Outlines and Apologias: Literary Authority, Intertextual Trauma, and the Structure of Victorian and Edwardian Sage Autobiography

OUTLINES AND APOLOGIAS: LITERARY AUTHORITY, INTERTEXTUAL TRAUMA, AND THE STRUCTURE OF VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN SAGE AUTOBIOGRAPHY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Chene R. Heady, M.F.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2004 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor David Riede, Adviser Professor Clare Simmons ____________________________________ Professor Sebastian Knowles Adviser Department of English ABSTRACT The Victorian and Edwardian sages were authors who worked, following the decline of organized religion among the educated classes in Britain, to restore a sense of unitary meaning to the world. As George Landow observes, the sage’s system is, by its very nature as a philosophy that attempts to explain the entire world, unprovable, and the sage’s authority is thus derived from his ability to interpret the world vividly, plausibly, and as a whole. Since the sage’s authority cannot be established by conventional means, it ultimately derives, as Susan Morgan notes, from the sage’s “lived experience.” This dissertation analyzes the implications of sage rhetoric for the genre of autobiography. The sage autobiographer must show that every aspect of his life serves as proof of his theories and, being a public figure, he invariably has experienced incidents— primarily lost literary controversies and poor textual reception—that seem to refute his theories. The premise of this dissertation is that these literary disasters constitute “intertextual traumas” that disrupt the sage’s literary authority and textual identity, that serve as signs that the sage seemingly cannot interpret. Sage autobiographies, I argue, are elaborately intertextual attempts to narrate, and thus to interpret and to control, such incidents of intertextual trauma. Unlike most autobiographers, the sage references and interprets preexisting biographies of himself and other rival accounts of his life because to do otherwise would be to permanently cede his authority to interpret the world. ii Dedicated to my wife Emily iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, David Riede, for his faith in this project, his willingness to believe in its premise, and for his extensive help conceptualizing how it might work. I thank Sebastian Knowles for his extensive help with the Edwardian sections of this dissertation, for enjoying and caring about the Edwardians, and for many pleasant conversations. I am grateful to Clare Simmons for helping me keep this dissertation, which could easily have flown into the stratospheric abstractions of genre criticism, historically grounded. I would like to thank Leigh Gilmore for her help in constructing the theoretical frame on which this dissertation sits. I would like to thank the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for the use of its incomparable archive of materials related to H. G. Wells. I would also like to thank Wheaton College of Wheaton, Illinois for the use of the Marion Wade Center’s archive of materials related to G. K. Chesterton and the English Department of the Ohio State University for giving me the fellowship that permitted my archival work in Illinois. I extend many thanks to my friends who have given me a place to stay on my various trips to Columbus over the last three years, particularly Andrew Mitchell, David Pettegrew, and Michael Lohre. Above all, I am grateful to my wife, Emily Walker Heady, for her support, patience, wide knowledge of things Victorian, and many other virtues, all of which have been put to the test by my attempt to compose this dissertation. iv VITA September 20, 1972 …………………....Born – Dearborn, Michigan 1994 ……………………………………B.A. Religious Studies, Madonna University 1995 – 1998 ……………………………M.F.A. Student The Ohio State University 1995 – 2001 ……………………………Graduate Teaching Associate The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Research Publication 1. Chene Heady, “Heraldry and Red Hats: Linguistic Skepticism and Chesterton’s Revision of Ruskinian Medievalism.” Prose Studies 23:2 (2000): 131-43. 2. Chene Heady, “‘Accidents of Political Life’: Satire and Edwardian Anti-Colonial Politics in The Voyage Out.” Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds: Selected Papers from the Tenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. Eds. Jessica Berman and Jane Goldman. New York: Pace UP, 2001. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ..............................................................................................................................ii Dedication ………………………………………………………………………………..iii Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………….....iv Vita ………………………………………………………………………………………..v Chapters: 1. Introduction ...……………………………………………………………………..1 2. Carlyle Versus the Devil and All Men: ………………………………………….44 Why Everyone Hated the Reminiscences 3. “Above the Influences of Chance and Necessity”: …………………………….128 Newman’s Development as Self and Sage in his Apologia and Autobiographical Writings 4. “Some Lingering Vestige of My Lover-Shadow”: …………………………….216 H. G. Wells and the Trauma of Textual Reception 5. “As Any Detective Story Should End”: ………………………………………..299 How Chesterton’s Autobiography Saves the Sage Discourse from Shavianism, Modernism, and Murder 6. Conclusion ……………………..………………………………………………399 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...420 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION I. “The Burthen of Atlas”: The Nature and Aims of Sage Autobiography In the opening paragraphs of the seventh (“Dissection”) chapter of his Experiment in Autobiography, H. G. Wells writes: If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read autobiography. If I did not take an immense interest in life, though the medium of myself, I should not have embarked upon this analysis of Memories and records . The reader’s role, the prospect of publication, is kept in view chiefly to steady and control these operations, by the pervading sense of a critical observer. The egoism is unavoidable. I am being my own rabbit because I find no other specimen so convenient for dissection. Our own lives are all the practical material we have for the scientific study of living; the rest is hearsay. The main theme of this book has been exposed in the Introductory Chapter and recalled at intervals. Essentially this autobiography treats of the steady expansion of the interests and activities of a brain, emerging from what I have called a narrow-scope way of living, to a broader and broader outlook and a consequent larger reach of motive. I move from a backyard to Cosmopolis; from Atlas House [where his mother was a servant] to the burthen of Atlas [his attempt to create a World State] (347-48). As so often happens, here the blunt and introspective Wells states explicitly the rhetorical dynamics that other sage figures carefully leave implicit. In these two paragraphs, Wells sketches the basic goals of the autobiography of a Victorian or Edwardian sage. The sage, as George Landow among many others has noted, possesses as his distinguishing trait an all-encompassing philosophical system through which he interprets 1 the universe (cf. Landow Elegant 45). For Wells, that philosophy was summed up in his dream of a World State, a politically and philosophically unified world where everyone would function in order and everything would possess a definable meaning. As I shall discuss at more length later, for Wells the overarching meaning of the disunified and often apparently meaningless present world consists in its potential to be transformed into the World State. Wells describes his autobiography in terms that would seem to better befit a treatise. The book is openly designed to illustrate his historical philosophy of a disorganized, provincial world that is slowly evolving into a unified and progressive World State, and the book is equally explicit about its use of Wells’s own life as the evidence in question. It is not surprising, then, that the autobiographies of sages such as Wells are accused, as Wells readily grants, of egoism of narcissism. The external world as other and foreign is obliterated; the author’s life and contacts (and, not-so-subtly, the implied reader’s life and contacts) serve as simple functions of the author’s understanding. This much, perhaps, could have been guessed by anyone familiar with the Victorian and Edwardian sages without the necessity of reading their autobiographies, though Wells’s openness about these dynamics is surprising. John Holloway identifies the effort to offer a totalistic meaning for the universe as the sage’s distinguishing characteristic, while George Landow identifies the idea that the sages have discovered the truth through their own lived experience as one of the prominent hallmarks of the discourse (Holloway 11; Landow “Aggressive” 39). The sage autobiography, then, could well be expected to be a place where the sage endeavors to show that his own life and works, like the rest of the world, serve to illustrate his philosophy. But Wells’s summary 2 of his work also identifies the prime sticking point for his autobiography and those of other sages, which is perhaps less expected and which has escaped critical notice. The sage’s “lived experience,” at least from the moment of his advent as an author, is not simply private property, but is also embodied in the written “records” of both the sage’s own works and others’ writings about him. A unified and coherent “analysis,” as Wells calls it, of these records in terms of sage’s philosophy is not always easy, and

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