robert Audley, one may clearly see that Robert’s task is to transfer
his affections from unsuitable objects and turn that attraction, which
189
is really an attraction to the unacceptable elements in his own
personality, to denial. The attraction that once led Robert to
violate the privacy of Lady Audley’s locked rooms, burglarizing her
suite in order to gaze upon her portrait and personal effects leads
him to continue violating the privacy of her past in order to expose
her "secret." It is significant that this obsessive pursuit generates
symptomatic behaviors of such a nature that the other lawyers in
Robert’s environment speculate that he is in love (211). It is the
forced "penetration" of Lady Audley’s identity, prefigured in the
invasion of her rooms and bonnet box, which will signify mastery
over the feminine elements in Robert’s own nature. Perhaps even
more significantly, at the terminus of this penetrating journey lies
not a woman, but a man. In marrying George’s substitute, Robert is
able to acceptably release the fever that has contaminated his body,
restoring his own health and the health of the social body.
Fortunately for Robert’s fragile mental health, he is not confronted
with the final horror of pursuing George down into the well, the
womblike opening half-hidden on the Audley estate into which the
mermaid has propelled her tiresome first husband. George has, in
fact, birthed himself, ably midwived by Luke, who brings home this
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"gentleman as was wet through to the skin, and was covered with . . .
slime . . .[who was] like a child in my hands, and helpless as any
baby" (419-424). Robert and Clara, newly married, spend their
honeymoon recovering his body, very much alive, from abroad.
Lady Audley’s secret, of course, is not her prior marriage,
alcoholic father, hidden child, or even her series of attempted
murders; it is her madness that she so carefully conceals. However,
many critics (e.g., Showalter) have questioned this "insanity," seeing
in it merely a convenient device for explaining away perfectly
rational behavior unacceptable in a female protagonist. Braddon’s
ironic references to the madness that lives in all of us certainly
undercut the definition of Lucy as mad. As early as Chapter One,
she stresses the socially constructed nature of "mad" behavior and
shows Lucy’s decision to wed Michael Audley as very sane behavior:
It was a tacitly understood thing in the surgeon’s
family that whenever Sir Michael proposed, the
governess would quietly accept him; and, indeed,
the simple Dawsons would have thought it
something more than madness in a penniless girl to
reject such an offer. (9)
From the perspective of the lower middle class, marriage is a largely
financial arrangement into which love enters as a happy
191
afterthought. Sir Michael, on the other hand, is "disappointed . . . as
if he carried a corpse in his bosom" when Lucy tells him plainly both
that she does not love him and that she "cannot be disinterested" in
the financial aspects of his proposal. Nonetheless, he demonstrates
a remarkable flexibility; having said a few moments before Lucy’s
announcement that he thinks it is the greatest possible "sin" for a
woman to marry a man she does not love, he states immediately
afterward that he sees no reason, so long as she loves no one else,
"why we should not make a very happy couple. Is it a bargain,
Lucy?" (11). Later, however, Braddon speculates that he had never
really trusted her since that moment. Where Michael Audley fails is
in his inability to enforce the representation of the pure woman as
marrying for affection, and as ignorant and unconcerned with crassly
material issues like wealth. The problem here is not so much that
Lucy does think the way she does; it is that he allows her to think
this way, knowingly collaborating in her violation of socially
approved representations of bridehood by using a term like
'bargain" to refer to their marriage. H e endangers himself by using
language that recasts his own role as a character in her narrative,
rather than insisting on preserving the integrity of her representation
192
within his narrative. The epic narrative rights itself by re-
representing Lucy as the deceptive and dangerous syren-the only
representation which can contain a woman like Lucy when she steps
out of her role as the adoring wife.
However, when the Lady speaks, instead of preserving a well-
bred silence, we see a woman who has tried to be principled-
working as a governess, sending money for her son, attempting to be
honest with Sir Michael about her motives for marrying him. She
feels guilt, and wonders if she is "really wicked," or merely
thoughtless (297). Braddon writes, not of a "mermaid" who is
innately wicked, but of a person raised to have certain ambitions
without the means of satisfying them, a person who has been driven
to desperation by adversity and the betrayal of comparatively
powerful males who failed to meet their obligations to her. In short,
Braddon gives Lady Audley what no syren has ever had: a history,
out of which a complex character with complex motivations may be
constructed by the reader-if she or he chooses to do so.
"My secrets are every body’s secrets" says Lucy bitterly (300).
Although she is referring to her own lack of privacy, another
meaning is suggested as well-Lady Audley’s Secret is patriarchy’s
dirty little secret, and Robert’s epic narrative depends on how well
he can keep this secret once he had discovered it. His "sanity," the
coherence of his epic identity, depends on how well he can resist the
urge to read Lady Audley on her own terms, as a character in her
own story, one who has a history, who has tried to play by the rules
and implicitly critiques those rules merely both by articulating them
so baldly (and thus calling attention to their arbitrary and artificial
nature) and by citing their failure to work. H e must read her only
as a mermaid, a representation who has no existence separate from
her relation to the epic text. To the extent that he fails to do this,
he is mad. H e regains his sanity by locking her away and her secret
with her, protecting the Audley identity from scandal and the epic
narrative from the intrusion of the voice of the Other. Victorian
critics, presented with a choice of narratives, which is also a choice
of tasks, chose Robert’s and cried out against the possibility of
choosing the other, which would entail formulating a critique of a
social narrative which creates Lady Audley’s and then refuses to
grant them recognition.
Like the relationship between Lucy’s body and that of Sir
Michael, the intersection of the two narratives is defined by disease.
194
It is the "fever" of sexual passion that brings the patriarch and the
Lady together; wherever difference exists between the two
interacting stories that cannot be hidden, there is the disease of
madness. As Sarano tells us (see Chapter Two, Section IV, above),
disease defines our bodies as both part of the self and alienated
from it through the experience of pain. Robert Audley discovers
himself as a member of the patriarchal social body through the pain
of contact with one alienated from it. If a healthy body is a body all
of whose component parts are telling the same story, without
dissonance, then the healthy body is a body largely unconscious of
that story as a story--it seems a truth that requires no telling. The
healthy body is unconscious of its components because it
experiences itself as a unity. That unity is violated when one
component of the body tells a different story than the whole.
(Cancer, for example, is a kind of counternarrative to the narrative
of the healthy body.) On the social level, Lady Audley’s story must
be absorbed into the overall narrative of the healthy social body, if
unity is to be maintained. If her story cannot be "absorbed" or
healed in this manner, then it must be excised or expelled from the
body in order to maintain its unity and health. Robert becomes the
195
sanitary policeman whose task it is to escort the seductive vector of
disease to the appropriate lock hospital, risking infection by the
contact (and in fact becoming infected with a mild case of madness),
excising the Lady neatly from the afflicted area. Sir Michael does
his part by refusing to speak of "that person" again, or to know what
has been done with her (399), refusing the possibility of any further
contamination by her separate story. Every effort is made to restore
the unity of the body, the integrity of the epic narrative, to reduce
Lady Audley to a representation having no subjectivity, no story of
her own. But in any surgery, there is bound to be a scar, a mute
testimonial to the vulnerability of the body and the possibility of
other stories, just as the epic ending of Lady Audley’s Secret does
not and can not negate the subversive insistence of the Lady’s voice.
II. The Doctor’ s Wife
In 1864, Mary Elizabeth Braddon attempted a decided break
with the sensational genre, and decided to write, as she called it, "a
novel of character." Always an admirer of the French realists,
Braddon was "very much struck" by the premise of M adame Bovary
(then less than a decade old), and set out to adapt the idea to her
196
own purposes. Many consider the result, The Doctor’ s Wife, to be
one of Braddon’s finest novels, even if it is derivative of Flaubert’s.
Braddon’s letters to Bulwer repeatedly refer to her desire to write
something "better" than her other bestsellers. Of The Doctor’ s Wife
in particular, she writes:
[I am] especially anxious about this novel; as it
seems to me a kind of turning point in my life, on
the issue of which it must depend whether I sink or
swim. . . . I am always divided between a noble
desire to attain something like excellence— and a
very ignoble wish to earn plenty of money, (in
W olff 165)
Braddon clearly accepts the distinction here between money -
making, "popular" novels and the more privileged realist novel that
is aligned with non-commercial motives. In line with her intention
to create a realist novel, she attempts to reposition the novel
internally; knowing that critics will place the novel in the sensation
category by default, she includes many internal references to
anticipate and forestall possible undesirable readings. Since the
novel hinges on a love interest, Braddon anathematizes popular love
stories, blaming her heroine’s "addiction" to them for her lack of
maturity and susceptibility to adulterous romance, signalling that,
although she is a woman writing about love, this is not a love story
197
per se. More significantly, her key supporting character is himself a
sensation novelist in penny numbers who provides a constant and
very droll commentary on the way in which sensation is constructed
and defined, providing also, in the process, a defense of sensation j
itself by throwing the blame for the corruption attributed to
3
sensation on the love story instead. This character, Sigismund Smith I
!
(he has changed his first name, which used to be Sam, for |
i
professional reasons), provides a key thread of contrast between the
characteristics of the sensational and the "real life" story in which he
plays a minor role. Braddon found this alter ego so invaluable that
she continued his career in another novel (The Lady’ s Mile), again in
a supporting role--something she never did with any of her hugely
i
popular heroines. Early in the novel, Sigismund articulates the '
i
dilemma of the penny-a-liner: |
If a man can’t have a niche in the Walhalla, isn’t it j
something to have his name in big letters on the ■
play-bills on the boulevard? . . . D o you think I ■
wouldn’t rather be the author of ’The Vicar of
Wakefield’ than of ’Colonel Montefiasco?’ I could
write ’The Vicar of Wakefield’ too, but. . . I should
do the Vicar in the detective pre-Raphaelite style
. . . There wouldn’t be much in it, you know; but
the story would be pervaded by M oses’s body lying i
murdered in a ditch half a mile from the vicarage,
and Burchell’s ubiquitous eye. I dare say some i
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people would cry out upon it, and declare that it
was wicked and immoral, and that the young man
who could write about a murder would be ready to
commit the deed at the earliest convenient
opportunity. But I don’t suppose the clergy would
take to murdering their sons by reason of my
fiction, in which the rules of poetical justice would
be firmly adhered to, and Nemesis, in the shape of
Burchell, perpetually before the reader. (43-44)
The dangerous lure of sensationalism is not, then, in the tendency of
readers to imitate the actions they read about; the danger is simply
in its addictive quality:
I like writing for them [the penny public]. There’s
only one objection to the style--it’s apt to give an
author a tendency towards bodies. . . . the penny
public require (sic) excitement . . . and in order to
get the excitement up to a strong point, you’re
obliged to have recourse to bodies. Say your hero
murders his father, and buries him in the coal
cellar in N o.l. What’s the consequence? There’s
an undercurrent of the body in the coal-cellar
running through every chapter, like the subject in a
fugue or a symphony. . . . And when you’ve once
had recourse to the stimulant of bodies, you’re like
a man who’s accustomed to strong liquors, and to
whose vitiated palate simple drinks seem flat and
wishy-washy. I think there ought to be a literary
temperance pledge by which the votaries of the
ghastly and melodramatic school might bind
themselves to the renunciation of the bowl and
dagger, the midnight rendezvous, the secret grave
dug by lanternlight under a black grove of cypress,
the white robed figure gliding in the grey gloaming
athwart a lonely churchyard, and all the alcoholic
elements of fiction. But, you see, George, it isn’t so
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easy to turn teetotaller . . . and I scarcely know that
it is so very wise to make the experiment. Are not
reformed drunkards the dullest and most miserable
of mankind? . . . I would rather . . . hear my
audience screaming with laughter . . . than write a
dull five act tragedy, in the unities of which
Aristotle himself could find no flaw, but from
whose performance panic stricken spectators should
slink away or ere the second act came to its dreary
close . . . the father and prince of melodrama . . .
was never a great man; he was only popular. (42-
43)
There is both defiance and capitulation in these lines: Smith offers a
spirited defense of his craft while yet accepting the distinction
between the great and the popular; he seems to accept the critics’
charge that sensationalism is like liquor, and yet equates its absence
with the absence of pleasure and the substitution of a sterile critical
pedantry for art. Yet Braddon assures the reader of The Doctor’ s
Wife, "This is not a sensation novel. I write here what I know to be
the truth" (309). Braddon does want to write Goldsmith’s Vicar (or
Flaubert’s Bovary), and sternly denies herself recourse to bodies,
ghostly figures, or even Ghastly Secrets-until the ending, which she
depreciated as "rushed."
Here also is the common equation between sensation and
alcohol addiction, and more importantly, the equation of both with
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"bodies." Bodies are what sensation has in common with the love
story. In the first, a corpse is offered to the reader, whereas in the
second it is the sexualized body of the heroine, but in both it is the
hidden, the secret quality of the body, its tendency to transform,
whether through decay or sexual excitement— to get out of control
and to betray or embarrass. In each case the body does indeed run
like an "undercurrent" throughout the story, and the question is
indeed one of accessibility. Will the corpse be found? Will the
woman be seduced? Anxiety over the permeability of the body
creates a center stage for the body itself as the chief protagonist,
and sexuality, addiction, disease and decay are the chief expression
of that "grotesque" permeability.
Yet sensation fiction’s dead bodies, we are shown, are
relatively harmless compared to the live bodies found in love stories
and novels of high life. The narrator continually repeats that Isabel
Sleaford, the heroine of The Doctor’ s Wife, reads novels constantly,
imagines herself the heroine in a novel, and is unfitted for real life
because of this. She is first introduced to both the reader and her
future husband reading in a garden, and when she rises to make
acquaintance, she holds the book open so that she may return to it
as rapidly as possible. She is described as "addicted," and addiction,
like any other passion, represents the dependency of the body on
something outside itself, and thus its connectedness to the other, its
non-closure. Within the world of The Doctor’ s Wife, novels are
extensions of Isabel’s body— or her body is an extension of the body
of popular fiction and its disruptive intrusion into realist "high"
culture. Symbolically, Isabel is rarely in the "real world" of The
Doctor’ s Wife, but often in the fictional world of other narratives,
which is the only framework that she is able to use to interpret her
experiences in the "real world," and so she forms a sort of conduit
between the fictive world of the popular and the "real" or "realist"
world she "lives" in. Through her, the realist world and the
privileged fictive form is invaded by elements of the popular— the
squire falls in love with the country wife, a murderer and his victim
are incidentally brought together, etc. If the popular is the "lower
strata" of the body of culture, something to be acknowledged only
with amused embarrassment, then Isabel Sleaford represents the
carnivalesque collision of romantic idealism with its sordid
underpinning-a banal sexual transgression.
Sigismund says of Isabel that,
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She reads too many novels . . . No wise man or
woman was ever the worse for reading novels.
Novels are only dangerous for those poor foolish
girls who read nothing else, and think that their
lives are to be paraphrases of their favorite books.
(27).
Not only does popular fiction make such girls potential victims of
seduction by the aristocracy, it also makes them more directly
revolutionary. Part of the problem stems from the edict that the
middle class domestic heroine must be passive, yet passivity and
melodrama are not always complementary. Braddon’s narrative
voice explains:
She was so eager to be something. . . . I think
Isabel Sleaford was just in that frame of mind in
which a respectable, and otherwise harmless, young
person aims a bullet at some virtuous sovereign, in
a paroxysm of insensate yearning for distinction.
Miss Sleaford wanted to be famous. She wanted
the drama of her life to begin, and the hero to
appear. . . . [but] Beauty must wait, and wait
patiently, for her fate.
Isabel does not become a regicide; however, what she does do is
marry George, a good-hearted but prosaic young doctor whom she
does not love. The murder of a king and the foreshadowed sexual
betrayal of the domestic patriarch is thus equated. Isabel’s openness
to the fictive, her willingness to collapse the borders between the
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real and the fictive, are a betrayal of the real— the social order, the
family, the empire itself. Braddon says of George that he "had those
homely, healthy good looks which the novelist or poet in search of a
hero would recoil from in actual horror" (6); he is a "model youth of
Graybridge," the backbone of middle class England, a foundation for
an empire which is the opposite and natural enemy of the fictive
elements that Isabel seditiously introduces into his home.
The effects of Isabel’s passion are manifested in the two male
protagonists in terms of disease. Lansdell refers to his passion for
Isabel as a "fever" and compares it to delirium tremens as well
(204). Isabel is thus both a contagion and a drug. Isabel herself is
an addict, and Braddon frequently compares her novels to opium:
[They are] Dangerously beautiful. . . sweetmeats
with opium inside the sugar [says Smith, and when
he asks if they make her happy, Isabel responds]
’No, they make me unhappy; but ’-sh e hesitated a
little and then blushed as she said— ’I like that sort
of unhappiness. It’s better than eating and drinking
and sleeping and being happy that way.’ (22)
The blush, the unhappiness, the indifference for the material needs
of the body-all are classic fictional signs of passionate love. She
later loves Lansdell as a romantic ideal, as an element of popular
fiction, and is confused and horrified when he suggests that she
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become his mistress. What Isabel really loves is her fictions; the
novels are the true object of desire and source of contagion, and
through them, the men in Isabel’s life becom e infected--in Lansdell’s
case, by sexual desire for her which will eventually lead him to take
steps which will cause his death. In fact, Isabel is particularly fictive
herself; not only is she constantly compared to the heroine of a
novel, but Lansdell’s jealous cousin warns her that Roland’s fancy
for her is nothing more than the craving for "a new sensation" (225).
Since Roland has come into her life, Isabel sees that her life is
indeed like a novel and that it has been "altogether like one long
fever since Roland Lansdell’s advent" (229). In Isabel’s unsuspecting
husband, the disease manifests itself as a literal fever. As Lansdell
is consumed by a "feverish" love for Isabel, his tenants experience a
minor epidemic of typhus; George attends the families, and himself
succumbs to typhus. The two men die within twenty-four hours of
each other.
As in many of the other novels discussed here, the principal
character inhabits a borderland. Isabel Gilbert lives between the
popular and the realist novel for the reader, and for the other
characters, between the fictive and the real. Coming from an
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indeterminate background, raised as a lower middle class woman yet
really the daughter of a petty con-artist, she breaches class
boundaries both by marrying into the solidly respectable middle-
class and by her liaison with her aristocratic would-be seducer.
Isabel is iconically aligned with boundary transgression as well.
George first proposes to Isabel on a bridge, and she later frequently
meets Lansdell at another bridge; on this second bridge he will ask
her to run away with him. All of this takes place within the domain
of the town of Graybridge itself. Isabel is a creature of crossings, of
misty indeterminate midway points. If the vampire is only limited
by the inability to cross running water, Isabel seems only to exist in
that transitional space, in which all her major decisions are made
and actions taken. With her pale face, black hair and huge yellow-
black eyes, Isabel’s resemblance to the type of the Victorian
vampire is not accidental-both are transitional creatures, not wholly
alive, and both possess sexual attractions that spell doom to the
unwary.
As in Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well, Braddon’s novel
manifests as a storyline the critics’ indictments of popular fiction.
Through it, a middle class woman is unfitted for domesticity, and
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rendered ripe for a seduction which will be the ruin not only of her
own home, but of the aristocracy which is infiltrated by the sexually
active woman of a lower class. Her desire— which is really the
transformation of the fictive desire which drives the popular book
market— is murderous and destroys the relatively virtuous men in her
life. As in Not Wisely, the adulterous passion is manifested as a
fever which destroys the men who love her and, following the
established pattern of Greek tragedy, extends to affect the lower
classes of the surrounding area, representing the failure of the moral
stewardship of the upper classes. By turning critical concerns about
the novel into a novel itself, Braddon both naturalizes and
neutralizes their commentary; "You are precisely right— novels are
terribly dangerous" she says, and uses the novel as a cautionary tale
to prove that point, thus collapsing the distinction between the
"moral" critical discourse and the "immoral" fictive one— a
preemptive strike in every sense.
Ironically, although Braddon denies that The Doctor’ s Wife is
a sensation novel, it is in large measure Sigismund Smith the
sensation novelist who creates a context for the story. H e
introduces Isabel and George; it is through him that they continue
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their courtship and that Isabel finds the employment with the family
friend of Roland Lansdell, the man whom she will come to love.
Smith is presented as a minor character who provides comic relief
and incisive commentary from an outside point of view, yet he has
an integral function as the very nexus of action, out of which the
entire story is generated. In that sense, Smith acts out Braddon’s
intention to write a non-sensational novel while protectively
retaining his own identity as a sensationalist; perhaps by placing
Smith in the text, Braddon was exerting control over her public
persona as a sensationalist, and placing herself as an author above
and outside of that fictive identity. Smith becomes one of many
layers of buffers between Braddon as a well known sensation author
and The Doctor’ s Wife as a realist novel which yet situates its "real
world" among multiple referents of the landscape of popular fiction.
The novel defines itself by references to the thing that it is
supposedly not, in fact is created out of webs of those referents,
perhaps precisely because the concept of a privileged realist fiction
can only exist positioned opposite the popular, mirrored rather than
absorbed by its multiple reflective surfaces. The novel uses the
fictive to repudiate fiction, references to the popular to repudiate
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the popular, the theme of passion to repudiate passion-in short, it is
a text built entirely on the denial of its textuality. In response, The
Spectator granted Braddon its first favorable review of her work.
Thus, in The Doctor’ s Wife, we see a number of familiar
tropes: reading as a kind of foreplay; reading as a drug; novels as
seducers who undermine the middle class family through the wife;
and the sexuality of female readers as diseased. The use of these
themes implies an agreement with critics’ denunciations of the
sensation novel, yet does not so much oppose the concerns of
Braddon’s own sensation novels as it transforms them. The
dangerous sensuality of the female is still the driving force of the
narrative, although the heroine of The Doctor’ s Wife is traditionally
passive rather than sensationally active-and ironically, it is in her
passivity that the danger lies. This mocking bow to the conventions
is later highlighted by Smith’s (now Smythe— as a three volume
novelist, he has upgraded his name yet again) cynical comments
about the differences between middle class and lower class fiction in
The L ady’ s M ile; his three volume bestseller is The Mystery of
Mowbray Manor, a "legitimate three volume romance, with all the
interest concentrated on one body." The difference, Braddon
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suggests, between the penny public and Mudie’s public is simply a
matter of quantity, of how many bodies it takes to sate their
appetites. It is the same mocking intelligence that transforms a
sensation heroine from an active but basically virtuous girl who
makes an unfortunate early marriage (Aurora) to a passive,
idealistic "heroine" (Isabel) whose near adultery wreaks havoc on the
community; the acceptable Victorian three volume heroine is by far
the more dangerous of the two.
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CHAPTER FOUR
RHODA BROUGHTON: ANYTHING BUT LOVE
I. N ot Wisely But Too Well
N ot Wisely But Too Well was Broughton’s first novel, a
bestseller that earned her a great deal of attention in the critical
press, much of it disapproving. Published in 1867, it was almost
immediately eclipsed by Cometh Up as a Flower, Broughton’s
blockbuster second novel which was published in the same year.
However, it commands attention, not only as an extremely popular
novel, but as a good example of a new author’s effort to position her
work in the marketplace. The novel traces the progress of a young
middle class woman who falls in love with a man unsuitable both by
position (he is an aristocrat) and by nature (he is morally bankrupt).
In an ironic twist on the bigamy theme in sensation novels, wherein
the heroine usually has a not quite dead first husband lurking on the
grounds of the second husband’s estate, Kate, the heroine of Not
Wisely But Too Well, is almost persuaded to run away with this man
before he confesses that he already has a first wife in London. Kate
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refuses to see him again, and subsequent volumes elaborate her life
without him, focusing on her struggle to be a good Christian. Years
later, they m eet again by chance; again she is almost persuaded to
run off with him, and again she resists temptation. More time
passes, as Kate struggles to lead a "good and useful" life in the
absence of her great love. At her sister’s wedding ball, Kate sees
her hero for the last time, when he is fatally injured in an accident
near the site of the party. He dies in Kate’s arms, and, after a brief
period of mourning, she becomes a Sister of Mercy. At that point,
the narrator succinctly summarizes the few years of her work with
the Sisters, and her death. Ironically, in a novel about love, we are
only allotted a few pages of love scenes after the first volume; in
fact, the lovers only meet about once per volume after their initial
courting. The story’s focus, if measured by the sheer amount of text
devoted to it, is, as the narrator insists in the first chapter of the
book, how a human soul "ennobled" by love is purified through
suffering. Kate grows from a thoughtless self-gratification to a life
of religious self-sacrifice. Yet the critics unerringly pegged the novel
as a story of "passion," and most reviews focused either on the
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charms of the heroine (if positive) or the indecent warmth of the
few love scenes (if negative).
Kate’s sexual passion is figured forth as disease, and, as she
works to cure herself, she actually spreads contagion wherever she
goes. Her body, constantly described in minute erotic detail by a
narrator with a confessed attraction to her, becomes the primary
focus of interest in the story as, supposedly in order to gain control
of her illicit desires, she places herself in situations and locations
where she is increasingly out of control; in order to become pure,
she seeks corruption. Kate’s body is literally uncontainable, and
becomes a "bodying forth" of disease, foreign invasion and class
blending; like Isabel Sleaford, she becomes a creature constituted of
transitions and transgressions.
Broughton attempts to control the interpretation of her text
through the authorial/narrative voice which tells Kate’s story. The
narrator is self-identified as an upper-class male (the novel was
published anonymously). This voice frequently intrudes into the
narrative in order to dictate the way in which scenes should be
constructed by the reader. Not only does he, as mentioned above,
summarize the theme of the book in the first chapter, but he breaks
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in at every point that Kate’s behavior is such that it might be
criticized. In the key love scene in the first volume, the narrator
intrudes to clarify the proper attitude towards Kate’s behavior:
Let no one think I am defending this girl, or
holding her sentiments up as the pattern of what a
young woman’s should be; nor let anyone, however
incapable of separating the historian’s own ideas
from those of the people whose history he is telling,
imagine that I am describing Dare [the object of
Kate’s affections] as being in anywise a hero or fine
fellow. I think him as great and unmitigated a
scoundrel as any strictest censor of morals . . . To
describe bad actions is not, as I would meekly
submit to indignant virtue, to be an accomplice in
them; otherwise he who relates a murder is equal
in iniquity to him who commits it, and the police
reporters are deeper dyed in guilt than any other
members of the community. (184)
Journalistic representation is morally irreproachable, but imaginative
love stories are not. Kate first appears to us in the act of
contemplating a love story she has just finished reading, and its
effect on her bodes no good: "Her brain was passively recipient of
the idea they [the words] conveyed, and her deep eyes looked out
over the water [she is at the sea-side], full of a girl’s speculations"
(21). Kate’s passivity is emphasized, both in the sense of her
uncritical acceptance and her submissiveness, which will be
emphasized again later in her ill-fated romance; here, the love-story
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is itself the seducer. She reflects that love is "an odd sort of
pleasant dangerous drunkenness . . . [with] dreadful hot and cold fits
that one is subject to in typhus fever and in love" (22), and although
she congratulates herself for having escaped it so far, the reader
knows (courtesy of the narrator) that she is to fall in love, and that
love is here aligned with the seductions of love novels, drunkenness
and disease.
Broughton consistently uses the rhetoric of disease and
contagion to underline her treatment of sexuality throughout the
novel, and Kate’s tastes in reading reflect the degree of her
exposure to contagion. When Dare first decides to pursue Kate, "an
ill light flashed over his face . . . a light bred of earthly exhalations-
a will-’o-the-wisp, potent to lead astray . . . Kate came up . . . and
her face caught a reflection of the will-’o-the-wisp light" (91).
Following her exposure to this miasma, we see her at home,
rejecting Lamb’s Essays for Byron’s Francesca di Rimini, since
Lamb’s "delicate flavour" was "too healthy and wholesome to tempt
a diseased palate" (109-110). Passion is a contagion that invades the
body and corrupts the mind. As the critics identify the sensation
novel as a substance that stimulates the appetite it feeds, we see the
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peculiarity of a diseased appetite for illicit passion that feeds its own
illness. The first crisis of this particular infection is precipitated by
the news that Dare is married. Kate refuses to run off with him,
and immediately succumbs to a brain fever.
Although Kate recovers from this particular attack, the fever
is not eliminated from the text but transformed from an individual
to a community concern, escaping its containment within the
individual to prey on society at large. The next time we see Kate, a
year and a half later, she is rather unwillingly taking on the duties of
"district visitor" in an area which is starting to be troubled by a
seasonal fever (probably cholera, often called the "Autumn fever").
A curate friend advises her to heal her griefs by visiting the sick,
which will dwarf her troubles by comparison, but dares not speak
too long on the topic of religion, "for he is dreadfully afraid of
giving her an overdose of that which to him is most palatable food,
but which to her sickly palate tastes like unsavoury physic" (231),
rather implying that Kate is among the sick who might require
visiting. Disease is endemic within Kate and is complemented by
epidemic, specifically in the lower class community. Although this
disease does not touch the middle class neighborhood in which Kate
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resides, Kate goes to the diseased areas as a kind of missionary, and
Kate’s family fears that she will bring the fever back to them from
her visits. Throughout the rest of the novel, Kate will represent the
link between the middle class and the lower classes; interestingly, it
is the lower classes whose condition will consistently mirror Kate’s,
linking Kate’s "sensations" with those of the more bestial, dirty and
licentious lower classes. There are also indications that Kate may
have become permeable to external conditions-subject to a lower
class vulnerability.
There are two dangers for Kate in her district visiting, and
her upper middle class cousins name them both. Kate laughingly
says that she is "going to make a tour of all the diseases in
Queenstown tomorrow" and her cousins remonstrate:
You’ll only be catching some of those horrid nasty
diseases that those kind of people are always
having. . . You’ll be getting something nasty said to
you . . . it is not right at all for such a pretty girl as
you to be walking about. (251)
Again, sex and disease are discursively related; a middle class
woman who goes among the suburban poor is liable to two kinds of
assault, two kinds of penetration, and both are classed ("those kinds
of people" have those kinds of "nasty" diseases, and say those kinds
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of "nasty," overtly sexual things). Nonetheless, this kind of exposure
seems to be a counter-inoculation for Kate’s illness; the next time
we see her reading, she has decided on a life of "self-abnegation"
(although she still likes to flirt), has been reading with real
enjoyment essays and biographies of great men, and has decided to
repudiate romances. Her first acts of charity are to bring "good
books" (tracts) to the poor.
However, poverty and "foul air" are not so easy to overcome
with reading material, and in discouragement, Kate sets down her
basket of tracts and thinks longingly of the new story in Macmillan’ s.
She continues to be tempted away from her duties by the pleasures
of reading (although reading "better books" than before-Cowper,
Shakespeare, etc.), and her voluntary vulnerability is appropriately
punished when she is accosted by an uncouth "bargee" who frightens
her with a remark which he might have addressed to a prostitute.
We are told that Kate’s "unreasonable" fear (just why it is so
unreasonable is never clear) of men of the "lower orders" dates back
to being accosted by a drunken sailor while alone on a country road
"a year or two ago." The narrator stresses constantly that her fear is
foolish and ridiculous; the impression is given that middle class
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women are simply not in real danger from men of this class, yet
clearly, Kate has been given good cause to fear that she will be
approached. Significantly, the first incident is placed in the same
time period as her affair with Dare, when she was indeed walking
alone on country roads (to and from assignations) as young women
of good family should not be; there is a subtle hint that these
encounters may be Kate’s fault, since she should not have to fear
them. Chaste women, so the logic goes, do not inspire that kind of
interest. Perhaps Kate’s awakened sexuality even draws such men
as customarily patronized the diseased prostitutes whom the
Contagious Diseases Acts legislated against in port towns (sailors
with the British navy). When fleeing the scene of the incident (at
which she drops her basket of tracts, leaving the bargee with
symbolic if not actual victory) she literally runs into her curate, who
immediately feels that he has been made "drunk" by the physical
contact and realizes he is in love with her, which he fears as "Satan’s
snare." In attempting to forget her passion through charitable
activity, Kate "carries" the sexual fever wherever she goes, and the
battle against this fever is transferred to her spiritual "doctor," the
curate.
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Ironically, the more Kate tries to do "good," the more
dangerous she is, since every contact is an opportunity for contagion.
H e conscious will has no control over her body. Kate, who does not
realize how the curate feels, is upset by his avoidance of her, yet
determined to continue to pursue spiritual peace:
She had a . . . new taste in letter writing, and that
. . . was a sort of desire for self-justification and
self-assertion. Though he had deserted her and
reneged the situation of spiritual guide and teacher
to her, she would show him that she still kept
persistently in the laborious path that he had
chalked out for her; for these destructive
[destructive because they feed his passion for her]
little billets hardly came under the head of billets
doux. They were business notes . . . James groaned
in spirit sometimes at the riotous, ungovernable
way his heart would leap up when he caught sight
of one of these little compositions . . . It would
have been a droll sight enough, if anyone had been
by to watch the gingerly way in which he held them
between his finger and thumb, as if cholera, typhus
and small-pox lurked in every fold of them . . . [he
read them and] invariably tossed them into the fire.
(70-71)
Kate’s disease is such that even with the purest intentions,
she is dangerous, and doubly so when she turns writer herself.
Writing, here, becomes an extension of the woman’s physical body,
sexually exciting and capable of infecting through touch. Like her
body, her text is not under her control; although she wills it to mean
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something innocuous, it always carries the fever of her sexuality,
which can only be purified by fire.
This infection comes to another crisis when Kate runs into
Dare at the Crystal Palace, and her desire for him returns with all
its old force. Kate determines to run off with him, and it is the
curate who discovers her secret, and follows her on to the train to
dissuade her, at which time the narrator compares the two men’s
passions for Kate: "Dare’s mad, wild-beast passion was as a stinking
stagnant pond to a leaping, pellucid, mountain brook" (155). Kate’s
perverted tastes, in other words, are sending her back to the heart
of urban London and disease and away from the country and health.
Once again she is saved from "the abyss"; again the crisis is
manifested physically as that most convenient of all Victorian
afflictions, "a brain fever." When she recovers, she commits herself
without reservation to a life of charitable visiting and religious
austerity. Once again, with her apparent recovery, illness breaks out
in the community. Fall returns, and with it, the fever, particularly to
the riverfront slums that Kate visits:
Fed by the fog, and the river mist, and the warm
drizzle, the fever shot up like a tropical plant, from
an infant iilto a full grown giant. Scorching, livid
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faced, it stalked and ramped stealthily among the
reeking crowded courts and alleys. (178)
Kate’s "wholesome" sister expostulates with her, trying to convince
her to leave off visiting the contagious area. Finally Kate’s family
leaves the area entirely for the duration of the epidemic, leaving
Kate to her own devices. Kate feels safe from the fever because she
has "just tumbled out of one fever [the brain fever caused by her
decision to leave Dare], and it is not very likely" she would catch
another immediately following (180), indicating that the passion for
Dare and brain fever have inoculated her against the contagion-
another hint that the fevers are similar in kind. Soon after, she
becomes a hospital head nurse in the fever ward set up to handle
the huge volume of patients. The curate succumbs to the epidemic;
Kate survives. After Dare’s death, Kate ends her life and the novel
as a Sister of Mercy "among the smoky reeking alleys and courts of
filthy, suffering, heart-rending London" (288).
Although they are apparently set in contrast, both Kate’s love
for Dare and her charity for the community seem equally sinister.
In each of the latter two volumes, there is a plague, which
structurally mirrors the function of the courtship in the first volume;
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in each, Kate meets Dare again and struggles with her own passion.
In fact, it is precisely when Kate in some measure overcomes the
passion in herself, the fever in her own body, that the plague strikes
the community. Kate, immune from contagion herself, nurses her
district through the plague, which always strikes immediately
following a resurgence in her visiting. Although the text overtly
presents this as merely coincident, it happens with astonishing
regularity. And it is Dare’s death that supposedly "frees" Kate from
her passion, yet she immediately returns to the filthy urban areas
with which he is metaphorically linked; indeed, her inclination for
such work is set against her "wholesome" sister, who has a healthy if
uncharitable dread of "those people." Kate’s need to conquer
passionate fever leads her to a religious transformation which yet
feeds on fever, and perhaps even breeds it, as the love for her which
"well hidden, was killing" the curate "by inches" (154), finally
achieves his death by driving him to work until he weakens and
succumbs to the fever that he and Kate are working together to
succour. Kate is a species of typhoid Mary, a vector for contagion
who is herself immune to deadly fevers so long as her passion for
Dare is endemic within her. For this very reason, she is attractive to
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the men around her. Kate is "bewitching" and "irresistible" because
she is permanently hectic with sexual arousal. Each of the three
volumes ends with a crisis in the fever which is manifested physically
in Kate, the last manifestation being her death.
Kate occupies an equivocal and highly charged space. In the
beginning of the novel, we see her at the sea side and in the woods;
after her encounter with Dare, who represents urban London, she
moves to the suburbs, a kind of liminal area between the country
side and the city. Within that space, she moves between the upper
middle class and upper class dwellings of her cousins and friends
and the slums for which she is district visitor; she carries texts in one
direction and, her friends fear, contagion in the other. She is in
love with an upper class man yet is accosted by men of the lower
classes. Additionally, she is courted by men of her own class,
making her the object of a desire that threatens to breach all class
barriers. (It is interesting to note that Dare’s first wife is a lower
class woman, which establishes Kate as one of a series of "inferior"
and inappropriate choices.) Kate hovers on the border between
proper, sexually chaste middle class womanhood and unrestrained
passionate transgression, between health and disease, good and evil.
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Both morally and physically, she inhabits a borderland, and
represents an unduly permeable quality of that borderland. Kate is
literally like the riverfront land in that the fever is endemic and
recurring within her; she does not go to it so much as she goes with
it. Broughton uses the theme of fever as both a structuring agent
within the text, marking time and structural transitions between
volumes and phases of Kate’s life, and as a way o f underscoring
Kate’s crossings of the multiple borders set up in the novel. Even
the Sisterhood which she finally joins occupies a troubled position
between low and high Church concerns, a "band of holy devoted
women whom Evangelical clergymen condemn as acolytes and
handmaidens of the Scarlet Woman," a position in which the
religious chastity of an all female community is aligned both with
heresy and the illicit sexuality of the prostitute. Even the "cure"
which Kate chooses is located in a discursive "war zone," a troubled
area between religious factions-and of course, even in the cure,
Kate follows the fever. It is to be noted that Kate in no way
reverses her geographical progress within the first two volumes, but
continues it--from the seaside, to the riverside suburbs, to the
commercial heart of the Thames, and the source of its heaviest
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pollution, in London— from health to disease, from country to city.
This directly contravenes the overt moral message of Kate’s spiritual
reclamation, suggesting that some borders may not be crossed with
impunity, some fevers can never really be cured, but only placed in
remission. Ironically, it was precisely Kate’s moral turnaround that
angered some critics, who felt that it was impossible for one who
had behaved as she did to ever be reclaimed. Oliphant writes
sarcastically of the piety
which generally associates itself with this species of
immorality; for sensual literature and the carnal
mind have a kind of piety quite to themselves,
when disappointment and incapacity come upon
them. The fire which burned so bright dies out
into the most inconceivably grey of ashes; and the
sweetest submission, the tenderest purity, take the
place of all those daring headstrong fancies, all that
self-will and self-indulgence. The intense goodness
follows the intense sensuousness as by a natural
law. (269)
The critic has seized on one of the central and perhaps most
unsavory messages in this novel; Kate is, in fact, not reclaimed, since
both sex and religion are equated as feverish obsessions. Kate’s
healthy sister, who flirts strictly with middle class men and ends by
marrying her cousin (remaining not only within class boundaries but
within her own family) refuses contact with the lower class and finds
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her sister’s charitable visiting repulsive and frightening. Both
sexuality and religion become illicit and unhealthy when they
threaten to breach class boundaries, and it is perhaps this quality
more than the alignment with Popery that makes the Scarlet
Woman allusion appropriate. That Kate’s passions are obsessive,
Broughton’s male narrator makes clear:
A woman’s soul is such a small room that it has
only space for one idea at a time; consequently, if a
passion, a desire, an impulse lays hold of her, it
possesses her with infinitely more force and
concentration than it would a man in like case.
Women have decidedly less of the brute . . . than
men, but en revanche, they have also infinitely less
of the god. (76)
And after her second brain-fever:
It was evident that this exaggerated strictness,
sprung from a morbid remorse, could not last. It
was only the rebound from her former recklessness.
Anyone could see that this girl was in a state of
transition, though transition to what remained to be
proved. (167)
Yet despite this judgement, Kate’s only subsequent change is her
move to the sisterhood. Kate’s story even gets away from its
narrator; Kate is not temporarily in transition, for she has been in a
constant state of transition throughout the novel, although in a
manner perfectly consistent throughout all her actions. The change
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of direction that the critic attacks and the narrator defends is
entirely superficial; Kate changes the object of her obsession, but
never its direction, as she burrows inward, from the healthy Welsh
coast of England to its fevered urban heart.
This, then, is less a love story per se than a story of a woman
who has a passion for boundaries, borderlands. She is drawn to the
edges of the "abyss" of sexual indiscretion, she moves among the
margins of the suburbs, of society, of the river, o f life itself. She
spends her time with the dying whenever possible. Even on her best
behavior, she exists in the realm of the extreme, the excessive, the
"transitional." Because she is excited by the marginal, she is
dangerously open to its influence and this is manifested by both her
sexual vulnerability and her susceptibility to brain fever— the latter
being a polite substitute for the former.
The sexual permeability of the middle class female body is
analogous to the vulnerability of British soil to that foreign invader,
the "tropical" fever. If the "moist warmth" of the land mirrors the
female body in its periodicity, fever that "shoots up" and "ramps" in
the narrow alleys, penetrating first the working class and then the
middle class neighborhoods, represents both an (endemic)
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pregnancy and an (epidemic) male tumescence. The discursive
opposition of epidemic and endemic recalls the discourses of rape
(foreign invasion) and miscegenation. (As discussed in Chapter
One, cholera was thought to be endemic to India. Its epidemic
manifestations in Britain were feared as evidence that it was
"invading" British subsoil and in the process of becoming endemic
there.) Broughton’s representation of the lovers’ first kiss, which
takes place in a greenhouse, is instructive:
Dare set his teeth hard . . . keeping shut the sluice
gates of the great flood that was surging, boiling,
raging within him . . . the flowers rustled their
leaves, and waved their bright heads
sympathetically. They had seen something of that
kind before, when they lived in the tropics. (166-
167)
Broughton’s description of the setting lays heavy emphasis on the
"warm damp atmosphere," and Kate answers Dare’s questions
"mistily"; in short, although the conservatory is beautiful and sweet
smelling and the riverside slums are ugly and foul smelling, the
settings mirror each other. Male desire rises like the river over the
land in the warm season; the tropical plants that thrive in such
conditions are passion and disease. The free expression of sexual
arousal is presented as endemic to the tropics, or to colonial
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savages; when Kate is with Dare, she is a "docile . . . Circassian
slave on the market at Constantinople" and if she exposes her skin
to the sun, as she threatens to do, she will become "a dear little
negro" (157-158). The domestic female body is alienated when it is
receptive to illicit sexual passion; it betrays the unity of the empire,
and through its doubleness, becomes Other than itself. If the
passionate woman is constituted as a threat to the imperial Subject,
it is to her own subjectivity first that she is dangerous. The title of
the novel is telling; Kate loves "not wisely but too well" and Kate is
the outsider, the "dear little negro." Yet it is Dare who is violent,
who amorously threatens to cut Kate’s throat if she ever kisses
another man. Dare is the soldier, yet it is Kate who plays
passionate and honest Othello to the "supersubtie" upper class Dare.
Although Kate is passive and "submissive," it is through that very
submissiveness, passivity, "openness" that good society is disrupted,
just as the Moor’s sexual intrusion into good Venetian society could
only be permitted to end in tragedy. Although born a middle class
English woman, inappropriate sexual desire transforms Kate into a
foreign invader in the healthy body of Victorian society who unmans
the imperial male.
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This alienation is traceable to its origin in the love novel
which Kate reads on the beach at the beginning of N ot Wisely But
Too Well, the original seducer of which Dare is the secondhand
beneficiary. As noted above, Kate’s progression toward "goodness"
is emphasized by her movement toward more "respectable" reading
material. On the other hand, reading the story of doomed lovers
(Byron’s Francesca) is replaced by living it, in the same way that the
metaphorical "fever" of love is replaced by physical fever.
Broughton’s book positions itself in opposition to love novels and
apparently confirms the superiority of religious self-sacrifice over
passion, yet just as Kate escapes one obsession with another, Not
Wisely But Too Well becomes what it denounces. The critics
condemned the novel for precisely the same reasons that the novel
itself condemned love stories-rendering it precisely as attractive as
the sins which it supposedly sought to prevent.
Just as the fever threatens to spread through Kate from the
lower class areas outward, the story itself seems to be an unstable
element, threatening to break out of its appointed boundaries and
"spill over" into other territories. The persona of the narrator is the
reader’s link with a story and a woman who preexisted the novel
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itself, and he himself exists in an intermediate space between the
reader and Kate. The omniscient narrator traditionally shares a
privileged space with the reader, a space in which power is absolute
and the play of voyeuristic desire is fairly unlimited. In "speaking
for" the author, as the omniscient narrator generally is perceived as
doing, the narrator shares a status of "reality" with the reader in the
world of the novel. However, such a narrator rarely establishes him-
or herself as a central character in the story s/h e "tells."
Confusingly, Broughton’s narrator establishes himself as an upper
class individual who knew Kate well and was in love with Kate
himself— which lends a curious intimacy to the lingering physical
descriptions of Kate that he regales his readers with— yet he never
appears within the story as a character. In fact, he acts the part of
an omniscient narrator, describing thoughts and feelings of several
characters, and scenes in which no observer could credibly have a
role. While the narrator contains Kate’s story by distancing it in
time, digressing and moralizing, the reader still sees her always
through the eyes of a man in love with her, whose part in the story
remains forever hidden; thus, in some sense, the reader participates
in a story that is yet to be written— the story of the narrator and his
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own history with Kate. In that sense Kate’s story is not fully
"contained" in the story the narrator tells, for the narrator himself
becomes a "bridge" to a part of Kate’s story that is not contained
therein.
The comfortable containment of the narrative is also
breached by the frequent references to the reader-text relationship.
Not only are readers often reminded, both by the narrator and by
references to Kate’s improving taste in reading (they are pointedly
reminded that, if this is a love story, then "good" reading is not
defined as the sort of reading they are doing), that we are reading a
story, and not a very reputable story at that (not a biography or
philosophical treatise), but readers are periodically distracted by
invitations to speculate on the role of their interlocutor, a role which
remains unresolved. The novel simply stops with the end of the
narrative of Kate’s life, and, despite the long introduction with
which the novel begins, and within which the narrator identifies
himself and explains his motives for writing, refuses to complete the
narrative frame that the novelist has begun and extended by
periodic digressions throughout the novel. The result is a strange
and deliberate lack of closure in the reading experience, even
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though the story itself ends in the approved manner, with marriage
or death for the primary characters.
In other words, because the reader sees through the
narrator’s eyes, and because the narrator’s relationship with Kate is
both amorous in its intent and ill-defined in its actuality, Kate’s
sexuality is offered to the reader in a double gesture, one within the
story (we watch her flirt with Dare, or flee the bargee) and one
within the intermediate text (the narrator has a relationship with
Kate outside the story and his descriptions of her charms are
conditioned by that hidden subtext). The reader is not entirely free
to suspend disbelief and act as a voyeur of events that do not
concern her or him directly, for s/h e is constantly reminded both
that this is a story, and that there is another "outer" story with which
s/h e has an incomplete and partially understood relationship. If the
reader exists in "reality" and Kate and Dare exist in the "story," then,
at least during the act of reading, the intermediate story, or the
"frame" in which narrator and reader interface is granted a status
between reality and story; it is the realm in which the reader
becomes a character him- or herself. The failure in the expected
and customary closure in that frame leaves the story "open" and
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does not allow the reader to disengage her- or himself from the
"space" in the story which s/h e occupies with certainty of how the
reader’s own story within the story ends. The reader ends the novel
without a clear sense of his or her own relationship to Kate in the
context o f the intermediate story; the comfortable invisibility of the
voyeur who enjoys the story without being a part of it is exchanged
for the uneasy liminality of a reader who both participates directly
in the story at some level and who is yet never allowed to forget
that it is a fiction, and that s/h e participates in the machinery that
creates it. A striking example of this movement occurs when Dare
lies dying after his accident, and the narrator digresses on the
subject of sensationalism:
Strange, is it not, that the rabid love for horrors
should be an instinct, so deeply planted in the
vulgar mind, that it requires the education of a
lifetime to outroot our love for ’raw head and
bloody bones’? A murder, of course, is the source
whence the keenest enjoyment is to be derived-a
wife murder with a good deal of poker, and of hair
torn out; but still there is a fair amount of pleasant
excitement to be extracted from a good accident,
always presupposing plenty of mangling and broken
bones. (273-4)
This is a direct commentary on the excitement of the crowd which
has heard of Dare’s accident, yet in its connection to both
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journalistic and novelistic sensationalism, it both distances the
reader from the ensuing scene (it’s only a text, like a newspaper or
sensation novel) and dictates an attitude ("educated" readers don’t
relish such "horrors"--though they apparently manage to read them
anyway). It also serves to both suggest a generic position for the
text within the marketplace (this is not a sensational scene, but a
tragic one) and to cynically remind readers of their role as
consumers (readers enjoy sensationalism, but stigmatize it as
uneducated). Here, the reader is obliged to construct the stories of
the novel, not merely as fictive experiences, but as commodities in a
market actively shaped by his or her own demands, and not
demands determined by the purest motives.
Kate’s refusal to be contained within a particular level of
textual "reality" simply parallels her general "grotesque" openness.
As a desiring body, she remains forever open, continuous with her
surroundings. Her unhealthy appetites draw her to disease, and,
true to her nature, she quickly becomes one with that
contamination, infecting any who, desiring her, become themselves
guilty of an injudicious openness-including the reader. Ostensibly,
this is a novel about achieving closure-mastery over desire and the
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subordination of the desiring flesh to a religious principle which
denies the body. Yet the dualism engendered in Kate by her
unconsummated desire for Dare disrupts closure and breaches
apparently impassable boundaries. Despite Broughton’s avowal that
the novel tells a story of purification, the story of contamination on
which the trope of purification depends and by which it is subsumed
allowed her sixties readers to locate Not Wisely But Too Well within
the genre of sensation.
II, A Beginner
If every novel, as a commodity, reflects the market conditions
under which it is produced, then every novel, to some extent, has as
a subject those market conditions. As ideology, these concerns must
remain submerged until an ideological shift makes them visible. In
1894, the year in which the libraries declared the demise of the
three decker, and thus, tacitly, their own enfeeblement, Broughton
produced her own "novel of the literary marketplace"— a book in
which the incidental romantic interest is thoroughly subordinated to
a dissection of the market in which such commodities flourished.
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Broughton opens her novel A Beginner (1894) with the quote
" ’A young girl knows enough when she knows the names of all the
great men, ancient and modern, when she does not confound
Hannibal with Caesar, nor take Thrasimene for a general, nor
Pharsalia for a Roman lady’" (1). Here she demarcates the
acceptable intellectual limits of a woman’s writing within a story of a
young woman who attempts to violate those boundaries. That this
ironic little tale is meant to reflect on her own experiences as an
author is clearly indicated to the audience. First of all, the title
would seem to be in response to the infamous Oliphant review in
Blackwood’s (1867) which lambasted the young Broughton’s first
bestseller {Cometh Up as a Flower), and which dissected the moral
anatomy of her female character’s emotions:
Nelly Lestrange has no particular objections to
meeting her soldier out of doors whenever he
pleases to propose it. H e takes her in his arms
after he has seen her about three times, and she
still has no objection. . . . She wonders if her lover
and she, when they meet in heaven, will be ’sexless,
passionless essences’ and says God forbid! She
speaks, when a loveless marriage dawns upon her,
of giving her shrinking body to the disagreeable
bridegroom. . . . And here, let us pause to make a
necessary discrimination . . . If two young people
fall heartily and honestly in love with each other
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. . . and one is forced to marry somebody else, it is
not unnatural, it is not revolting, that the true love
unextinguished should blaze wildly up . . . This is
wrong, sinful, ruinous, but it is not disgusting;
whereas those speeches about shrinking bodies and
sexless essences are disgusting in the fullest sense
of the word. Would that the new novelist, the
young beginner in the realm of fiction, could but
understand this! (267)
The "beginner" in Broughton’s novel, Emma Jocelyn, has just
anonymously published her first three volume novel, Miching
Mallecho. The title is an obscure reference to Shakespeare, for
choosing which as titles early in her career Broughton herself was
also heartily teased (Cometh Up as a Flower, Not Wisely But Too
Well): "There is no mistaking the hand that has already spoiled for
us two or three sacred bits of our literature by filching them to serve
as the catch-titles of her ignoble tales" (Norman 878). But most
telling of all is the steady criticism of the novel’s "impurity," (for
which Broughton herself was often criticized) which finally corrupts
the author’s cousin, leading her into an adulterous affair, and which
finally breaks Emma of writing anything at all.
Broughton’s deft handling of the tale both pleases her
readers’ conservativism (Emma gives up writing and her romantic
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infatuation for author and critic Edgar Hatcheson, and settles down
to a thoroughly "sensible" domestic life) and makes a number of
telling points about both the literary marketplace and gender
relations therein. The quote (above) which begins the novel is
ambiguous. Is Broughton giving it this privileged place as a truth
which the novel will illustrate, as Emma’s eventual decision to give
up writing would suggest? Or does she place it there to show the
limits placed on women authors striving to compete intellectually
with males? Emma is chided by her reviewer for having the
"colossal presumption to use the tremendous subject of heredity as a
lever by which to move her paltry puppets," (173) and for the
recondite choice of title, both of which indicate her desire to move
beyond the realm of the merely entertaining and into the more
intellectual territory of the social problem or tendenz novel. How
thoroughly Broughton herself managed to disassociate herself from
such accusations of intellectualism can be seen in the final words of
an extremely favorable Temple Bar review: "She is neither a great
artist nor a profound philosopher; but she is a good story-teller, a
brave lover, a true woman and a smart writer; and, being all these,
she can well afford to dispense with the rest" ("Miss Broughton’s
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Novels" 209). A Beginner shows us a young, inexperienced writer,
perhaps with potential, perhaps not, who steps outside the
appropriate subject boundaries for her gender and class and is made
to suffer for it, losing her admirer, gaining the disapproval of friends
and family members and the approval of the foolish, causing marital
strife, and finally, giving up writing entirely to restore order. On the
other hand, the man she loses is one whom class differences
prevented her from seeing as a possible mate anyway, the man she
marries is not one she apparently feels passionately about, and the
very existence of A Beginner as the product of a successful and
continuing woman author who has weathered some of the very
criticisms directed at Emma in the novel decries the appropriateness
of Emma’s decision. Hence, this is also readable as the story of a
graceful capitulation to social pressures, rather than a story of a
confused young woman finding her true domestic vocation.
In the first chapter, the novice receives her first bound
volumes, in their "neat and rather coquettish" covers, under "virginal
white" wrapping. Immediately, we become aware of the double
bind: the coquettish book is female, must please and invite while
retaining its purity, yet the author thinks to herself,
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’Miching Mallecho.’ ’Yes, surely a good title. It
excites curiosity, and tells nothing, and ’By a
Beginner.’ That must certainly disarm hostility. No
critic could be harsh to one who owned herself a
beginner. I say ’her ,’ but I have my hopes that the
reviewers may be at fault in that respect, that they
may take me for a man. There are one or two
passages that— ’ She turns the pages fondly, seeking
for some of those ’purple bits’ of virile dealing with
the passions, and handling the problems of life,
which are to turn the hounds of criticism off the
track. (7-8)
It is these purple bits, of course, which will get her into trouble
later, particularly with Edgar Hatcheson, the author of Warp and
Woof, a little volume of essays which she has admired immoderately.
In the second chapter, Emma meets Edgar for the first time, and
finds herself speaking solely about his literary accomplishments,
since her idol mentions that he has little respect for women who
write.
The reception of the book and the generic category the book
is "read within" will depend on the perceived gender of its author
and intended readership. Emma intends her novel as a tendenz
novel on the subject of hereditary vice, detailed through the
exploration of a love relationship. Her cousin, Lesbia, reads it for
the love story:
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[Emma argues] ’There are subjects one
must face--that are a part of our century’ . . .
[Lesbia responds] ’That is like one of the
moralizing bits in the book, which I skipped at the
first reading to get on with the story . . . do not
imagine that I am finding fault with it for being so-
so— impassioned! If I have a love story I own I like
it boiling!’ (110-111) . . .
[Emma] ’How frightfully you have
misunderstood me! . . .What I tried most earnestly
to bring into strong relief~I can’t think how you can
have missed it— was the absolute need for greater
self control’ . . .
[Lesbia] ’I have no doubt that was in all the
stiff bits which I skipped . . . but after all, why
should you mind? One does not go to a novel to
learn one’s moral duties, but to forget one’s own
tiresome jog-trot existence.’ (112-113)
This tension between the two genres will repeat itself throughout A
Beginner; the reviewers who like Miching Mallecho will read it as a
social-problem novel and assume a male author; the negative review
assumes a woman author attempting a romance novel who
overreaches herself.
Broughton pits the male working class author who is
attempting to climb socially and intellectually through the privileged
literary form -the essay— against the upper middle class woman who
writes the devalued form— the novel-for purposes of self-expression.
Although this sets up the traditional duality of the hard driven
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intellectual male against the frivolous female, Broughton constantly
undermines this dichotomy by invoking the realities of the
marketplace and class and gender prejudices;
Emma smiles to herself at the discrepancy between
this statement and the version that had been given
her by the young writer himself . . . of the cause
and scope of his literary labors, from which it was
evident that ’Warp and W oof,’ if it had seated its
writer among the immortals, had also ignobly
boiled the pot! (56)
The novel itself both ridicules and validates the powerful
reviewing system. Miching Mallecho is shown, through its effects and
through the judgement of "reliable" characters, to be a morally
questionable novel, possibly deserving of the rather vicious review it
receives from the almighty Porch, a major London literary journal,
to which "the sheeplike race of circulating-library readers look in
order to make up their minds for them" (131). Yet, Broughton also
shows the capriciousness of the system in her absurd character Miss
Grimston, a failed novelist and feminist who has "confined herself to
tomahawking others" in reviews since her own disastrous literary
debut. Indeed, the perceived gender of the anonymous critic is
crucial to indexing the accuracy of the criticism:
’You say he’ says Lesbia . . . ’but how do you know
that it is a man? How do you know that it is not a
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woman? It reads to me much more like the work
of a spiteful woman!’
’D o you think so?’ asks Emma, raising her
head from its abased position on her arms, and
with a ray of revived hope in voice and eye. (177)
{The Porch’s review bears a striking resemblance to Blackwood’ s
hatcheting of the young Broughton.) Of course, we will later
discover that the unknown critic is not only male, he is none other
than Edgar Hatcheson, the object of Emma’s literary admiration. In
fact, we are told that Miss Grimston is not allowed to publish in The
Porch, even though her uncle is the editor. Presumably, she reviews
for the less prestigious local papers. W omen are clearly active in
the literary marketplace; just as clearly, they are excluded from
power within the critical edifice which controls that marketplace.
It is Hatcheson, the future editor of the Porch, who provides
a portrait of the ideal woman in his mother; widowed and with five
children to support, she must work at something suitable.
Hatcheson explains to Emma:
’If I could tell you how my mother pinched and
slaved, and what a plucky uphill fight she made of
it! What odd out-of-the-way methods of making
money she hit upon! Once she mended pens for
Government offices, and for six months we waded
knee deep in old goose-quills!’. . .
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’Is it not from her, then, that you inherit
your— your bent? D oes she herself never write?’
’Never; she does not belong to the species’
. . . ’My mother knew, at all events, that she was
doing something useful and harmless.’ (192)
Emma is reminded that her own novel is turning out to be other
than harmless and is properly rebuked for placing her work, even
anonymously, before the public eye. A "good" woman, we infer, is
one who works only to support her children, and then does the kind
of work that supports and complements male power— mending the
pens so that others may write, without ever wishing to write herself.
Broughton may well have intended an ironic reference to Mrs.
Oliphant, the purported author of the Blackwood’s article cited
above, who explained her own writing as an attempt to support her
children in her widowed and helpless state, yet still chose writing
instead of some less public vocation. Mrs. Oliphant could be a
pitiless reviewer of other women’s novels, particularly is she thought
them wanting in womanly "reticence." A Beginner carries much the
same message as many of Mrs Oliphant’s reviews, yet the very act of
its publication undermines its message about the inappropriateness
of the writer’s career for women, even as Mrs. Oliphant’s presence
in the market did.
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The critic insists that the purpose of criticism is moral
judgement and prescription. Yet, as Broughton constantly reminds
the reader, the practical function of this criticism was purely market-
based. The review of the major journals will make or break the new
writer, since it is there that the circulating library patron will seek a
recommendation. Therefore, much of A Beginner is concerned with
the progress of Miching Mallecho through the reviewing system, first
in the local papers, which are favorable, then in the all important
London journals. Broughton parodies the language of such criticism
beautifully; the "Pudbury Post" review mixes food and illness
metaphors with abandon:
It is written with a verve and sparkle most
refreshing to the mental palate, and yet with an
unflinching grappling of the more painful problems
of the age, a fearless cauterization of the wounds of
poor humanity. (126)
Finally, however, the book receives the coveted notice of the
powerful London literary journals, represented by "The Porch,"
whose negative review sounds remarkably like Blackwood's 1867
vivisection of Broughton. Interestingly, when the book is reviewed
well, it is a "cauterization" of wounds, yet after the Porch’s review,
Emma wonders isn’t merely a treatment of a "scabrous subject" with
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"noxious effect." Emma’s intent is therapeutic, but as a woman
author, her actions may serve only to disseminate moral disease.
Only the male author can gaze upon or represent immorality
without being tainted thereby. Emma refers to the Porch’s review
as a "phillipic," wondering if indeed her book is too "warm." But
Lesbia, representative of the average circulating library patron,
enjoys the book for precisely those "warm" moments, and refers to
the review as a "Billingsgate" (178), shifting the moral grounds of
the novel’s criticism to the arena of the marketplace wherein one
fish vendor devalues another’s wares. Thus are the two competing
models of literary value set against each other: the noble (male)
orator with a moral message of national importance, and the
fishwife vending her vulgar merchandise.
Lesbia’s opinions are significant here precisely because she is
represented as the typical consumer— a somewhat insulting portrait
of the reader in the text:
If only Lesbia’s opinion were better worth having;
but, after all, she may be taken as a fair
representative of the average public; and, in some
notable instances, the verdict of the average public .
has proved in the long run a more veracious one
than that of the adepts. (107)
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Broughton, of course, is one of those notable instances; as the
Temple Bar states, "Miss Broughton is one of the novelists who owe
all their success to themselves and the public, and nothing or
comparatively nothing, to the press" ("Miss Broughton’s Novels"
196). And the reader she is writing to, that is, the one who is
presumably reading this assessment of Lesbia, would be precisely
that public to whom Broughton is indebted for her success.
However, since Lesbia is clearly characterized as charmingly silly
and absurd, the reader also is invited not to identify with Lesbia, but
to see herself as superior in kind to Miching Mallecho’s readers and
to see A Beginner as superior in kind to the novel whose fortunes it
chronicles. Thus, the metanarrative both incorporates the reader
into the text itself and displaces that text in the act of doing so:
Broughton is Emma and not-Emma; the reader is Lesbia and not-
Lesbia; A Beginner is text and not-text, that is, meta- or even con
text. This equivocation with the subject of the text put the
Athenaeum ’s reviewer out of patience:
’A Beginner’ is devoid of anything approaching a
plot. Were it not for the lightness, vivacity and
sense of movement inherent in Miss Broughton’s
touch, it would hardly be even what is called ’a
story without a plot.’. . . We are told little about the
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volume (Miching Mallecho) except that it is
concerned with ’passion.’ Yet it is the principal
feature of ’A Beginner.’ (Review of A Beginner)
Indeed, there is a kind of tantalizing frustration in reading so
much about a book that cannot, itself, be accessed; Miching
Mallecho lives up to its early description as "coquettish." W e are
given tidbits of information about it in conversations, are privy to
various reviewers’ opinions, and are even witness to its destruction,
but are never afforded so much as an excerpt from the book itself.
Emma is, in fact, offered to us as the substitute of the book,
regardless of her valiant struggle to disassociate her own experiences
from those described in her novel. Again, the indelicacy of the
novel reflects directly on the flesh of the female author/mother
(Emma is referred to several times as the book’s parent); as
Emma’s readers say " ’What beats me is, where have you got your
experience— such very startling experience— . . . from?’" (109). Again,
the woman is supposed to merely re-present personal experience;
the realm of the imagination belongs to "Shakespeare and Fielding"
(109). Appropriate subject matter for women authors, then, is
domesticity. When Emma seeks advice from her publisher, he tells
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her that, after The Porch’s review, the book has "ceased to move."
In an attempt to comfort her, he advises her to pursue safer topics:
It is always difficult to foretell what the public will
like. The only perfectly safe line is the domestic.
Now, there is a slight work which we have just
brought out . . . "Hame! Hame! Hame!" As you
may see by the title, it is on purely domestic lines,
the reviewers have been almost unanimous in its
praise, and we can’t print it fast enough. (252-253)
Emma has, however, gone outside the domestic sphere for her
subject matter, and the "infant" (166) betrays the traces of the
mother-author’s illegitimate textual activity. Such activity is a
gender and class betrayal. Significantly, the county papers that
favorably notice the book assume a male author whose class is not
called into question, yet The Porch attacks on both fronts:
We can predicate with absolute certainty four
things concerning the author of "Miching
Mallecho": that she is young, female, foolish, and
innocent of any personal acquaintance with the
lofty society to which, with such generosity, she
introduces us . . . among the milliners and
’prentices who will pasture on this masterpiece, one
or two may be found silly enough to take it
seriously, (so) we utter our protest against this
vicious trash . . . let her give us her views of the
nobility and gentry, as seen through the ’airy’
railings, but let her beware of again putting out her
feeble hand to clutch Jove’s thunderbolt. (174)
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Not only does the critic attack the writer as a woman who has
chosen a gender-inappropriate topic, he labels her lower-class,
writing to a lower-class audience, whom she may corrupt. This is an
amusing reflection of the Blackwood’s statement that "Miss Braddon
and Miss Thomas (Broughton) . . . might not be aware of how young
women of good blood and good training feel" (180). In both the
fictional and the actual case, however, the targets of these
aspersions were of the classes of whom they wrote. This irony is
sharpened in A Beginner by Broughton’s revelation that the critic is,
in fact, Hatcheson, who is working class. In fact, class is a key issue,
both in the marketing of Miching Mallecho and in the relationship
between Emma and Edgar. Edgar is an inappropriate companion
for the upper class Emma, so when Emma’s aunt notices Emma’s
admiration of his work, she is horrified that this admiration may
extend to his person: "It is illiberal and an anachronism on the part
of Mrs. Chantry, but to hear her adopted child entonner this hymn
of praise on behalf of a young male Hatcheson gives her almost as
great a shock as it would do to see her walking arm in arm with the
footman" (121). For Emma, however, "the man is swallowed up in
the Mind. Could even Mrs. Cave point the finger of scorn at her for
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treading the stubble [taking an unescorted walk] in company with an
Intelligence? Not that she formulates to herself this delicate
difference; but it is unconsciously yet reassuringly present to her"
(95). As an author, class does not "mark" Hatcheson as it does
Emma. As a woman, however, Emma is marked primarily by
gender and class in everything she does; consequently, her writing is
judged by those criteria first. Sexual activity is rigidly policed by
class concerns, and as a woman, Emma is defined by her sexuality in
all of her activities-her every action represents the penetrability or
impenetrability of the upper classes, whereas Edgar’s class only
becomes important in relation to his sexual interaction with upper
class women. Again, Edgar’s text is a product of his intellect, which
is not class bound, Emma’s text is representative of her body, which
is subject to the class which dictates its uses and assigns it its value.
Broughton uses the class issue to problematize the personal
relationship between Emma and Edgar in the reader’s mind. Emma
is infatuated with Edgar Hatcheson’s writing, and her image of him
as a "great" writer, but his lower class status make him an impossible
love object in himself. Yet Broughton encourages the reader to flirt
with the possibility that Emma will betray her class in a choice of
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mate, just as she did in writing her novel, while Emma is sublimely
unaware that Edgar may be interpreting her hero worship as
something rather more personal. When she is made aware of the
possibility of this interpretation, she is more horrified than pleased,
yet intrigued with the possibility of such a sacrifice to the intellect.
When Edgar visits her to give her his new volume, which he has
dedicated to her, he announces that, by virtue of his accession to the
editorship of The Porch and a small inheritance, he may now
propose to her. At this point, she opens the volume, sees the
reprinted review of her work, learns that he is the "slasher" of
Miching Mallecho, and tells him that she can never speak to him
again. Criticism delineates the boundaries of class and gender
appropriate behavior, ending all possibility of transgression,
intellectual or otherwise, in the novel.
It is through such details that the whole justification of the
judgement of the critics upon Miching Mallecho and the
appropriateness of Emma’s decision to give up writing are called
into question. The "clues" the reader are given about the book and
the workings of the publishing industry are sufficiently ambiguous to
suggest that the book may very well be worth while. Yet the genre
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of A Beginner and its reflection of the formula which the Broughton
reader expected demanded that Emma repudiate authorship in favor
of domesticity. As events in the novel bring pressure to bear on
Emma to do so, the desire of the reader for the "appropriate"
ending becom es a part of that pressure; we, too, are willing to
sacrifice Miching Mallecho and its author to the traditional narrative
and the narratives of tradition. Like good circulating library
readers, we are willing to accord The Porch the authority to evaluate
what we will read, even though we know that such an authority may
well be spurious.
Thus, in Broughton’s book, the critics-represented by
Hatcheson and Grimston respectively— really do make the readers’
decisions by placing both the book and the author out of reach-
even though Lesbia, the reader’s representative, thought it "the most
beautiful love story" ever written. By holding the text out of the
reader’s reach and focusing on the con-text of publication,
Broughton implicates the reader in a complicity with the values that
keep Emma out of the market. By constructing A Beginner in such a
way that it ultimately, if somewhat problematically, validates those
values, and inviting the reader to do the same, At the end of the
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novel, most copies of Miching Mallecho are recovered and made into
a bonfire. Broughton insists that in the act of reading, we deprive
ourselves of the text, that we burn Miching Mallecho even as we
desire it, that we destroy the thing we love even as we enjoy its
pleasures. In short, we must recognize ourselves as participants
rather than as mere voyeurs of an existing spectacle.
These substitutions--of one text for another, of character for
author--are extensions of the fundamental structure of the popular
romance, which depends on the tension between repetition and
substitution. As the Temple Bar points out, "As her (Broughton’s)
stories are always essentially love stories, and nothing else, it would
be impossible to write them without hitches, more or less severe, to
make the plot and carry on the play" ("Miss Broughton’s Novels"
203). To the extent that this is true of Broughton’s work, we may
say then that their appeal depends on the repetition of theme (two
people fall in love) and the variation or substitution of the specific
characters, the particular obstacles to their happiness and the
backdrop against which the spectacle is seen. However, this in turn
creates a condition under which the repetition of them e-supposed
to be the main attraction of the text for the reader— must in some
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sense "disappear" in the reading process, that, in fact, the ubiquitous
love theme becomes the background for what is specific to the text,
although supposedly subordinate, which is the substitution. In this
way, each novel becomes a part of a larger text of "formula" novels
in the same genre, and the reading of the individual novel is
conditioned by that intertext, within which the love interest both
overshadows all other concerns and disappears beneath them.
Broughton takes such very good advantage of this contradiction that
often the love interest is in fact conspicuously absent from her "love
stories." Frequently the object of the woman’s affections is physically
absent for most of the story, and he is generally the shallowest of
cardboard constructions. Sometimes a secondary character for
whom the heroine evidences no particular attraction will becom e the
deus ex machina, and in later novels, the love theme may be given
entirely to secondary characters, whom the protagonist advises. In
this sense, the genre with which Broughton is identified conditions
the critics’ reading of her works; even romances are rarely about
love "and nothing else" and Broughton’s stories, particularly the later
ones, are quite frequently about everything but love-w hich is
treated as a sort of given, necessary but, in itself, uninteresting. In
the same way that the interpretation of Miching Mallecho as a
romance trivializes the explosive social content of the book, while
rendering it all the more dangerous, the definition of Broughton as
a writer of romances directs attention away from A Beginner’s
critique of the literary marketplace. Broughton’s use of the love
interest in A Beginner is paradigmatic. After the reader’s equivocal
flirtation with Edgar as the love interest in the novel--a flirtation in
which Emma does not, for the most part, participate in-E m m a is
unceremoniously given to "Old George," a fatherly advisor, in
marriage; this is an event of such little interest that it is not even
part of the text, but is summarized in the epilogue. Truly, the real
focus of this "romance" is not the tender passion, but a much hardier
and more dangerous on e-th e passion for writing, for transgression,
for "mischief' indeed, as "Miching Mallecho" is supposed to mean.
The ultimate failure of Miching Mallecho, and even the reader’s
possible approval of that failure, do not eradicate the desire for
transgression that motivates the reader to peruse the rogue progress
of Emma and her book, and their eventual neutralization.
As mentioned above, A Beginner ends with a bonfire. With
the exception of five public library copies, all extant copies of
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Emma’s novel are retrieved and burned. The action is a ritual
cleansing: "There is only one final act of expiation to perform, and
without perceptible wincing the high-priestess advances to the edge
of the fire, and tosses the original M C.~the beloved, the much-
treasured, the sole— into the heart of the furnace!" (391). This self-
immolation takes place at Easter. The regeneration of the
authoress occurs through an auto-da-fe; she is reborn at the closing
of the book, and the epilogue assures us that she has married and is
"not very fond of literary society" (394). Emma’s rebirth into
domesticity is literally a death of the author; with the burning of
Miching Mallecho, A Beginner ends, and Emma is beyond the text
and therefore, closed and impermeable. The fire is therapeutic;
Emma is cured of the mania for self expression. (On the other
hand, five public library copies linger; apparently, the text is never
completely under the author’s control.) The reassertion of order,
through the patriarchal and patronizing discourse of the critic, and
through the domestication of Emma by marriage to her "vielle
pater" after her purification by fire deprive the reader of the
possibility of transgressive passion as Miching Mallecho burns. The
narrator’s (and Emma’s) ambivalence toward Edgar make this
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palatable to some degree, yet present a problem in interpretation.
Hatcheson’s attractiveness rests in his intellectual power, his
intelligence which has allowed him to rise from the lower classes to
the editorship of The Porch. Yet he is judged to be a mere follower,
a traditionalist who is politically backward, "the shoe upon the
coach-wheel" of progress. This judgement is offered by Miss
Grimston, herself an absurd character who has "unsexed" herself by
speaking, as a politically active feminist, of inappropriate topics like
women’s rights and Malthusianism. Miss Grimston is, of course,
suspected of writing the negative review of Miching Mallecho and is
shown, through Emma’s jaundiced eye, as quite objectionable and
foolish. Yet Emma’s novel also is accused of "gender inappropriate
speech" and the review was actually written by Hatcheson. If the
maligned Miss Grimston is reinterpreted as a positive character in
the light of the information disclosed at the end of the novel, then
Edgar may indeed be a reactionary conservative representing a
reactionary critical institution whose opinion is unreliable, as his
prejudice against all women authors, in a novel written by a
successful woman author, would seem to suggest. In this case, the
judicial homicide of Emma’s career is to be mourned, even as she is
260
congratulated for escaping a liaison with Hatcheson. If his opinion
of her novel is correct, however, it validates his intelligence and
hence, his suitability as a love interest, in which case Emma’s
marriage to George would be a failure of the romantic plot. Thus,
regardless of which interpretation the reader favors, the story cannot
be said to have a thoroughly "happy ending," wedding or no. While
the traditional format of the love story ending in a marriage
trivializes the story of Emma-the-writer, the fact that Broughton
begins her novel with the "birth" of the novel and ends with its
"death" by fire, and that the novel is burned for crimes of
(representing) passion suggests that A Beginner is more a story of
destruction than creation, more of hate than love. In this way, the
story mirrors the traditional mechanism of the formula romance (the
love theme is submerged beneath the exigencies of plot, Miching
Mallecho recedes into the text of A Beginner) without duplicating it
(love is not, at any time, the primary concern of this text.) The
object of pursuit, of passion, is shown to be a commodity whose
availability is determined by a market constrained by gender, class,
and genre expectations (Is Miching Mallecho a social problem novel
or a love story, masculine or feminine?) and the reader is implicated
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in the enforcement of those constraints in the act of
reading/consuming itself.
CHAPTER FIVE
OUIDA: ROMANTIC EXCHANGE
262
I. Under Two Flags
Under Two Flags, published in 1867, was Ouida’s fourth novel
to gain a wide popularity, but the first to really attain sales figures
that caused her name to be mentioned in the same breath as those
of Braddon and Wood. (It went into 63 editions in England alone
[Stirling 109].) Ouida’s extravagant descriptions of people and
places she had never seen left her open to sniping by critics for
whom realism and correct grammar were prerequisites for fine
writing. Her many readers apparently preferred gorgeous, if
somewhat confusing, fantasy. Monica Stirling calls Under Two Flags
a "rapidly moving, highly coloured, frequently preposterous, and
frequently touching novel" (65). An anonymous Athenaeum critic
winds up a sarcastic review of the novel by admitting that "Ouida
has certainly the gift of speech; and though her speech is not
standard silver, it is capital electro-plate, and her nonsense has a
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spirit and dash about it which keep the reader from finding flaws or
asking questions" (Review of Under Two Flags 249).
Under Two Flags follows the career of a young aristocrat,
Bertie Cecil, living a life of fabulous luxury on the edge of
bankruptcy in England. Through a series of catastrophes, he finds
himself in trouble with the law and dishonoured among his peers; he
is actually innocent of any wrongdoing, but cannot clear himself
without disgracing both a married woman with whom he is having
an affair, and his beloved younger brother. H e flees Europe, where
he is thought dead, and joins the French foreign legion under an
assumed name. H e serves in Africa for many years as a valiant
soldier, under grueling conditions, perhaps the worst of which is the
enmity of his commander, Chateauroy. Ouida also introduces here
one of her most interesting characters, and one for which she is best
rem em bered-the character of Cigarette, a vivandiere of the French
army. The nameless daughter of a camp follower and an unknown
father, she grows up in the midst of the army, treated first as a sort
of mascot and later as an honorary soldier. Adored by her male
comrades, Cigarette has her choice of lovers, but becomes intrigued
by Cecil, who is not only unresponsive, but completely unaware of
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her infatuation with him. Instead, he falls in love with Venetia, a
woman "of his Order," whom, of course, he cannot approach.
Through a complex series of events, it becomes possible for him
honorably to reclaim his lost identity and court the woman he loves,
but he is nearly prevented from so doing by a firing squad.
Cigarette saves him by stepping in to take the bullets herself,
thereby simultaneously saving his life and allowing him to realize
her true worth and the greatness of his loss (while gracefully
eliminating her status as a plot complication and inappropriate love
object).
Under Two Flags combines the high society romance with the
adventure story, the common theme being that both Belgravian
boudoir and African desert are exotic and rather lawless places. In
stark contrast to most popular English novels, adultery is
represented as the norm in the upper classes, keeping wealthy men
very busy attending both their aristocratic mistresses and their
fashionable courtesans. Why this was tolerated in Ouida’s novels is
unclear; it may have had something to do with her residence in
France and the perception that her novels were really simply French
novels written in English. The English reading public certainly
265
tolerated more open sexuality in French novels than they did in
English ones, seeking out French novels for precisely this quality.
Many critics pointed out this difference with pride, while a few
commented on the difference with annoyance at the "absurd
limitations" placed on English writers, but the awareness that such a
difference existed was apparently general. Ouida frequently
commented humorously on such restrictions herself; in Puck, a
playwright discusses the difficulties in adapting a French play for the
British stage:
They never stand any nonsense with the seventh
commandment, remember. You must change the
illicit love into a decorous bigamy. Indeed, you
might try trigamy. They wouldn’t at all mind three
husbands . . .The English conscience is so intensely
mercantile, that it has no notion of a passion that
does not result in the cheating of somebody . . .
Bigamy is fraud; and the fraud commends it to the
public of these very commercial Isles. (62)
Obviously, however, Ouida managed to avoid the use of this
formula. When Ouida later writes "At risk of arousing the censure
of readers, I confess that I would leave to society a very large liberty
in the matter of its morality or immorality, if it would only justify its
existence by any originality, any true light and loveliness" (Ouida,
Views 4), she is being disingenuous; she knows exactly how much
266
censure she could expect-as well as how that censure might increase
her readership.
It is also possible that part of the appeal was similar to that
of the expose and the newspaper accounts of the Divorce Court; like
many novelists of her day, particularly sensation novelists, Ouida
sought and found inspiration in the newspapers; in fact, an article on
Vivandieres of the French army, complete with detailed sketches, in
the Illustrated London Times may have been the spark that lighted
Cigarette ("The Cantinieres and Vivandieres of the French Army").
Critics wrote of their concern that lower class readers would take
Ouida’s depictions as the gospel truth about the aristocracy, and
Gissing has a character in The Odd Women warn a jealous working-
class husband to read Ouida’s accounts of the European lifestyle
before he takes his wife on the Continent. Ouida’s readership,
however, was largely middle class: as Vincent E. H. Murray notes
with great disapprobation, "The price at which they are published
renders them inaccessible to those whom it is customary to call ’the
people,’ and it is clear that . . . [Ouida] does not address herself to
them. These books are issued by one of the first houses in the
trade; they are written for and read by society" (935). Whether this
267
largely middle class readership would have had such faith in Ouida’s
veracity is unknown, but certainly the demand existed, for Mudie
forgave scenes in Ouida’s books which he would never have
tolerated in, say, George Moore. It may well be that Ouida’s matter
of fact presentation of the demi-monde and of adulterous wives was
tolerable because she did not try to gain sympathy for them as
essentially virtuous but erring natures, as W ood or Gaskell do for
their controversial heroines. In what Oliphant calls "very fine and
very nasty books,” the reader may regard the fallen, but generally
beautiful, charming, amusing and fairly happy woman with guilty
fascination, without ever being called upon to challenge her or his
own beliefs about the fallen woman’s spiritual or moral condition.
Perhaps also the fact that the main characters of Ouida’s early
novels are all males, and that the erring woman is not central, as
she is in W ood’s, Gaskell’s, and many other sensation novels may
play a part in readers’ acceptance of these characters. Ouida tended
to be denigrating in her comments about women, being, even in the
1890s, opposed to suffrage and anything that smacked o f feminism,
and she is unsparingly negative in her evaluation of most of her
female characters’ moral qualities. Y et she grants these women a
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remarkable power and energy in manipulating and controlling their
environment, and a capacity for doing damage that may have been
a potent attractant for female readers who felt that their own
control of their lives was at best tenuous. In an essay decrying
"Female Suffrage," Ouida warns of the dangers of unleashing wom en
in the political arena, since, "There is in every woman, even in the
best woman, a sleeping potentiality for crime, a curious possibility of
fiendish evil. Even her maternal love is dangerously near an insane
ferocity" (Views 324). As unflattering as this "view" is, it at least
does not portray woman as weak.
Like Lady Audley’ s Secret, Under Two Flags chronicles the
growth of a young man from immaturity and irresponsibility to
maturity. Like Robert Audley, Bertie Cecil is frivolous and lazy,
even effeminate at the start of the story; like Robert Audley, Bertie
Cecil is ready to assume his rightful place in the social order, as an
English peer and family patriarch, at the end. Amd, as in Lady
Audley’ s Secret, the logic of the story demands that a woman be
sacrificed in order that this may be so. Robert Audley takes the
place of Helen/Lucy, both in the affections of her first husband and
ultimately in Audley Hall. Cigarette, shielding Cecil from the firing
269
squad, is executed in his place. Cigarette is Cecil’s logical
complement; just as he is "feminine" in many of his characteristics,
so she is masculine. However, Cecil never loses his masculine
identity or privilege, while Cigarette, the author repeatedly tells us,
is both "unsexed" and "doomed" by her sex.
When Cecil is first introduced to us, we find him in the midst
of a costly and spectacular disarray reminiscent of Lady Audley’s
sitting room:
A Guardsman at home is always, if anything, more
luxuriously accommodated than a young duchess
. . . the hangings of the room were silken and rose
coloured, and a delicious confusion prevailed
through it pell-mell, box-spurs, hunting-stirrups,
cartridge-cases, curb-chains, muzzle-loaders,
hunting-flasks and white gauntlets being mixed up
with Paris novels, pink notes, point-lace ties . . .
(the nickname) "Beauty," gained at Eton, was in no
way undeserved; when the smoke cleared . . ., it
showed a face of as much delicacy and brilliancy a .
woman’s . . . his features were exceedingly fair— fair
as the fairest girl’s. (7)
The constant reference to Beauty’s "woman’s face" and feminine
accoutrements have raised eyebrows among later readers; as Stirling
dryly remarks, "Fortunate Hon. Bertie, able to indulge in scent,
turquoise-studded dressing-cases, French pictures, point-lace ties,
and startling eyelashes without anybody misunderstanding him!"
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(66), but it is fairly clear that Ouida presents these "feminine"
characteristics as positive, or at least neutral; these are the signs of
Cecil’s aristocratic lineage, and are not inherently negative since
they are balanced by a "masculine" self-control and sense of honor,
although they may betray negative, though dormant, tendencies. His
younger brother Berkeley, however, is characterized as "very girlish
in his face and ways" with a "girlish weakness in his temperament"
and it is made clear that in Berkeley’s case, these are negative traits,
without the requisite balance of masculine self-control. After an
exciting and life-threatening steeple-chase, Cecil’s manner is
described:
Bertie looked as serenely and listlessly nonchalant
as of old, while he nodded to the Seraph with a
gentle smile. . . . Outsiders would sooner have
thought him defeated than triumphant . . . N o one
could have dreamt that he was thinking in his heart
of hearts how passionately he loved the gallant
beast that had been victor with him, and that if he
had followed out the momentary impulse in him he
could have put his arms round the noble-bowed
neck and kissed the horse like a woman! (45)
Berkeley, on the other hand, has no such control. Cecil finds him
gambling away money he doesn’t have: "Little Berk’s pretty face was
very flushed; his lips were set tight, his eyes were glittering . . . He
271
was playing with a terrible eagerness" (85). Unfortunately, Bertie
suffers from "the absence . . . of that delicate, intangible,
indescribable, sensitive nerve which men call Honor" (94) and which
we might call the Phallus, with which pretty features are an asset to
one’s masculinity and without which they are an emasculating
liability. Cigarette, however, has a strong sense of honor, but is
none the better for it, since in gaining it, she has become "unsexed."
Cigarette, overhearing Cecil’s pitying judgement of her, poses the
question thus: "Unsexed? Pouf! If you have a woman’s face, may I
not have a man’s soul? It is only a fair exchange" (230). Her
question, however, is answered in the negative, both in repeated
narratorial asides, and in the plot equation that exacts her death as
the surcharge of the "fair exchange" of the two characters. Ouida is
specific about the disadvantages of Cigarette’s sex, as she is about its
charms:
’What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little amazon!’
he thought . . . she had not much interest for him
. . . save that he saw she was pretty . . . But he was
sorry a child so bright and so brave should be
turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should
have been tossed up on the scum and filth of the
lowest barrack life, and should be doomed in a few
years’ time to become the yellow, battered, foul-
mouthed, vulture-eyed camp follower that
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premature old age would surely render the darling
of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As-de-Pique.
Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex,
dancing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes,
. . . but strive to kill it how she would, her sex
would have its revenge one day and play Nemesis
to her. . . . [And] when the bloom should leave her
brown cheeks . . . the womanhood she had defied
would assert itself, and avenge itself, and be
hideous in the sight of men who now loved the
tinkling of those little spurred feet . . . Cecil
thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this
eighteen-year-old brunette of a campaigner; he
might have gone further and said that a hero was
lost. (294)
A hero, however, is not lost but gained in Cigarette’s death; by
fixing her identity forever in the twin preservatives of youth and
death, her martyrdom gives her the mystique that the living
Cigarette can never have, with her sexually active behavior evocative
both of desire and disease, of fertility and mortality. The "scum and
filth," which refers both to the human beings with whom Cigarette
interacts and to the filthy living conditions, also functions as a fairly
direct reference to the bodily fluids and products of disease that
make up a part of that filth. Ouida ties together images of the
"yellow" (diseased), "vulture-eyed" (death and disease consuming)
camp follower (sexually promiscuous woman, who is "foul mouthed"
(consuming and spewing filth) with Cigarette’s attractiveness, i.e.,
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her sexual availability. Ouida makes much of Cigarette’s soiled
mouth, "which was now like a bud from a damask rose branch,
though even now it steeped itself in wine, and sullied itself with
oaths, and had never been touched from its infancy with any kiss
that was innocent" (293), and refers to Cigarette as floating on the
"sewer waters" of "vice" (294). Cigarette’s mouth is referred to
whenever Ouida invokes Cigarette’s sexuality, standing for all the
openings of the body and Cigarette’s femaleness. Ouida’s
description of Cigarette’s heroics are constantly undermined by
references to the grotesque body that is both the body of war torn
Franco-Africa (the torn bodies of soldiers, the disease ridden bodies
of hospital patients, the raped bodies of Arab women) and that is
the female, and therefore by its nature grotesque, body of Cigarette,
defined by its openings and its permeability. Only in death, its
breast pierced by hundreds of bullets, is the permeability of the
upper body sufficient to balance Cigarette’s femaleness, to achieve
sufficient closure and masculinization of the grotesque lower body
that she may be identified as a hero, "the color . . . passing fast from
her lips and a mortal pallor settling there in the stead of that rich
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bright hue, once warm as the scarlet heart of the pomegranite"
(592).
The "Two Flags" in Under Two Flags refers to the flags of
England and France, but it might very well stand for all the dualities
in Cecil’s nature and experiences— the extremes of wealth and
poverty, luxury and hardship, domestic Britain and exotic Africa,
masculinity and femininity. The entire novel becom es a mechanism
to define Cecil’s mature masculine identity, by pitting Cecil against
characters and situations that body forth ambiguities in his own
nature, and force him to commit him self to appropriate objects of
desire (his identity, his homeland, his future wife); after years of
reacting (feminine), he finds his identity as a masculine, desiring
subject. It is his exile that "saves" him:
On the surface it seem ed as though never was there
a life more utterly thrown away than the life of . . .
a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts,
had he ever chosen to make anything of them,
buried in the ranks of the Franco-African army . . .
Y et it might be doubted if . . . any other . . . would
equally have given steel and strength to his
indolence and languor as this did. In his old world,
he would have lounged listlessly through
fashionable seasons, and in an atmosphere that
encouraged his profound negligence of everything
and his natural nil-admirari listlessness would have
glided from refinement to effeminacy. (266)
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If the feminine grotesque is defined by openness and hedonism,
masculinity is defined by closure and control. Control, however, is
nothing without desire to master and contain. The story, then, of
Cecil’s coming to manhood is one not only of control being tested,
but of becoming able to desire both intensely and appropriately.
Bertie Cecil the aristocrat desires nothing intensely because his
needs are met, which is to say that he is never confronted with the
permeability and the neediness of the body. H e runs the risk of
becoming lax and effeminate (open) because he has never faced the
need to maintain closure. It is only when that openness becomes
both a risk and a desire that control is truly invoked and mastery
tested.
Homosocial bonding both constitutes the occasion for and the
threat to that self-mastery, as it does in Lady A udley’ s Secret. Like
Robert Audley, Cecil undertakes his quest at least partly out of love
for his closest male friend, the Seraph, in whose eyes Cecil believes
his honor has been tarnished. Also like Robert Audley, Cecil
marries the sister of his closest male friend, who can hardly compete
with her brother in moving Cecil’s most intense emotions. When,
i
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several years after Cecil’s flight from England, the Seraph turns up
unexpectedly in Africa, Cecil is "powerless" (439):
[Cigarette saw] the startled amaze, the longing love,
the agony of recognition, in his eyes! . . . "[I fear]
my own weakness." . . . H e felt that if he looked
again on the face of the man he loved, he might be
broken into self-pity, and unloose his silence, and
shatter all the work of so many years. (437-440)
H e runs from the sight of the Seraph’s face "as men flee pestilence"
(490), and does it so successfully that it is only when he faces the
firing squad that the Seraph finally sees and recognizes him, and
a great shuddering cry broke from them both . . .
Cecil’s eyes filled with slow, blinding tears; tears
sweet as a woman’s in her joy, bitter as a man’s in
his agony . . . he knew that this love, at least, had
cleaved to him through all shame and against all
evil. (585-586)
However, in each of these scenes Cecil is powerless to aid himself,
or to act at all. The description of Cecil’s emotional danger is both
feminine and sexual ("broken" and "unloosed"); it is the language of
the open and opened body. Somehow, these openings must be
closed or at least mediated or cleansed; otherwise, direct contact
with the Seraph through those openings may lead to "pestilence."
In each instance, Cigarette is the agent who saves him, first
by getting him orders to leave the camp, and finally by throwing
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herself in front of the firing squad while the Seraph struggles
helplessly in the grip of the soldiers. The Seraph is the occasion for
Cecil’s Odyssey to gain self-control; however, Cecil cannot effect a
reunion with his friend without threatening that very control, i.e.
masculine identity. Through the death of Cigarette (the sexual
woman) and marriage to Venetia (the non-sexual and therefore non
threatening woman of "race"), Cecil can be reunited with the Seraph
while his own masculinity is safeguarded; i.e., he does not act on his
desire to be with the Seraph, or his desire to escape the firing
squad, but is able to become husband, brother, and patriarch, and to
assume his title and position as an English peer and active,
masculine member of the power structure.
Feminine openings are dangerous and liable to
contamination, yet they are the only means through which passages
or boundary crossings may be effected. Cecil goes to Africa to learn
desire and need (awareness of the body’s openings) and therefore
how to control that desire (how to close the body’s openings). In his
ultimate moment of desire, in the moment he sees the Seraph’s face,
he must not take steps to fulfill that desire, for that would show a
lack of self-control or ability to maintain closure; it is Cigarette who
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serves as a conduit between the men, so that Cecil’s desire may be
gratified without Cecil releasing ("unloosing") his self-control, his
closure. Cecil reenters fellowship with the living through the
opening of Cigarette’s body by the bullets, and the fellowship of the
Seraph through the opening of Venetia’s body in the marital
relation; Ouida emphasizes several times that Venetia, although
previously married, is a "pure" virgin, and learns her "passion from
him [Cecil] alone" (596). In contrast to Cecil’s early affairs with
promiscuous married women or courtesans, his relationships with
women in Africa stress female purity and monogamy. Cigarette
holds little appeal for him, partially because she is "unsexed," but
also because, in his newfound fastidiousness, he cannot contemplate
her without evoking the specter of her middle age as a diseased
prostitute. This is a scruple which never was at issue in his earlier
liaisons with London courtesans. This may partially be an economic
difference; a London courtesan might well retire on her earnings at
a decorous age, whereas a camp-follower would be less likely to do
so. But as Cigarette is not a prostitute, but a wine-seller who has
had a number of lovers, Cecil’s concern may also be linked to the
very perception of Africa (or India, or any other colonial holding) as
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a country "whose sun was as flame and whose breath was as
pestilence" (596).
Under Two Flags is thus devoted to defining the appropriate
aristocratic masculine English character, and all Cecil’s travails are
means for refining and testing that character. As an aristocrat, Cecil
is born with the raw materials, e.g., a fine physique, instinctive self-
control and that "sensitive nerve," but in England, surrounded by
luxury and "Paris novels" (6), he runs the risk of degenerating--that
is, of developing exclusively the feminine aspects of his nature. The
(in this case, French) colonial setting, with its exposure to disease
and deprivation, seems to be necessary to "tighten" the English
character:
H e had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved,
hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa,
with a force and vividness that he had never
dreamed possible in his cold, passionless, insouciant
world of other days. H e had known what the
hunger of famine, what the torment of fever, what
the agony of forbidden pride, what the wild delight
of combat were. . . . he had known all these, the
desert passions, and while they left him much the
same in character, they changed him vitally. (267)
The English character, then, is defined through the experience of its
opposite. Cecil becomes worthy of his heritage after experiencing
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the lack of privilege of a common soldier, worthy of "the glad, cool,
green, dew freshened earth that was so sweet and so full of peace,
after the scorched and blood stained plains" (596), worthy of health
after the "torment of fever." His transition from passive recipient of
stimuli to active agent is set forth also in literary metaphor. A
French officer praises him: "[Y]our sword writes in a brave man’s
fashion-writes what France loves to read. But before you wore
your sword here? Tell us of that. It was a romance— wasn’t it?"
Cecil responds, "If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur"
(257). Just as the manly world of battle is contrasted against the
feminine domain of love, the masculine genre o f the war novel or
adventure story is pitted against the feminine genre of the
"romance," the novel of high life in which it is embedded.
Ultimately, however, that masculine genre is both contained
and domesticated within its feminine counterpart. The first half of
the novel is in fact the novel of high life, and the reader’s
commitment to the novel is based on that generic choice. The
adventure story within the overall novel— Cecil’s twelve years in
Africa-tests and proves Cecil’s worthiness to return to England as
the protagonist of the romance of high life, and so end the story in
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marriage, the classic feminine-genre ending. "It was worth
banishment to return . . .It was worth the trials I bore to learn the
love that I have known," Cecil explains to Venetia in his last lines in
the book (596). Just as Africa only acts as a sort of finishing school
for Cecil’s manhood, the adventure novel functions to prepare Cecil
for his role as bridegroom-hero of the romance of high life. His
return to England signifies that the transition is complete.
As is so often the case in sensation novels, class identity and
class conflict are the signs of boundaries and their permeability.
Usually, this boundary transgression takes place at the plot level
through inter-class romance, as in Lady Audley’ s Secret', here,
however, it takes place also at the level of genre, and a gender role
reversal must take place in order for the romance to begin again.
Since a loss of class identity on Cecil’s part is the occasion for the
beginning of the adventure story, he must regain it to resume the
romance. However, his loss of caste places him in an inferior
position to his love interest, Venetia; he is therefore placed in the
feminine role relative to her. Whereas a difference in class may be
passable (although still dangerous) if the woman is inferior, and
therefore merely more feminine, more powerless, and therefore
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potentially more appealing, it is impassable if the man is inferior, at
least in a heterosexual or heterosocial relationship. Interestingly,
within homosocial relationships, class differences are acceptable for
men, as in the friendship of Cecil and his valet, Rake, whereas close
homosocial bonding between wom en of different classes, even in the
patronage relationship, are often represented as threatening, as is
Phoebe Marks’ closeness to Lady Audley. Perhaps women, being
"open," are more liable to class contamination than men are. Even
Cigarette avoids the company of other women. Ouida, in a later
essay, is specific about the deleterious effects of physical closeness
between women, as she is supportive of the homosocial and even
homosexual bond between men: "When a girl has a common
bedchamber and a common bathroom with other girls, she loses the
delicate bloom of her modesty. Exposure to a crowd of women is
just as nasty as exposure to a crowd of men" (Views 219). If women
do lose this modesty, men are likely to be inclined not to risk
contamination in their company:
The New Woman declares that man cannot do
without woman. It is a doubtful postulate. In the
finest intellectual and artistic era of the world
women were not necessary to either the pleasures
or the passions of men. It is possible that if
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women make themselves as unlovely and offensive
as they appear likely to become, the preferences of
the Platonic Age may become acknowledged and
dominant, and women may be relegated entirely to
the lowest plane as a mere drudge and child-bearer.
( Views 209)
Under Two Flags is full of cautionary tales in which men are
emasculated in socially inappropriate sexual relationships, such as
Leon Ramon, a young painter of genius who is deprived of his
ability to paint when he is "dropped" by the aristocrat who hires him
to paint her portrait and enjoys an affair with him during the period
of the sittings. H e fails to recognize that he is not her equal
socially, and that it is therefore impossible for him to have a sexual
relationship with her that is not based on dishonor, i.e., male
powerlessness. Her treatment of him as a prostitute feminizes him;
his failure to recognize the true basis of the relationship and refuse
it results in his destruction. Loesberg has argued that the sensation
novel’s obsession with secret identities stems from the anxiety over
loss of class identity; here, with a masculine protagonist, it becomes
possible to understand how directly class and gender identity are
equatable, at least for the male reader-loss of class identity is, quite
simply, castration.
284
Class conflict is the one of the main sources of anxiety for
Ouida’s critics, who are concerned that her portrayal of the upper
classes might cause them to sink in the estimation of Ouida’s
(presumably lower-class) readers. Certainly class conflict is a theme
which might well be expected to be of central importance in a story
which follows its main character from the houses of royalty to the
barracks of common soldiers and which chronicles the excesses of
wealth in such minute and profuse detail. Often it appears as envy
of the upper classes by the lower, out of which no good can come.
Cecil’s initial ruin is wrought by a bookmaker whose hatred of Cecil
is based as much on Cecil’s aristocracy as on actual conflict between
the two characters, and his life in Africa is made particularly
miserable by a commanding officer, Chateauroy, whose title of
Marquis is a recent acquisition and whose sensitivity about his
peasant ancestry causes him to resent Cecil’s unadmitted but evident
aristocracy bitterly. The most dangerous liaisons between classes
come through female sexual desire; Cigarette’s love for Cecil leads
her to contemplate the murder of Venetia as she recalls an
anecdote of the Revolution in which a peasant woman jilted by her
aristocratic lover takes her gory vengeance on the severed head of
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his noble wife. In a fury, Cigarette confronts Venetia with spirited
and rather convincing speeches about the injustice of class
inequality, but finds herself subdued by the intangible power of
Venetia’s nobility. Although Venetia fails to completely convince
Cigarette, she seems to be speaking for Ouida’s point of view:
’As far as in us lies, we strive to remedy its
(poverty’s) evil; the uttermost effort can do but
little, but that little is only lessened— fearfully
lessened— whenever Class is arrayed against Class
by that blind antagonism which animates yourself.’
Cigarette’s intelligence was too rapid not to
grasp the truths conveyed by these words; but she
was in no mood to acknowledge them. (526)
The real occasion for Cigarette’s resentment of Venetia is jealousy
over Cecil, and thus the reader is made to see the dangers of love
crossing over class boundaries. About prostitution, however, Ouida
is less concerned; Cecil’s mistress, "the Zu-Zu" rides with the hunt
along with the married noblewoman with whom he is having an
affair; the ladies manage their hostility by simply not acknowledging
each other’s presence, and the Zu-Zu seem s to be in no hurry to
upset the social order. Critics were concerned that the glorification
of unlikely romances between lower class girls and aristocratic men
would lead young servant girls into disastrous relationships in which
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they would be seduced and abandoned. Ouida certainly didn’t waste
ink on the pathos of the courtesan’s plight:
The Zu-Zu was perfectly happy; and as for the
pathetic pictures that novelists and moralists draw,
of vice sighing amid turtles and truffles for childish
innocence in the cottage at home where honey
suckles blossomed and brown brooks made melody
. . . the Zu-Zu would have vaulted herself on the
box-seat of a drag, and told you ’to stow all that
trash;’ (sic) her childish recollections were of a
stifling lean-to with the odor of pig-sty and straw
yard, pork for a feast once a week, starvation all
the other six days, kicks, slaps, wrangling, and a
general atmosphere of beer and wash-tubs; she
hated her past, and loved her cigar on the drag.
The Zu-Zu is fact; the moralists’ pictures are
moonshine. (62)
The danger lies, not in the economic exploitation of lower class
women’s sexuality, but in romantic involvement between the classes.
Of the plight of the waif seduced and abandoned to the streets,
Ouida is contemptuous; in a later essay she writes, "In nine cases
out of ten the first to corrupt the youth is the woman. In nine cases
out of ten also she becomes corrupt herself because she likes it"
(Views 215). In Held in Bondage, one of Ouida’s earliest works, "the
Trefusis," a lower class woman who expects marriage of her
aristocratic lover, avenges herself by tricking him into marrying her
under a false upper class identity. Ouida makes it clear that this is
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a heinous act on the part of a scheming and unscrupulous woman,
while her aristocratic male lover is to be pitied. W omen who abuse
the power they gain through sex are "Faustines," Satanic figures.
(They are also some of Ouida’s liveliest characters.) It is
particularly important that the intangible and therefore literally
price-less qualities of nobility not be allowed to escape the
boundaries of the upper classes through reproduction, either through
incautious marriages or marriages of monetary convenience. In one
essay, Ouida complains
All the unpurchasable, unteachable, indescribable
qualities and instincts which we imply when we say
he or she has ’race’ in him, are growing more and
more rare through the continual alliance of old
families with new wealth . W e understand the
necessity of keeping the blood of our racing and
coursing animals pure, but we let their human
owners sully their stock with indifference. (Views
30)
This (in)valuable blood is sullied through the sexual act in which it,
as sperm, is passed through the lower openings of the female body;
thus, it is through sex and the grotesque (too open) female body
that the "unpurchasable" crosses into the realm of the merely
commercial. Again, the female body, specifically, the vagina is the
dangerous liaison between realms that are, ideologically, mutually
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exclusive. Thus, since all female characters embody this openness,
this potential for transgression, the type and degree of openness and
its appropriate uses for the male must be established, and clear
distinctions made in order that no contamination take place during
the m ale’s transition through, or contact with, female openness.
In order for the adventure novel to take place, Cecil must
journey to Africa. In order for the romance to resume, he must
return to England. However, since he must not initiate such a
return, it is necessary for the domestic romance to "come and get
him." Enter Venetia, touring the barracks of the Army of France
(!), who stops to ask the price of an ivory chess set which Cecil has
carved, as many of the soldiers extend their incomes through the
sales of various curios and handmade items. Forgetting his station,
he offers them to her as a gift-a gentleman’s privilege, but an insult
coming from one of his social position to one of hers. She refuses,
and this starts the long series of transactions which will eventually
expose his identity and lead to the climactic confrontation with the
firing squad. The conflict revolves around his class identity, upon
which hinges her right to purchase versus his right to give; her class
position places her in the masculine role wherein, although she may
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give or buy, she may not receive without reciprocity. (For more on
the cultural dynamics of gift-giving, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift.)
As a lower class male, he is feminized in his relations with her, and
this is what must not happen if he is to be the hero of the romance.
His simple refusal to sell the chessmen does not protect him,
however; incensed by Cecil’s behavior, Chateauroy commands that
he give the chess set to Venetia, and before his commanding officer,
Cecil is helpless to refuse. The situation is analogous to
prostitution, with the commander as the pimp: "Victor, Madame la
Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toys again. Spread
them out" (299). Venetia refuses to "rob" him, and Cecil again asks
her to keep them, leaving before Venetia can respond with another
offer of compensation. In this way, his masculine identity as "giver"
rather than feminine "vendor" or "recipient" is kept intact. They
m eet again by chance; again she insists on paying Cecil for the
chessmen, again he refuses. The scene is acceptably resolved when
she spends the money she would have given him on charity for his
men in the hospital. Later, in an attempt to goad Cecil,
Chateauroy gives him money, intimating that it is from Venetia in
payment for the chess set. Cecil goes to Venetia in indignation, the
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lie is exposed, and he gives Venetia the money to return to
Chateauroy.
It is imperative, both for Venetia and Cecil, that neither
accept the feminine role at this time. For Cecil, it would mean
emasculation and disqualification for his future role in the romance.
This role reversal in gift-giving is a persistent theme in Ouida’s
novels. In Folle-Farine, a male character sums up the doctrine
succinctly: "Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter, and sap the
strength of the receiver, but of a woman to the man they are-to the
man, shameful" (emphasis mine, III, 56). For Venetia, it would be a
breach of chastity which would likewise disqualify her from her
future role as the hero’s love interest. For her to be femininely
receptive (open) to a lower class male would risk contamination; she
must achieve closure by exchanging money for the chess set,
"closing" the transaction. Later, after his correct social class is
known, she is able to thank him for a favor (he finds a lost piece of
jewelry and returns it) without offering recompense, simply saying "I
am greatly indebted to you" (484). Immediately following this
declaration, his true identity as her brother’s close friend is revealed,
and he discovers her identity as well.
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Interesting and clearly unresolved conflicts regarding class
and gender emerge in this series of exchanges. Although Ouida’s
avowed belief is that such customs and divisions are appropriate and
necessary, the prerogatives of conqueror over conquered, upper class
over lower, and male over female are repeatedly presented as rapes;
in fact, Chateauroy is explicitly presented as a rapist in an earlier
scene, wherein he abducts an Arab princess and plans to rape her
and then give her over to the "general enjoyment" of his men. His
attempt to make Cecil complicit in this rape, by sending him to the
princess’s husband with a message detailing his plans, is analogous
to his attempt to make Venetia complicit in his humiliation/rape of
Cecil, and underscores the ways in which the relationship of the
upper class to the lower is similar to the relationship of the imperial
colonist to the indigenous population. Further, the placement of
Cecil, the sympathetic protagonist, in humiliating situations engages
the reader’s resentment against not only the abuse of power by
Chateauroy, but the "appropriate" level of coldness and distance
employed by Venetia. Clearly the reader’s knowledge that Cecil is,
in fact, of Venetia’s class is intended to mitigate our sense of the
injustice of class inequities; however, the sense remains that there is
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a cruelty here, not only in the deliberate malice of Chateauroy, but
in the system itself:
He had been used to the impassable demarkations
(sic) of caste, he did not dispute them more now
that he was without than he had done when within
their magic pale . . . [he stood] with a certain
serene dignity that could not be degraded because
others chose to treat him as the station he filled
gave them fit right to do. (300)
Y et Cecil does dispute those "impassable demarkations," as his
resistance against selling the chessmen reveals. Cigarette is also an
eloquent spokesperson against both gender and class inequality;
indeed, however often to the contrary the narrative voice
pontificates, the characters’ "lived experience" seems to directly
critique the naturalness of gender and class distinctions.
Another challenge to the dominant order is mounted through
the depiction of the colonial struggle. Ouida is adamant, even in
the novel’s glorification of the French army, that the Arabs have
"the right of' the struggle. She presents the indigenous population
of Africa as fighting a gallant but inevitably losing battle against
superior military strength, which is used to rape, rob and murder the
native population. This sentiment seems at variance with the book’s
consistent message that the imperial character demands the
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challenge of maintaining or extending colonial domination, a
message that is also prevalent in critics’ anxious warnings that
sensation novels weaken the Imperial English character by focusing
readers’ intellectual attention on narrow domestic concerns and
encouraging physical passivity. Cecil folds down the page of his
French romance and leaves his boudoir for the African battlefield
where he wades "ankle-deep in blood" (267); apparently the lives of
"hundreds" of innocent Africans are a small price to pay for the
tonic effects of this healthy exercise on a future English peer.
Despite one Ouida fan’s statement that the reason she liked Ouida’s
books was that the distinction between good and evil was always
perfectly clear (Stirling), it seems that the distinctions between the
fine and the wicked, despite the insistent moralizing of the narrative
voice, are in fact almost entirely unclear.
The reader’s attempt to make moral judgements is both
engaged and frustrated constantly throughout the novel. Ouida’s
disregard of conventional sexual morality (or perhaps too open
acceptance of the double standard) combine with her praise of her
male characters to invite the reader to suspend moral judgement— to
take the tale on its own terms. On the other hand, the constant
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narrative asides evaluating the character and quality of various
characters and actions invoke the reader’s acceptance of a fairly
detailed ethical system. These asides are worded so as to imply that
the reader of "race" or at least some refinement will immediately
understand this system, while a reader who lacks these qualities has
little hope of grasping it; the "snob intimidation factor" may work to
secure this acceptance. The conversion to the novel’s ethical system,
or at least suspension of the conventional ethics during the reading
is indeed subversive. Although Ouida herself tends to claim the
Romantics, particularly Byron and Shelley, with their ethic of free
love, as her tradition, she is in fact more closely aligned with the
Regency, with its witty exploitation of a double standard, both in
gender and class mores, which it does little to overturn. Ouida’s
offer of sexual freedom without censure only extends to men, and a
very few women "of genius."
The woman reader is offered, as always, two distinct choices
in female characters to identify with; the fallen and the chaste. The
difference is that here the fallen woman’s is a role with many
attendant pleasures and with few serious penalties. However, the
average reader may be comforted; it is the chaste and passive
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woman to whom the spoils of marriage are actually awarded.
Perhaps the most exciting opportunity novels like Under Two Flags
can offer the woman reader, however, is the opportunity to identify
with the male protagonist-a rare item in the "woman’s novel" of the
tim e-and thus to enjoy sexual, geographical, and aggressive
freedoms without fear of reprisal. For the female reader, the
embedded adventure novel offers an opportunity to escape the
confines of the romance into a purely masculine fantasy, a fantasy
therefore free from the need for moral self-monitoring, since, as a
male, Cecil is doing nothing inappropriate. Thus, the elaborate
negotiations between Cecil, Cigarette, and Venetia are not merely
necessary to the plot, but helpful to the reader in providing ways to
renegotiate an identity appropriate to the return to the romance.
Thus, just as Cecil’s "woman’s face" and love of luxury provides a
point of identification for fem ale readers initially, it becomes
necessary to ease the female reader out of the role of the now
thoroughly masculinized Cecil at the end. Cigarette becomes this
transitional vehicle for the now "unsexed" reader-in-the-text; she is
Cecil’s equal in power and aggressiveness, but female. Like the
adventuress, she is charming, she is adored; unlike the adventuress,
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she is a hero, she is purified in death. Cigarette provides a vehicle
for the reemergence of the romance while allowing what Judith
Fetterly calls the "resisting reader" a voice with which to protest the
narrator’s gender and class role double standard. Although madly in
love with Cecil, she is also allowed to hate him for his continual
rejection of her, and to contemplate the murder and literal de
facement (the fantasy of the destruction of the woman’s decapitated
hear and, specifically, facial features) of the cold, passive, chaste
Venetia. In her masochistic self-sacrifice, she achieves his love, the
humbling of Venetia (who will ever after compare her own love for
Cecil to Cigarette’s and find it "little worthy of the fate it finds"
[596]) and the final role reversal in the novel— by giving Cecil a gift
he can never repay, Cigarette assumes the masculine role with Cecil,
gaining an ultimate ascendancy over and penetration of him that
Venetia may never be allowed to have. If what we might call the
"assenting reader" (i.e., the reading subject who accepts conventional
literary gender roles) is left to identify with Venetia in the happily
ever after of the standard marriage plot, the resisting reader has the
last word in the guerrilla gender-warfare that flourishes in the
border areas between the two genres of Under Two Flags; the last
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line of the novel returns to Africa for a simple assertion of identity,
"one name on which the Arab sun streamed as with a martyr’s glory:
’CIGARETTE,
Enfant de L’Armee, Soldat de la France.’"
The woman reader can have her rebellion and eat her wedding cake
too. What she may find more difficult is the reconciliation of her
investment in both Cigarette and Venetia.
II. Folle-Farine
Norman Douglas said of Ouida that "she was not an artist,
but just as surely, she was a genius" (in Stirling, 11). Whatever one
thinks of these terms, they seem to reflect a truth about Ouida’s
appeal; it is slippery, mysterious and contradictory. Her prose style
was often considered excessive and flamboyant in the nineteenth
century, and surely seems more so to the tastes of today. Her
situations strain to the uttermost the credulity of a suspended
disbelief nurtured on realism. However, there is an enduring charm
in Ouida for tastes conditioned to intricacies, like an Elizabethan
garden carefully planned and then allowed to run riot. If the Ouida
of Under Two Flags is the author whose plotting skill Thackeray
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openly envied, the Ouida of Folle-Farine is the author whose
aesthetic sense and cutting irony were admired by George Meredith,
Max Beerbohm and G.S. Street.
Ouida bases the novel in part on G oethe’s Faust, with its
potpourri of genres and references; however, whereas Faust splits
melodrama and "high" drama along gender lines, between Gretchen
and Faust, Folle-Farine pulls a single female character through both
registers. Both authors use their Mephistopheles to provide social
commentary; of the two, Ouida’s entirely human tempter is perhaps
the more sinister. Melodrama and social satire are a rare and
usually incompatible mixture, perhaps because melodrama is
traditionally a popular feminine genre rooted in acceptance of
traditional values and set in the realm of the personal, while the
social satire lies in the masculine domain of the political
commentary, set in the public. Ouida’s combination of the two in
Folle-Farine (1871) jars, but intrigues also, finally shifting toward
tragedy, away from the social and its relativist moral codes and
toward the absolutist-from which realm the reader is carefully
excluded. As in Under Two Flags, Ouida is concerned with the
capacity of the mechanisms of exchange to undermine and transform
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identity. As a very young, poor and uneducated woman, Folle-
Farine is defined by powerful, wealthy, more sophisticated persons
in her environment, that is, directly by certain male characters and
indirectly, by the reader. Folle-Farine eludes those ineluctable
forces, however, through her non-identity; having no "self' to value,
she escapes the forces in the novel (including the reader) which are
confident in their ability to put a price on everything.
Ouida’s eighth novel, Folle-Farine was the last one o f her
forty-seven books that was written on English soil (Stirling 75).
Already, however, she had left England behind as the setting for her
stories, and settled on France. In Folle-Farine, Ouida explores the
exploitation of a noble nature made powerless by circumstance.
Folle-Farine is a later incarnation of Cigarette, and indeed, this
could, in some particulars, be Cigarette’s story. Like Cigarette,
Folle-Farine is nameless; she has only her nickname, which refers to
the worthless dust produced in the milling of grain, that blows away
on the wind. Like Cigarette, Folle-Farine is doomed by her sex to
victimization; if she will not capitalize on her own sexuality as a
prostitute, she will be deprived of her chastity anyway. Much like
Cigarette, it is for love that Folle-Farine makes the ultimate
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sacrifice. She sells her body to Sartorian, a man she dreads, in
order to save the life and advance the career of the man she loves,
who does not return her love or comprehend her sacrifice. Once he
is safe, she kills herself.
Her mother is a young French peasant who dies in childbirth,
having been seduced by a gypsy. Her father leaves her to die, but
she is taken under the protection of another member of the gypsy
band, who takes her at the age of six to her maternal grandfather
when her father announces his intention of selling her, first as a
child performer and later as a prostitute. She is "saved" from this
fate, at least initially, by her grandfather, who sees her ability to
labor unceasingly as an asset more valuable than her beauty. This
grandfather, an intensely religious but cruel and bigoted person,
hates the shame she represents, and treats her with cruelty so
appalling that one critic who labelled the book a work of genius still
felt that the explicit brutality was sufficient to spoil it ("Ouida’s
Novels" 374). Early on, therefore, we see Folle-Farine constructed
both as a potentially valuable commodity and as a currently
valueless human being.
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As Folle-Farine is systematically stripped of her power and
dignity, the novel poses the question: at what point will woman "fall"
and be damned? Conventionally, that point should be at the
moment of sexual penetration, and indeed the drawn-out seduction
plot prepares us for that outcome. In fact, in this fully packed three
volume novel, Folle-Farine again and again is placed in situations
which are metaphorical penetrations, while Ouida appears to reserve
actual sexual violation for the novel’s "climax." However, Ouida
challenges this convention by allowing Folle-Farine to maintain her
integrity at a level "above" physical closure, even after the bartering
away of her virginity. She constructs Folle-Farine as the
counterhero of a spiritual anti-quest m odelled on G oethe’s Faust,
framed in references to the "Walpurgisnacht" intermezzo where
Faust dances as Margarethe awaits execution. (The
Faust/M argarethe story seemed to have an irresistable appeal to the
popular writers of the day. Ouida herself had done it at least once
before in "Two Little W ooden Shoes: A Sketch," although it was not
until the early nineties that both Broughton and Braddon came out
with their versions, Dear Faustina and Gerard, respectively.)
Whereas the male Faust sells his soul freely for personal gain, Folle-
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Farine sells hers with great resistance, for the sake of a man’s gain.
Whereas Faust seeks growth and additional power, Folle-Farine
seeks only to hold her ground against the erosion of power. Folle-
Farine is Faust’s nature in Gretchen’s circumstances, and whereas
Faust must invoke his Mephistopheles, Folle-Farine finds herself
relentlessly pursued by hers.
Folle-Farine’s gender dooms her from the beginning. She
has no choice but to either become corrupt or a victim. In volume
one, she is beaten, hated and kept in utter ignorance by her
grandfather and the townspeople who do not understand her dark
"Eastern beauty" and think she is the daughter of the devil. Like
Cecil contemplating Cigarette, Folle-Farine’s only friend Marcellin,
also outcast because of his populist role during the French
Revolution, considers her inevitable fate:
It was a pity to make you a woman . . . You might
be a man worth something; but a woman!— a thing
that has no medium; no haven between heaven and
hell; no option save to sit by the hearth to watch
the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out
into the streets to mock at men and to murder
them. Which will you do in the future?
Since she does not understand the question, Marcellin answers it
himself:
303
’I spoke idly . . . slaves cannot have a future . . .
Many will love you, doubtless— as the wasp loves the
peach that he kisses with his sting, and leaves
rotten to drop from the stem!’
She was silent again, revolving his meaning;
it lay beyond her, both in the peril which it
embodied from others, and the beauty in herself
which it implied. (172-173)
In her innocence, Folle-Farine draws hope from others’ ironic
promises that the devil will help her, as he always helps women.
She believes the devil is her father and hopes that she will inherit
his kingdom. It is not until she becomes aware of her sexuality that
she understands what is being told her; when she "enters her father’s
kingdom," both her hopes and her sanity will be stripped from her.
Like the other novels examined here, the dynamic of the plot
revolves around the opening and closing of Folle Farine’s body, or
more precisely, her struggle to maintain closure against the struggle
of surrounding forces to open/seduce her. The reader is in the
position of voyeur throughout volume one, which traces Folle-
Farine’s childhood and early adolescence. Ouida offers detailed
descriptions of Folle-Farine’s physical beauty (often only partially
dressed), the abuse she sustains (whippings, etc.) and the marks it
leaves upon her body. Folle-Farine’s lack of self-consciousness or
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even a self-concept absolves her of complicity in this exposure.
Schroeder notes that Folle-Farine gains power by masochistically
submitting to men, which is indeed the case. Schroeder also notes
that this submission is erotically rendered; characteristic of
sensational fiction, woman bids for power sexually:
Ouida’s description of the naked female’s
submitting to her grandfather’s sadistic violence
becomes a veiled metaphor for incestuous violation,
and it echoes flagellation scenes in Victorian
pornographic literature . . . I do not think it is
straining the point to note the metaphorical
significance of the adder-like rope that bites the
pubescent girl and causes her to bleed. (96-97)
Schroeder is correct in her assessment of the eroticism of the scene,
an eroticism which implicates the reader. However, it is precisely
Folle-Farine’s ignorance of her sexuality which is her strength.
When she strips for these beatings, she is "insensible of humiliation
because unconscious of sin," and thus she is a closed system,
untouched even though the rope penetrates her body.
Interestingly, it is the contact of other wom en which first
makes her vulnerable to shame. After a Fall of "feverish" drought
comes a famine winter, which leads to more viciousness on the part
of the peasants. Several women seize fifteen year old Folle-Farine
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and, employing a sixteenth century method of investigation, pierce
her breast to see if she will bleed (if she does not, she is a witch.)
The scene is strikingly like a rape:
[A] dozen eager hands seized a closer grip upon
her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding
her down on the mud floor, searched with ravenous
eyes for the signet marks of hell. . . the nail drew
blood . . . The muscles and nerves of her body
quivered with a mighty pang, her chest heaved with
the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a
wounded bird— not at the physical pain, but at the
shame of these women’s gaze, the loathsome
contact of their reckless touch. The iron pierced
deeper, but they could not make her speak. (244-
246)
When Folle-Farine sees "the blood trickle . . . she understood what
had happened to her; and her face grew savage and dark, and her
eyes fierce and lustful . . . It was the shame of defeat and outrage
that stung her like a whip of asps" (251). By the time she gets
home, she is "hot with fever" (254), indicating that she has indeed
been penetrated and contaminated. Folle-Farine has thus in some
measure been "opened" by her contact with the women, her "perfect
health" disturbed with fever. Folle-Farine’s illness following this
attack is extended, and she recovers only to find that Marcellin is
dead. This preliminary awakening to sexuality and mortality ends
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the first volume of the novel. Folle Farine’s shame derives directly
from her awareness of having been the object of the gaze of the
women, which is passionate in its hatred. The reader’s gaze,
passionate in its pity but as "ravenous" for sensation as the women
are for the "signet signs of hell," remains behind the gaze of the
women; unperceived and untouched, we watch characters watch
Folle-Farine, a process which will continue until the reader’s gaze
eventually merges with that of the powerful characters whose own
gaze defines Folle-Farine. Her contact with the women increases
her sensual awareness (opens her) to the extent that it becomes
possible for her to conceive an erotic attraction (infection), and the
second volume begins shortly after with the introduction of Arslan,
the starving artist to whom Folle-Farine will give her unrequited
love.
With Arslan, Folle-Farine begins an equivocal patronage
relationship much like that of Cigarette and Cecil, beginning the
identification of erotic with capital exchange. Just as Cigarette
repeatedly saves Cecil’s life and does him favors without his
knowledge, Folle-Farine saves Arslan with anonymous gifts of food
and fuel when she finds him dying of starvation and cold in the
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granary which he is using as a home and studio. Thus begins the
first compromise of Folle-Farine’s integrity, for she steals the food
and fuel from her grandfather to help Arslan that she would have
died before taking for herself. (She repays this debt eventually.) At
this time, she makes a bargain with the portrait o f Thanatos, drawn
on the wall in chalk, which she believes is a real person:
’One life alone can ransom another’ . . . the force
of an irresistable fate seemed upon her; that
sacrifice which is at once the delirium and divinity
of her sex, had entered into her. . . . ’Let him live!’
she murmured . . . ’Let me die as the Dust dies—
what matter?’ (40)
The Faustian bargain is struck, and immediately Folle-Farine begins
to pay the price when she learns she must steal food, must
acknowledge the base neediness and openness of the body as she
never had before in her own starvation. Ouida’s choice of language
makes clear that the weakness of character that leads to theft of
food is a form of sexual transgression:
She had been so proud of her freedom from all
those frailties . . . with the chaste, tameless
arrogance of the women of her race . . . yet this
cleanliness of hand and heart . . . which she had
girded about her as a zone of purity more precious
than gold-this, the sole treasure she had, she was
about to surrender for the sake of a stranger. (II,
49-50)
308
Again the language is symbolic of defloration; again the result is
shame and self-consciousness before the gaze of others. Whereas
before, she had "passed through the crowds . . . not knowing why the
youths looked after her with cruel eyes all aglow," now "a hot shame
smote her, and the womanhood in her woke" (65-66).
The danger of her indebtedness to her grandfather is
complicated when Arslan, unaware that Folle-Farine is the
anonymous food donor, offers her sketches in return for her sitting,
attempting to assume the male-female patronage relationship and
unconscious that his superiority is already undermined. Folle-Farine
instinctively refuses, "a certain dullness and disappointment at her
heart. She wanted, she wished, she knew not what. But not that he
should offer her payment" (196). M en continually offer Folle-
Farine gold throughout the novel, the plot of which revolves around
the straggle to keep herself "pure"— i.e., not under the patronage of
any man. Like Cigarette, although denied the power to maintain
conventional purity, she becomes purified and assumes power within
the patronage relationship through sacrifice, rendering up a gift to
her lover that can never be returned or neutralized by any
subsequent payment.
309
Ouida suggests that capitalism converts people into objects,
commodities. She anticipates Marx in her sense that the value of
the commodity is located in its look or on its surface; the person
Folle-Farine has no value, while the spectacle Folle Farine has a
great deal. However, the eroticism of the novel is not in the
commodity itself, but in the inexorable force of the conversion of
the subject into the commodity, or the transformation of depth into
surface. The commodity’s surface appeals because there is the
lingering possibility of penetrating to some depth, in short, that
there is some surplus value of "sensation" beneath the icon. Folle
Farine ultimately escapes this flattening because she is hollow to
begin w ith-that is, she has no depth, no subjectivity to be
"flattened." The themes of the gaze and of the exchange converge
as characters and reader exert pressure upon Folle-Farine to make
her "buy" that she is a commodity, to alienate herself from her body.
But she escapes the trope of exchange by invoking the trope of
sacrifice, whereupon her body no longer becom es a commodity to
be sold by her, but an embodiment of the collective crimes of the
community. Thus, she vacates her body and invests it with the
desires of her pursuers. Therefore, when we penetrate her surface,
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we find not the continuing erotic challenge of alienated
consciousness to be converted (or, as Sartorian puts it, corrupted,)
but only our own corruption, which we hoped to "infect" Folle-
Farine with. Instead of being able to penetrate Folle-Farine
entirely, body and soul, and therefore take her into our bodies,
making her one with us and neutralizing her as a threat, we find
that her essence is elsewhere, that even though her body submits to
the laws of exchange, she remains outside the system, forever Other,
a threat and reminder that we are open, needy, in danger of
infection, because the thing that would have confirmed our
completion has escaped us. The melodrama demands that that
Folle-Farine maintain her physical purity. As long as Sartorian has
power over her, the only solution is for him to be "won over’ by her
goodness-the Pamela ending. Since Ouida’s seducer is more
efficient than Richardson’s, the reader expects that Folle-Farine will
die before losing her purity or will fall. By challenging the laws of
the melodrama, which the reader accepts in order to "play the
game" of the book, Folle-Farine "opts out" of the game, leaving the
reader and the other characters standing on the crumbling
foundation of their avowals that there are no other rules. Artistic
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genius, however, as represented by Arslan, is brought into the realm
of exchange (it is Sartorian’s money that subsidizes Arslan’s
production and success). Whether his art is therefore debased or
whether, like Folle Farine, it escapes debasement by means of its
two dimensionality is a question that remains open.
In fact, his art is based precisely on this ability to turn depth
(subject) into surface (object) through the gaze. In the early stage
of Folle-Farine’s relationship with Arslan, the nature of power is
exemplified in the erotic gaze. Because of the new modesty which
results from her awakening, she does not allow Arslan to see her at
first, but brings him food anonymously and watches him unseen as
he works, admiring him and his art equally. She is in the position of
power as voyeur and patron, but does not exercise this advantage to
act upon him or gain from him. This fem ale gaze is sympathetic, as
well as erotic, as "a passionate sorrow for a human sorrow [his
Faustian frustration] possessed her. . . . She gazed at him, never
weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty . . . of those lithe and massive
limbs" (151-152). When their roles are reversed, and he finds her
asleep in the granary where she has ventured once too often, his
gaze immediately objectifies her:
312
As she had once looked on himself, so he now
looked on her.
But in him there arose little curiosity and
still less pity . . . his only desire was to use the
strange charms in her for his art. . . . he had time
to study and to trace out every curve and line of
the half-developed loveliness before him with as
little pity, with as cruel an exactitude, as that which
the vivisector tears asunder the living animal. (177)
The villainous Sartorian’s gaze is described in much the same terms
as Arslan’s:
The old man watched her . . . H e . . . made his
passions docile ministers to his pleasure, and never
allowed them any mastery over himself. H e was
studying . . . her . . . ’All these in Paris,’ he was
thinking. ’Just as she is, with the same bare feet
and limbs . . . only to the linen tunic a hem of gold,
and on the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say
that even I had never in my many years done
better.’ (111:91-92)
His pleasure in her is specifically aesthetic, he objectifies her
visually, as does Arslan. H e thinks of her, not as a unified
subjectivity, but as a fragmented catalog of goods ("All these"). As
Arslan likes "to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to pourtray her
(sic)," Sartorian also "could not resist the pleasure of an added
cruelty, as the men of the torture-chambers of old strained once
more the fair fettered form of a female captive, that they might see
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a little longer those bright limbs quiver, those bare nerves heave"
(111:95).
Ouida constantly stresses Folle-Farine’s animal nature, her
likeness to the birds and plants, and finally to the reed which the
god killed to make the first flute. As a woman, without any
secondary forms of power such as wealth or male protectors, she is
reduced to her "natural" status as an object for the use of the male.
She learns what she is through the male gaze, a gaze which analyzes
and evaluates (commodifies), rather than sympathizes. This
objectification teaches her, for the first time, that she is beautiful, as
Arslan tells her so, and then shows her the sketch, hoping to get her
to continue posing for him. Her reaction is equivocal:
H e watched her, letting the vain passion he thus
taught her creep with all its poison into her veins.
. . . ’You are glad?’ he asked her at length.
’I am frightened!’ (11:189-190)
As Schroeder points out, although this realization frees Folle-Farine
from some of her grandfather’s abuse (she refuses to let him beat
the body that has becom e "sacred" because Arslan thinks it worth
painting,) she early on has a sense of "what beauty and sensuality
meant in the 1870’s— utter subjugation" (Schroeder 94). It means she
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can be assigned a certain value as a desirable commodity and
entered into exchange. Ouida is explicit in her sense of what Folle-
Farine’s self-consciousness means:
Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal
pomegranate seed, which, whether she would or no,
would make her leave the innocence of youth . . .
and draw her footsteps backward and downward to
that hell which none,— once having entered it,-can
ever more forsake. (11:198)
She is losing the fight to maintain her closure.
Arslan is a male counterpart to Folle-Farine. Arslan finds
Folle-Farine’s company congenial, because his origins are similar to
hers. H e is the bastard son of a peasant girl, abandoned to die in
childbirth. However, he is raised by a loving grandfather, and his
artistic genius takes him all over the world, to gain education and
culture because of his freedom, as a male, to move independently.
Except for his passion for art and fame, he is utterly cold, once
stopping to draw a man dying in the street without offering to save
the man’s life because it simply doesn’t occur to him. H e is the
male Faustian character, who has genius and vision, but is
constrained by circumstance not to enjoy worldly acclaim, power and
wealth: "the gaoler was poverty, and they who lay bound were high
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hopes, great aspirations, impossible dreams, immeasurable
ambitions" (11:233). H e is also much like G oethe’s Faust in his
tendency to "use up" ordinary people. Folle-Farine also has
aspirations, although she cannot put a name to them: " ’I do not want
love,’ she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong, half feeble,
struggled to fit her thoughts to her words. ’I want, I want, to have
power, as the priest has’ . . . ’Power!’ he echoed, as the devotee
echoes the name of his god" (238). However, as Arslan mockingly
lists the kinds of power available to her as a woman, she rejects
them all in confusion, finally thinking that the only god worthy of
worship is Death, with whom she made the contract to save Arslan
(11:246). In a scene that recalls Marlowe’s Faust’s necromantic
conjuring of Mephistopheles, Folle-Farine watches and listens
unseen as he dissects a dead woman to study her anatomy while
delivering perorations on his frustrated ambition:
’Oh God,’ he, who believed in no God, muttered
half-aloud, ’Let me be without love, wealth, peace,
health, gladness, all my life long . . . give me only
to be honoured in my works; give m e only a name
that men cannot, if they wish, let die.’ . . . This
hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured
him . . . thrilled her with the instinct of his
greatness. . .
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’Oh Immortals!’ she implored . . . ’D o what
you choose with me . . .kill me . . . let me be
bruised, beaten, nameless, hated . . . but grant me
this one thing— to give him his desire!’ (252)
The characters’ actions and language mirror each other, except that
he asks, not believing his plea will be taken seriously, for himself,
and she asks, in perfect faith, for him. Ouida is clear that the male
Faustian ambition is not worth having; the painting that Arslan
would sell Folle-Farine’s soul to bring to the world is a painting of a
loathsome crowd adulating a "grinning, bloated, gibbering" Barrabas,
and rejecting the genius-god (283). Folle-Farine gazes at the
preliminary sketch and asks, with justifiable confusion, why he wants
the adulation of such a world, and Arslan agrees: "He had drawn the
picture in all its deadly irony . . . only himself to desire and strive
for the wine streams, and the painted harlotry, and the showers of
gold, and the false gods, of a worldly success" (291). His cynicism
extends to her, and he paints her in twin studies which introduce a
new character who remains with Folle-Farine throughout the end of
the novel:
In the first, he painted her in all the warm,
dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a
field of poppies . . . amongst them, hiding and
gibbering and glaring at her with elfin eyes, was the
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Red Mouse of the Brocken . . .I n the second . . .
there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless,
and twisted in the contortions of a last agony . . .
upon the stone there lay a surgeon’s knife and a
sculptor’s scalpel; between her lips the Red Mouse
sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. (11:297-298)
The introduction of the red mouse of the Brocken is another direct
reference to G oethe’s Faust. (M ephistopheles brings Faust to the
magical Walpurgisnacht celebration on the Brocken to distract him
from inquiring into the plight of Gretchen, the young woman Faust
has seduced and abandoned to her fate— madness and execution.
Faust dances and flirts with a young "fair woman" as M ephistopheles
whiles away his time with another witch. U pon Faust’s
reappearance, Mephistopheles testily asks why he has left his
partner "who sang so sweetly as you romped" and Faust responds
that as she sang, a red mouse leaped out o f her mouth.
M ephistopheles chides him for his fastidiousness, and directly after,
Faust sees an image which presages the death of Gretchen, but is
willing to be distracted.) Faust is repulsed by the sexual advances of
the woman when he learns she is corrupt inside, vermin infested,
dead. Yet, as the apparition of Gretchen reminds us, death and
corruption are the lot of the sexually active but powerless woman in
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nineteenth century Europe. Ouida gives the red mouse a voice, and
uses it to refer to spiritual corruption with the sexually awakened
woman, but also to implicate the male desire which creates, and
then rejects that corruption as a commodity. The gypsy who seduces
Folle-Farine’s mother explains his sexual desire for her as the need
to destroy her purity: "She looked so white and so cold; and they all
called her a saint. What could a man do but kill thatV (III: 171).
In this way, Ouida calls attention not only to the plight of Gretchen,
but to Faust’s culpability, referring to the seduction of the woman as
murder.
This world revolves around capital, which Arslan needs, and
upon overhearing this stated in one of his many soliloquies, Folle-
Farine hits upon a plan to get it for him. Volum e three opens with
this plan; Folle-Farine will take some sequins she has to Prince
Sartorian, an art fancier and collector she thinks will buy them.
Once again, she risks vulnerability by complicating the existing
economy between herself, Arslan, and her grandfather by
introducing a new contributor. The moment Sartorian appears, his
likeness to the red mouse is evident, "a small and feeble man, with
keen and humorous eyes, and an elfin face, delicate in its form,
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malicious in its meaning" (111:28). Like Hades, this diminutive
M ephistopheles offers his beautiful guest food; unlike Persephone,
she is bright enough not to take it:
’I never took a crust out of charity.’
’But when a man, old and ugly, asks a
woman that is young and beautiful, on which side
lie (sic) the charity then?’ . . . She was sharply
hungered . . . but he besought her in vain. . .
[He asked] ’How shall you bind me to keep
bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner
from his cave of snakes, unless you break bread
with me, and so compel my faith?’ (39).
Eating, of course, is a directly physical penetration, analogous to and
often foreshadowing sexual penetration of the body (e.g., Hardy’s
Tess and her strawberries). Sartorian’s religio-legal language recalls
both the Faustian contract and various myths of female self-sacrifice.
W hen Sartorian next tries to give her jewelry, offering the more
subtle bondage of patronage (golden chains) instead of direct
penetration, she responds " ’If I think your bread would soil my lips,
is it likely I should think to touch your treasure with my hands and
still have them clean?’" (41). Even though we move from the
openings of the body to its periphery, Folle-Farine recognizes the
danger, and a moment later, asks him in startled recognition, " ’Are
you the Red M ouse?’" Folle-Farine has an intuitive understanding
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that to take anything from him that is not an even exchange is to
render herself open to his influence; her refusal to eat is a refusal to
let the mouse enter her lips. She is already more vulnerable than
she knows; he has given her a great deal of money for the sequins
that were financially worthless. H ere again her ignorance is partial
protection, just as Arslan’s ignorance of her patronage saves his
pride, and she is able to run away from his house unviolated.
Unfortunately, Folle-Farine’s sense of the indignity of
receiving gifts does not prepare her for the horror with which Arslan
greets her offer of gold: "If I were mean enough to take the worth
of a crust from you, I should no more be worthy of the very name of
man. It is for the man to give to the woman. . . . Have I seem ed to
you a creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put
such shame upon me?" (111:57). Understanding the light in which he
would view the other gifts she has given him, she casts away the
gold and wanders all night with "the sense of some great guilt" (63)
and her grandfather guesses she has been at a "witches sabbath"
(62), which, given her communication with Sartorian, is apt.
The stability of this economy is again undermined when
Folle-Farine discovers that her grandfather has died leaving her
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nothing, and that she is homeless. Arslan drops by to say farewell,
apologizes that he cannot love her, and compounds the injury by
thrusting gold into the bosom of her dress as a parting gift. When
she realizes what he has done, she wishes he had killed her instead:
"The sight of the gold stung her like a snake. Gold!— such wage as
men flung to the painted harlots . . .The horror of the humiliation
filled her with loathing of herself' (III: 126-7). She is "violated" by
Arslan’s gift at the precise time that she is most economically
vulnerable. Having no idea what to do next, she decides to follow
him to Paris to return his gold and be near him. Once again, Folle-
Farine is unwillingly placed in the inferior position in the patronage
relationship; the gift of gold is a robbery of her power. In fact, this
gold itself renders her vulnerable: she is found travelling with it and
arrested as a thief. The gold is stolen from her, never to be
recovered, and she is thrown into prison, where, in a striking scene,
she loses her sanity. Already sick with fever, she lies in the prison
cell at night when a dying, insane, drunken male tramp is thrown in
with her:
She saw the looming, massive shadow of an
immense form . . . nature, instinct, youth, sex,
sickness, exhaustion all conquered her, and broke
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her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable
loathsomeness of such association; she sprang to
the grated aperture . . . and bruised her chest and
arms against it . . . shriek after shriek pealing from
her lips. (165)
No one comes, of course, (perhaps because, as Hardy writes, no one
does,) and they are so close together that he clutches at her and
strikes her in his delirium, singing and detailing "his lustful
triumphs." Among these are references to Folle-Farine’s mother.
The narrative cuts off at this point; it resumes when the prison door
opens, finding Folle-Farine mad and her father dead, "For Folle-
Farine had entered at length into her father’s kingdom" (171).
The references here are multiple. The father is a gypsy
tramp; he is also the devil, with his "red eyes." If Folle-Farine is a
reluctant witch at a Sabbat, she is also the sacrificial victim, once
again described in terms of spectacle; although no one directly
watches them, they are described as a gazelle and lion, caged
together in a Roman circus entertainment. The gold, which for a
man or a "corrupt" woman, would m ean power, here acts as a literal
curse to conjure up the persecution of the devil. The metaphor of
incestuous rape runs throughout the scene, as does the reference to
Gretchen’s imprisonment and madness during the Walpurgisnacht
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(in the only house near the prison, a bridal dance is being given
which drowns out Folle-Farine’s screams). The price for the
Faustian consumption of experiences is paid by the commodity itself,
when that commodity resists its status. Given that her father had
originally wished to sell her as a child-dancer and prostitute, her
entry into her "father’s kingdom" as sexual victim and sadistic
"spectacle" is telling.
Like Persephone, the other rape victim to whom she refers
continually in her delirium, she has been given a tainted gift, which
propels her into a role created for her by the desires of others.
Also like Persephone, she remains in hell until the Spring, when her
reason returns. She is released to continue toward Paris, and when
she collapses on the roadside, she awakens under her own picture,
the first of the Red Mouse series, in Sartorian’s house. The process
of objectification which she has undergone is so nearly completed
that she awakens unable to distinguish herself from the painting, or
Sartorian from the painted red mouse. W hen she awakens again,
she is screaming that the red mouse is claiming her soul from
Thanatos.
324
It is her love for Arslan that saves her in these critical
moments, because of the power of that love to make her self-less,
that is, to destroy the self which is being drawn into the realm of
exchange by the forces which operate to turn her into a commodity.
When she is initially in Sartorian’s house, she is saved from possible
imprisonment and rape by the force of her self-sacrifice; when he
points out that, with his help, Arslan will leave his poverty and
forget all about her, she responds that her happiness doesn’t matter.
In his surprise, he is distracted sufficiently that she is able to run
away from the house. Awakening in his house after her collapse,
she feels threatened, but when she sees the picture "The Red Mouse
had no power over her, because of her great love" (111:193). Even
Sartorian recognizes his limitations. On one of the many occasions
that she successfully resists "this voice of M ephistopheles— which
tempted her but for the sheer pleasure of straining this strength to
see if it would break . . . of alluring this soul to see if it would fall"
(96) she escapes him, leaving him musing "The Red M ouse does
not dwell in that soul as yet" (111:99).
To what extent it dwells in the reader’s soul is another
question. Throughout the novel, the reader has been in the position
of Voyeur, first when, as a child, Folle-Farine is presented to us
stripped for beating, then when we see her through Arslan’s clinical
eyes, and finally through Sartorian’s, as an object of sadistic and
aesthetic appreciation. In this regard, the interest of the novel, like
that of Richardson’s Pamela or Clarissa, is driven by the anticipation
of her violation; unlike Richardson’s rapist, Sartorian prolongs the
foreplay deliberately: "he desired to tame and beguile her, and to
see her slowly drawn into the subtle sweetness of the powers of
gold; and to enjoy the yielding of each moral weakness one by one,
as the southern boy slowly pulls limb from limb, wing from wing, of
the cicala (sic)" (111:216). Yet it is the reader who, however intense
her or his pity for Folle-Farine, draws the most pleasure from this
erotic vivisection, and reads on both dreading and anticipating the
final violation of Folle-Farine’s body and soul.
The reader is invited to participate in Sartorian’s
gamesmanship, while at no point does any human character in the
novel cast doubt on what is presented as an inevitable outcome. It
is, in fact, the Red Mouse who critiques the cynicism of the human
community, when he speaks directly in his own person, rather than
that of Sartorian. When the sun rises in the empty bedroom in
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which Folle-Farine was imprisoned, the Red Mouse in the painting
holds a conversation with the sun in which he states that "Love is
stronger than I." The sun asks if Eros is not always the Red
M ouse’s pander, and the Mouse replies "Anteros only." In a rare bit
of outright feminism, Ouida blames men for the negative assessment
of woman’s nature; when the Sun responds " ’And yet I have heard
that it is your boast that into every female soul you enter at birth,
and dwell there until death’" the response of the R ed Mouse is
" ’That boast is not mine; it is man’s’" (111:221). This apparent
challenge to what looked like the inevitable conclusion functions
both to bolster the reader’s sense of suspense (perhaps Folle-Farine
will escape Sartorian, perhaps Arslan will recognize her value and
come to love her) and to foreshadow the actual ending; like
Clarissa, she will not be spared, but like Faust, she will be saved in
spite of all by the power of a love that is eternally and uniquely
feminine in its absolute self-abnegation. In fact, Folle-Farine’s self-
abnegation is her identity; paradoxically, the Red Mouse cannot
enter because her subjectivity is so entirely negated by the time her
body is sexually violated that there is nothing there to penetrate.
When Sartorian asks her " ’You know that . . . you are nameless and
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bastard because you are of a proscribed people, who are aliens alike
in every land?’" she simply responds, "I am Folle-Farine; yes" (210),
asserting her identity as a non-subject. She retains this identity as
she retains her closure, even as Sartorian’s mistress "her lips kept
their silence to the last. They were so strong, they were so mute,"
that in dying "her eyes had a look of blindness; her lips were locked
close together" until she approaches Thanatos, when her prayer is to
die before she is "weak or mad" and opens her lips to speak, risking
that Arslan might find out the debt he owes her.
The evocation of the capitalist economy as both a system and
a place which is antagonistic to female purity runs throughout the
novel. Folle-Farine is surrounded by men who understand that gold
is power, and who see her as a commodity worth a certain amount
of gold. Her struggle is to remain outside the realm of exchange.
Ouida largely agrees with traditional Victorian middle class beliefs:
love, feminine chastity, "race" and art must remain outside of the
commodity consumer market, "unpurchasable." Folle-Farine poses
the question: how can a woman without race, without genius, and
without power remain outside the public realm of exchange when
she is constructed as a commodity by the only power that exists in
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her world: the power of capital? Arslan would happily sell himself,
as his maleness gives him the right to do without censure; it is his
art that keeps him outside the realm o f the purchasable, and it is
this genius for which Folle-Farine substitutes the market-price of her
price-less chastity. When the child Arslan hears an itinerant
preacher tell the story of Midas as a warning to the spirit of the
times, Arslan challenges him with the statement that gold is a
greater god than the preacher’s: " ’Gold must be power always . . .
And without power what is life?’" The preacher knows, however,
that Arslan "will not give his life for gold . . . For there is that within
him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it if he would"
(84). Y et even if he could, Arslan would not be contaminated by
the sale of his life or art, although he would be if he accepted gifts
without offering recompense. Since he is a male, the public realm
of exchange is his rightful place, and his subjectivity remains intact
while he sells that which belongs to him. A woman, however, does
not own a commodity that she may sell; she is the commodity, and
consequently cannot sell her services without bringing herself
completely within the realm of exchange, where she is consequently
degraded. As a woman, Folle-Farine should remain within the
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private, domestic realm, where exchange is based on the intangibles
of emotion and blood relation; since she is denied that in her family,
her only hope is to set up a kinship (marital) relation with Arslan
through romantic love. This too is denied.
Both Arslan and Sartorian constantly offer her gifts, most
frequently of gold, and it is to relieve herself of the taint of his gold
that she follows Arslan to Paris, alternately described as "the hell of
the Christians" and as a more pagan underworld into which
Persephone is drawn, never to be fully ransomed back again. But
most consistently of all, Paris is defined as the ultimate marketplace.
Accosted by a brothel-keeper who extends an apparently kind
hospitality, Folle-Farine insists that she must move on to Paris: "The
old woman laughed roughly. ’Oh ho! the red apple must go to
Paris. No other market grand enough! Is that it?’" (Ill: 147). She
is told that there are only two trades in Paris, "to buy souls and to
sell them" (111:249). Paris as the place in which Sartorian envisions
Folle-Farine’s transformation into commodified spectacle merges
with the vision of "Hell" as a place which is traditionally beyond
both the body and the marketplace. The Faust story, in placing the
price-less soul within the realm of economic exchange, collapses the
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boundaries between the religious and secular. The city setting, by
the mid-nineteenth century a familiar trope for both extreme
economic contradictions and corruption, becomes a space which
Folle Farine traverses, in frantic wanderings as Arslan lies dying, in
a quest which transforms her from a melodramatic victim to a tragic
hero:
[H]er bloodless face had the horror in it that Greek
sculptors gave to the faces of those whom a
relentless destiny pursued . . . She went on through
the sulphurous yellow glare, and the poisonous
steam of these human styes, shuddering from the
hands that grasped, the voices that wooed her, the
looks that ravished her, the laughs that mocked her.
It was the hell of the Christians; it was a city at
midnight. (Ill: 309)
Paradoxically, it is her acceptance that "all the gods are dead" and
her decision to sell her body that deprives hell of its power over her
and removes her from the marketplace, in its specific geography of
the city, into the domestic non-space of the Prince’s palace.
Because she accepts that gold is the "one God" of the Christians
(III: 310) she offers herself up as an economic sacrifice for Arslan,
thus becoming the vehicle by which the antagonistic spheres of the
sacred and profane intersect. Religion is sacred, outside the realms
of both sex and exchange. Whereas the Faust story debases religion
331
in its blending of the two, Folle Farine’s substitution of a narrative
of sacrifice for one of sale transforms Sartorian’s "sensualist’s
palace" into a temple and its and her "innermost recesses" into
holies of holies.
As Schroeder points out, his indebtedness to her leaves Folle-
Farine, in her death, more powerful than the living Arslan.
Although her gift indeed places her in the superior position to
Arslan, it is paradoxically even more powerful because
unacknowledged. The acknowledgement would place it in the
public realm, back into the realm of the social and commercial
exchange. Should Arslan find out, she should accrue a certain
amount of socially acknowledged power over him. Once socially
acknowledged, that power becomes capital, with an exact monetary
value which can be repaid and spent again, i.e., interpreted in
different ways. Curiously, however, that power would be Folle-
Farine’s undoing; should she accrue that power, it would place her
in the subject position, and her subjectivity would be the object of
the Prince’s purchase and violation. It would also vitiate the
priceless value of her silent suffering, bringing Folle-Farine’s
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sacrifice into the realm of the merely commercial. Again, it is in
her abjection that she is invulnerable.
The actual "climax" of the seduction plot, Folle-Farine’s loss
of chastity, takes place off-stage, marked by a chapter consisting of a
dramatically set-off single page containing the continued dialogue of
the Red Mouse and the Sun, which both explains what has
happened to Folle-Farine and evaluates its results. The Sun
congratulates the Mouse on his victory, but the M ouse answers
" ’Nay, not so. For the soul is still closed against me; and the soul
still is pure." (111:318). Within the year, both Arslan and Sartorian’s
mistress are famous; "One day the man whom the nations at last had
crowned, saw the woman whom it was a tyrant’s pleasure to place
beside him now and then, in the public ways . . . ’So soon?’ he
murmured . . . H e had his heart’s desire. H e was great. H e only
smiled to think-all women were alike" (III: 320). Arslan has, in
fact, misread everything. His blindness is all the more culpable
because of his role as seer, truth teller— artist. If he is not capable
of seeing Folle-Farine for what she is, rather than for what he and
others want her to represent, then the "terrible Truth" that his
paintings supposedly represent is at best a partial, cynical truth, at
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worst an outright lie-an d in any case a mere reflection of his (and
our) desires. The analogy is clear: Folle-Farine, as she is, not as
she appears, is the Christ; the much feted Arslan is Barrabas.
Lest we harbor confusion about the state of Folle-Farine’s
sou l-or body— the last chapter spells it out for us. She returns to
the gods sketched out in the granary and falls down dead at their
feet "free, even in base bondage; pure, even though every hand had
cast defilement . . . incorrupt, amidst corruption;— for love’s sake.
The Red M ouse sat without, and was afraid, and said: ’To the end
she hath escaped me.’" (111:328). And to the end she has escaped
her readers, who are denied any account of erotic surrender to
Sartorian, which is what the novel appeared to be building toward.
The Red Mouse never enters her perpetually closed lips: "Thanatos,
in answer, laid his hand upon her lips, and sealed them . . . mute for
evermore" (327), and the final "violation" of her body, by reapers
who strip her corpse and "dragged her naked body to the air, and
thrust it down there, into its nameless grave" (111:331) is less
evocative of eroticism than horror. Like Faust, Folle-Farine’s body
is given to the devils and her "immortal part" goes to the gods.
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Since the readers are left with the disposal of the former, there is
little doubt with whom we are aligned.
Folle-Farine’s identity as waste material, what Kristeva calls
the abject, makes possible her invulnerability. Kristeva notes that
the revulsion caused by waste materials, what we reject and throw
away, particularly from the body, exists not merely because they
remind us of "the other side of the border" (3), death which defines
and forever encroaches on our lives, but because it signifies the
nullity of identity, the seed of death within us which we cannot
"reject" and which will one day consume us and replace identity:
The corpse, seen without God and outside of
science, is the utmost of abjection . . . It is
something rejected from which one does not part,
from which one does not protect oneself as from an
object. . . . It is thus not lack of cleanliness or
health but what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect borders, positions, rules.
( The Powers o f Horror 4)
Kristeva’s observation yields interesting results when applied to
Folle-Farine. Folle-Farine is "always already" thrown away, the
already rejected product of a grotesque, because illicit, coupling.
Because death is therefore not a boundary set against her, but is
itself integral to her identity, she is invulnerable to boundaries so
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long as her anti-identity as abject is not threatened with desire. (As
when she wakens from a nightmare that the red mouse is claiming
her away from Thanatos.) If the red mouse represents the seed of
the abject, of revulsion in every object of desire, of death in life, her
imperviousness to it rests in her non-recognition of desire. Her
upbringing reinforces her "outsideness"; she is defined by the
villagers as death, she is supernatural, she is the plague. As she
remarks of her relationship with these villagers in retrospect, " ’If I
had loved them, and they me, I might have become a liar, and have
thieved, and have let men kiss m e’" (III: 311), equating sex with
other forms of illicit exchange.
Death has no power to define her so long as her life has no
meaning, as demonstrated in her casual offer to Arslan to kill
herself if he would rather sketch her dead than alive. Because the
mill-dust is "valueless," she is able, consistently, to set no price on
herself. Sartorian’s temptation of her is often based on the attempt
to change her identity:
W ell— be Folle-Farine still. Why not? But let
Folle-Farine no longer be a beggar, an outcast, a
leper, a thing attainted, proscribed, and for ever
suspected, but let it mean on the ear of every man
that hears it the name of the most famous, most
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imperious . . . woman of her time . . . homeless,
tribeless, nationless, though you stand there now,
Folle-Farine. (Ill: 211)
Y et the name Folle-Farine "meant that she was a thing utterly
useless, absolutely worthless; the very refuse of the winnowings of
the flail of fate" (I: 3). Her ability for self-sacrifice is based on her
abject identity; she is already "dead." Deciding to sell herself to
Sartorian, she reasons, "For her— what could it matter— a thing baser
than the dust,— whether the feet of men trampled her in scorn a little
more, a little less" (III: 317). Sartorian attempts to reconstruct her
identity within the realm of the living by reinterpreting the "waste
material" of Folle-Farine as something of value, an object of desire
rather than rejection, thus subjecting her, as a living subjectivity
motivated by the rejection of death, to what Kristeva calls order-the
social and economic laws of patriarchy in which women are objects
of exchange.
Because Folle-Farine is largely denied a human subjectivity,
the reader is asked to have pity for her rather than sympathy; the
reader is invited to align her or himself with the other educated
adults in the novel who are able to "read" Folle-Farine, both
character and novel, with the full appreciation of the social and
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narrative complexities which she lacks for her own situation. Those
characters are Arslan, Sartorian and the Red Mouse. The two
principal genres of the novel, melodramatic seduction story and the
sermonizing social satire, laden with parable and analogy, are
antagonistic. The melodrama is heavily invested in traditional social
practice; the heroine clings to her physical chastity like a life raft,
and when it goes, however blameless she is, she must die to retain
the reader’s favor. It will not bear overt irony, which would both
question the rules by which melodrama is played and distance the
reader and protagonist from the immediacy of physical and
emotional suffering through the mediation of an intellectual
commentary on its dubious worth and/or necessity. The social
satire, on the other hand, is heavily invested in irony, cynical about
traditional social practice and relies on emotional distance from the
events described in the plot, often through the invocation of the
author and reader’s sense of shared intellectual superiority to the
protagonists. Folle-Farine "suffers dumbly" entirely in the realm of
melodrama; her pain is real and immediate, and despite her status
as outsider, she is subject to a very traditional fate. Sartorian, who
intellectualizes even his pleasures and surveys Folle-Farine’s
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suffering with humorous cynicism, aligns himself with the decadents.
It is his voice combined with the authorial voice, which invokes the
non-traditional moral code that Sartorian lacks, which combine to
create social satire. The reader is shuttled between three levels: in
the consciousness of Folle-Farine, there is never any ironic
awareness, only pain; in that of Sartorian or Arslan, we see the
anguish of a specific melodrama in the larger context of an
implacable social aesthetic which demands that pain for its greater
pleasure; in the "authorial" consciousness we are called upon to
understand that tragedy lies in the choice of the reader to
participate in an aesthetic which requires that this be so. It is the
reader-consumer who, in her or his relentless demand, requires the
subjugation of a speaking subjectivity to the mute object-commodity.
On one of the rare occasions when Folle-Farine speaks from her
lived experience to answer the goading of Sartorian, and challenges
him to do the same, Sartorian immediately disregards the substance
of her response, transforming her pain into aesthetic appeal:
’D o I know? [the pain of poverty]’ her voice . . .
rang loud . . . ’D o you? The empty dish . . . the
mud floors, with the rats fighting to get first at your
bed, the bitter black months . . . whose holy days
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are feasted by fresh diseases. D o / know? D o youT
H e did not answer her; he was absorbed in
his study of her face; he was thinking how she
would look in Paris in some theatre’s spectacle of
Egypt, with anclets of dull gold and a cymar of
dead white, and behind her a sea of palms and a
red and sullen sky. . . . H e watched her with a
musing smile, a dreamy calm content; all this
tempest of her scorn . . .all this whirlwind of her
passion and her suffering, seem ed but to beguile
him more . . . ’She would be a great creature to
show to the world,’ he thought. (207-213)
Her pain is transformed for his own aesthetic pleasure and for the
pleasure of display, the conspicuous consumption of a valuable
object made more valuable by its capacity for displaying anguish. It
is not incidental that the content of her disregarded message is what
he calls "unlovely things": i.e., her experiences of the poverty and
disease which are the hidden face of nineteenth-century commodity
capitalism. The unlovely things make possible the "loveliness" he
appreciates, which is based not merely on her "natural" beauty, but
on her powerlessness. She is a "chained whirlwind" because she is in
his monetary debt, and her physical strength contrasts against his
frailty to underscore the power that gold gives him, to buy Arslan’s
paintings of her and to transform her into the visual representation
of his desires. As he tells her in Paris, "gold" has "a million eyes"
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(258) to transform her into the object of his gaze. Whereas the
appeal of her beauty is "natural," the sadistic appeal of her pain is a
cultivated taste, and has less to do with sexuality than a commercial
sensuality wherein the pleasure is to be had in the exertion of power
over nature. Sartorian tells her frankly, " ’I do not speak of passion.
I use no amorous phrase. I am old and ill-favoured; and I know
that, anyway, you will for ever hate me. But the rage of the desert
beast is more beautiful than the weak submission of the animal
timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to chain. . . .
Name your price" (111:263).
Sartorian desires her, though, precisely because she is not for
sale. Melodrama demands that she die or at least be raped rather
than submit to the economy of an exchange; it is in this sense that
melodrama is a characteristically feminine genre, in that, like the
virtuous Victorian wife, even as it presents itself as a commodity (in
popular novels and plays), it claims to be outside the realm of the
commercial. It makes that claim resting on the back of capitalism,
the existence of which it requires in order to define its "separate
sphere." (Consider the archetypal melodramatic situation: the evil
landlord attempting to coerce the impoverished daughter of the
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house into a simple commercial exchange of sex for shelter.)
Tragedy, like social satire, recognizes that inexorable logic, and
demands that the character submit to it. But for tragedy, that logic
is not absolute, but conditional and therefore subject to critique.
Melodrama, as it allows no mercy for the woman once she loses the
"privileged" position of pursued victim by becoming a caught victim,
allows for no critique of the values on which it depends. Social
satire, while allowing some critique, also depends on traditional
values for much the same reasons. Tragedy sets up an alternate and
usually absolutist value system (in Folle-Farine, that of Greek tragic
myth) from which to critique the social values which result in the
character’s fall. That this value system is also, in its sources, social
and traditional, matters less here than that it serves to provide some
critical distance from the assumptions which drive the plot, thus
rendering them vulnerable to examination and questioning. (It is
also profoundly anti-critical, as it naturalizes the absolutist values
which it invokes at a level supposedly "beyond" the social, endowing
them with the legitimacy of the natural.) It is in this sense and at
this level that Folle-Farine, like Faust, is "saved"-for all the opening
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o f her body, her soul remains "closed" against the Red Mouse,
outside the realm of exchange.
The reader, on the other hand, finds herself implicated in her
acceptance of Sartorian’s assumption that as long as Folle-Farine
lives, her subjectivity can be equated with her body, which, if it can
be seen, can be bought. Folle-Farine manages to remain outside
the realm of the commodity by allowing her body to becom e a
conduit for an exchange in which she is not essentially involved. It
is telling that Arslan is the one who has been contaminated by fever
in the end; in every other scene which has hinted at violation of
Folle-Farine’s chastity, she has experienced fever and ill-health. Yet
when she gives her body to Sartorian, it is to save Arslan from his
fever, and although all who see her assume she is contaminated with
his fever, her health remains intact. Even though her body is given
in order to pay for Arslan’s life, his success, and the reader’s
pleasure, her selflessness prevents corruption; in short, while her
empty subjectivity cannot be commodified or penetrated, Sartorian
penetrates Arslan, proving that even the genius-god can be "had" by
a Barrabas who cares to make an offer, and incidentally he "has" the
reader as well. Arslan, Sartorian and the reader, voyeurs together,
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gaze upon Folle-Farine, objectifying her beauty and in so doing
implicitly consenting to the logic established by the assumption that
possession of the body, already defined as a commodity by social
practice, is tantamount to purchase of subjectivity. Once Sartorian
actually touches this beautiful object, however, we find there is
nothing there, except, perhaps, the reflection of our own desires.
Meanwhile, Folle-Farine disappears into the intersection of
melodrama and tragedy, leaving us alone with a corpse and a red
mouse, in a picture that we now understand was never really of
Folle-Farine at all.
Ouida’s conclusion is transgressive in that it undermines—
spectacularly--the equation of the woman’s body with her
subjectivity. However, it fails to rescue the surrender of physical
chastity outside of the romantic relation from its status as a fate
worse than death, and makes woman’s highest purpose self-
immolation on the altar of romantic love. In seeking to redefine
female purity and closure, Ouida does nothing to displace purity and
closure as tropes of feminine goodness, but reinscribes them beyond
the personal and political level at which the plot moves, in the
mythic and eternal level of the tragedy wherein Folle-Farine’s purity
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remains intact. Perhaps Ouida’s most telling act of revolt against a
Romanticism which turns women into aesthetic objects of inspiration
at the expense of their humanity is her rewriting of Goethe. (Oddly,
this is a credo which Ouida herself espoused, asking "who would not
give the lives of a hundred ordinary women?" to make the poet
Shelley happy for a moment.) Whereas his Gretchen is saved only
by her turning away from Faust and M ephistopheles and back
toward God, Folle-Farine remains true to her love throughout.
Whereas Gretchen is tricked into her fall, Folle-Farine makes her
own decisions and takes responsibility for them. And whereas
Gretchen’s sacrifice is incidental to Faust’s ambition, Folle-Farine’s
is integral to Arslan’s. Finally, while Faust is G oethe’s protagonist
whom the reader follows through life into death and beyond,
Arslan’s career and fate fall from importance in the novel with
Folle-Farine’s demise. Ouida takes the "dust" o f an incidental scene,
and transforms it into the vital substance of a tragedy.
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Conclusion: The Other Victorians
Examining the construction of popular, potentially "decadent"
genres allows us to see something of the attitudes that shaped
Victorians’ perceptions of gender and reading in relation to beliefs
about the body. However, as stated in the Introduction, every
history is an exercise in analysis of the culture that produces the
history as well as of the subject at hand. The workings of Victorian
metaphors of cultural production and consumption and physical and
political health are "readable" by us and important to us in part
because those attitudes are present in our culture today. Obviously,
these constructions have been bequeathed to different cultures in
different configurations and have been reshaped by varying
circumstances. My purpose here is not to give a survey of these
differences or even to discuss a single example in detail, but to
indicate a couple of broad connections with examples from my own
late twentieth century American cultural environment, and hopefully
raise some salient questions.
Victorian attitudes about genre shaped and continue to shape
the canon today. One obvious way, of course was to exclude authors
like Braddon or Broughton from consideration as canonical, thus
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allowing them to go out of print and be forgotten. This affects the
canon of Victorian literature as it is, or can, be taught today. It also
masks and perpetuates the assumptions that shaped that canon by
excluding the opportunity for critical comparison of "canonical"
Victorian works with "marginal" ones. Another, less obvious way
that Victorian attitudes continue to influence us is evidenced in our
continued distinction between "high" and "popular" forms, not only
in Victorian studies, but in contemporary culture. Even when
popular (in particular, "mass") cultural forms are accorded critical
interest, they are perceived by (generally liberal) academic critics as
having a different relationship to culture than "high" or avant-garde
forms. Often, the critical assumption is that popular forms are
rarely directly critical of the dominant ideology, and are therefore
somehow more "representative" of a commonly perceived reality—
often in a naively mimetic sense. Additionally, the habit of thinking
of popular forms as market determined commodities versus "art" as
non-market determined remains depressingly current. Finally, the
tendency to categorize popular culture according to its epic,
pedagogic function is very much with us.
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Interestingly, the assumptions of (generally conservative)
politicians and journalists mirror Victorian attitudes most closely in
their conception of "good" and "bad" popular culture.
Conceptualizing the mass public (above which the critic is always
elevated by his or her own rhetoric) as uncritically responsive to the
"moralities" set forth in popular representations, the would-be censor
distinguished between "healthy" popular culture supportive of the
dominant ideology and dangerous, "unhealthy" popular culture which
subverts the social order.
Victorian attitudes toward disease and the body have also
remained current, just as the structural association of the body of
culture and the body of the individual "consumer" continues. Just as
the archetypal "low" forms of television and print are the feminine
forms of the soap opera and the Harlequin-type romance novel
respectively, disease is still linked to the feminine, foreign,
impoverished, immoral Other. The disease which in our own era
symbolizes all the "evils" of the Other is of course AIDS (and to the
extent that the two are conflated, HIV). AIDS’s metaphorical
descent from syphilis is well documented (see Gilman, Sontag) and
has becom e a critical commonplace. To the extent that syphilis was
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associated with the feminine or feminized and racial Other, this
correlation holds. However, there are complications in this simple
identification. The perception of syphilis underwent a change in the
late nineteenth century; as it became more and more widespread, it
was stripped of some of the negative moral implications associated
with it earlier and began to share kinship with a very different
disease, tuberculosis, in its romantic associations with creativity
(Sontag 111). Additionally, syphilis was traditionally associated with
excessive, but essentially "normal" or acceptable masculine sexuality.
Although female prostitutes were blamed (and duly policed) as
vectors for the spread of disease, male syphilitic patients were not,
by the end of the Victorian period, seen so much as perverse as
indiscreet or incautious.
AIDS, however, is, despite all medical evidence to the
contrary, still seen as a disease of perversity— to some extent, a filth
disease. Despite its early identification as a largely male disease in
the United States, it is associated with a feminized grotesque body.
I refer here, not to the body of the prostitute, but to the body of the
homosexual male and the drug user, both "addicted" to "unnatural”
stimuli, both representing the "grotesque" penetration of the
(passive) male body, whether penile or hypodermic. In its
association with the anal region, with the impoverished drug user,
with the third world (in its feminized, passive relationship to the
first world powers) and with the specifically Black body, whether
American, Haitian or African, we see the same old associations with
filth, foreignness, femininity, and the (post)colonial body. The
notion of Africa as the "cradle of AIDS" and the rumor, at one time
given some currency, that the virus first developed in a simian
species and then, through African intermediaries, was passed to
"degenerates" such as male homosexuals, has nineteenth-century
Darwinist roots too painfully obvious to require detailed explication.
At one point, it was argued that heterosexual American women
would not get AIDS because of the toughness of the vagina, and
that African women’s AIDS could be explained in terms of
degenerate vaginal conditions resulting from the prevalence of
venereal diseases there (Abelove 3-5).
The white male homosexual, then, is both aligned with
femininity and Blackness on the margin of society. Interestingly, the
gay male AIDS victim, as presented to us by the media, is never the
hypermasculine gay stereotype still common today, but always the
feminized stereotype of the "sissy." Part of this, of course, stems
from the presentation of the AIDS patient’s emaciated fragility as
the outward sign of disease, a fragility and languor associated with
femininity. Still, the media’s presentation of the gay male PW A is
always presented as readable within the stereotype of gay man as
passive, fem inine-penetrated by disease. The fear of this "filth
disease" infiltrating the upper (white, moral, heterosexual) classes,
should it becom e "endemic" (hence restrictions on immigration and
the granting of visas) is, precisely, the descendent of cholera anxiety.
The alignment of AIDS to the urban, and the economic relationship
of the third and first world mirror the nineteenth century
relationship of cholera to urban industrialism and the colonial to the
imperial nations. Finally, the rhetoric of "plague" that surrounds
AIDS not only, as Sontag points out, identifies it as the "punishment
from God" that syphilis (and, indeed cholera) were supposed, in
their times, to be, but also with the rapid devastation of the Black
or bubonic plague— or cholera- instead of the slow onset and
extended progress of the AIDS pathologies. Like Black plague,
cholera killed quickly, within hours or days. AIDS kills over several
years, like certain kinds of cancers or systemic infections. Yet the
rhetoric of early journalistic and political discourse on AIDS was of
the Plague-catastrophic, even Apocalyptic, at direct variance with
the protracted process we know living with AIDS to be. This
catastrophic Plague association-which in fact refers to the disease’s
capacity for rapid spread rather than rapid progress within the
individual body— allows for a much less measured response. In
short, a catastrophic m odel allows for a militaristic solution, just as
we declare martial law in the wake of natural catastrophe, and has
led to the "war" metaphor that Sontag so deplores. We survived the
most dangerous of the early impulses— the rounding up of PWAs and
their incarceration as epidemiological criminals or the "mark of the
beast" indicated in Buckley’s famous proposal to tattoo all AIDS
patients across the forehead and buttocks or even Dr. Richard
Restak’s seductive formulation that "AJDS is not about civil rights,
political power of ’alternative lifestyles.’ It’s a disease, a true
plague," thus eliding the undeniable fact that a disease is inevitably
manifested in a person, placing it precisely in the realm of the civil
and political. Yet the impulse to subsume the individual beneath
the sign of disease, and to make that individual and disease Other is
still overwhelming.
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In the official (and laudable) effort to avoid stigmatizing the
PWA, television programming has avoided overtly identifying AIDS
with criminality; that is, the AIDS patient is not formally identified
as criminal, or even necessarily nonwhite or homosexual. However,
the persistent use of emaciated "drug-addict types," especially Blacks,
as criminal characters makes the connection fairly clear.
Additionally, "reality" police shows, by their nature restricted to the
depiction of criminals, are one setting in which PWAs and
PW H IV+ s are often shown as poor, homosexual, drug-users, often
of color. Although it is understandable that these depictions would
be negative, the status of these shows as a primary source of popular
images of persons living with AIDS or HIV and as "reality" offsets
the sentimental "movie of the week" presentations which have lost
the attention of audiences in recent years anyway. The counter
image that remains is that of the celebrity with AIDS, and those
who have gone public while still alive— and therefore able to hold
the attention of the public over time--have tended to be African
American (e.g. Michael Jordan).
This "othering" trend can be traced throughout the
development of the rhetoric of AIDS through the 1980’s. In mid-
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1983, the two major mainstream news magazines of the United
States, Time and Newsweek, both did cover stories on AIDS.
Newsweek did theirs first (April) as an in-depth, informative piece.
It is a fair, reasonably comprehensive presentation of the history of
the research on AIDS to date, which makes two things quite clear:
first, that AIDS is defined primarily as an epidem ic-that is, it is
defined by its demographics rather than its frighteningly multiple
pathologies— and secondly, that the troubling presence of Haitians as
one of the four dominant groups not marked either by illicit
activities (drug use, homosexuality) or predisposition to disease
(hemophilia) must be resolved either by postulating that the disease
evolves out of Blackness or that Haitians can somehow be aligned
with one of the other, degenerate groups. The first point is made by
the emergence of hepatitis B as a possible model for AIDS, not
because of similarity in symptoms, but because it "strikes the same
groups" (Seligmann, et al. 76). The second point is illustrated in the
inset of "Destine," a Haitian patient representing his "group." H e is
portrayed reading a "book of Christian prayers and homilies" waiting
at a clinic for his interferon: "He looks up slowly and scowls when
two affectedly effeminate men walk in" (77). This distancing of the
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Haitian from the other groups is both underscored and undercut in
the column to the right of the inset: "Because the Haitian victims
are neither hemophiliacs nor-apparently-hom osexuals or
intravenous drug users" they have baffled researchers, and "One
Miami researcher has suggested that the water supply in Haiti
should be scrutinized" (77), The hedge on "apparently" suggests that
they may still be assimilable to some other group; the alterative to
illicit penetration as cause of infection is water contamination, with
its fecal overtones, a la cholera.
Tim e’ s spread comes in April, and shows the strain of
needing to present some ground left uncovered by Newsweek.
Perhaps consequently, this story offers the history of AIDS research
in the context of an exciting detective story, with AIDS as the
protean supercriminal and the CDC as the heroes in the white hats.
"Hunting For the Hidden Killers: Disease Detectives Face a Never
Ending Quest" fits easily into police-show stereotypes about the
dregs of society falling prey to the even dreggier murderer. "Asking
questions. Hunting for clues. Testing theories. Hitting blind
alleys", these gumshoes are undaunted in their "Faustian ambition"
to stop infectious diseases (Isaacson, et al. 50-51). This "Faustian
ambition has been foiled by the mobility of American society, the
influx of tourists and immigrants (illegal as well as legal), changes in
technology that create new, inviting environments for organisms and
most notably, by casual intimacies encourages by the sexual
revolution" (51). This statement is immediately followed by statistics
on genital herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea and AIDS. Infectious disease
comes to mean venereal disease, attributable to "most notably" the
sexual revolution, but of course, foreigners and "mobility," which
involves, as a subset, divorce. This is followed by a rather startling
statement by the director of the CDC that "the average AIDS victim
has had 60 different sexual partners in the past twelve months" (51).
After having taken the usual pains, early in the article, to cover the
diversity of AIDS victims, at least in the standard four groups, to
reduce this diversity to a single "average AIDS victim" is shocking.
And what is "average" here? The sentence specifies that the victim
is "average," but then provides a specific number— could it be that
the intention is actually to cite an average number of partners in a
group of people with sexual habits that may range from the
monogamous to the promiscuous instead of implying that the
average PWA is to be defined by promiscuity? The reader will
never know. Having dropped this statistical bomb, the article
quickly shifts grounds; the focus is not to be on patients, but on the
detectives, the "spiritual descendants of Dr. John Snow (1813-58),
who tracked the incidence of cholera during the London epidemic of
1831" (51). Although the article mentions many other once
epidemic and now controlled or controllable diseases, two that are
repeatedly mentioned are "Lassa fever and Ebola virus, two
maladies that cause severe internal bleeding and are native to
Africa"(52), as examples of "the world’s most lethal microbes" (52).
This is balanced by an inset article on the same page, discussing an
unrelated researcher’s experiences with diseases in Ethiopia and
with cholera specifically on Truk, a Pacific island. The only
connection of this inset to the rest of the article is thematic; its title
is "Sleuthing is the Fun." In short, the entire article links disease to
Africa, to blackness and to sexual promiscuity; the authors do not
neglect to point out that "Recent investigations show that the
disease is probably transmitted in Haiti . . . by homosexuality or by
dirty needles, and that Haitians have no more propensity for the
disease than victims in the U.S." (54), a gesture that absolves
Haitian PWAs of racial predisposition by identifying them as lying
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deviants. The authors also emphasize that the first director of the
AIDS task force was "Dr. Curran, a venereal disease specialist" (54),
emphasizing the sexually transmitted nature of the disease. The
article leaves us on a note of hope; our "adversary" will be
controlled, "through the heroic struggle of medical sleuths" (55).
The article is followed by an article on panic in the gay culture,
reinforcing that AIDS is really still the "gay plague."
Examining the popular presentation of AIDS, Sander Gilman
observes that through the mid-eighties "the male black homosexual
[was] still the archetype of the individual suffering from AIDS" even
in the context of an official effort to stress the spread of the disease
across categories (269). In short, AIDS occurs outside the "normal"
nuclear family. Cultural critic Henry Abelove, surveying materials
on AIDS in the newspapers as well as "preventive" informational
literature given out by the Yale-New Haven Hospital, argues
compellingly that this literature is not at all about preventing death;
its purpose is to "reassert and reinforce both racism and
conventional, regulative positions about sex and the family" (4).
The "family values" debate surrounding the policing of
popular culture, particularly film and television, today reflects the
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fear of the "sex and violence" associated with metaphors of AIDS.
The association of violence with filth seem s to be becoming more
commonplace; a recent example came to hand in the USC Trojan
Family, a glossy, upbeat public relations magazine published by the
University of Southern California for its alumni and financial
supporters, which excerpts brief items of faculty commentary that
have appeared in major newspapers as insets, unsupported by any
extended text, and illustrated by the magazine’s choice of graphic.
These items offer a useful index both of what the editors think their
generally upper and upper middle class, college educated American
audience will find interesting and pertinent, and of what that same
audience will know well enough to require no contextualization. In
the most recent issue (Winter 1994), there were nine insets, two of
which related to violence in popular culture. One ran in part as
follows: "Business policy expert Ian Mitroff says the government
should restrict violent movies as ’social pollution.’" ("Warning..." 18).
Although the excerpt contains no reference to any specific film, the
illustration chosen by the magazine is a caricature of the face of
Sylvester Stallone over crossbones with the headline "Warning: Toxic
Levels of Sly Ahead." The gesture of assimilating the dangers of
violence in representation to the minds of the American viewer to
the model of pollution and toxicity, with their references to physical
health is particularly intriguing when placed against the voluntary
"consumption" of this toxin by the view er-it is not the involuntary
poisoning associated with pollution in the environment or with the
hazards of passive smoking, with which it is identified later in the
quote. As a self-pollution, it ranks with active smoking (and, of
course, Victorian self-pollution— masturbation). But most
interestingly, it is Stallone as the late eighties Rambo that is
portrayed here, not a more recent violent figure. Rambo, wallowing
in the muck of the Vietnamese jungle, becomes the type of bloody
violence, rather than, say, the antiseptic (because inhuman)
Term inator-a more currently popular choice. The caricature itself is
of a feminized Rambo; deprived of the hypermasculine upper body,
the head is portrayed with long curly hair and puffy red (open) lips.
The face is curiously emaciated (the sign of AIDS), allowing it to
substitute for the deathshead it replaces in the skull and crossbones
motif. The background is blood red at the top, diluting to a
feminine pink in the lower portion of the image. The
hypermasculine violence of the eighties nationalist military hero
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whose violence was directed at the Asian Other is now feminized in
its dangerousness to the domestic social body.
The violence we fear is the violence of the Other— the
criminal, the lower class, who is always dirty, monstrous, ugly, and
often aligned with the drug-world. Although most of the violence in
this nation takes place between family members, family violence is
only represented (when it is represented at all) as lower class and as
bizarre. Sexual relationships among these criminal lower classes are
violent and often murderous. If the man doesn’t murder the
woman, she may well castrate him (although medicine was able to
undo Lorena Bobbitt’s handiwork). Middle class males who stray
outside the family, on the other hand, are pursued by their one night
stands (Fatal Attraction), their amorous babysitters (The Babysitter),
their Long Island Lolitas. Less violent sexual transgressions are
implied in the representation of nontraditional family structures.
Alternative families, even as sanitized as television sitcom character
Murphy Brown’s single parenthood, are terrifying because they imply
the possibility of the "opening up" of the family structure, and even
the Other’s entry into the nuclear family in some capacity other than
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the traditional first-world/third-world relationship between
employing American household and foreign nanny.
The persistent pairing of sex and violence in discourses on
censorship of popular culture continues its relatively long tradition
without much scrutiny and with ever increasing vigor. Most oddly,
this sex and violence is formulated in terms of an attack on the
American nuclear family, another construction which continues in its
perceived importance without much scrutiny. The recent
Republican presidential campaign, which attempted to counter
attacks on the failing economy under the Reagan-Bush
administration, is exemplary in its linking of sex, violence, the Other
and popular culture as the enemy of the American Family. Dan
Quayle’s infamous "Murphy Brown" speech is, of course, a key
example. Entitled "Restoring Basic Values: Strengthening the
Family," this speech purported to comment on the L.A. riots. Yet
the first several sentences comment on the Vice-President’s visit to
Japan, hopes for improved economic relations between the U.S. and
its major economic rival, and the Japanese perception, as Quayle
describes it, that the L.A. riots are an example of how the U.S.’s
heterogenous population weakens it. Thus, the riots are cast in
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terms of the U.S. perceived weakness in the eyes of the major rival
and economic bugbear of the American people, in terms of external
threat to America, rather than as an internal problem. Quayle
quickly dismisses the notion of "diversity" being the cause of the
riots (although the implication stands that some kinds of diversity
are better than others, and the audience posited in the speech
excludes the "underclass,"), and then explains the "real" cause of the
riots: "I believe the lawless social anarchy we saw is directly related
to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and the
social order in too many areas of our society" (518). Which areas
are quickly made apparent; Quayle only refers to Blacks, although
he starts by saying "The poor you have always with you, Scripture
tells us" (518). H e then explains that he is going to discuss
differences between "black poverty" (518) between the 1960’s and
the 80’s. The first statistic he shares is as follows "In 1967, 68
percent of black families were headed by married couples. In 1991,
only 48 percent of black families were headed by both a husband
and wife" (518). In this, as in the three other statistics he gives,
there is no direct reference to poverty, and the only indirect
reference is the third statistic, referring to unemployment rates
among black males. Blackness, in short, has simply become poverty.
Two of the four statistics refer to marital status and the birth of
children to unmarried mothers. These statistics’ exact correlation
with poverty is not explained, but, we find later, this is unimportant
because the poverty of Blacks is not actually economic: "The
intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much today is
predominantly a poverty of values" (518). These values not only
form the nuclear family, but the nuclear family in turn fosters these
values (never mind that most violence in this country actually occurs
between family members.) "When families fail," Quayle explains,
" . . . civilization falls apart" (519). Making clear that this family is
specifically a patriarchal one, he continues, "A welfare check is not a
husband. The state is not a father. . . . And for those concerned
about children growing up in poverty, we should know this: marriage
is probably the best anti-poverty program of all" (519).
The attack on Murphy Brown as a "prime time TV" character
who "mock{s} the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone,
and calling it just another ’lifestyle choice’" (519) is linked to a hazy
but rather frightening prescription: "marriage is a moral issue that
requires cultural consensus and the use of social sanctions" (519).
("Lifestyle choice" is also a frequently used code for gay and lesbian
relationships, an important association given Clinton’s gay-rights
platform and republican reaction against it.) These social sanctions
begin, evidently, by censoring popular culture, perceived as peda- or
even demagogic. Pat Buchanan’s equally infamous speech at the
1992 Republican convention extends these connections, calling the
democratic convention, with its pro-choice, pro-social program
platform, "the greatest single exhibition of political cross-dressing in
American political history" (712). Furthering the identification of
homosexuality with the threat to the nuclear, patriarchal family,
Buchanan associates Clinton’s commitment to "unrestricted,
unrestricted abortion" with the " ’most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket
in history’" (713), an association ludicrously implied to be somehow
causal, although one might consider logically consider gays and
lesbians the groups generally least ready to utilize abortion access,
"unrestricted, unrestricted" or otherwise. Again, in making his stand
on what he perceives as the five important points of Bush’s
campaign, the link is direct. Those five items are, freedom of choice
in religious education, the denial of gay and lesbian couples’ right to
be recognized as married, the "right-to-life" (here restricted to its
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anti-abortion implications), the denial of "our wives and daughters
and sisters" the right to serve in combat (notice that "we" are males),
and "the right of small towns and communities to control the raw
sewage o f pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture"
(italics mine 714). On a less individual scale, at that same
convention, extra-marital sex was equated with political
irresponsibility, and, by extension, with the fear of infection; large
banners asked "If Hillary can’t trust him [Clinton], how can we?"
(Fineman and M cDaniel 30).
Buchanan ends with a parable about the L.A. riots also:
"The troopers came up the street, M-16s at the ready, and the mob
threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated because it had met
the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed
by moral courage" (715). A scriptural reference praises the "love"
shown by the National Guardsmen (identified as "boys," though
many women served in the same capacity) for their fellow "man."
What is perhaps most frightening here is the simultaneous insistence
on the necessity of "force" and "M-16s," and the suppression of that
image under the labels of "love" and "moral courage." The
declaration of what amounted to martial law in Los Angeles was a
366
social tragedy, an admission of defeat, of the breakdown of the
social contract in a free democratic society. Although arguably
necessary, it is hardly a cause for celebration, and still less a case for
emulation. To suggest that we use "force" to restrict "the raw
sewage" of sexual representation and the pursuit by individuals of a
lifestyle consonant with their own sexualities is beyond irresponsible,
it is an incitement to murder— murder already evident in gay-bashing
and the recent spate of shootings of doctors willing to provide
abortions.
In the era of AIDS, it is the blood and semen of the Other
that are frightening, and violence or sex render the "clean and
proper" self vulnerable to an illicit passivity in which the Other
penetrates it, impregnating it with the monstrous viral Otherness of
the se lf s own death. It is most interesting that the most vocal
proponents of censorship always take on the evils of sex and
violence, rarely the problems of racism, sexism and so forth— those
are generally the purviews of liberal cultural critics whose agenda is
change, but not necessarily restriction. Generally, when "violence" is
the topic, it is specifically the image of bodily fluids that is at issue;
in short, one can show a gun firing, presumably into som eone’s
body, but it is not considered truly "violent" until one shows the
body itself, bleeding. It is in the depiction of the ruptured,
grotesque body that the offense is contained. Yet, surely the
violence is in the shooting, not the bleeding, If we consider the
trend toward "less violent" shows on television, we see that it is
generally the "guts and gore" that has diminished. The violence—
often an implied act of murder-remains. But it is a "clean" murder
in which the open and staring eyes, or the unnatural position of the
body (often feet are the only part visible, or a hand, relaxed and
dangling) are the signs indicating death. These signs supersede the
flowing blood and/or bloody bullet-hole that generally indicated
television death by violence throughout the seventies and eighties,
and which illustrated the grotesqueness of the violated body far
more directly. Thus violence and sex in representation is linked
with the grotesque body and its dangerous fluids, in short, AIDS. At
any rate, to the extent that popular culture is criticized, it is for its
opposition or demagogic threat to "family values," which are, as seen
above, encoded not only in the rhetoric of moral inviolability, but of
national identity.
368
Television, and to some extent film violence is generally
attacked on a couple of different bases. The first is the exposure of
children to violence, premised on the notion that children can be
"infected" by television violence, reproducing it on their own bodies
and the bodies of others. The second is the notion of violence as a
drug or unhealthy stimulus to which adults become addicted, or at
least habituated, with unspecified, but negative effects. The third is
that the linkage of sex and violence leads to sexual violence against
women in our culture. I would like to explore the concern with
television violence in its connection with children (which raises more
concerns about children’s access than film), that has led to serious
"scientific" investigation since the 1950’s (Clark 174) and has been a
topic of recurring debate. This concern has long led to scrutiny of
programming by community groups and network executives, but now
we are seeing additional and sustained efforts to regulate the
representation of violence much more closely; as a result, a bill is
currently before the Congress to impose a rating system, and
possibly more drastic sanctions, on television programming, and the
industry is developing a technology which will enable television
owners to selectively program out certain shows from being
369
accessible on their sets ("Technology and Television" 295). I would
argue that the emphasis on the child, as a genderless, classless,
raceless cultural icon of innocence and vulnerability, is masking
much more complex and less innocent motives.
The Children’s Television Violence Protection Act of 1993
requires that violent shows be given a warning label that specifies
"that the program may contain violence or unsafe gun practices"
("Bill Summaries" 298), a warning which plays on the cliched
connection between guns and male sexual organs, shooting and sex.
The rhetoric of media violence is, in fact, rife with metaphors of
disease, sex, and the grotesque body. In the interest of brevity, I
shall give only a few examples, taken from speeches before the U.S.
Congress as reported in the December 1993 Congressional Digest,
under the assumption that such speeches represent attitudes of at
least a significant minority of the population. Senator Ernest F.
Hollings notes that "The National Institute of Mental Health and
the Centers for Disease Control conclude that violence on television
breeds violent behavior" (italics mine 300) and proposes a bill that
"treats violence like indecency" (301). Doctor Robert E. Gould,
President of the National Coalition on Violence, flatly states
370
"Violence is contagious and infectious"(303). H e continues to
explain that this "epidemic" is a danger to the "health of all who are
expose to the poisonous doses of violence that TV sends into our
homes. . . . An antidote to this poison" would be Legislation
analogous to that restricting pollution and drug and alcohol
"ingestion":
and so, when the air in our living rooms is polluted
by programs glorifying and sanitizing violence and
promoting it . . . we must act to protect those most
vulnerable, the children, from being infected by the
virus of violence which they will only spread. This
may be deemed as one of the most important
public health measures our government can
institute . . . Adults who may need their violence fix
can still obtain it at other hours. (306)
Representation of violence is repeatedly described as and made
indistinguishable from substances that actually enter the body-*
smoke, air pollution, drugs, alcohol, poison, and, of course, viruses.
The argument is not merely that representation of violence (and
sex) is like these substances, but that it is one of them. The anti
regulation arguments indicate a recognition of the basis of the
discussion as the body’s continuity with its environment. The Jack
Valenti, President of the M otion Picture Association of America,
cautions that even though "mayhem and madness . . .with a
371
malignant fidelity, infests our streets" (301), we must realize that
"human edges are blurred . . . [and] ’Nature never draws a line that
isn’t smudged’" (301).
The invocation of the CDC, of "health" legislation and
"pollution control," represents an alarming change from earlier
arguments, which were basically about morals, aesthetics, and
psychology-in short, about ideas, which are protected under the first
amendment. Discussion of the influence of representation is now
shifting to a medico-legal construct of infection. This move, from
the notion of representation as intangible free speech or free idea to
the tangible virus, replicates Victorian constructions of "dangerous"
or diseased popular culture--with all its emphasis on its ability to
incite imitation in "the vulnerable" and places popular culture in the
role of diseased body under the medicolegal jurisdiction o f its critics.
It also elides the notion of any freedom of decision in the
consumer/victim of popular culture; the use of children to stand in
for all persons influenced by popular culture uses the legal concept
of minority and the cultural belief in children as non-autonomous
tabulae rasae to construct the consumer of representation as literally
"mindless," a body to reproduce or act out the virus of
representation unmediated by subjectivity. It is no coincidence that
Clinton uses a frequently repeated cliche in his recommendation
that the media should be "deglamorizing mindless sex and violence"
(in Kurtz A4). The President is not, of course, suggesting that
intelligently planned sex and violence would be more acceptable
than what is currently shown, or is not what is, in fact, currently
shown. Representation of sex and violence in our culture is seen as
dangerous because of the perceived "mindlessness" of its consumer-
imitators, who are, as Congressional Digest points out,
"disproportionately drawn from racial and ethnic minorities"
("Understanding and Preventing Violence" 296). However, the
construction of representation as a substance controllable under laws
governing the public health, of ideas as drugs or poisons, paves the
way for a legalized censorship far more appalling in its implications
than the proposed quarantine of AIDS victims.
This metaphorical conflation of violent representation with
disease is not unique to the present era, and the current anti
violence campaign may have as much to do with media deregulation
in the 1980’s as it does with any other cause. But such concerns and
metaphors acquire a special force in a popular culture
373
supersaturated with the discourse on AIDS. Most problematic is the
distinction between "good" (epic) representations of violence (on the
news, reality-cop shows, etc.) and "bad" violence:
’If it bleeds, it leads’ goes the cynics’ view of
television news. But now stations that start off
newscasts with generous doses of gore and mayhem
are being held responsible for their role in feeding
Americans a steady diet of television violence. . . .
Sen. Paul Simon . . . told the senate . . . ’[V iolen ce
on the news does not glamorize violence.
Entertainment violence glamorizes violence.’ . . .
’News violence is a tough call’ . . . says Edward
Donnerstein . . . ’You don’t want to sanitize the
world, there are horrors out there.’ (LA Times rpt.
as inset in Clark 182)
The world "out there," that is, outside the home/family, is
unsanitary, but representation must be careful to warn of that
infection without reproducing it within the home. Whereas the
middle class woman, as wife, represented the avenue of infection in
the Victorian British family, here the American family is invaded
through the children, especially o f the lower, ethnically or racially
marginal classes. Through those "diseased" individuals, violence
"infects" the upper classes, as those children grow up to be criminals
preying on society. When the LA Riots are tied in with sex and
violence on entertainment television, it is clear that the threat to
374
society is constituted in the rhetoric as specifically through the
dangerous to the "mindless" lower classes. Even in the statistics
presented on violence in society as support for the danger of TV
violence, it is clear that researchers are concerned with adult
criminal violence, mostly perpetrated by (and, although this is not
stressed, upon) minorities. Yet, in most literature on violence, the
gender and class neutral icon of the ubiquitously threatened "child"
cloaks these racist and classist concerns.
My concern here is not to refute researchers’ connections
between television violence and viewers’ violent acts, or to oppose
the adoption of a rating system. My concern is simply to show how
the rhetoric of AIDS and of censorship in popular culture coincide,
and reflect attitudes about popular culture and the body which are
rooted in Victorian concerns about gender, class, and national (here
racial/ethnic) identity. The stereotype of the naive consumer of a
diseased popular culture is a non-innocent historical construction
based on the need to maintain boundaries which, supposedly, a
liberal democratic society is committed to eradicating. The fears
aroused by a disease perceived as AIDS has been perceived seem to
justify superseding the critical process and long term commitment to
375
civil liberty in favor or short term commitments to survival. That is
precisely why this rhetoric is so effective in arguing for censorship
and other Constitutional violations, and precisely why it demands
our most sedulous attention and skeptical analysis. We are the
Other Victorians, and we must recognize that the cultural work
begun in Victorian discourses of popular culture must be critically
attended to, lest it conclude in limitation of freedoms which
Victorian critics may themselves have found intolerable.
376
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