LABYRINTHS of DECEIT Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

LABYRINTHS OF DECEIT Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES 44 LABYRINTHS OF DECEIT Culture, Modernity and Identity in the Nineteenth Century Richard J. Walker LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2007 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2007 Richard J. Walker The right of Richard J. Walker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-0-85323-849-2 cased Typeset by XL Publishing Services, Tiverton Printed and bound in the European Union by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction: Tracing the fragments of modernity 1 Part I (De)Generating doubles: duality and the split personality in the prose writing of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde Introduction 29 1 Speaking and answering in the character of another: James Hogg’s private memoirs 49 2 He, I say – I cannot say, I: Robert Louis Stevenson’s strange case 68 3 The psychopathology of everyday narcissism: Oscar Wilde’s picture 91 Part II The stripping of the halo: religion and identity in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson, James ‘B. V.’ Thomson and Gerard Manley Hopkins Introduction 119 4 A life of death: Alfred Tennyson’s ‘St Simeon Stylites’ 124 5 But what am I? Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam 137 6 All is vanity and nothingness: James ‘B. V.’ Thomson’s haunted city 155 7 Dead letters: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ 175 vi labyrinths of deceit Part III Infected ecstasy: addiction and modernity in the work of Thomas De Quincey, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and Bram Stoker Introduction 193 8 A change in physical economy: Thomas De Quincey’s confession 203 9 Coming like ghosts to trouble joy: Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’ 226 10 Like honey to the throat but poison to the blood: Christina Rossetti’s addictive market 243 11 The blood is the life: Bram Stoker’s infected capital 256 Conclusion: Ghost-script 284 Notes 293 Bibliography 323 Index 331 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Tony Lopez, Dr Robert Gee and Professor Geoff Ward, who supported this project in its early stages. Thanks also to all my friends at the University of Plymouth where it had its origins. I must also acknowledge the support and friendship of colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire, particularly the office staff in the Department of Cultural Studies, and Dr Daniel Lamont, Karen Adams, Dr Alizon Brunning and Dr Jason Lee. The English Literary Studies cohort of 1999–2002 had to put up with me using some of the ideas in this book in their seminars. The R. L. Stevenson conferences at Stirling and Gargnano made appreciative noises when I presented some of the work as papers. The chapter on Thomas De Quincey first appeared in an abbreviated form in S. Brewster et al. (eds.), Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Thanks to Robin Bloxsidge at Liverpool University Press for his patience. This book is dedicated to Tony and Celia Walker whose help, support and encouragement have been incomparable. Introduction Tracing the fragments of modernity All Truth is change.1 All that is solid melts into air.2 this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.3 What is it like to be in a state of crisis? To be more specific what is it like to be in a state of crisis in the nineteenth century? The aim of this book is to explore such a condition and to ask, as a significant sub- clause: what is it like to be modern in the nineteenth century? This interaction between crisis and modernity is not a randomly chosen connection. Isobel Armstrong, in her radical rethinking of the political and subversive elements of Victorian poetry, states that ‘Victorian modernism, as it emerges in its poetics, describes itself as belonging to a condition of crisis which has emerged directly from economic and cultural change.’4 Armstrong’s positioning of Victorian culture, in particular its poetics, in direct correlation with a cultural and socio-economic topography effectively conflates the two questions posited above; nineteenth-century modernity as it appears in cultural representation is intrinsically equated with crisis. In Armstrong’s definition modernism in terms of poetics doesn’t get engendered by crisis or act as a response to it, it is explicitly affiliated with it; the definition there- fore identifies a significant act of belonging – to engage with the strategies and devices of Victorian modernism is to be in crisis. In his study of the Gothic, The Literature of Terror, David Punter argues that the genre arises from a period that is affiliated with Armstrong’s sense of the ‘economic and cultural’ changes which instigate crisis; in his investigation of the effect of these changes on culture Punter suggests that 2 labyrinths of deceit The period which saw the birth of the Gothic novel was that in which the early forces of industrialization were producing vast changes in the ways people lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by enclosure of land and by the labour demands of urban-centred industry. The stability of an, at least theoretically, long-accepted social structure was being dissolved amid the pressure of new types of work and new social roles … In the most general terms, it was of course changes of this kind that occasioned so much romantic writing.5 Punter refers of course to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the decades conventionally associated with the main impact of the Industrial Revolution upon the British landscape and on British social structures, and also the period most closely associated with British Romanticism; indeed Armstrong defines the Victorians as ‘post-Romantic’ and ‘post-industrial’, suggesting that the changes assessed by Punter are already in operation by the time of Victorian modernism.6 Nonetheless, certain connections can be established between the two analyses in that both identify a state of crisis emerging out of a radically reconfigured social and economic climate. At the heart of this change is urbanization. Indeed the metropolis becomes a central motif within, if not the explicit location for, the condition of crisis alluded to by Armstrong. William Wordsworth, in a passage from The Prelude of 1805, also cited by Punter, compares an urban fair to the early nineteenth- century city experience: Oh, blank confusion! and a type not false Of what the mighty city is itself To all except a Straggler here and there – To the whole swarm of its inhabitants – An undistinguishable world to men, The slaves unrespited of low pursuits Living amid the same perpetual flow Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning, and no end.7 Punter describes the passage as ‘Wordsworth’s lament … for stability, for a social system in which people knew their place’; in effect what introduction 3 starts out as a description rapidly turns into a critique of the urban condition and the city experience itself.8 The poem posits the fair as a microcosmic and metonymic representation of the macrocosmic city. The experience as depicted by Wordsworth is more complex than a mere lament for past stability and social structures, however, antici- pating, even literally providing a prelude, for many of the issues that will be significant in this book. The predominant feature of the urban condition is its chaotic nature, what Wordsworth refers to as its ‘confusion’; this feature is intensified in the state of flux implicit in the ‘perpetual flow of trivial objects’ which branches out into the anarchy of ‘no law, no meaning, and no end’ where the city-dweller cannot read the plethora of signs in an ‘undistinguishable world’. Within this topography strange things start to happen to identity and the indi- vidual: the inhabitants of the city become a ‘swarm’, further dehumanizing the mass, and ultimately they are ‘melted and reduced / To one identity’. Again flux and change are evoked as the city induces a state of disidentity for its dwellers with Wordsworth using a vocabulary that anticipates many of the discussions of modernity in the nineteenth century.9 At its core the experience is contradictory for the city generates a consciousness of the strange and the alien, yet also, through the creation of a dehumanized mass, induces uniformity; as Stallybrass and White put it, ‘[i]n the city … differences proliferate and at the same time melt into one identity’.10 In his reading of modernity Marshall Berman suggests that the notions of crisis and the representations of uncontrollable flux rise from a fundamental sense of division in nineteenth-century life; he argues that the public shares the feeling of living in a revolutionary age, an age that generates explosive upheavals in every dimension of personal, social and political life. At the same time, the nineteenth-century modern public can remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritu- ally, in worlds that are not modern at all. From this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously, the ideas of modernization and modernism emerge and unfold.11 For Berman at the root of nineteenth-century modernity there exists a basic sense of inner conflict, one that takes place between an oscil- lating consciousness of the old and the new.

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