Romances of Modern Enchantment at the British Fin De Siècle

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Romances of Modern Enchantment at the British Fin de Siècle

Melanie Christine East

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

Romances of Modern Enchantment at the British Fin de Siècle

Melanie East

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between romance and Max Weber’s narrative of the disenchantment of modern life in which scientific calculation has mastered mystery. I argue that specific British novels at the fin de siècle deploy romance to resist the rationalization of experience and create new forms of enchantment. I re-read texts by major authors that include tropes of romance when the mode was synonymous with the Romance Revival of authors like Rider Haggard and R.L.

Stevenson, but disavowed by proponents of realism and emerging modernism. Unless it appears to deconstruct itself, romance from this period continues to be viewed by critics as nostalgic. The novels I call “romances of modern enchantment” employ metafictional elements to subvert narrow understandings of romance as a conservative mode, instead drawing on areas of uncertainty in modern life as sources for romance.

In Chapter One I examine discourses of play in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881). Hardy challenges romance’s association of play with childishness by exploring the gothic castle, the theatre, the telegraph, and the casino, demonstrating how these sites become material for romance. Chapter

Two reads G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) as a metaphysical detective novel that combines Edwardian detection with the medieval dream vision to show how

mystery might be sustained within modern romance. Chapter Three contends that Joseph Conrad and

Ford Madox Ford’s collaborative novel, Romance (1903), re-works the “boy’s adventure” story to challenge ideologies of imperial masculinity by drawing on Catholicism and literary impressionism as subversive discourses. Finally, Chapter Four attends to romance in Ford’s post-war tetralogy

Parade’s End (1924-28), arguing that these novels challenge collective efforts to memorialize the dead and contain trauma by employing hagiographical tropes to depict the inconveniently returned soldier.

My project demonstrates that both fin-de-siècle and current critical perceptions of romance ignore possibilities for the mode as an experimental literary strategy that explores uncertainty without rationalizing, controlling, or regulating it. Re-reading romance in these novels broadens our understanding of the connection between literary form and the disenchantment narrative, and reveals ways in which romance might enchant modern life.

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Acknowledgments

This thesis was generously supported by University of Toronto Fellowships and a Doctoral

Completion Award, as well as by Ontario Graduate Scholarships including The Toronto Star OGS at the Faculty of Arts and Science, and the Kathleen Coburn Award.

I owe my supervisory committee an enormous debt of gratitude. This project would never have come to fruition without the careful and patient work that each member put into reading it over many years. My supervisor, Christine Bolus-Reichert, inspired my project in the first place, and she has been a tireless supporter. Her perceptive comments, questions, and even her listening ear kept me going whenever the project seemed to be at another dead end. Mark Knight’s discerning suggestions and his willingness to come on board my committee helped steer the project toward success. His kind, professional guidance is a model I hope one day to emulate. Audrey Jaffe’s brilliant and meticulous feedback still continues to amaze me. The thesis would be inferior without her keen, critical eye.

Thanks also to my examining committee for engaging so generously with my project. Dr.

Katherine Baxter’s knowledgeable report has led me to see aspects of the thesis through fresh eyes, and her penetrating questions before and during the exam will continue to incite further thought.

Thanks also to Hao Li and Cannon Schmitt for their insightful questions and feedback.

Academia can be very isolating, but I have picked up several cherished friends along the way.

Laurel Ryan, Kailin Wright, Jenny O’Kell, and Marci Prescott-Brown helped me navigate graduate school and have cheered me on since the beginning. They are all fierce, brilliant women and I am proud to call them my friends. Julia Grandison’s patient, empathetic support also carried me through this program. I relied on her in myriad ways, and owe so much of this thesis to her generous

friendship. Christine Choi has been an exceptional ally: she has walked this journey beside me and, to the end, has been the most faithful encourager in all the ways she knows.

I am profoundly grateful to have such a large support network outside academia. Melanie C.,

Alex Y., Erika F., Charla W., Denise L. and many others have prayed me through, and have stuck with me when I was too busy to be a friend. I was already a mother when I began writing this thesis, so it is also imperative to acknowledge that I could not have finished the project without a small army. Several good women selflessly cared for my children so that I could go the coffee shop and work. Thank you to all of the young women who helped out whenever I called: Julia B., Tracy L.,

Aimee, R., Julia R., and Chelsey G. Miraculously, my oldest and dearest friend, Lyndsay M., also became our caregiver for an extended time: I’m so thankful for that period in our friendship. Lastly, I have been wildly blessed to have Donna L. care for my children (and me) for the last few years. She continues to be an indescribable gift.

I would like to thank my family for just some of the ways their presence in my life has contributed to this thesis. My grandmother, Shirley, introduced me to “Anne-with-an-E” and the world of stories. My brother, Trevor, and my sister-in-law, Jessica, randomly called with offers to babysit. My in-laws, Sue and Eric East, have done everything in their physical power to encourage and enable me. My parents, Sharon and Dieter Breitkreuz, worked hard to give me every opportunity they could. They started me down this road, and I want nothing more than to make them proud.

Above all, I have depended upon the daily support of three remarkable humans. My husband and my children deserve more gratitude than I can express here, and this project is dedicated to them. My husband, Jamie, has made continual sacrifices to help me achieve my goal; his support in every aspect of my life has meant that I could write this thesis. Finally, my children have been the constant source of joy and meaning beyond this project. Noah and Rebeckah—mommy’s “pieces” is finished.

Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents vi Introduction: Romance and Modernity in the Fin de Siècle British Novel 1 Romance Revival and the “Battle of the Books”: Romance versus Realism 8 Romance and Modernism: “Abandoned Clearings” and the “Swan Song” of Romance 13 Methodology and Critical Terms: “Romance as (Dis)-Organizing Principle” 17 Methodology and Critical Terms: Romance in the Age of Disenchantment 20 Methodology and Critical Terms: Romance and the Ethics of Enchantment 25 Overview of Chapters 31 Chapter One: A Romance of Play: Uncertainty in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean 36 Critical Reception 39 Sites of Uncertainty: Play, Sincerity, and Performance 43 Play and Gothic Sincerity 48 Sites of Uncertainty: Play and Telegraphy 54 Sites of Uncertainty: Play, Chance, and Gambling 63 Chance and Probability 65 Gambling and Morality 67 The Romance of Gambling in A Laodicean 71 The Network and Enchanted Perception 77 Chapter Two: A Romance of Order: Detection and Dream Vision in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare 82 Critical Reception 86 Limits, Order, and Enchantment 90 Detective Fiction: The Romance of Order 93 Detective Fiction: Realist Detection 97 Detective Fiction: Metaphysical Detection, Anarchism, and (Dis)order 100 Dream Vision and Detection 107 Dream Vision in The Man Who Was Thursday 113 Metaphor and Logos: Mysterious Order 117 Chapter Three: “The old thing . . . done in a way that is new”: Re-enchanting the “Boy’s Story” in Conrad and Ford’s Romance 124 Critical Reception 128 Adventure Romance: Conrad’s Conflicting Canon 132 Adventure’s Content: Masculine Codes of the Boys’ Book 134 Adventure’s Pattern: “Quickly Changing Scenes” and the Form of Experiencing 138 Literary Impressionism 142 An Impressionist Chronicle of Youth 146 Impressionist Bewilderment: Candlelit Shadows and Uncertain Sight 148 Impressionist Bewilderment: The Enchantment of Catholicism 154 Catholicism and the Ethic of Uncertainty 159

Impressionist Vision and the Emplotment of Romance 162 Chapter Four: Saint Christopher in the Trenches: Spiritual Romance in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End 167 Critical Reception 171 Romance, Disenchantment, and War 175 Disenchantment in Some Do Not 181 Representing Trauma: Romance and Formlessness 185 St. Christopher the Giant Mealsack: Secular Hagiography and Excess 190 Trauma and Romance in Last Post: Resurrected Christ and Returned Soldier 196 Trauma and Romance: Resistant Mourning and Return to Arcadia 201 Conclusion 208 Works Consulted 212

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Introduction: Romance and Modernity in the Fin de Siècle British

Novel

It may be that when we have tired of ransacking the centuries and of inventing new kingdoms, we shall find at our own doors the object of our quest. —T. Michael Pope, “The Matter of Romance,” 467

If we had knowledge of absolute certainty there could be no such thing as romance for us. If science held absolute sway, if we were not for ever skirting the perilous edge of the unknown, we should never be disappointed and we should never hope . . . Magnificent uncertainty is essential to the romantic atmosphere; the intellect must leave things undefined in order that imagination may define them, that the consciousness which lurks behind consciousness may hint at the wonders behind the unknown. —R. A. Scott-James, Modernism and Romance, 9

A rondeau published in the December 1897 issue of The Academy wittily characterizes the popular literary scene in England at the fin de siècle:

Romance revives! Once more we read Of bold adventure, daring deed, Of valiant knight and lady fair, Of secret hoard of treasure rare, Of hero’s pluck and villain’s greed.

From hard and long-borne fetters freed, To merry tunes its pipes are keyed; With happy laugh and jaunty air Romance revives!

Now, if an author would succeed, He writes no realistic screed, With stubborn facts and statements bare, And epigrams in bad repair, Their day is past—it is decreed Romance revives!

This facetious poem by American writer and critic Carolyn Wells captures some of the central aspects of what contemporaries in England called the New Romance, and what scholars have subsequently labeled the late-Victorian Romance Revival. From roughly the 1880s to the 1920s, various popular genres

“revived” recognizable romance conventions of the past, updating adventurous stories of quest and mystery, knights and ladies, heroes and villains.1 These tropes, which Fredric Jameson calls the “raw materials” of romance, recur in various guises across genres and periods, being resituated in exotic geographical or historical settings, or else updated in modern forms like the spy novel or detective tale.2

Wells’ rondeau draws attention not only to the popularity of New Romance and its nostalgic ethos but also to its contest with the “realistic screed.” The poem alludes to what contemporary literary critic and romancer, Andrew Lang, called the “Battle of the Books”—a literary debate in which romance and realism were positioned as foils. Even though Lang himself knew this literary contest was reductive, his

1 Studies of romance and popular genres of the fin de siècle have established this period as a discrete literary moment. Martin Hipsky’s Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain (2011) ranges from 1885-1925; Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid’s edited collection High and Low Moderns (1996) sets its parameters as 1889-1939; William J. Scheick’s The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century (1994) reads a variety of texts from the fin de siècle as romances. For two significant studies of the period, see Anna Vaninskaya, “The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: A Generic Excursus” (2008) and Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle (1999). Vaninskaya describes the romance revival as a “period phenomenon” (57) in which the “economics of publishing, the material methods of book production and distribution” changed (58). She argues, “In the respectable literary world, romance writers were among the first to take advantage of the dramatically expanding popular fiction market . . . The late-Victorian romance in this sense was not a generic entity but a commercial one, a commodity in an increasingly fragmented mass market” (59). Nicholas Daly dates his study from 1880- 1914 and similarly describes the Romance Revival as “the literary current that began to overwhelm the domestic novel in the 1880s . . . initially most closely associated with R.L. Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard . . . ‘Romance,’ though, was also the genre in which readers would have placed the work of Anthony Hope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, George Du Maurier and their many rivals for the attention of the popular reading public” (9). 2 Jameson describes “raw materials” as the “magical” categories that have to be renewed when romance reappears in new times and spaces (131). 3 battle trope is telling.3 Romance in this period may have “revived,” but it continued to be dismissed as a largely popular literary movement with a vexed reputation. Contemporaries lamented its cheap sensationalism and early modernists tried to distance themselves from what they saw as Victorian sentimentalism. The “happy laugh” and “jaunty air” of Wells’ revival suggest a jarring contrast to the turn-of-the-century world reflected in the works of the early modernists. For all its popularity, the

Romance Revival was attacked in some quarters as a “coarse and violent intoxicant . . . destitute of fragrance, destitute of sparkle, destitute of everything but the power to induce a crude inebriety of mind and a morbid state of the intellectual peptics” (Harris 336).

Although such strident literary debates now appear simplistic, these fin-de-siècle perceptions of popular romance shaped the aesthetic milieu in which more established authors wrote. Consequently, where elements of romance appear in the work of canonical authors of this period these elements are read as nostalgic lapses or as ironic strategies of deconstruction. Turning to romance in this moment seemed derivative, not generative. Against this historical backdrop, my thesis reconsiders the use of romance in works by authors of this period who are not typically considered “popular romancers” but saw writing romance as an opportunity for exploring modernity. In order to unsettle notions about romance and canonicity from the inside, rather than from the periphery, this project demonstrates how four major writers—Thomas Hardy, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford—experiment with what

I will call “romances of modern enchantment” and use the genre to challenge conceptions of the modern world. Although most of these authors have been classed as writers of “high” literature, they wrote metafictional romances that drew on the popular tropes and forms of their contemporaries.4 Despite the

3 In his article “Realism and Romance” (1887) Lang criticizes realism as “pap” (689) but he still acknowledges near the beginning that “Fiction is a shield with two sides . . . the study of manners and of character, on one hand; on the other, the description of adventure, the delight of romantic narrative. Now, these two aspects blend with each other so subtly and so constantly, that it really seems the extreme of perversity to shout for nothing but romance on one side, or for nothing but analysis of character and motive on the other” (684). 4 William Scheick’s introductory chapter focuses on the contest between a high and low binary in which romance was fighting for legitimacy against “high art” as “an elevated, even privileged form of imaginative expression relatively 4 perceived value of the rest of these authors’ works, the use of romance, where it occurs, has been criticized as a nostalgic fault or comedic element. The works that comprise this study—Hardy’s A

Laodicean (1881), Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), Conrad and Ford’s

Romance (1903), and Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28)—defy easy categorization, because they both draw on and disavow popular romance. These novels include recognizable materials from contemporary romance, signaling that they are in conversation with their near contemporaries. But more than this, they capture a spirit of romance that is marked by a modern ethos of indeterminacy, even when they use materials of the past. In diverse ways, these are romances about romance. By providing more nuanced readings of their experiments with romance as strategy, this project broadens the picture of aesthetic movements and literary influence at this transitional period of literary history. I will argue that these texts engage both critically and generously with popular romance to affirm the possibilities of the mode for representing life in England at the fin de siècle and the early decades of the twentieth century.

As Wells’ rondeau suggests, the Revival was primarily identifiable through its use of adventure, starkly contrasted heroes and villains, stock settings and plots, and other elements mainly found in historical romances, gothic and horror fiction, detective stories, imperial adventure tales, and religious romances. For Hardy, Chesterton, Conrad, and Ford, however, such tropes were incidental to the uncertainty of romance. The fact that uncertainty in and of itself could be a literary quality is famously suggested in John Keats’ 1817 letter to his brothers in which Keats coins the term “Negative Capability.”

In his letter, Keats praises those writers “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any inaccessible to the average person” (15). Scheick emphasizes this hierarchy by focusing on the discourse around “journalistic” art as a non-aesthetic label that some romancers took on to distinguish their popular appeal, as well as the mode’s contemporary reputation for sensationalism and childishness. Nicholas Daly has shown that the divisions we now identify between popular and “serious” writers of the period were not clear at the fin de siècle. Rather, literary culture was far more homogenous. He writes, “At the fin de siècle, writers that we now often identify as proto-modernists . . . were not perceived to belong to a separate coterie literary culture. But when we look backwards we tend to imagine a continuity between twentieth-century genre fiction . . . and that earlier popular fiction; and by the same token we tend to imagine an equivalent continuum from late Victorian aestheticism . . .to high modernism” (118). My project contributes to an understanding of this more homogenous literary culture by looking at where perceived market and subject divisions break down within the works of canonical authors themselves. 5 irritable reaching after fact & reason . . . of remaining content with half-knowledge” (“To George and

Tom Keats 21, 27 (?) December” 60). Henry James’ famous 1907 description of romance as “beautiful circuit and subterfuge” defines the mode using a similarly indefinable quality of confusion and bewilderment (“Preface to The American” 32). In 1908, literary critic R.A. Scott-James argued that romance is found in “magnificent uncertainty” (9). Together, “half-knowledge,” “subterfuge,” and

“magnificent uncertainty” suggest that romance is defined by indefiniteness.

When modern critics attempt to describe romance they often use terms like “slippery,” “protean,”

“flexible,” “fluid” and “transgressive.”5 This set of terms implies romance is a sort of shape-shifting trickster, self-conscious, disruptive, subversive, and altogether alien. For Corinne Saunders, romance is

“open-ended.” It frustrates in “its capacity to defy classification” and it is a “mixed mode” (2-3). Diane

Elam similarly notes that romance can be found in “widely divergent materials” and that it exceeds period and genre boundaries just as postmodernism does (4,12). According to Patricia Parker, furthermore, an essential characteristic of romance in various literary periods and guises is its emphasis on delay and dilation, which she also sees as a delay of certainty akin to Keats’ “half-knowledge.”6 For

Parker, romance is the narrative of a liminal time and space before the end of the quest is revealed, making it a mode that actually resists the movement towards an “end” or closure. Jean-Michel Ganteau connects Elam’s postmodernism, Parker’s dilation, and Keats’ “Negative Capability,” claiming: “The

5 See, for example: Corinne Saunders in A Companion to Romance (2004): “The pervasive nature of romance, however, also means that it is inherently slippery . . . the genre of romance is impossible adequately to define . . . Romance is a genre of extraordinary fluidity” (Saunders 1-2); Barbara Fuchs in Routledge Companion to Romance (2004): “Romance is a notoriously slippery category. Critics disagree about whether it is a genre or a mode, about its origins and history, even about what it encompasses . . . This volume charts the multiple, protean transformations of romance throughout literary history” (Fuchs 1-2); Pamela Regis in A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003): “In a genre as old, as flexible, and as ill defined as the romance novel, it is, perhaps, understandable that many critics would mistake a few texts as representative of the whole” (Regis 7); Diane Elam in Romancing the Postmodern (1992): “the romance genre transgresses the distinction of form and content which has traditionally governed genre studies” (7). 6 Parker’s study, Inescapable Romance (1979), ranges from works of the Renaissance to Keats, but she includes an epilogue on modernist poetry. Her study is significant for my definition of romance, because she traces the evolution of narrative delay as an aspect of romance across time, aligning it in later periods with uncertainty. Parker writes, for instance: “This connection between naming, identity, and closure or ending remains a persistent romance phenomenon, from the delaying of names in the narratives of Chrétien de Troyes to Keats’s preference for the noumenal over the nominal, for ‘half-knowledge’ over ‘certainty’ or ‘fact.’” (5). 6 essence of romance could thus be seen as the vehicle of excendance and as an operator of openness whose function is to resist all totalizing claims . . . romance does not seem to keep much on its hermeneutic agenda, and is content with not knowing, or at least with half knowledge” (“The Logic of

Affect” 84-85). Altogether, these qualities imply that romance is more of a strategy and disposition of uncertainty than a distinct genre. Contemporary critics are apt to note the flexibility and openness of romance as a mode, yet the novels of the Romance Revival are more typically read as conservative works that promote stability and easy closure.

At the fin de siècle, though, emphasizing uncertainty is an apt choice of material for romance.

Being content with “half-knowledge” ran counter to the ethos Max Weber captured in his famous articulation of disenchantment wherein he suggested that the world was “disenchanted” because “no mysterious, incalculable powers” were any longer at work, and one could “in principle, master everything through calculation (“The Vocation of Science” 274).”7 Weber used the term “disenchanted” in 1917 to capture the feeling that, at the turn of the century, uncertainty in any area could theoretically be erased. According to Weber, another significant factor contributing to disenchantment was the rationalization of life that recast traditional social values to correspond with a means-ends logic. If romance is the mode of otherworldliness—of religion, ghosts, fate, fantasy, mystery, and the supernatural—then a disenchanted world that no longer believes in “mysterious incalculable forces” has no space for romance, or rather, romance itself must become disenchanted. Despite a turn towards instrumental thinking, romance and fantasy—distinctly non-instrumental artistic modes—persisted. The novels in this study draw on the destabilizing effects of such indefiniteness in order to rescue and re-

7 Although Weber’s declaration comes from his lecture “Science as a Vocation” delivered in 1917, he is only naming ideas that were already in circulation. Scott-James makes a very similar declaration to Weber, linking it to the conditions for romance: “The most remarkable feature of the new era has been the progress of science and invention, and the intrusion of the scientific and positive spirit into every field of modern thought, till it has even plundered the sanctuary of imagination and religious belief. It has encouraged materialism, and the tacit assumption that everything can or ought to be explained in terms of the law of cause and effect just as things can be explained in chemistry or physics” (Scott-James 23-24). 7 deploy romance at a time when it often served the narrow ideological constructs of British rationality in popular subgenres like detection and imperial adventure. If disenchantment entails the assumption that we could know everything, a romance of enchantment works hard to divest us of that totalizing assumption by attempting to represent or invoke the ineffable. In the texts I examine, the modern “raw materials” of romance are cultural and artistic phenomena that are under threat of being rationalized like romance itself: chance, mystery, impressionism, and trauma, to name a few, were areas that science and other instrumental discourses sought to contain, but which might find their destabilizing expression in romance.

I propose this new “family” of texts as a framework for viewing romance as a flexible mode found in works of different aesthetic and philosophical orientations rather than as a set of conventions that is either reified or deconstructed in this period.8 Reading these books together, my project hones in on a unique cross-section of romance at the turn of the century, transcending genre studies that focus on popular niches of the Romance Revival, to re-consider what romance looked like, how it was used, and by whom.9 The criticism leveled at romance texts written by “serious” authors reflects deeply ingrained perceptions of romance as frivolous and inadequate as a vehicle for depicting modernity. In particular, identifying romance as a set of generic conventions leads to critical disregard for those texts that draw on such conventions, because they appear formulaic. As Katherine Isobel Baxter has argued: “Structuralist

8 In her introduction to The English Romance in Time (2004), Helen Cooper argues that the romance is best thought of as a family of texts or lineage that shares similarities, but are not identical copies of each other (8). See also: Katie Owens- Murphy “Trope Theory, Cane, and the Metaphysical Case for Genre” (2013) for a discussion of genre and groupings of texts. Owens-Murphy borrows “trope theory” from metaphysics as a way to identify specific similarities between texts that lead to new and unusual groupings without resorting to the artificial classifications of genre that presuppose Platonic universals. In particular, Owens-Murphy argues that trope theory can “produce some surprising arrangements of literary texts that do not appear, on the surface, to speak to one another . . . These groupings in turn lead to fresh readings of even the most overstudied of texts, giving us a framework for better understanding individual tropes based on shared likeness” (247). 9 Other studies of this period tend to focus on a specific genre of the popular romance. For instance, Nicholas Daly’s Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle focuses on gothic romances, Margaret Bruzelius’ Romancing the Novel: Adventure from Scott to Sebald (2007) on the adventure tradition, and Martin Hipsky’s Modernism and the Women’s Popular Romance in Britain, 1885-1925 on popular women romancers. Except for Bruzelius’ treatment of Conrad, my project focuses on authors that fall outside the pale of these projects. 8 approaches to romance paradoxically make it easier to dismiss works in which romance elements are discerned where the critic decides that romance is, in and of itself, a debased genre” (2). By approaching romance with a different assumption—that it is a mode that promotes literary innovation—this thesis combines works like Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday with Ford’s Parade’s End to suggest that despite their dissimilarities, the texts demonstrate the potential of romance to counter a narrative of modern rationalization.

In the rest of this introduction, I offer a fuller picture of the general consensus about romance at the fin de siècle, highlighting how its reputation was shaped in relation to realism and modernism. In addition, I further define three key terms I use in this project—romance, disenchantment, and enchantment—in order to explain how I believe romance in these texts alters the popular conception of the mode at the fin de siècle. Rather than employing romance as a strategy of nostalgia or as a source of disillusionment, I argue that Hardy, Chesterton, Conrad and Ford demonstrate how the (dis)organizing principles of uncertainty in romance could re-enchant both the mode itself and provide fresh ways of seeing the modern world.

Romance Revival and the “Battle of the Books”: Romance versus Realism

Early in Hardy’s A Laodicean one of the protagonists tours De Stancy Castle, which is both the central setting and symbol of the novel. As George Somerset moves through the inner rooms, he encounters art and architecture from a number of periods in varying states of decay. At one point, the narrator notes: “Downstairs there was also an interesting collection of armour, together with several huge trunks and coffers. A great many of them had been recently taken out and cleaned, as if a long dormant interest in them were suddenly revived” (22). In a novel explicitly concerned with the “contest between ancient and modern,” the revival of this “long dormant interest” might be read as the revival of romance 9 in Victorian England, and as the armour suggests, as a battle between romance and realism. Mirroring romance’s freedom from “hard and long-borne fetters” in Wells’ rondeau, the suits of armour suggest a renewed interest in romance tropes.10 Hardy’s 1881 novel, featuring a modern woman who inherits a medieval castle, was published in a century obsessed with medievalism; it was also published in the early stages of the Revival when older romance elements were resurrected to compete against the dominance of the Victorian realist novel.

Prescient as always, Hardy stages a figurative contest between romance and realism, anticipating the battle conceit coined by Andrew Lang six years later, which would come to be used more widely by writers and literary critics alike in the 1880s and 90s. When Lang draws on Jonathan Swift’s satirically titled essay to vivify the contrast between romance and realism as “the Battle of the Books” in The

Contemporary Review, he captures the terms of a new debate developing in literary periodicals. In 1891

H.D. Traill could still invoke the combat trope, claiming in his “Romance Realisticised” that “Realism, having so completely supplanted Romance, can afford to be generous to its ousted rival . . .” (205).

Today, scholars might resist such a reductive opposition between romance and realism, but late-Victorian critics often used the terms as foils in earnest, viewing them as discrete genres. The battle conceit highlights the stakes of the debate: such authorial and cultural anxiety over literary form suggests how integrally form was connected to morality for Victorian readers. Magazines like The Contemporary

Review, The Bookman, Atalanta, Longman’s, The Fortnightly Review, The Westminster Review, and The

Academy provide insight into the sort of rhetoric used by contemporary critics. For writers and readers of these periodicals, representational choices in a novel were weighed within a complicated matrix of values that reflected morality, worldview, and complexity. Tracing the interweaving strands of these articles

10 Jameson, not entirely unlike Wells, characterizes the contest between romance and realism as one related to freedom: “It is in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism that romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage” (104). 10 sheds light on how perceptions of romance were shaped in cultural debates, and how the “romances of modern enchantment” in this study disrupt these divisions.

Critics of romance emphasized its connection to popularity, levity, childishness, play, and even primitivism, yet these same terms were often embraced by romancers. According to Lang, the Coming

Man of modernity, who reads only the “pap” of realism, has no hair, teeth, or nails: such a reader lacks the natural impulse for combat and adventure that Lang valorizes in romance (689). In this line of reasoning, realism is soft and overly intellectual with no substance to it. Lang’s rhetoric proclaimed primitivism and childishness as values—values shared by other popular romancers such as H. Rider

Haggard, Hall Caine, and R. L. Stevenson.11 Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” in Longman’s also equates the mode with play and childhood, echoing the levity suggested by the term “gossip” in his title.

With these values in mind, proponents of romance praised their chosen form as a breath of fresh air in contrast to the close, stultifying stench of the sick bed or charnel house with which they characterized realism and its limited subject matter.12

Formal associations of realism with sickness and health extended from arguments over fit subject matter for a novel, and even the appropriate length of a text. Detractors of realism associated the realist novel with mental illness because it dwelt too much on the mind, while critics of romance equated the romance novel with mindlessness, because it lacked an interior focus. In H.D. Traill’s tongue-in-cheek piece he mockingly asserts the superiority of realism by arguing that writers like Shakespeare and Homer should have spent more time considering their characters’ inner psychology and reduced the sensationalism of their stories. Traill supports his mock-argument by emphasizing the relationship between psychological subject matter and physical space: “The materials which serve a Romancer only

11 See Hall Caine, “The New Watchwords of Fiction” (1890) and Rider Haggard, “About Fiction” (1887) 12 For example, see M.G. Tuttiet “The Advantage of Fiction” (1896) Tuttiet laments “some people are attracted by the fumes of the pothouse . . . some even by the stench of the shambles, the charnel-house . . . I do verily believe, and am not alone in believing, that mankind on the whole prefers sweet airs, fresh and exhilarating . . . (129-30). 11 for a single novel would furnish forth a dozen or more for the Realist, who by dint of ‘analysing’ the emotions experienced by a romantic hero at his first appearance on the scene can easily expand the contents of a Romancer’s first chapter into an entire volume” (201).13 In re-imagining classic works as realist novels, he mounts his defense of romance on the same basis by which it was attacked: critics of romance often claimed the slimness of the volumes reflected thinness of material. Similarly, in reference to the realist novel, Lang complains, “They all talk about their emotions for ever” as contrasted with his own preference for “a true Zulu love story, sketched in two pages” (689). Even as a defender of romance, he has no qualms about emphasizing the diminutive size of romance while emphasizing its large-scale subject matter. The interest in magnitude reveals how writers and critics on both sides associated romance with the physical slimness of a text and broad subject matter, while realism was associated with length and narrow subject matter.14

The recurring commentary on size became more complicated as the physical space a book takes up came to be seen in some circles as a marker of its intellectual value. Proponents of romance criticized realism for treating “minute changes in the human consciousness as ‘events’” (Traill 201). The term

“minute” became a common pejorative used by defenders of romance to deride realism’s subject matter.

Arguing in terms similar to Traill, Lang claims that where novels are written for the purpose of “the unrelentingly minute portraiture of modern life and analysis of modern character . . . we may say that these novels, though often full of talent are limited in scope, and are frequently cramped in style” (688).

Arguments like these revolve around scale as well as critical depth: psychological detail is the stuff of lengthy tomes, but “minute” also comes to mean complex and serious by defenders of realism.

13 In “About Fiction” Haggard similarly depicts American realism in spatial terms: “Their men . . . with culture on their lips, and emptiness in their hearts, they dangle round the heroines till their three-volumed fate is accomplished” (175). 14 Of course economic factors like the changing mass market that made the triple decker novel too expensive to publish also plays a role in the physical size of texts, yet the debates in these journals seem to ignore this fact, and continue to associate the size of a novel with its subject matter. 12

Critics of romance mounted arguments in similar terms but used a different scale of values. Frank

Harris’ article in The Fortnightly Review bemoaned the “fall of fiction,” and equated romance with a downhill turn in literature precisely because of its slimness. The author argues that the “fashionable” tendency is for “a certain conscious, not to say wilful, thinness of narrative material. The old merits of fullness and ‘body’—virtues apparently hereditary in that lineage of robust minds . . . have been growing rarer and rarer. In their place the art of making a very little go a very long way has been carefully cultivated by undoubtedly dexterous hands” (324). Thinness and fullness are equated with the quality of the mind, and it is “robust” minds that can flesh out a scene or idea, as opposed to weak minds that are unable to delve deeper. In “The Decline of Romance,” D.F. Hannigan also champions realism’s narrow subject matter. He writes: “We want facts, not romantic dreams. Let the novelist use his powers of observation to take in the entire milieu, and let him use his imagination to penetrate the hearts and minds of those amongst whom his life is spent. In one village or parish he may find enough of human interest to furnish forth a dozen novels” (35). Equating realism with the writing of history, he goes on to say that the writer “should describe it with the minuteness and severe simplicity of an artist” (36). Hannigan underscores “minuteness” as a value, rather than a criticism, and similar to his opponents, hangs the merits of realism on the physical space it occupies.

As the terms of this literary debate illuminate, interiority came to be associated with a scale of values that granted psychological realism authority by associating it with seriousness and complexity.

While some defended the brevity of romance, others felt that the broad subject matter and slim physical presentation signified a lack of critical depth or a false representation of history. This opposition over size and scope is part of the literary milieu in which the novels in this project are written. The contest between realism and romance may have more to do with epistemological presuppositions than with literary taste but the two factors were entangled at the fin de siècle. As my overview suggests, incorporating romance 13 elements into the novel in this period meant taking on the baggage of the Battle of the Books—baggage that led to the relative critical neglect of these novels.

Romance and Modernism: “Abandoned Clearings” and the “Swan Song” of Romance

The emergence of early literary modernism in the same period adds another layer to the Battle of the Books. Employing the same battle trope to discuss romance and modernism threatens to create another false dichotomy—particularly since modernism itself is no more a transcendent totality than romance or realism— but there are ways in which the two literary movements have seemed like discrete antithetical entities. Though there was no clear alignment between modernism and realism, modernism was sometimes opposed to romance, just as realism had been. In many ways modernists constructed the antithesis, since they tended to define themselves in contrast to their Victorian and Edwardian predecessors.15 Where modernists identified romance as belonging to popular forms of the Revival, the mode seemed irrelevant to new, evolving aesthetics unless viewed as a sign of decay. Consequently, as

Katie Owens-Murphy points out: “Scholarship has largely overlooked modernism’s relationship to romance” (“Modernism and the Persistence of Romance” 50).16

15 See Michael Whitworth, Modernism (2007), and in particular the sections in his introduction “The Victorians and Modernity” (16-19) and “Modernist Self-Construction” (19-24). Whitworth explains: “Many modernist writers explicitly differentiated their movement from the norms of their predecessors . . . the older generation were very often taken to task for their uncritical adoption of Victorian norms and values” (16). See also, Daly Chapter Four for a discussion of how modernism shaped both itself and its critical heritage. Daly argues: “present-day criticism often reproduces the terms of modernism’s avowed relation to popular fiction, and critics continue to view modernism as the maturely ironic reaction to an overcharged and naïve popular literature” (121). He writes that outside the “modernist story of origins . . . lay the sentimental, associated with popular success, women’s culture and an outmoded Victorianism . . . As the modernist aesthetic gained ascendancy over Victorian literary taste, popular, masculine imperial culture and its narrative pleasures went the same way to dusty critical death” (119-120). Daly’s project reminds readers of the modernists’ impulse to distance themselves from the popular mass market and from Victorian values in general; however, he also warns of the danger of “anthropomorphizing” modernism by imagining it with a monolithic intent (120). See also J. Hillis Miller’s chapter “Modernist Hardy” (2009) for a list of modernist characteristics, which includes “an increased complexity in narratological devices used, at least as compared to Victorian literature” (433). For further discussion of modernism in relation to “high” and “low” culture see Whitworth, Modernism (2007), Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms (2006), Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns (1996). 16 Similar to the argument of this thesis, Owens-Murphy notes that romance in modernism is understudied and usually understood in a one-dimensional way. She writes: “In a literary-historical period that is often characterized as demystified, 14

One critical exception to this neglect is provided by Fredric Jameson in his work on modernist romance. Jameson explores the role of romance in modernism’s rejection of rationalization, laying seminal groundwork for understanding the ideological traces of romance in modern fiction. Jameson’s complex historical narrative of this period still depicts romance under the modernists as a

“desacralize[ed]” mode, however. He claims that modernist romance generates its imaginative power from its depictions of “abandoned clearings across which higher and lower worlds once passed” (135).

Though he acknowledges that modernism was not a homogenous literary movement, Jameson reinforces the divisions between “high” modernism and popular culture when he notes the competition of forms in

Lord Jim, one of which is “the prototype of the various ‘degraded’ subgenres into which mass culture will be articulated (adventure story, gothic, science fiction, bestseller, detective story, and the like)”

(207). By contrast, Nicholas Daly rethinks the reductive divisions between romance and modernism in order to uncover the more complicated relationship between them. Daly summarizes the critical narrative of this period as one between “Authors whom we now see as ‘serious’ and those whose names we have all but wiped from the slate of literary history, or consigned to the nursery as writers of children’s literature” (4). Citing the contemporary rhetoric that associated popular romance with child’s play, he notes the “rapid decline” in the literary status of Kipling, for example, “from Nobel Prize winner to children’s author,” in which romance is positioned as “an embarrassing stage of arrested literary development” (120). Nonetheless, Daly reminds us that popular romance and modernism were part of the same literary marketplace, and that divisions between them were not entrenched at the fin de siècle.

Within this framework, he suggests that Jameson’s distinctions in the way modernist and popular texts of this period handle their “raw materials”—either in terms of high modernism’s “fetishism of style” or

disenchanted and disillusioned, it seems unlikely that many writers would make use of romance, a literary mode that explicitly relies on the magical and fantastical” (49). Like me, Owens-Murphy reads the two novels of her study as innovative “meta-narrative commentaries on romance itself,” yet the texts she examines are both American, and resist the sorts of “harmonious” endings with which the texts in this study experiment. 15 mass culture’s “allegories of resolution”—are narrow in their approach, because the distinctions between

“high” and “low” become too neat (Daly 9-10). Daly’s argument breaks down traditional critical barriers between modernism and popular romance—barriers that the texts in this study also destabilize, often by providing resolution.

Texts that conclude with a “happy ending” or resolution appear to lack complexity and seem disengaged from the literary works that eventually formed the modernist canon. In a list of modernist characteristics J. Hillis Miller includes “an increased propensity for unhappy endings,” further stating

“(you can be fairly sure, when you pick up a novel by Anthony Trollope, that it will end happily, whereas you can be pretty sure the opposite will be the case for Conrad, Forster, James, and Hardy)” (433).

Miller’s list reifies the common divisions between Hardy and Conrad and their Victorian near- contemporaries, placing them on the modernist side of the literary-periodical binary primarily based on their resistance to happy endings. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz emphasize a similar opposition as a defining feature of modernism: “The history of the modernist affront . . . was shaped by an antagonism to certain all-too-positive elements judged characteristic of works achieving more immediate public acceptance” (3). Disparaged for naivety and false sentimentalism, popular romance genres of this period contain some of these “all-too-positive elements” of “public acceptance.” Indeed,

Mao and Walkowitz list “uplifting sentiments and happy endings” as elements against which modernism positioned itself” (3).17

In contrast to “uplifting sentiments,” many modernist texts are identifiable by a disillusioned approach to modern life that draws on romance as representative of a dead past. Thus, Jameson characterizes signs of romance under the modernists as “absence,” “vacancy,” and an “unexpected hush” over “abandoned clearings.” Jameson describes a mode that signals finality, which is reflected, for

17 See also: Suzanne Clark Sentimental Modernism for a discussion of how modernism variously negotiated the sentimental as the feminized “other.” 16 instance, in Conrad’s claim that his 1920 novel, The Rescue, was his “swan song” to romance (“Letter to

J. B. Pinker, 15 February 1919” 362). Conrad envisions romance as a waning mode, and only two years later T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) invokes dead, inaccessible fragments of romance strewn throughout a wasteland. As one contemporary critic argued, Eliot’s mythic poem actually captured modern reality:

The terrible dreariness of the great modern cities is the atmosphere in which “The Waste Land”

takes place . . . all about us we are aware of nameless millions performing barren office routines,

wearing down their souls in interminable labors of which the products never bring them profit . . .

In our post-War world of shattered institutions, strained nerves and bankrupt ideals, life no longer

seems serious or coherent. (Wilson 106)

The rationalization of modern life presented here seems to defy the conventions of an idealized narrative mode: romance accompanied by resolution is out of place in such a Wasteland. Katie Owens-Murphy looks to overturn such images of dead romance in works by Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter, yet she still concludes that their affirmations of romance end in dissonance (“Modernism and the Persistence of Romance” 50).

In short, just as late-Victorian romance was forced to engage with realism’s charges of levity, modernism’s focus on the death of romance only deepened the struggle for the mode’s legitimacy. In this narrowed space for romance at the turn of the century and immediately after, not only were romance novels slim in subject matter and size, but they also pointed to a presence where modernist romance memorialized absence. Attending to “romances of modern enchantment,” then, challenges the critical inheritance that insists texts worth reading from this period are ultimately disenchanted. Although Conrad and Ford are central figures of the modernist canon, their collaborative novel, Romance, has been almost completely ignored, and Ford’s Parade’s End was overshadowed for years by his novel The Good 17

Soldier, which could be more neatly categorized as both modernist and as disenchanted romance. While I am not making a case for any of the texts in this thesis as specifically modernist or not, I argue that they have been undervalued precisely because their use of romance has seemed less experimental than that of many modernist works. What distinguishes these texts from others of the period, or even from other texts in their respective authors’ canons, I argue, is a metafictional concern with romance that positions the mode as a useful strategy for engaging with the realities of modern life at the turn of the century.

Methodology and Critical Terms: “Romance as (Dis)-Organizing Principle”

Some of the most fruitful approaches to romance in the past few decades have responded to rigid categorizations of romance as a form by redefining it as a formal strategy. Barbara Fuchs suggests that a more useful approach to romance as a strategy, then, is to focus on “what romance does and enables within a narrative” (2). The idea that romance can “enable” suggests that the mode can be generative of new possibilities in a novel and not merely a gesture toward nostalgia or escape. Where romance is best viewed as a strategy, looking at its defining characteristics further opens readings of these “romances of modern enchantment,” because these texts incorporate a variety of elements that are seemingly antithetical to romance. Caroline Levine’s re-consideration of formalism offers a helpful method for understanding romance as both strategy and form. Though she does not address romance specifically,

Levine’s recent approach focuses on the variety of formal principles that organize a text: her framework invites a consideration of how romance organizes, or sometimes disorganizes, a text and its seemingly stable generic features.

To reconsider the ways in which forms organize, Levine looks for the uses and ideas that forms carry with them in both literary and social space.18 She borrows the concept of affordances from design

18 To distinguish between form and genre, Levine writes, “Forms, defined as patternings, shapes, and arrangements, have a different relation to context: they can organize both social and literary objects, and they can remain stable over time. . . More 18 theory, and examines the common organizing principles that are portable between both aesthetic and social forms.19 Levine argues that “‘form’ always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping . . . It is the work of form to make order” (3). She identifies four prominent organizing principles that shape such order: wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. The familiar affordances of a bounded whole, for instance, lie in its capacity to contain, unify, and exclude. Rhythms are repetitive: they offer routine and predictability, even social cohesion. Hierarchies arrange according to levels of power or scales of value, and networks seem to resist containment and causal links, though they often follow strict laws and patterns. Rather than deconstructing these formal principles, Levine redirects attention to what happens when the affordances, or potential uses, of a form intersect or “collide” with other forms—an interaction she defines as “the strange encounter between two or more forms that sometimes reroutes intention and ideology” (18).20 In other words, when different organizing principles come into contact with each other, their affordances can be re-directed to produce new forms: “Forms will often fail to impose their order when they run up against other forms that disrupt their logic and frustrate their organizing ends, producing aleatory and sometimes contradictory effects” (7). The focus on potentiality reminds us that forms can do things, and that we should not focus exclusively on how forms can be deconstructed but should also consider how they can construct in new ways.

stable than genre, configurations and arrangements organize materials in distinct and iterable ways no matter what their context or audience” (13). 19 Levine explains affordances using the fork as one example. Forks are designed to stab and scoop up food, but they might also be used to pry open a lid. Forms are capable of doing specific things, but they also have latent possibilities in them that are realized when they are crossed with other forms (ie. a fork becomes an opener when in contact with a container). See pp. 6-7. 20 Here, Levine’s terminology differs from the Marxist genre critique that Jameson establishes for romance in Chapter Two of The Political Unconscious-- “Magical Narratives.” Levine focuses on the “collision” of forms, which is radically different from the notion of coexistence that Jameson uses to describe the result of sedimentation, or the traces of meaning in romance elements that comingle with other forms as they reappear in different times (Jameson 141). For Levine, “collision” reroutes intention and ideology making coexistence impossible: “I offer many examples of such collisions, in part to unsettle the power of another explanatory form in literary and cultural studies: the dialectic” (18). Levine claims that Marxist thinkers, like Jameson, “have cast literary form as an ideological artifice, a neat structuring of representation that soothes us into a false sense of order” (14); in her argument, reality (which Marxists distinguish from literary form) is itself organized by forms, so that social reality and literature share overlapping organizing principles. 19

Using Levine’s formal terminology, my project takes a unique approach to the intersection between romance and other forms. Although I argue for the uncertainty, indeterminacy, and even formlessness of romance (which are qualities Levine specifically lists as beyond the scope of her study), I find her ideas of affordances and the collision between organizing principles to be particularly helpful in understanding exactly how elements of romance can produce uncertainty in their juxtaposition rather than in their dissolution.21 I argue that the texts in this project do not simply deconstruct romance, but rather, that the collision of romance’s (dis)ordering principles with other organizing principles “reroutes” the ideologies of popular fin-de-siècle novels. We might say, for instance, that texts containing conventional romance tropes appear to be organized by the principles of the bounded whole for their resolutions, or by hierarchy for their stark depictions of good and evil. These organizing principles most often connote exclusion, restraint, and power inequality, which have resulted in a common effort to deconstruct romance. Yet as a mode that exceeds containment, romance is also suggestive of a network that travels, overlaps, and intersects with other modes, intentionally defying classification and teleological meaning. Thus, if romance tropes appear in a network form in juxtaposition with hierarchical forms in the same text (as I show in Hardy’s A Laodicean), the juxtaposition of these forms can create new pathways of meaning.

Romance, then, is able to produce new narrative space by way of its characteristic indeterminacy.

Levine’s reminder that formalism is the study of patterning, shaping, and ordering is particularly apt in a project focused on texts that respond to the process of rationalization and instrumentalization.

Romance in these novels is a direct response to narratives of disenchantment that shape and order the world in instrumental ways. If rationalization is a process whereby phenomena and human experience are broken down into their component parts and redirected towards utilitarian values, then this is a shaping

21 Levine writes: “the field has been so concerned with breaking forms apart that we have neglected to analyze the major work that forms do in our world . . . Scholars in recent years have written a great deal about indeterminate spaces and identities . . . But while it may be possible to rid ourselves of particular unjust totalities or binaries, it is impossible to imagine a society altogether free of organizing principles” (9).

20 and ordering process that might be read through Levine’s formalist principles. As the texts in this thesis demonstrate, when romance crosses paths with other organizing principles of knowledge, the result is not just uncertainty, but also enchantment as a result of such intersections. In these texts, romance provides new enchantments during a period in which narratives of disenchantment, which I discuss below, occupy increasing space in cultural discourse.

Methodology and Critical Terms: Romance in the Age of Disenchantment

In his 1917 lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” Max Weber borrowed the term disenchantment

(Entzauberung) from Friedrich Schiller to characterize the modern condition. Weber explained the term as “the knowledge or the belief that, if one only wanted to, one could find out at any time; that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather that one could in principle master everything through calculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world. One need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control or implore the spirits . . .” (“The Vocation of Science” 274).

Weber borrows the term to describe the effects of rationalization, which is the process he traces in several areas of modern social life. Rationalization refers to the ways in which institutions, systems, and modes of thought are reorganized and revalued in a hierarchical scheme that prizes a means/ends approach to the world. As Jane Bennett describes it: “Rationalization encompasses a variety of related processes, each of which opts for the precise, regular, constant, and reliable over the wild, spectacular, idiosyncratic, and surprising” (58). More than just the dissolution of belief in magic and religion, rationalization affects all areas of society in which instrumental logic transforms traditional processes. Science, bureaucracy, law, and the military, for example, are other areas in which Weber traces the process.

The disenchantment resulting from such a shift in values might fuel a narrative of evolutionary progress in which humanity flourishes after shedding its belief in magic and religion, or a narrative of 21 pessimism laden with nostalgic feelings of loss for the certainties of the past. Popular nineteenth-century figures like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and H.T. Buckle promoted an ideology of progress, and

British culture at the turn of the century had its own varied accounts of racial, imperial, industrial, and military progress. Each of these narratives assumed the sort of mastery by calculation that Weber named as contributing to disenchantment. Yet opposing chronicles of decline, like Nietzsche’s cultural pessimism, are also paired with Weber’s articulation of disenchantment to characterize the world as empty of transcendent meaning. These disenchantment narratives, both positive and negative, can be detected in romance genres of the fin de siècle, from imperial tales that privilege British rationality, to detective stories that rely on new scientific advances, to disillusioned romances in which loss of belief has left struggling protagonists with narrowed options. The narrative responses that arise in this period suggest that where disenchantment occurs, new conceptualizations of meaning arise to replace or rethink what has been lost. The texts in this study represent a set of responses to the wide-reaching effects of rationalization: they register the surprising directions of rationalization in modern life and the cultural narratives that re-channeled mysterious phenomena into instrumental narratives of material certainty.

Charles Taylor considers the diversity of disenchantment narratives a part of the formation of secularism. Rather than a subtraction narrative in which secularity arises by stripping away naïve beliefs,

Taylor argues that secularism develops unevenly through the construction of new narratives that offer replacement worldviews, values, and meaning. He considers the historical changes over hundreds of years that led to the conditions under which secularity could even be the basis for belief, or, as he puts it, the “new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed” (20).

Where teleological meaning is lacking, new forms of human fullness are sought out, which lay the 22 ground for “exclusive humanism.”22 As the conditions for belief alter and the transcendent is eclipsed, individuals begin to feel the “flattening of life,” which leads to a desire to recover a sense of meaning in the everyday. New narratives to support a viable “exclusive humanism” then become a significant source of recovering this sense of meaning. Taylor’s secularization thesis provides one way of historicizing the value system and collective narrative fantasy shaping the conditions for romance in this period: such narratives were driven by a desire, not simply to mark loss, but to construct new secular narratives.

Within Taylor’s long and complex genealogy the nineteenth century was a particularly fecund period for developing the framework of secular belief. As Taylor argues: “the nineteenth century saw a great rise in unbelief. I mean by this not only that many people lost their faith . . .but also that new positions were devised, new niches or spaces for unbelief . . . this is a period in which the gamut of alternatives of this range becomes richer and wider” (322-3).

New understandings of the self at the fin de siècle concerned both humanity’s and the individual’s place in time and space. In Taylor’s narrative, human existence was once understood as part of both a divinely ordered cosmos and a teleological conception of time, but the long trajectory of secularism led to a reimagining of human existence in which humans belong to a vast, infinite universe and are no longer at the centre. For the individual, claims Taylor, the re-ordering of time and space also led to the notion of the “buffered self.” The “buffered self” conveys an understanding of one’s own power of moral ordering that is no longer subject to the world of spirits or transcendent powers like the enchanted “porous” self.

For the buffered self, all that is real is “a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual

élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans . . . and minds are bounded,

22 Taylor defines “exclusive humanism” as a humanism “accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing” (18). Most importantly for this project, he argues that exclusive humanism in the form of various modern alternatives to faith was already available at the end of the nineteenth century (28). He repeatedly notes the presence, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the narratives of unbelief we have today: “The deeper, more anchored forms of unbelief arising in the 19th century are basically the same as those which are held today. We can see the Victorians as our contemporaries in a way which we cannot easily extend to the men of the Enlightenment” (369). 23 so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated ‘within’ them” (30). Taylor goes on to contrast this mind-centered view with the “enchanted” view by examining how they both create meanings through their respective frames for understanding experience: either in “immanent,” material terms, or

“enchanted,” transcendent ones.

In the debates about romance and realism during the Romance Revival, we can see the underlying dichotomy between an enchanted view of the world and an immanent view in which the world is represented through a focus on “minute” psychological detail. The fin de siècle is a period in which enchantment, disenchantment, and secularism exert a particularly powerful influence over modes of fictional representation and in which romance is aligned not simply with the magic of the past but with a sense of enchantment associated with childishness. Romance’s broad subject matter and slim physical presentation are equated with a lack of critical depth where critical depth is increasingly associated with the limits of the human mind as worthy subject matter. Realism, and especially French naturalism, which made the most convenient hyperbolic foil for romance, is the materialist mode of the “buffered self” and

“mind-boundedness.” As Taylor states: “the appeal of scientific materialism is not so much the cogency of its detailed findings as that of the underlying epistemological stance, and that for ethical reasons. It is seen as a sign of maturity, of courage, of manliness, over against childish fears and sentimentality” (365).

With its reputation for the same sort of escapism and childishness that Taylor identifies in the

“enchanted” worldview, romance is associated with what he terms the “porous” self. Thus, where the opposition between romance and realism in the Battle of the Books is taken as a sign of the mental health of writers, readers, and even the nation, it becomes clear that these seemingly minor literary debates are also about disenchantment and secularity and their corresponding epistemological positions. 24

In the late-nineteenth century these related contests between enchantment and disenchantment and romance and realism are apparent in the novel. Just as Jameson suggests that the modernists looked to the

“abandoned clearings” of romance where meaning once existed, Weber suggests:

The irrational elements (Einschläge) in the rationalization of reality were also the places to which

the heavily suppressed need of intellectualism for supra-real values saw itself compelled to retreat,

especially so the more the world appeared to be divested of values. The unity of the primitive

worldview, in which everything material was a concrete manifestation of magic, then showed a

tendency to split; on the one side, a rational understanding and a rational subordination of nature

and, on the other, ‘mystical’ experiences whose inexpressible content was the only possible Beyond

left remaining in the face of the godless mechanism of the world. (“Introduction to the Economic

Ethics of the World Religions” 70)23

Irrational elements, typically the purview of romance, frequently find their way into novels. Hardy, for example, depicts such a tension between enchantment and immanence in the conflicts he creates for his plots and characters. In The Return of the Native, the Mephistophelian reddleman and his dice, or

“magical machines,” frighten the provincial character, Christian Cantle, whose “porous” enchanted sense of self clearly conflicts with Clym Yeobright’s more cosmopolitan “buffered self.” Likewise, when

Conrad’s Marlow looks at the sky the stars remind him “of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe” (Chance 41) reflecting his own sense of the shift from living in a divinely ordered cosmos to merely “being included in the universe” (Taylor 59). Familiar fin-de-siècle responses such as the ones found in these novels resist instrumental versions of exclusive humanism as the highest good, but continue to reject anything outside

23 Fredric Jameson characterizes this division between rationality and irrationality as divisions of the psyche, under which “archaic functions” like the senses and modes of thought (Weber’s “inexpressible content”) are underdeveloped and “allowed to vegetate in a kind of psychic backwater” (220). 25 the immanent frame, often emphasizing detachment, failure, and death. By contrast, the “romances of modern enchantment” in this thesis challenge and re-shape the narrative of exclusive humanism. They combine the “minute” analysis of the mind with uncertainty and romance to suggest the limits of the immanent frame.

Methodology and Critical Terms: Romance and the Ethics of Enchantment

Disenchantment has been a popular cultural narrative for modernity, not only because it offers a deceptively totalizing story of historical differences but also because, as Taylor shows, it reinforces the assumption that modernity has “grown up.” Where enchantment is viewed as naïve belief in magic and religion, it is associated, like romance, with childishness. Though they are not synonymous, romance draws on the magical, the spiritual, the mysterious, and the transcendent for its imaginative material—all of which are features of enchantment. For some scholars who study enchantment in the novel, the two terms are often interchangeable, which limits readings of romance as experimental and generative. For instance, when John McClure examines late-imperial romance, he uses a definition of enchantment that is synonymous with magic and superstition: associating it with naïve magic, he sees enchantment as a reification of Otherness in Conrad’s imperial romance.24 David Payne looks at George Eliot’s gospel of sympathy, alongside other writers like Dickens and Thackeray, examining their responses to the commodification of literary culture in the serial as disenchanted. In Payne’s argument, re-enchantment is specifically a response to capitalist disenchantment. Payne looks for areas where re-enchantment means a

“reoccupation” of previously sacred space, implying a definition of enchantment that is reliant upon

24 In Late-Imperial Romance (1994) McClure recognizes late imperial romance as a productive genre through its anti- imperial project; however, though he also makes the rare move of looking for enchantment in disillusioned romances, his use of enchantment is a synonym for magic. Relying on such a limited definition, the re-enchantment strategies he locates in Conrad, Kipling, and Forster are problematic: “in their determination to preserve the non-Western world as the locus of magic and mystery, they perpetuate a Western tradition of ‘othering’ the subjects of imperialism” (12). In other words, the term enchantment is used in his study to refer to both hegemonic cultural myths, as well as a return to the spiritual magic of the past, which he sees as exploitative. 26 religious markers, even where these are now empty.25 As these cases demonstrate, when narrowly defined as magic and religion, enchantment can be interpreted as an apparatus of power. Rather than benign naiveté, enchantment (and romance) can marshal nostalgia and magic to enforce the status quo of power imbalances, which is why a more nuanced view of romance as experimental must be accompanied by an alternative understanding of enchantment as more than superstition.26

In contrast to the negative view of enchantment as naïve or exploitative, scholars from diverse fields have turned to enchantment as a term that denotes a constructive orientation towards the world.27

Enchantment has a discourse all its own, cutting across disciplines as varied as literature, visual art, politics, sociology, religion, law, and science.28 In alternative uses of the term, enchantment describes an intentional focus on one’s reaction to the modern world. For instance, political theorist Jane Bennett sees

25 In The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2005) Payne focuses on the serialized novel in Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot as a space in which they mediated between disenchantment and re-enchantment in this specific form of literary commodification. Adopting atonement, they write scenes of sacrifice and suffering, which Payne suggests are not fully successful. For instance, he writes: “As we have seen, one task for Middlemarch was the reoccupation of incarnational humanism in the cultural position of a religious practice. The apparent corollary to this work of reoccupation was the consecration of the novelist as a figure who, in the course of representing the failure of traditional transcendence most forcefully, herself becomes an object of worship” (142). 26 For a nuanced discussion of the differences between definitions of enchantment over time see Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review” (2006). Saler lists three approaches to understanding disenchantment and enchantment: binary, dialectical, and antinomial. The binary approach views disenchantment as a rational, mature modern worldview posing enchantment as the primitive Other. Champions of romance like Lang, Stevenson and Haggard are evidently working within this binary when they attempt to reformulate the value of romance and its accompanying enchantment by celebrating primitivism and childhood as aspects of romance. The dialectical view, which Saler traces from Marx, Weber, and then Horkheimer and Adorno assumes that the modern world is enchanted in the negative sense of being “duped” by religion or at least the religion of science, technology, and bureaucracy. The third approach, which is Saler’s own, is the antinomial approach. Obviously postmodern in nature, the antinomial approach sees the world as both disenchanted and enchanted, and focuses on where modernity reveals rational enchantments. In this thesis, I trace a shift in these novels from a binary model of enchantment to an antinomial one, but one that does not insist on enchantment within a strictly immanent frame. 27 See Stephen David Ross Enchanting: Beyond Disenchantment (2012). Ross’ work is an example of a contemporary academic turn to enchantment as both theory and method that rejects the limiting view of modernity as disenchanted. He evokes enchantment through style by rejecting the paradigm of academic rationality in prose that is part of the disenchantment narrative. For instance, Ross’ mixture of italics, poetry, quotations, unanswered questions, and critical prose defies a stance of modern disenchantment. He writes: “The mark of enchantment—but not its soul—is that it exceeds all accounts. Every ingredient, moment, thing, and creature of the earth exceeds every account, including every account of enchantment. This does not entail that accounts are useless, that knowledge is impossible. To the contrary, enchantment is the condition of the inspirations that make knowledge possible, that make truth accessible” (5). 28 For examples of enchantment in non-literary fields see: Yishai Blank “The Reenchantment of Law” (2011); Linda Ross Meyer “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment? An Address Given at the Northeast Law and Society Conference, 2013”; Jane Bennett The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001); Katherine Verdery The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, pp. 26- 27 (1999); Brad West Re-enchanting Nationalisms: Rituals and Remembrances in a Postmodern Age (2015); and Christopher Partridge The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (2004). 27 enchantment as an orientation that challenges one’s understanding. As a mood, it involves “a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage . . . a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic- intellectual disposition” (5). Bennett’s explanation emphasizes enchantment as a challenge to intellectual disposition, which entails more than a simple disruption of what one thinks: enchantment disrupts how one thinks. Likewise, sociologist Mark A. Schneider argues, “How deeply enchanted we become quite likely depends upon how fundamentally our understanding of the world is challenged . . . The excitement comes from being lifted out of our mundane existence and situated on the verge of a new understanding of our world, while the unease derives from the assault upon our prior sense of how that world works”

(3).29 In these formulations, enchantment is an outlook to be practiced and honed, despite its reliance on surprise and spontaneity. As Bennett and Schneider suggest, enchantment is a practice of thinking beyond the cultural and intellectual limits that condition how we respond to phenomena. Romance also points to the inability to assimilate experiences of otherness that one cannot understand, or that incite resistance.

These qualities of romance have been aligned with Levinas’ ethics of alterity that seeks to hold on to the difference of the Other, rather than attempting to reduce it to the Same through the desire for knowledge and mastery.30

Reconsiderations of enchantment as more than just a synonym for magic and religion are often intentionally oriented to the secular, however. Enchantment is invoked in response to the

29 See Schneider, Chapter Five for a discussion of enchanted forms of enquiry versus disenchanted forms, and a discussion of the “boundary-work” that polices where each form of enquiry is relevant. 30 For an overview of Levinas’ ethics of the Other see: Bernhard Waldenfels “Levinas and the Face of the Other” (2002) Waldenfels’ description of Levinas’ encounter with the irreducibility of the other has particular parallels with descriptions of the experience of enchantment: “But this leads us to the crucial question of how it may happen that the other appears to us without being reduced to somebody or something in the world. At this point where our world, crowded as it is with persons and things, explodes, the common face turns into the uncommon, into the unfamiliar, even into the uncanny . . . the experience of what is strange, shifts into the estrangement of experience itself” (65). For a discussion of romance and Levinasian ethics see: Jean-Michel Ganteau. “The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics” (2011) Ganteau argues, “Romance would then appear as the mode of excess used to figure that there is something in excess of representation, which makes it perfectly compatible with an ethics of the deconstructive type whose characteristics owe much to the disarticulating power of the romantic text as event” (92). 28 instrumentalization of the material world, but its proponents still insist on the same material limits for their imaginative responses. In their examination of cultural enchantment, for instance, Michael Saler and

Joshua Landy claim that finding enchantment in modern experience offers “fully secularized subjects an affirmation of existence that does not come at the cost of naiveté, irrationalism, or hypocrisy” (Landy and

Saler 2). The anxiety over hypocrisy arises from their dedication to a completely closed secular framework in which any older forms of enchantment are inassimilable with the conditions of belief. Saler and Landy contend: “it will not do, either, to revert to prior forms of wonder, order, and redemption. No, the world must be enchanted anew—human flourishing requires it—for those who wish to be consistent in their adoption of secular rationality” (14).31 By limiting themselves to the secular, their insistence on combining enchantment with human flourishing exemplifies what Taylor characterizes as the search for new models of “exclusive humanism.” There is a contradiction in this conception of modern secular enchantments: clinging to consistency and rejecting naiveté is a form of resistance to the openness, unease, surprise, and challenge that enchantment requires.32 In a literary framework, then, enchantment looks like more than magic: enchantment implies a critique of all epistemological boundaries. Like romance, enchantment can be difficult to define and locate, but also like romance, its very nature is to destabilize.

31 Saler himself has extended the search for “rational” and “secular” enchantments in romance at the fin de siècle. See his chapter “Delight without Delusion: The New Romance, Spectacular Texts, and Public Spheres” in his book As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, pp. 57-104. Like this thesis, Saler looks at enchantment in New Romance of the period. He focuses his historical summary and argument on popular romancers like Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, and similar figures, arguing that they are directly responding to the discourse of disenchantment. However, Saler argues for a romance dedicated to rational, secular critique, well within the bounds of the immanent frame. In other words, an enchantment that, in his words, doesn’t “delude.” 32 Richard Jenkins also problematizes enchantment as strictly secular, arguing also that the world has never really been disenchanted. He writes: “Enchantment conjures up, and is rooted in, understandings and experiences of the world in which there is more to life than the material, the visible or the explainable . . . in which the quotidian norms and routines of linear time and space are only part of the story” (29). 29

George Levine makes a case for enchantment as central to the ethics of realism, which is at once distinctively secular, and yet hints at what is unknowable.33 Specifically, he uncovers an ethic of enchantment in writers that emphasize the not-self, such as Hardy and George Eliot.34 For Levine, the sort of wonder and enchantment that Darwin saw in the natural world and the complex minutiae of life is reflected in realism’s careful depiction of the Other, whether human or animal, and the resulting attempt to resist the demands of the ego. Nonetheless, Levine himself notes that some of the most powerful encounters with the “not-self” in realism violate its borders. He even notes Hardy’s propensity to drop realism in crucial moments: “while his novels are usually very highly formalized, there are moments that register just the animal difference that has such powerful symbolic force in romance” (Realism, Ethics,

Secularism 257). Where Levine might see this as a breach of realism’s act of containment, this rupture gestures not simply towards the limits of realism but also toward the limits of the material enchantment he emphasizes. The ethical movement towards depicting pure, inassimilable difference is the purview of romance exactly because naturalistic explanations fail and the suggestion of inexplicable mystery is the ever-present alternative.

In the romances of this project, I identify an orientation towards enchantment that not only intentionally resists the narrative of disenchantment itself but is also open to new understandings of the world that undermine the limits of the immanent frame. Like enchantment, romance raises the specter of what is before, or outside of, reason by highlighting the transcendent and non-instrumental. Romance, I contend, is a narrative space particularly suited to representing that which cannot be assimilated into a

33 In his work since the millennium, Levine has increasingly focused his readings of realism on enchantment and secularity. My project shares many of Levine’s themes, though from an opposing angle: his work consistently explores the material enchantments of science and naturalism. A glance at his recent titles—Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re- enchantment of the World (2006); Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (2008); The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now (2011)—reveal the intricate connection Levine perceives between science, secularism, literary representation, and enchantment, both in Victorian literature and this modern moment. 34 Levine’s use of the term ethics stems from his reading of Darwin: Levine explains, “Darwin’s scientific self-effacement is not a disguise for unacknowledged feeling and ideology but part of a complex romantic strategy that sees self-abnegation as a supreme moral virtue allowing access to the great world of the not-self” (Darwin Loves You 220). 30 rational framework. As Jean-Michel Ganteau argues: “the revelatory power of romance may be used so as to break into a consensual vision of culture and/or society and its institutions and to provide the reader with some sort of renewed perception” (“The Logic of Affect” 89). In some romances renewed perception may be depicted as falling in love, while in adventure, imperial, or spiritual romance this might be the possibility of unsolvable mystery and incomprehensible space, or subjects that disrupt previous knowledge. Romance affords a unique receptivity to conflicting modes of being and imagining without necessarily descending to an ironic deconstruction of its own form. Each of the novels in this study highlights a moment of vision, a scene that gestures to the importance of seeing through the lens of enchanted romance. In each text this lens counters the way in which the protagonists are used to experiencing the world through reason. These figurative moments do not just register a battle between romance and realism: rather, they point to how meaning in both literature and in individual phenomenological experience is created by a framework that itself requires study. Just as romance has always tested knowledge (both the hero’s and the reader’s) by challenging it on the unknown ground of the distant land, romance can re-organize knowledge into different pathways. In Caroline Levine’s formalist framework, romance elements can be re-configured in, for instance, the network or the rhythm to upset traditional binary oppositions that organize our understandings of the immanent and enchanted world.

George Levine has argued that the “fuss” about civilization and disenchantment was never far from the center of Victorian literary representation. He insists, “I want to get Victorianly serious about this idea of enchantment and suggest that for the Victorians, on the whole, belonging to modernity seemed almost inevitably to entail disenchantment, in just Weber’s sense” (Realism, Ethics and Secularism 53).

Approaching romance as a strategy of enchantment itself rescues both enchantment and romance from 31 being simple synonyms for magic, and re-casts them as active responses to the narratives of disenchantment at the fin de siècle.

Overview of Chapters

Each chapter in this thesis takes as its point of departure a popular trope or sub-genre of the

Romance Revival upon which these “romances of modern enchantment” drew. I examine the formal and ideological conventions of these aspects of popular romance in the period and demonstrate how each of these texts engages with, and reimagines, a modern, enchanted romance in response. Using Caroline

Levine’s formal terminology, I look at the organizing principles of the romance elements in these novels and how these principles intersect or “collide” with others in order to produce new models of romance.

This study spans the years 1881 to 1928, the period of the Romance Revival; yet, the authors on either end of this timeline have more in common than the forty-seven odd years between the first and last texts might suggest. Thomas Hardy is often considered a modernist for his poetry, and many accounts of modernism begin with his late novels.35 On the other end, Ford’s Pre-Raphaelite familial and literary heritage is well documented and the Victorians were the subject of much of his literary criticism.36

Moreover, both Hardy’s and Ford’s writing careers spanned years in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with both publishing novels in the 1890s, and Ford publishing Hardy’s work in The English

Review. Though this project covers a long period, the authors on either end are often seen as crossing period and genre boundaries.

35 See: Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (2000) and Ariela Freedman, Death Men and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction form Hardy to Woolf (2003). 36 Ford’s grandfather was the painter, Ford Madox Brown, who was connected to the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina Rossetti was an aunt by marriage, and he was often around Victorian literary figures in his childhood. See Ford’s monograph The Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood (1906), and his essay “The Collected Poems of Christina Rossetti” (1904) for the intimacy with which he writes literary criticism about his Victorian family members, as well as his book Ancient Lights in which he records his impressions of the literary circles he witnessed as a child. See also: Douglas Goldring, The Last Pre-Raphaelite (1948) for an account of Ford growing up around eminent Victorian writers. 32

The first two chapters in this study on Hardy and Chesterton, respectively, are largely focused on romance and its relation to realism, science, and rationalism in the late nineteenth century. Chapter One examines Hardy’s A Laodicean, looking particularly at how gothic architecture, modern technology, theatricality, and scenes of gambling are interwoven as materials of romance. Each of these are sites of play, which was a particularly prominent term related to romance in the literary debates of the fin de siècle, and one that carried with it the connotations of childishness. The collision of various forms of play in this novel, however, occur within a text equally preoccupied with images of the network. The novel affords perhaps the clearest opportunity to apply Levine’s formalist reading to romance, where the network motif can be read as another organizing principle of knowledge. Through the network, indirection and unpredictability are privileged over certainty, but in contrast to the malign overtones of

Hardy’s later novels, indefiniteness is distinctively associated with the play and risk of romance. In A

Laodicean, complex arrangements of lines promote the uncertainty of romance and play, providing fresh meaning to Hardy’s frequent use of web imagery.

Chapter Two reads The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare as a metaphysical detective novel in conversation with popular detective fiction at the fin de siècle. Thursday is also playful, but its focus on uncertainty and irrationality is directed at an unsolvable mystery. Despite being the most prolific of this group of writers, Chesterton does not enjoy the same status and is often regarded as a conservative

Catholic writer out of step with the experimental ethos of many of his contemporaries.37 However,

Chesterton’s particular difference from this group of authors is also the grounds for his inclusion. While the other texts in this study tend towards a more optimistic enchantment than their authors depict

37 Chesterton’s reputation for comedy, absurdity, and generally “light” literature has limited serious readings of his experimentalism. He was often unjustly treated as a caricature of conservatism, and his romances have been neglected. Thomas Hardy’s spite for Chesterton was so deep he composed an ironic epitaph for Chesterton the day before his own death. The acerbic poem is not focused on Chesterton’s writing, but rather on their differences regarding Darwinian theory, demonstrating the grounds on which Chesterton is so often dismissed. See Hardy, “Epitaph for G.K. Chesterton.” See also: Michael Shallcross, Re-Thinking G.K. Chesterton and Literary Modernism (2018) for a discussion of the critical heritage that depicts Chesterton in opposition to his modernist contemporaries. 33 elsewhere, Chesterton’s novel explores darker sources of enchantment than we find in much of his other work. In The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare Chesterton combines the older medieval dream vision with modern detection, staging a collision of forms with vastly different ideological connotations.

In this novel, the dream vision destabilizes the scientific rationalism of fin-de-siècle detection, gesturing to the limits of the immanent frame. Thursday raises more questions than answers, resulting in a metaphysical mystery that, like Hardy’s novel, validates uncertainty as the essence of romance.

The final two chapters focus on thematic and narrative elements characteristic of early works of modernism, which are rarely considered in conjunction with romance. In these chapters I demonstrate how romance is a suitable strategy for representing what defies representation. Chapter Three looks at the

1903 novel, Romance, a neglected collaboration between Conrad and Ford. The novel overtly draws on the “boys’ adventure” to critique the imperial ideologies of one of the most popular forms of the

Romance Revival; nonetheless, I will show that the novel is far more than a parody. It contains both an enchanted Catholicism and early examples of the literary impressionist techniques that Conrad and Ford would develop throughout their careers. Romance stages a collision between the adventure form and the bewildering formlessness of impressionism to disrupt the imperial hierarchies so ingrained in the boys’ adventure, while also affirming the adventure novel as a narrative space apposite to phenomenological expression.

Chapter Four takes up Ford Madox Ford’s post-war tetralogy, Parade’s End, to argue that romance retains generative possibilities for representing the modern world even after the First World War. This chapter explores Ford’s struggle to write a post-war romance that was committed to representing the formlessness of shell shock and trauma. Like the other works in this study, Parade’s End both critiques and uses romance: it challenges narratives of a romanticized Englishness used in commemorative discourses that seek to contain trauma and mourning, yet it also re-deploys these narratives to evade 34 disengagement and detachment. For instance, it is a romance pattern that organizes the final novel into an

Arcadian idyll—the very pattern of enclosure that critics have used to charge this conclusion with escapism. Yet it is also this pattern of wholeness that draws attention to the more damaging forms of bureaucratic and class hierarchies, and the rhythms of traumatic return that haunt the protagonists after the Great War. Ford’s tetralogy is a necessary conclusion to a study of romance in this period, which would be incomplete without a consideration of how the cataclysm of the First World War affected the space for romance. If romance can convincingly be a space for engagement with the modern world, then the presence of romance after the conflict is particularly critical when disenchantment seems the only ethical response to the deceptive enchantments that propelled a generation into war.

Where romance has been noted in these texts, it has frequently been treated as a fault or incongruity, rather than as an interpretive key. I argue, by contrast, that these are romances about romance, engaged in exploring the correspondence between literary mode and epistemology, and challenging the narrative of disenchantment by re-imagining modern cultural phenomena as materials of romance. These texts posit an optimistic uncertainty that runs counter to an uncritical bravado in science, imperialism, war, and politics, but also departs from the familiar narrative of decline and disillusionment that has come to characterize “high” literature in England at the turn of the century.

In his 1907 Preface to The American, Henry James described romance as the indefinite elements that reach us through the “beautiful circuit and subterfuge” of our thoughts and desires. To illustrate the elusiveness of the mode, he uses his well-known balloon metaphor to depict romance as a trick played by the author who “insidiously” and “for the fun of it” cuts the cable tying the balloon the reader is holding.

Cable cut, the reader floats away from “terra firma,” or recognizable reality, without knowing it. James recites common tropes of romance, arguing that these are inadequate in defining the mode: 35

There have been, I gather, many definitions of romance, as a matter indispensably of boats, or of

caravans, or of tigers, or of ‘historical characters,’ or of ghosts, or of forgers, or of detectives, or of

beautiful wicked women, or of pistols and knives, but they appear for the most part reducible to the

idea of the facing of danger, the acceptance of great risk for the fascination, the very love, of their

uncertainty, the joy of success if possible and of battle in any case. This would be a fine formula if

it bore examination; but it strikes me as weak and inadequate . . . (“Preface to The American” 32) 38

Fittingly, the novels in this study draw variously on each one of these formulaic romance materials: forgers (A Laodicean), detectives (The Man Who Was Thursday), pistols and knives (Romance), and beautiful wicked women (Parade’s End). However, they do so not to imitate a formula but as part of a strategy that combines these stock tropes with other literary and cultural forms to gesture towards larger metaphysical questions that displace the reader from terra firma.

38 James’ self-consciousness about romance as a form, his own emphasis on uncertainty, and his relation to his brother William’s work on phenomenology, seem to qualify him for a place in this thesis. However, while some of his work may pay attention to romance and uncertainty, I do not see him working towards an enchanted ethics in the way I view the other novels of this “family.” The Turn of the Screw, for instance, highlights phenomenological and epistemological uncertainty in regards to gothic phenomena, yet I would argue this story firmly establishes the mind-bounded, immanent frame, rather than suggesting its limits. 36

Chapter One

A Romance of Play: Uncertainty in Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean

The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream.

—R. L. Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” 72

These lines from Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” were published in Longman’s in 1882—a year after A Laodicean appeared. In the articles that contributed to the Battle of the Books, romance was often associated with childishness, levity, play, and games, which was a connection alternately praised or derided in contemporary novels.39 Despite the stark differences between Stevenson’s romance novels and much of Hardy’s overtly pessimistic fiction, Hardy anticipates the former’s association of play with invention and romance. Hardy is not known for “delightful circumstances,” nor for satisfying the

“longings of the reader;” however, he is often preoccupied with play. Play in Hardy, though, is usually malign. When “dicing Time” casts only pain in “Hap” (1866), it is the poet himself who fixes the dice.

When Wildeve gambles on Egdon Heath with Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native (1878), it is the mysterious reddleman with whom Fortune sides. When the President of the Immortals ends his “sport” with Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), it is Hardy’s narrator who finally gives up the game. In

Hardy’s textual world, sport, dice, and games are usually the blind or cruel acts of some inimical force,

39 See, for example, D. F. Hannigan “The Decline of Romance” (1894). In his disparaging commentary on contemporary romance, he insists: “Fiction, when it is divorced from fact, becomes childish and ridiculous” (36). 37 the play of fate, in which humans are the pawns. His 1881 novel, A Laodicean, breaks with this pattern.

In this novel, Hardy re-orients his customary tropes and foregrounds the delightful playfulness of romance—that “light” literature of the Battle of the Books. A decaying family line, crumbling buildings, and the workings of chance feature in this novel just as in many of his others, but here they find expression in romance, not tragedy. His Preface to the 1896 edition promises as much to the audience.

Unlike the readers of his other novels into “whose souls the iron has entered,” Hardy proposes that A

Laodicean might “help to while away an idle afternoon of the comfortable ones whose lines have fallen to them in pleasant places” (“Preface (1896)” 380).40 His readers should not be tricked, however, by the reversion to a stereotype of romance here.

In the same Preface Hardy begins by invoking King Arthur’s final speech in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, signaling the novel’s affiliation with Victorian medievalism even before it opens. He begins:

“The changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be slow or sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic issues being not necessarily restricted to a change back to the original order; though this admissible instance appears to have been the only romance formerly recognized by novelists as possible in the case” (“Preface (1896)” 380).41 From the outset, Hardy situates his novel in the romance tradition, not only in literature, but also in the revival of Gothic architecture; yet rather than an imitative “change back to the original order,” Hardy suggests that this novel might be “a picture of other possibilities.” A Laodicean, his Preface hints, is the product of both of Hardy’s aesthetic professions: his former career as an architect is easily traced in the protagonist, George Somerset, and in

Somerset’s plans for the restoration of the decaying De Stancy castle—the inanimate protagonist, according to the subtitle.42 The architectural model of this new possibility for literary romance is hinted at in Somerset’s winning design for the restoration, which leaves the ancient, crumbling part of the castle

40 Hardy’s reference is to Psalm 16:6. 41 Arthur’s final speech to Bedivere begins, “The old order changeth, yielding place to new” (Tennyson, line 408, 520). 42 The full title reads A Laodicean: or The Castle of the De Stancy’s 38 intact and adds the new wing beside it. The castle becomes a metonymic symbol of how the novel re- enchants romance through juxtaposition: the castle embodies a formal conflict through what one character calls a “clash between ancient and modern” (27).

This “clash” resonates with Caroline Levine’s “collision of forms” that “reroutes intention and ideology” (18). In addition to the clash between ancient and modern, A Laodicean contains multiple thematic strands that seem, at first, incongruous: architecture, technology, melodrama, performativity, and gambling. These strands are linked as sites of uncertainty woven together in the novel as converging discourses of play under threat of rationalization. To continue the metaphor, these strands are each realized through a visual trope of lines—lines that are architectural, physical, mental, hierarchical, and constraining—and which signal rationality and enclosure; yet, through “collision” with each other, these lines are twisted and “rerouted.” Levine’s discussion of the network form provides a useful basis for reading the interwoven strands of play as a form of romance in this novel. While Levine acknowledges the critical tradition that reads the network as the antithesis of form, or as formless and destabilizing

(112), she reminds us: “as a form that first and foremost affords connectedness, the network provides a way to understand how many other formal elements—including wholes, rhythms, and hierarchies—link up in larger formations” (113). In short, the network is a “meta” form. Both of these senses of the network can be traced in A Laodicean. Its association with Paula’s unpredictability and uncertainty recall its destabilizing tendencies, but the network also draws together the different thematic strands into one image of connectivity. Thus, Hardy’s suggestion that the novel will appeal to those for whom, like the

Psalmist, the lines “have fallen in pleasant places” is a hint that lines themselves are significant to the romance of the novel. Through the line motif, readers of this novel will find their own rational lines of perception shifted, warped, and bent to re-enchant key areas of instrumentalism at the fin de siècle.

Critical Reception

The novel tells the story of a love triangle between an heiress, Paula Power, and her two suitors:

George Somerset, her architect, and Captain De Stancy, the last descendant of the De Stancy line that once owned the castle. Somerset is hired to restore the medieval castle, which had only recently passed into the hands of Paula’s father before his death. Through the machinations of Captain De Stancy’s illegitimate son, Will Dare, Somerset and Paula are kept apart until the conclusion of the novel when they marry, just in time for Dare to burn down De Stancy castle. Though the conclusion is somewhat ambivalent, the satisfaction of the marriage plot and the comedic elements make the novel much lighter in tone than The Return of the Native (1878), published a few years beforehand, and Two on a Tower

(1882) published the following year.

Due to its sensational and melodramatic elements, as well as its layering of diverse themes, contemporary critics were rarely generous to A Laodicean, many of them considering it one of Hardy’s worst works. Taking their cue from Hardy himself, critics explained its inconsistencies by the fact that the novelist was not only ill while writing it but also dictated it to his wife while lying inverted in his bed.43 The 1912 advertisement in The Athenaeum for the Wessex Edition states: “The novel . . . is not of the author’s best, and was written during a period of illness. It has, however, its moments of high romance” (“Hardy (Thomas),” The Athenaeum 783). Likewise, one writer of the Dublin Review remarks,

“In ‘A Laodicean,’ Mr. Hardy is hardly at his best” (“A Laodicean,” The Dublin Review 189). More mild criticism insisted on the strangeness of the novel. A reviewer in The Saturday Review uses the term odd five times in a short article, claiming “it is in many ways so unlike anything else that he has written.

Whether he has made his new departure in the right direction is another question” (“A Laodicean”

Saturday Review 54). Used to Hardy’s rustics and depictions of rural life, contemporary critics had a hard

43 In Hardy’s (auto)biography the narrator describes the writing of A Laodicean: “Its writer was, during the first few weeks, in considerable pain, and compelled to lie on an inclined plane with the lower part of his body higher than his head” (Hardy, The Life 150). 40 time making sense of A Laodicean.44 Even J.M. Barrie charges Hardy with faltering when his subject matter moves beyond the small Wessex towns: “Rich as English literature is by his Wessex tales, it would have been richer had he not sometimes wandered abroad and astray for his chief character . . . he has thrown away skill on books that have no value and little momentary interest . . . “A Laodicean” and

“Two on a Tower” . . . are both dull books: here and there, nasty as well, and the besom of oblivion will soon pass over them” (60).45 Yet having already written Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The

Return of the Native (1878), it is unlikely that what seems problematic in A Laodicean was not intentional on Hardy’s part.

The later 1912 General Preface to the Wessex Editions of Hardy’s novels may have been shaped by criticisms such as the ones surrounding A Laodicean. In the later Preface he famously categorizes his novels under three distinctive headings: “Novels of Character and Environment,” “Novels of Ingenuity,” and “Romances and Fantasies.” In his categorization, Hardy gives primacy to the “Novels of Character and Environment”: this may either explain why the novels in the other two categories were neglected for so long, or it may reflect Hardy’s own sensitivities about the reception of these novels and his subsequent attempts to distance himself from them and re-shape his artistic reputation.46 Ostensibly, Hardy did not consider A Laodicean a romance—in fact he categorized it under the “Novels of Ingenuity.” However, its

44 A reviewer in The Bookman argues, “it may here be said that the country and rustic life are to Mr. Hardy as was Earth to Antaeus. From it he draws his finest inspiration; whilst, as is shown in “A Laodicean” . . . it is in the presence of artificial and conventional characters, and in the exhausted air of crowded drawing-rooms, if at all, that his genius flags” (Douglas 111). 45 In contrast to Barrie’s charges of dullness, another contemporary essayist finds A Laodicean amusing, but this too, is not a positive assessment. For Lindsay Garrett, Hardy is best when not held to realist standards, because of his “false methods” (61) and “contempt for technique” (67). Garrett writes: “No lover of the fine arts, especially architecture, can rise from the perusal of “A Laodicean” without a sense of having derived pleasure. But he who adheres to the rational belief that fiction is the art of producing in literary form a convincing, beautiful, as well as instructive portrait of some selected phase of life must of necessity contemplate with disapprobation the disuse of the material conducive to these artistic effects” (67). 46 Hardy’s description of the newly formed categories states: “ . . . the first group is called ‘Novels of Character and Environment,’ and contains those which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail. The second group is distinguished as ‘Romances and Fantasies,’ a sufficiently descriptive definition. The third class—‘Novels of Ingenuity’— show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterized as ‘Experiments,’ and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life” (“General Preface” 397). 41 original publication date, 1881, falls between the publications of two novels he did categorize as

“Romances”: The Trumpet Major and Two on a Tower, suggesting romance was on his mind when writing A Laodicean. Evoking the trajectory J.M. Barrie predicted for the novel, Mary Rimmer concludes: “Whatever its purpose, the 1912 classification had far-reaching effects. By privileging the

‘Novels of Character and Environment,’ it led to nearly a century’s neglect of the rest, especially the

‘Novels of Ingenuity.’ If Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean were often criticized in reviews and in studies of Hardy’s fiction before 1912, in the wake of the Wessex Edition they began a slide towards near-oblivion” (268).

In recent years, despite the novel’s “near-oblivion,” the critical conversation around Hardy’s

“Novels of Ingenuity” has shifted and A Laodicean has received increased attention for its experimentalism and, especially, its use of the telegraph. One of the earliest critics to rethink the reception of A Laodicean, Peter Widdowson cast the inconsistencies in the novel in a far more positive light, arguing that the novel’s “oddities” were part of Hardy’s modern spirit and his “transitional” phase towards modernism: “Laod., then, represents the ‘clash’ of ‘the modern spirit’ and a ‘romantic’ medievalism in comic form. It represents it, however, not just as theme, but also in its own irresolute

‘eclecticism’ of mode, discourse and textual stance. This is ‘transitional’ writing at its more extreme”

(99).47 For Widdowson, the mixture of modes is self-conscious, and draws attention to the text’s self- reflexivity (106), which is also part of its “persistent foregrounding of false (or mis-) representation”

(111) and its challenge to realism. Jane Thomas also recognizes self-reflexivity as a metafictional quality in A Laodicean. She argues: “If realism wasn’t art for Hardy, and if the production of art was his ultimate goal, then the ‘Romances and Fantasies,’ along with the ‘Novels of Ingenuity,’ should attract more serious critical attention that has hitherto been the case, because they demonstrate Hardy’s radical rather

47 Widdowson’s re-evaluation of the novel was not just in response to Hardy’s contemporaries. Only a few years before Widdowson, Beat Riesen in Thomas Hardy’s Minor Novels (1990) offers a particularly caustic review: where he sees a “moment of uncharacteristic optimism” near the end of the novel, he characterizes it as “gratuitous vulgarization” (111). 42 than his ‘flawed’ aesthetic” (296). Significantly, Thomas pairs romance with Hardy’s “radical” aesthetic.

In his extended discussion of the novel, Richard Nemesvari similarly examines the challenge to realism, arguing for the significance of melodrama and sensation fiction as intentional generic discontinuities.

Bridging early criticism of A Laodicean with a more recent critical focus on technology and gender,

Nemesvari argues that the melodramatic and sensational modes introduce disproportion and excess in order to critique cultural ideologies.48 In particular, Nemesvari notes the dubious reputation of the sensational novel in the 1860s, and Hardy’s certain knowledge of the generic controversy that was prevalent in literary journals like Blackwood’s Magazine, the Westminster Review, and the Athenaeum

(Nemesvari 10). The literary contest over sensation fiction was similar to the Battle of the Books in which the reputation of romance was just as fervently debated. While elements of the sensation novel are explicit in Will Dare’s villainous character and some of the more secretive and criminal plot twists, the novel was written at the beginning of the Romance Revival when literary periodicals were already focusing on the distinctions between the new popular romance and realism: A Laodicean’s negotiation between realism and romance mirrors this contemporary periodical debate.

The crumbling castle, ancient ancestry, Paula’s “whim” for medievalism, and the competition between lovers are just some of the more familiar elements of romance that Hardy uses as a backdrop for his preeminently modern heroine. But these, the novel suggests, are not enough for modern romance.

According to Paula’s predilection for old families, Captain De Stancy is a perfectly romantic figure. His romance is an illusion, however. He merely imitates his ancestors and accompanies his illegitimate son,

48 For Nemesvari, Hardy’s melodrama is an extension of his tragic vision and loss of faith that result in “an extreme clash of ambivalent desires and conflicting principles that, because it occurs in a realm of radical uncertainty, produces the kind of (often destructive) ‘excess’ that indicates unresolved ideological cruxes. What is sometimes designated Hardy’s tragic vision, therefore, is not undercut or neutralized by his employment of melodrama” (5). Like Nemesvari, I argue that a certain kind of excess in the novel is part of its representation of uncertainty in the modern world, and that such excess does indeed subvert realism in the novel that is constantly in tension with romance; however, the overt elements of romance are also aligned with modernity in a way that uniquely deviates from Hardy’s tragic vision and challenges tragic perception. The excessive and self-reflexive romance in the novel is upheld.

Will Dare, to the castle to photograph their ancestral portraits, making copies of copies (172). De Stancy is symbolic shorthand for the imitation of past romance that the novel challenges. Preparing for his first encounter with Paula, Captain De Stancy studies the romantic histories of the De Stancys and revives them through dramatic recitation. After relating a romantic tale featuring some of his ancestors, he slips into armour to impersonate the male lead. Here, he draws ironic attention to his contrived romantic revival by “placing himself in front of a low-hanging painting near the original, so as to be enclosed by the frame while covering the figure, arranging the sword as in the one above, and setting the light that it might fall in the right direction . . .” (167). De Stancy self-consciously frames himself in a romantic narrative, but the frame is only a copy of the original. His re-enactment is clearly artificial, which is emphasized by his adjustment of the light. Exposing De Stancy’s romantic efforts, rather than allowing the infrastructure of his seduction to remain hidden, ironizes this imitation of bygone medieval romance.

As evidenced in this scene, the novel is preoccupied with romance, play, and artifice, but it challenges their connection by affirming play as a state of modern uncertainty.

Sites of Uncertainty: Play, Sincerity, and Performance

Though the novel could also be categorized with the romances in between which it was written,

Hardy placed A Laodicean with the novels of “Ingenuity” (alongside Desperate Remedies and The Hand of Ethelberta). His decision to categorize it as such gestures to the novel’s preoccupation with the social and moral layers of play and artifice embodied in De Stancy’s romantic charade. The most common use of ingenuity denotes skill in construction or device, and even connotes cleverness or experiment such as

Stevenson associates with the play of romance. Thus, in one sense, A Laodicean fits in this category because it contains a gothic castle as well as the modern inventions of the telegraph machine and a new photographic process. Yet, a seventeenth-century confusion in adjectives between ingenuous and 44 ingenius means that ingenuity relates to both skill and invention, and sincerity and straightforwardness

(“ingenuity” OED)—a layering of etymological roots that Hardy’s novel cleverly exploits.

Earlier definitions of sincerity denoted “purity” in the sense of an uncorrupted substance. From this, the leap was easily made to a religious adjective connoting uncontaminated faith. Under the Romantics, sincerity of expression became an aesthetic value denoting both the artist’s sincerity of intent and expression. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ruskin’s writing helped shift the Romantic concern with sincerity of the artist to the sincerity of both the architect and the material.49 Pam Morris also traces the movement in the nineteenth century from the social code of civility to one of sincerity. Morris has argued that the social code of sincerity emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a hierarchical model of society made way for a more inclusive one in which individual interiority takes definitional precedence over social position. Morris writes, “the code of sincerity . . . was always public and performative . . . the code of sincerity could be utilized, and doubtless often was, to utter great insincerities: that indeed was part of its manipulative political and commercial utility” (22). Morris suggests that sincerity could, ironically, be insincere for the Victorians, and indeed, A Laodicean reflects this connection by introducing both a literal stage and an upwardly mobile trickster who employs technology for his own insincere ends. The novel’s engagement with play, then, reflects an awareness that play was also disturbing for its association with the manipulation of character.

A Laodicean registers the scale of values attached to sincerity and play, and the way in which such a value system dictates limiting conceptions of the self and human meaning. Jeffrey Franklin attends to some of the specific threats of play as artifice in the Victorian novel, each of which is featured in A

Laodicean. He argues:

49 See Patricia Ball, “Sincerity: The Rise and Fall of a Critical Term” (1964) and Michael Bright, Cities Built to Music (1984) for overviews of sincerity as an evolving term in relation to art and architecture.

the primary function of the figure of play within realist novels is to signify their Other . . . Thus

they stigmatize gambling, chance, and associated ‘bad’ sources of value . . . with the figure of play.

These then serve as straw figures in juxtaposition to which are defined the ‘good’ sources of value .

. . In general, characters and actions associated with gambling, theatricality, or aesthetic play are

demonized as duplicitous, superficial, illusory, selfish, idealized, violent, or carnal, and these act as

foils to privileged characters and tropes that are portrayed as sincere, authentic, real, meritorious,

sympathetic, domestic, and enduring. (8)

In Franklin’s list, the sides of the binary associated with play reflect its connotations of immoral behaviour. The demonized halves represent instability: theatre, art, and gambling—all of which appear in

A Laodicean—were notorious sites of anxiety because of their disruption of certainty. What Franklin’s list makes evident is that the charge of levity in relation to romance during the revival was not only a charge of simplicity in contrast to the seriousness and depth of realism but also an accusation of insincerity. In his work, Franklin also focuses on the literal kinship between theatricality and play, showing how various forms of theatrical play are Othered by the realist novel, because of the way in which they destabilize identity. As Franklin explains, “The mark of the theatrical model is externality and artifice—as opposed to internal authenticity” (82). Of course, Franklin also shows the ways in which this is paradoxical, since realism itself is ultimately an act of staging, of “constitut[ing] the reality that it claims to report; it manufactures the ‘natural’ in its own image” (131). To challenge such a pattern, A

Laodicean stages a contest between play as romantic uncertainty and play as manipulation centered largely on Paula. Frequently, Paula’s epithet—her Laodiceanism—is the ground for conflicting views of uncertainty and play as either manipulative or romantic.

An early scene in the novel, in particular, acts as an introduction to Paula’s play as a site of uncertainty and possible romance. Will Dare discovers from a maid that Paula is most becoming when 46 she is playing at the Greek sport newly revived for women (150), and brings his father along to watch her secretly in the hope he will fall in love. In this voyeuristic scene, Captain De Stancy and Dare watch

Paula swinging through the ropes course in her private gymnasium. Hardy literalizes the enchantment of play in his depiction of Paula’s sport and the audience’s reaction:

Paula, in a pink flannel costume, was bending, wheeling, and undulating in the air like a gold-fish

in its globe, sometimes ascending by her arms nearly to the lantern, then lowering herself till she

swung level with the floor . . . The white manilla ropes clung about the performer like snakes as she

took her exercise, and the colour in her face deepened as she went on . . . She required only a cloud

to rest on instead of the green silk net which actually supported her reclining figure for the moment,

to be quite Olympian. (152)

This spirited scene is both eroticized and romanticized through imaginative description that elevates

Paula to goddess. As De Stancy watches Paula “play” at her sport, his reaction is described as “a fermentation . . . a purely chemical process” (153) that leads him to fall in love with her. Paula’s play here is literally a catalyst for the romance plot, but it is also an opportunity for metafictional reflection, as the narrator looks for a register in which the irrationality and provocation of Paula’s play can be properly appreciated.

Describing her sleek movements and the beauty of her form, the narrator calls Paula an “optical poem” (152). He can barely separate himself from the scene and from his complicity in gazing at her. He even becomes self-deprecating as he suggests that his narrative art is inadequate for describing this

“poem.” In imagining Paula as text, the narrator becomes self-conscious of his role and his art, claiming,

“It would have demanded the poetic passion of some joyous Elizabethan lyrist like Lodge, Nash, or

Constable, to fitly phrase Paula’s presentation of herself at this moment of absolute abandonment . . .”

(152). Here, he draws attention to the inadequacy of his art—not just to capture Paula’s beauty but to 47

“fitly phrase Paula’s presentation of herself.” Paula as “optical poem” cannot be adequately written or interpreted. Her play is romanticized, but also inassimilable. The narrator waxes poetic by claiming that she only requires a cloud to complete her Olympian image, but he descends again to the language of realism by recognizing that instead of “haughty effrontery there sat on her countenance only the healthful sprightliness of an English girl” (152). Since his genre is not poetry, he cannot carry the conceit, and must return to the conventions of realism that deflate the romantic ideal. This tantalizing scene manifests a clash of literary form and social threat that reappears throughout the text. The stage trope introduced in

“Paula’s presentation of herself” recurs in the novel as the melodrama of some of the characters involves the staging of a public self. The trickster, William Dare; Paula’s uncle, Abner Power; and her suitor,

Captain De Stancy, all inhabit false identities, which suggest a negative connotation of stage play.

However, the novel is ambivalent about the eroticism of Paula’s unwitting public performance, and more interested in aligning her theatricality with romance.

As the narrator specifically notes her pleasure in “performing” daring feats, and the need for poetry to describe Paula’s “presentation of herself” (152), a connection is established here between play, romance, and the stage, which looks forward to her later performance in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The gymnasium scene also closes with her playing at Shakespeare’s Ariel, an important nod to The Tempest’s emphasis on magic and enchantment, as well as theatricality. The novel’s awareness of its own conventions is suggested by Paula’s conscious performativity as she impersonates Ariel. Hardy himself ventriloquized Prospero in his 1912 postscript to the 1896 Preface, commenting on the lack of topographical detail in A Laodicean—a feature of formal realism—and claiming the details in this text are merely “the baseless fabrics of a vision” (Preface 380). Hardy’s comments place the novel in a tradition of metafictional romance specifically grounded in romance as stage play.

Paula’s connection to the stage is carried further as she performs with Captain De Stancy in the 48 local production of Love’s Labour’s Lost—much to the chagrin of her lover, Somerset. Again, Paula’s presentation of herself is at issue, rather than just the presentation of her character. When De Stancy contrives to kiss Paula on stage by altering the lines and stage directions, Somerset is horrified by how the audience reacts, because he fears the audience will conflate the stage performance with the real Paula.

Somerset’s fear of the audience’s reaction, though, point to his own fear of stage play as a demonstration of his lover’s ability to manipulate her self-presentation and hide her interiority. Through Somerset’s frequent anxieties about his lover’s sincerity, the text suggests that the danger of play is merely a social construct.

Play and Gothic Sincerity

The connection between sincerity and play also bears architectural significance, and is interwoven with Paula’s performativity on the gymnasium ropes through the recurring visual motif of lines. In a novel where the heroine’s character is so explicitly connected to the gothic architecture of her castle, it is worth recalling that John Ruskin prized the warp lines of the gothic for their variability—an architectural aesthetic with which Hardy was very familiar. Ruskin’s second internal element of the gothic in “The

Nature of Gothic” is changefulness. Praising the adaptability of gothic architecture and its builders,

Ruskin declares: “whenever it finds occasion for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty . . . And it is one of the chief virtues of the Gothic builders, that they never suffered ideas of outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did” (“The Nature of Gothic” 178-9). Ruskin’s words here could be used to describe Paula’s Laodiceanism. In fact, when Hardy’s narrator earlier describes Paula in the gymnasium flying through the air and abandoning herself to every whim, he notes that the ropes cling about her “like snakes” (152)—an image that may well be taken from Ruskin’s description of gothic changefulness as 49

“subtle and flexible like a fiery serpent, but ever attentive to the voice of the charmer” (“The Nature of

Gothic” 179). The snake charming metaphor equally fits the whim and movement of Paula’s Laodicean character, and the changeful nature of the gothic.

Ruskin also famously expounds on the sincerity of architecture—especially in relation to restoration, which is a significant plot device in A Laodicean. 1881, the year of A Laodicean’s volume publication, was also the year Hardy joined the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings begun by

William Morris and others and closely associated with Ruskin’s writings.50 The line motif so often associated with the crumbling gothic castle and its changeful owner is also suggestive of Ruskin’s conclusion about the collapse of sincerity in gothic architecture, which he explains in terms mourning the loss of a formal vision. In “The Lamp of Truth” he blames the decline of gothic on the confusion of architects whose focus shifted with their “substitution of the line for the mass” (79):

the traceries had caught the eye of the architect. Up to that time, up to the very last instant in which

the reduction and thinning of the intervening stone was consummated, his eye had been on the

openings only, on the stars of light. He did not care about the stone; a rude border of moulding was

all he needed, it was the penetrating shape which he was watching. But when that shape had

received its last possible expansion, and when the stone-work became an arrangement of graceful

and parallel lines, that arrangement, like some form in a picture, unseen and accidentally developed,

struck suddenly, inevitably, on the sight. It had literally not been seen before. It flashed out in an

instant, as an independent form. It became a feature of the work. (79-80)

Ruskin regrets the architectural shift that produces a new form: the form previously thought useful merely for the open space that permitted light. The architectural features that were once utilitarian suddenly became an object of art in themselves, and the individual lines of the tracery and mouldings became more

50 See Claudius J.P. Beatty, Thomas Hardy: Conservation Architect (1995). 50 important than the network of materials and shafts of light they were originally meant to afford. The decline of the gothic resulted in what Ruskin refers to as “surface deceit”—a concept Paula seems to intuit. Hardy carries over this architectural metaphor of the substitution of the line for the mass, accusing

Somerset of seeing Paula as a straight line and missing the “mass” of her more complex personality.

Somerset’s obsession with Paula’s linearity might even be read as a direct reference to Ruskin’s theory of decline. In the opening scene when the warp threads of the sun surround Somerset as he sketches an ancient church, the network of the sun’s rays illuminate him as he carefully measures individual lines up against a “tall mass of antique masonry” (emphasis mine) (3).

This opening scene also introduces the visual motif of lines that is taken up as a metaphor for

Paula’s sincerity. The novel describes Somerset sketching the church against the backdrop of the sun

“that crossed the neighbouring mead like a warp of golden threads, in whose mazes groups of equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly” (3). The narrator uses a weaving simile to depict the sun’s rays as the warp threads running lengthwise on a loom, creating a maze or web image. In this very first paragraph we are introduced to an image of intricate lines: in this case warp indicates the straight lines that form part of a weave. As the novel progresses, Paula’s minister and lover both blame the medieval influence of her castle for what they see as a warp in her character. Where sincerity denotes straightforwardness, Paula and her gothic castle are associated with warped lines, with bending and twisting, and variation. When the narrator describes Paula “bending, wheeling, and undulating in the air,” abandoning herself to “every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form” (152), the imagery of Paula surrounded by twisting, bending ropes, recalls the maze of warp threads in the opening paragraph.51 The scene is also symbolic of the “warp” (or bent) of her nature, which her lovers call

51 Perhaps subconsciously, Hardy himself reveals the way in which the imagery of lines draws together disparate strands in the novel. In The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, Hardy (through the voice of his “biographer” Florence Dugdale) describes the revision process for the novel: “During some sunny days in September Hardy corrected A Laodicean for the issue in volumes, sitting under the vine on their stable-wall, ‘which for want of training hangs in long arms over my head nearly to the ground. 51 caprice and the Baptist minister calls Laodiceanism: she is characterized by movement and whim. The final paragraph of the novel repeats the term warp from the opening description of Somerset’s sketching but shifts the image away from straight lines by using the more familiar sense of a bend or twist.

Somerset, now Paula’s husband, imagines his wife’s future: “You, Paula, will be yourself again, and recover, if you have not already, from the warp given to your mind (according to Woodwell) by the medievalism of that place . . . for since it is rather in your line you may as well keep straight on”

(emphasis mine) (379). Somerset uses warp here to refer to the bent of her mind as an image of her

Laodiceanism but then reimagines the image as a straight line, despite his professional preference for the curves of the flying buttresses and gothic tracery. His desire for Paula’s thinking to conform to straight lines, rather than warped lines, suggests he still misunderstands his new wife.

In his fears, Somerset is far more Puritan than Paula. As lover and architect to Paula, Somerset is concerned with the integrity of both the castle’s gothic character and his beloved. Through Somerset’s dual role, Paula and her castle become the loci of Victorian obsessions with sincerity. Repeatedly, Paula is accused of caprice because of her refusal to commit to church or husband. As aforementioned,

Somerset’s anxieties are exacerbated when Paula plays the lead female role in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and he conflates real life and the life unfolding on stage in his worried observations of her acting. He is not only concerned with sincerity, but with what the audience might feel, and the ways in which the drama on stage might be mistaken for real life by others. He is afraid that spectators will recognize Paula’s necklace and misinterpret the gesture of De Stancy fastening it on Paula’s neck for a real-life pact between them (206). The synecdoche used to describe the public reception of the stage kiss reflects the focus of Somerset’s fury: “ . . . Somerset turned his head. Five hundred faces had regarded the act; and four hundred and fifty mouths in those faces were smiling . . . It was a profanation without parallel . . .”

The sun tries to shine through the great leave, making a green light on the paper, the tendrils twisting in every direction, in gymnastic endeavours to find something to lay hold of’” (Early Life 194-5). 52

(207). The profanation here seems to lie less in the possibility that the kiss actually took place, than in the fact that it was acted out in public and could be construed as sincere by so many observers. The narrator notes Somerset’s confusion: “He could hardly go so far as to assume that Paula was a consenting party to this startling interlude; but her otherwise unaccountable wish that his own love should be clandestinely shown lent immense force to a doubt of her sincerity” (207).

Somerset’s obsession with social sincerity lessens his appeal as romantic hero. His lover is first introduced as she turns her back on the baptismal tank, and as Paula’s epithet suggests, she is comfortable with the lukewarmness condemned in Revelation. In contrast, Somerset’s perception of sincerity is influenced by a rigid morality. Although the Baptist church in which Somerset first sees her is ugly and utilitarian compared to the gothic architecture he spends his days studying, he is “arrested” by it and is drawn “to linger in a way he had not at all expected” (9). In other words, it is the Baptist church that first entices him in this scene rather than Paula. Moreover, he is attracted to the church by the “earnestness” of the hymn he hears emanating from the building (9), and he is curious to see a baptism because “he had been told that Baptists were earnest people” (10). From the beginning, Somerset is characterized, not by his former days as romantic artist (5) but as someone “intently practical” (5) and drawn to gravity, as opposed to the “caprice” he infers must exist in Paula’s nature (16). His conventional morality affects what he wishes for in a lover: “all that [is] tender, and noble, and kind” (55)—qualities he is never quite sure Paula possesses. Rather than a Ruskinian gothic sincerity, Somerset desires a public sincerity that accords with social custom.

Somerset’s fear that she is insincere is shared by the Baptist minister, Woodwell, who initially disturbs Somerset’s calm by suggesting that the mystical spirit of the castle will “tain[t]” her (54). Here, the contest between sincerity and artificial performance is cast in terms of dirt, purity, and sin, which are 53 etymologically connected to the word sincerity.52 In other words, both Somerset and Woodwell re-enact the rationalizing tendency of the realist novel in Othering insincerity and any sort of playful theatricality: the former in terms of Othering undesirable feminine characteristics, and the latter in terms of Othering the impurity of sin. Somerset embodies a Victorian agitation over the threat of insincerity, which is so historically connected to theatricality. Ventriloquizing Somerset’s interiority, the narrator often frames his nagging concern over Paula’s sincerity in terms of his fear of levity (55) and games.

When a false report in the local paper suggests an impending marriage between De Stancy and

Paula, Somerset decides that if it is true, “It would simply amount to a proof that Paula was an arrant coquette, the explanation of whose guarded conduct towards himself lay in the fact that she wished not to commit herself in playing her game with him” (222). Her apparently insincere intentions are cast in the language of play; wishing “not to commit,” a characteristic of Paula’s Laodiceanism, is equated with coquetry. Yet since readers are already acquainted with the lengths to which Paula has gone in order to free herself from acting the second night, they know that Somerset’s speculations are untrue. The text itself suggests that while Somerset’s fear of insincerity may be ubiquitous in the Victorian novel, Paula’s

Laodiceanism is less a flaw than a challenge to Somerset’s assumption that he has full knowledge of his lover’s interiority. Nemesvari similarly argues that Somerset’s attempts to read Paula’s blushes and facial expressions are problematic: “Somerset’s effort to understand Paula through her dis/embodied face is exposed as fundamentally flawed, since he is attempting to apply fixed, culturally predetermined designations to a woman who is herself neither fixed nor predetermined” (141). The figurative representation of sincerity as a straight line suggests an organizing principle for knowledge that affords linear certainty of the Other. Somerset’s demands on Paula’s sincerity and straightness reflect his expectation that a stable interiority will be reflected on the surface. Yet, Paula’s association with the

52 In Sincerity and Authenticity Lionel Trilling notes that the word derives from the Latin sincerus, meaning clean, sound, or pure (12). 54 warped and twisting lines of the gothic; the whimsical play on the ropes of the gymnasium; and the lines of the stage play, redirect Somerset’s rational certainty into uncertainty.

The Ruskinian influence on the novel’s imagery suggests a formal revision of romance that resists the lover’s desire for certainty. When another architect suggests replacing some of the old stones on the vaulting of her castle with new ones, Paula is quick to jump in: “But the new ones won’t be Saxon . . .

And then in time to come, when I have passed away, and those stones have become stained like the rest, people will be deceived. I should prefer an honest patch” (60). Like Somerset and her Baptist minister,

Paula desires honesty, framing architectural impurity with the same language of immorality used against her; however, her version of sincerity is a gothic one dedicated to Laodicean changefulness and a wild imaginative truth, rather than imitation or false contrivance.

Ruskin’s vision of the gothic, comprised of both design principles and philosophical ones, generates a way to think about aesthetic design as promoting certain kinds of knowledge. As an architect,

Hardy was very familiar with Ruskin’s ideas. Hardy’s attention to the sincerity of architectural materials is mirrored in the novel’s emphasis on Paula’s Laodicean sincerity. By embracing some of the playful elements to which the code of Victorian sincerity was opposed, Hardy’s novel challenges the conception of a rational, linear model of the self, replacing it with a model of enchanting uncertainty.

Sites of Uncertainty: Play and Telegraphy

Paula’s affiliation with warped lines connects her, not only with the enchanting indefiniteness of gothic architecture, but also with the often bent or misinterpreted signals of new social technologies in which sincerity was also at stake. Networks of warped threads, ropes, and lines become a motif connected to Paula, her castle, and technology, and weave together the sense of deviating from a straight path, which undermines connotations of rational straightforwardness. The encroachment of the railroad and 55 new farming equipment on the countryside, and the regretful nostalgia that accompanies this shift towards modernization, are overt themes in other novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd and The

Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), but A Laodicean’s depiction of technology is different. The gymnasium scene not only conjures romance through play and theatricality, but it also presents an enchanted image of modern technology. As Paula swings through her ropes course, the narrator describes her “bending, wheeling, and undulating in the air,” abandoning herself to “every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form” (152). As aforementioned, the imagery of Paula surrounded by twisting ropes reflects the maze of warp threads in the opening paragraph as well as the symbolic warp of her nature; however, the ropes course recalls more than just this thread motif. The gymnasium scene concludes with Paula resting on a woven net, teasing her aunt: “Ariel sleeps in this posture, does he not,

Auntie?” (153) This allusion to the Shakespearean sprite points to more than her theatricality. Paula’s invocation of The Tempest while she lies on the net also draws on a contemporary simile that had been used to describe the wires of the telegraph.

In his 1854 essay on the inner workings of the telegraph machine, Andrew Wynter described the electricity running through the telegraph wires as “a spirit like Ariel to carry our thoughts with the speed of thought to the uttermost ends of the earth” (119). Iwan Rhys Morus explains that, like Wynter, more than one contemporary compared the telegraph to a Shakespearean sprite (341), which suggests that

Hardy may indeed had been aware of the metaphorical connection. Ariel’s association with electricity and wires was also well established by the infamous 1857 Charles Kean production of The Tempest that featured the actress hung above the stage on wires, illuminated by the electricity of a carbon arc lamp

(Schoch 68). In other words, by mid-century the staging of Ariel bore an association with wires, electricity, and new ingenious technologies for accentuating theatrical effect. More importantly, to the average user in 1881 electricity was still dangerous and unpredictable, and its power, like both Ariel’s 56 and Paula’s, had to be tamed. Christopher Keep explains that the connection between telegraphy and women was a particular source of anxiety. He writes that “Telegraph girls” presented a dilemma for the post office, which had to “consider the possible threat that their innate sensitivity—the ease with which they could be touched by the intelligence that flowed through their nervous systems—might pose to the information network itself . . . the female telegraphist was seen as a danger to the security of the nation’s communication” (248). Not only is Paula Power just such a female telegraphist, but, as evident in her name, she is aligned in the novel with all modern forms of power—money, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the influence of the New Woman. Her depiction as a snake charmer taming the gymnastic ropes, then, is also a metaphorical nod to her taming of the electric lines of the telegraph since she has her own private telegraph wires entering into the window of the castle beside her bedroom. Indeed, as the uses of the telegraph and electric power broadened in the later nineteenth century, the measurement of electricity became a source of controversy as engineers and scientists attempted to harness its use for individuals.53 It is worth noting that whereas Paula is explicitly associated with the uncertainty of power and electricity, our first glimpse of Somerset is of him measuring the lines of a church—an image that resonates with his attempt to measure and tame the unpredictability of Paula’s interiority. In the novel, telegraph wires symbolize the same sort of mysterious power possessed by Paula that is always threatened with being rationalized into orderly, linear lines.

There was an association of telegraph wires with linearity, order, and truth from their inception.

Possessing the formal qualities of both network and rhythm, the first telegraph wires ran along the rail lines and were used for scheduling and ensuring that track and train operations ran smoothly and

53 Graeme Gooday explains that in the mid to late nineteenth century “Natural philosophers, electricians, and telegraphists could not agree among themselves about whether electricity was a form of energy, or constituted out of one or possibly two negatively or positively charged fluids . . . or perhaps was even something hitherto altogether unknown” (xiii). However, even if the nature of electricity could not be determined, scientists could attempt to measure it, and as Gooday demonstrates, practices of electrical measurement also bore judgments of value and use for electricity: “judgements of fairness, fidelity, and honesty were used to decide which electrical practitioners and instruments should be trusted or distrusted in measurement work, and why” (xv). 57 efficiently. In A Laodicean, Paula’s deceased father was a rail engineer whose rail lines would have been accompanied by these wires. Another early use for the telegraph was law enforcement: police were able to send messages down the line before a criminal arrived in the next town and could get off the train. The telegraph was even famously responsible for catching a murderer, and one source referred to the wires as

“the cords that hung John Tawell,” turning the telegraph wires into a visual trope for law and order

(Standage 51). By the publication of A Laodicean the government Post Office was in charge of erecting the telegraph lines. The wires themselves, then, became a powerful symbol of authority, efficiency, precision, rational instrumentality, and the straightforward (both literal and metaphoric) transmission of messages. Andrew Wynter even refers to telegraph messages as “linear language,” suggesting a correspondence between their physical appearance and metaphorical function (133). Wynter imagined this “linear language” as “a series of conversations carried on with all corners of the island . . . as intimately as though the speakers were bending their heads over the dinner table and talking confidentially to the host” (134). His description renders the telegraph an apparatus of intimacy.

Because of the way it connected people internationally, it was indeed thought to be a tool for peace and understanding. The idea that minds could be connected across time and space seemed to promise not only intimacy, but also increased understanding and enlightenment. It was as if the linearity of the telegraph lines themselves could be translated into earnest speech that might bring people together, much like the connection Somerset makes between straightness and earnestness in his ideal for Paula. An 1858 book telling the story of the telegraph exclaimed:

How potent a power, then, is the telegraphic destined to become in the civilization of the world!

This binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices

and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of

thought between all the nations of the earth. (Briggs and Maverick 22) 58

Depicting the telegraph as a “vital cord,” this statement resonates with the thread motif running throughout the novel and suggests a rational, reliable form of network that could increase empathy with instrumental certitude. Indeed, Christopher Keep acknowledges one contemporary endorsement of the telegraph that described the technology as a nervous system: “We may view . . . the vast network of wires about to be erected over our heads as a plexus of nerves” (qtd in Keep “Touching at a Distance” 241). As

“linear language,” “vital cord,” and “nervous system,” the telegraph wires become an image of both bodily and social connections in a network form.

Parallels in the text suggest Hardy’s familiarity with these contemporary descriptions. As Somerset notices the wires running into the gothic castle, for instance, he is struck by the opposition between a monument to “hard distinctions in blood and race” and a “machine which beyond everything may be said to symbolise cosmopolitan views and the intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind” (18). The telegraph does indeed break down class barriers between Paula and Charlotte De Stancy, a close female friend and Captain De Stancy’s sister. Charlotte feels more intimately connected with Paula because the brevity and speed of the telegraph leads them to communicate more frequently about mundane matters.

When Paula first gets the machine, she “was sending messages from morning till night” (29). When Paula telegraphs Charlotte just to tell her when she will be home, the narrator explains, “Miss De Stancy blushed with pleasure when she raised her eyes from the machine. ‘Is she not thoughtful to let me know beforehand?’” (43). The telegraph’s casual use for updating a friend with the unimportant details of daily life seems to increase familiarity, not to mention the suggestion of sexual attraction between the two women, which is fostered by the exclusively feminine use of telegraphy in the novel.54

54 See Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003), Chapter Two for a discussion of gender, sexual desire and the use of the telegraph in the relationship between Paula and Charlotte. See also, Christopher Keep, “Touching at a Distance: Telegraphy, Gender, and Henry James’s In the Cage” (2011) for his argument about the feminized discourse around nineteenth-century telegraphy. As a technology that relied on the haptic sense, rather than the visual, the telegraph privileged body over mind and was thus associated with femininity, but also susceptibility. Keep argues: “the telegraph’s uncanny effects were understood, first and foremost, as they troubled the categories of femininity and masculinity, asserting the 59

Before Somerset even meets Paula, he inspects the contents of her private quarters where the telegraph wires find their place amongst books and other bric-a-brac as clues to her character. The lines of the telegraph amongst her private things suggest that the telegraph is central to her interiority and self- expression. Yet, where the telegraph may increase intimacy on one level, Paula embraces the machine for its ability to decrease intimacy and protect her from public exposure where she cannot be misread through the physical cues with which Somerset is so preoccupied. As Karin Koehler has recently argued:

“Telegrams are an essential tool in [Paula’s] endeavour to devise a version of herself that transcends culturally approved representations of femininity” (154). Paula has a telegraph wire run directly into her window precisely because this new technology affords her physical disembodiment from such expectations.55 For instance, though she clearly loves Somerset, a declaration of affection will expose her to public judgment and particularly to the censure of her uncle. To protect herself, she orders her lover to communicate with her only through the telegraph and only on business while she travels. Mirroring

Hamlet’s refusal to exhibit “that which passeth show,” Paula resists the display of emotion through which her lover expects to read her sincerity. When she suggests to Somerset that they telegraph rather than write, she whispers “Be true to me!” ironically twisting Polonius’ dictum to Laertes on sincerity. Yet

Somerset wishes, “In addition to those words, warm as they were, he would have preferred a little paleness of cheek, or trembling of lip, instead of the bloom and the beauty which sat upon her undisturbed maidenhood” (226). Instead of swooning at her lover’s advances, Paula hides her emotions from lover, narrator, and reader. Self-enclosed in her tower, Paula uses both the affordances of the possibility that the emergence of techné as the epistemological mode that will increasingly dominate the modern period may find its expression not in the disembodied form of masculine reason, but in the thoroughly embodied form of feminine sympathy” (242). Keep sees an emphasis on physical connection and immediacy through the telegraph’s network as akin to eighteenth-century affective sympathy (243). While the telegraph network is unifying, however, there are also barriers to effective and affective communication underscored by the possibilities for misrepresenting oneself in A Laodicean. 55 Nemesvari argues that not only is A Laodicean sensational in its melodramatic mode, but he argues, like Keep, that Paula’s association with the telegraph is sensational in the literal sense that the technology was read through physical sensation (133). Nemesvari explains: “The Victorian association of the telegraph with the sensual, with the production of physical sensations, means that Paula’s facility with the instrument is not an attempt to deny her female body, but rather a method for expressing its sensuality in a way that frees it from conventional responses and restrictions” (133). 60 bounded castle tower and the far-reaching telegraph network to assert and protect the femininity which is under such constant scrutiny.56

The juxtaposition of the enclosed tower and the network of lines reaching beyond her window is also an inverse image of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott—another famous figure of romance. The wires of the telegraph are analogous to the threads on the Lady’s loom, and from the tower of a medieval castle,

Paula weaves her messages—though these are messages received by the outside world. The collision of network and enclosure here has a unique affordance: she is isolated from the world, and yet her weaving provides a liberating outlet for her to exert her “Power” through the telegraph. 57 For instance, when she writes to Somerset to tell him of her decision to hire him—essentially to complete a business transaction—the telegraph itself is the instrument of romance: “When the message was fairly gone out of the window Paula seemed still further to expand. The strange spell cast over her by something or other . .

. in a great measure became dissipated, leaving her the arch and serene maiden that she was before”

(182). Like the Lady of Shalott, Paula has a spell or enchantment cast over her by the reincarnation of feudal romance embodied in De Stancy; however, the telegraph has the power to dissipate the romance of the past and cause Paula “to expand,” suggesting it is a modern element of romance. Paula harnesses the telegraph’s energy—an energy that the Victorians found dangerous and unpredictable—but from within her gothic tower, so that it becomes a source of enchantment in the modern world. The technology becomes instrumental to the romantic courtship of the novel, and it provides Paula with some control over her own love story. Unlike the Lady of Shalott who is isolated from the outside world in a tower, or

56 In Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (2013) Jane Thomas addresses Paula’s desire for a free expression of her selfhood undetermined by social constructions of gender by focusing on her close female friendship with Charlotte inside the castle walls. Similarly, in Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication (2016) Karin Koehler argues that the telegraph’s ambiguity becomes “Paula’s chief weapon for challenging the romantic master narrative . . . that prescribes that a love story must result in monogamous marriage, and in female submission to male authority” (147). This is because telegrams are less “readable” than letters, and therefore Paula can resist being read, or have meaning imposed on her (Koehler 151). 57 See Caroline Levine, Forms, p.119 for a similar argument about the affordances of the postal network in collision with enclosure for Emily Dickinson. 61 like Ginevra of “The Mistletoe Bough” (a ballad mentioned earlier by Somerset) who is also captive in a tower, Paula exerts control over the outside world using new technology. Through the placement of the telegraph wires in Paula’s tower, the text draws on both medievalism and new technology for romance— a clash resembling Somerset’s plans for the castle in which old and new will co-exist. Nonetheless, while

Paula may be a New Woman, Somerset’s insistence on public sincerity demonstrates that her ability to weave her own life is still circumscribed.

Despite the generous inference Charlotte draws from Paula’s telegrams, Somerset, who does not yet know Paula, feels he is not “in possession of sufficient data” (43) to judge her character. He mistrusts the telegraph, because it lacks the physical signs that provide the clues he looks for in a potential lover.

Because of this misdirected investment in sincerity, the lovers’ communications through the winding wires of the telegraph do indeed become warped. Yet Paula mistakenly assumes that her telegraphic words will be trusted as sincere, which is not surprising given the popular connotations of the wires as reliable. Yet, as Karin Koehler points out, “notwithstanding its association with ‘objective truth’, in A

Laodicean Hardy suggests that, where personal and emotional matters are concerned, telegraphic style becomes a source of heightened ambiguity” (147). Paula’s reliance on the telegraph exposes her to the insincerity of others because she cannot see her interlocutor, but also because of her own faith in its straightforward nature. At one point she attempts to conduct business using her telegraph to hire an actress—the sort of expedient instrumentality for which the telegraph was invented; however, she is taken advantage of during the deal, unsure of whether or not she is talking with the actress or an agent (215).

Paula’s insistence on corresponding through the telegraph with her lover also makes her the victim of fraud. Pretending he is Somerset, Will Dare sends a telegraph to Paula asking for money because he has lost everything at the casino in Monte Carlo. In spite of the fact that gambling and requests for money are 62 completely out of character for Somerset, Paula’s belief in the telegraph’s truthfulness induces her to believe the story and send the money.

Not surprisingly, the novel is ambivalent about the social benefits of the telegraph. As it reshapes an image of the telegraph wires themselves, the novel interrogates the very discourse of honesty and sincerity with which these wires were invested. The text registers a host of contemporary ideas about the telegraph including harmony, enlightenment, order, and straightforwardness, yet the visual motifs that associate Paula with warped, gothic lines suggest an association with romance rather than rational certainty. The initial introduction of the telegraph wires is conveyed in imaginative language. Somerset stumbles upon the “musical threads” that hum and lead him seductively away from the paved path.

Significantly, the noise he first hears arises from “the play of the breezes” over the wire, so that the wire is first associated with play. As he follows the wire, the telegraph suggestively diverges from the mapped, paved roads of rational, orderly life, and wanders off on its own romantic path into a park “which flourished in all its original wildness,” eventually leading to the “fossil of feudalism” and to his love interest (17). In other words, rather than emphasizing the modern rupture on this rural landscape, the telegraph wires bring him into contact with untouched nature, with the past, and with love.58

The wires of the telegraph, like the warp lines of Paula’s character, are depicted in playful terms and are consistently associated with older materials of romance. In this novel, they undermine the social insistence on sincerity that assumes a linear relationship between interiority and exteriority. Yet the warped lines that develop into the unpredictable network of the telegraph also find themselves re-cast into a web, as a similar organizing principle in which knowledge remains inscrutable and uncertain.

58 These natural descriptions of the telegraph may have been suggested by Hardy’s own earlier work. One of his early poems highlights a conflict between disenchantment and romance, providing insight into this recurring theme in his work. In 1866, before deciding on a career in writing, Hardy wrote a poem, “Heiress and Architect” that tells the story of a young heiress who approaches an architect to build her a romantic, gothic manor. She desires “high halls with tracery / And open ogive- work, that scent and hue / Of buds, and traveling bees, may come in through” (lines 13-15). In A Laodicean, the telegraph wires are represented by the sound of the buzzing bees traveling right into Paula’s medieval window (16), making her an updated version of this earlier heiress. 63

Sites of Uncertainty: Play, Chance, and Gambling

Representing another site of epistemological uncertainty, the network form in A Laodicean becomes an enchanted metaphor for the play of chance in a way that deviates from Hardy’s own typically pessimistic treatment of this theme.59 In a scene at the Monte Carlo casino, the narrator reorients the network imagery to describe a group of gamblers around one gaming table. He fancifully describes the opposing “wishes” of the competing players, almost personifying them, as they “issu[e] from the murky intelligences around a table, and sprea[d] down across each other . . .” (250). These wishes form a

“network of hopes,” which disappears like “magic gossamer, to be replaced in a moment by new” (250).

Here, the romantic conceit of the competition, which is present earlier between the architects, and in the

“battle of wits” over a fair damsel, is re-shaped from a duel into a network of “a hundred diametrically opposed wishes” (250) that resembles the telegraph network.

The narrator’s formulation of gambling as a “network of hopes” surprises in its atypical portrayal of chance. For Hardy, chance suggested the cruelties of fate, but for some Victorians, chance represented a lack of knowledge that had to be rationalized and contained in Weber’s sense. In his examination of the various Victorian tropes of play, Matthew Kaiser outlines the Victorians’ conceptualization of “play as fate.” He explains:

Rather than something we do, play is something that happens to us. We are the playthings of the

cosmos, the pawns of God, of chance or fortune, of ineffable forces beyond comprehension. Play

59 Hardy’s conception of chance, like his ironic playfulness, can be traced from his earliest poem to some of his most recognizable later work. In “Hap” “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, / And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . / These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown / Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain” (11-14). Likewise, some of the final lines of Tess of the D’Urbervilles read, “the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (396). The sardonic tone of these lines from his second-last novel is not far removed from the tone of “Hap.” Both of these examples signal his career-long interest in chance, though from the early poem to the late novel, the play of chance has shifted in nature. In “Hap” both the roll of the dice and blindness are representative of chance, whereas by the time he writes Tess, the dice have turned to “sport,” and a malignant conception of fate has replaced the blind gods of his earliest poem. In the much later “Convergence of the Twain” (1915) the Immanent Will intentionally “prepares” a “sinister mate”—fate does not even “sport” anymore, but intentionally predestines doom. 64

tugs at our strings. Victorian materialists may call the mysterious force nature, history, or society,

rather than God, but they feel the tug nonetheless. Play humbles us. An exhilarating or horrifying

sensation, it reminds us just how flimsy, how partial and perspectival, our knowledge and authority

are in the grand scheme of things. (37)

Kaiser’s emphasis on “partial and perspectival” knowledge presents a problem for Victorian science and religion alike. Such tensions between science, religion, and chance were frequently represented in the

Victorian realist novel. Leland Monk demonstrates, for instance, that the novel is deeply invested in rationalizing efforts to resolve chance through plot. He argues: “Chance and its cognates have been systematically suppressed in Western science and philosophy in the service of order, certainty, and necessity in order to assure metaphysics a cognitive and conceptual mastery over reality” (Monk 4). In the Victorian novel chance often appears as gambling, and as aforementioned, Jeffrey Franklin shows that gambling was stigmatized as a form of play and a “bad source of value” (Franklin 8). George Eliot’s treatments of gambling, for example, place it at the negative end of a scale of values that valorizes work, personal responsibility, and choice. Notably, the gambling house in which Fred Vincy loses his money is called The Green Dragon, a name that ironically conjures a figure of romance and danger that must be figuratively slain.60

In contrast, A Laodicean suggests gambling might be a positive signifier of uncertainty. As Kaiser notes, chance can also be “exhilarating” in its reminder of our limited knowledge. Uncharacteristic of

Hardy’s other work, the play of chance in A Laodicean liberates characters, not just from social conventions, but also from the strictly immanent frame in which play never points past itself and the limits of human behavior. Play as chance becomes a sign of alternative ways of observing the world

60 See also, Michael Flavin, Gambling in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel: "A Leprosy Is O'er the Land" (2003). Flavin writes: “Perhaps gambling was attacked because it exposed the principles of chance and speculation which lay at the heart of nineteenth-century English society, despite the best attempts of that society to present itself as rational and orderly” (1). 65 rather than an indicator of morality. Distinct from Eliot and from common critical assessments of chance and gambling in Hardy’s work, A Laodicean experiments with gambling as a source of danger, adventure, and even hope.61 Overwhelmingly, it is chance that most clearly embodies the enchantment of romance in the novel and subverts contemporary rationalizations of uncertainty.

Chance and Probability

In the nineteenth century, the expanding belief that the universe was subject to chance and chaos only encouraged scientists to look harder for tendencies in order to detect deterministic laws.

Paradoxically, the acceptance of chance increased a desire for control, which, according to Ian Hacking’s seminal argument, was translated into the form of probability and new mathematical formulae (Hacking

2). For instance, statistics measured behavioural tendencies and illuminated norms from which, if people deviated, they were seen as outside the pale of a new mathematical definition of regular conduct. The world may not be deterministic, but it could be quantified and explained, in part, through what Hacking calls “an avalanche of printed numbers.” He writes:

The printing of numbers was a surface effect. Behind it lay new technologies for classifying and

enumerating, and new bureaucracies with the authority and continuity to deploy the technology . . .

The systematic collection of data about people has affected not only the ways in which we conceive

of a society . . . It has profoundly transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we

think of ourselves. (2-3)62

61 Mike Huggins in Vice and the Victorians (2016) incorporates Hardy into a sweeping statement about gambling in Victorian fiction: “Many novelists, such as Disraeli, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Moore, Thackeray and Trollope portrayed gambling negatively, not as a normal recreational activity but as addictive, a way of escaping urban problems by gamblers who lacked self-control” (88). See also, Flavin and Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (1993) for similar appraisals of Hardy’s negative portrayal of gambling. 62 See also, Hacking p. 5 for the rising importance of measurement in the nineteenth century. Again, Somerset’s association with measurement from the opening page symbolically establishes his character in opposition to chance and romance in the novel. 66

As Hacking demonstrates, probability, statistics, and numbers became forms of knowledge used to assert order over uncertainty—to rationalize and “tame” chance (10).

Thomas Kavanagh relates this mathematical “taming” of chance to the realist novel’s elimination of chance in an argument similar to Monk’s. Kavanagh writes, “Like probability theory, the novel depended for its significance on an ability to solicit the reader’s identification with its rationalized and causally integrated sequencing of events. Like probability theory, the novel promised a greater understanding and mastery of life’s apparently random events” (emphasis mine) (117). Kavanagh’s remarks reflect a connection between the scientific rationalization of chance in probability theory and the rationalization of uncertainty, mystery and chaos (read: romance) in the realist novel. Yet, as Hacking notes, alongside this increasing desire for knowledge grew conceptions of chance as “pure irregularity, of something wilder . .

. it harked back, in part, to something ancient or vestigial. It also looked into the future, to new, and often darker, visions of the person” (10). A Laodicean stages this conflict between the increased desire for mastery over chance in the realist novel and the view of chance as irregular, wild, and perhaps even a source of romance in its irrationality.

A tantalizing possibility for Hardy’s affirmation of chance as romantic uncertainty is that Hardy read and borrowed the idea for A Laodicean from a popular 1877 essay of C.S. Peirce’s entitled “The

Fixation of Belief.” In his essay, Peirce suggests that dogmatism and the adherence to settled belief results in intellectual slavery. Later, in 1892, Peirce asserted that deterministic laws were false and that the world was “irreducibly chancy” (Hacking 11). The slightly unconventional Victorian scientist, philosopher, and logician was reacting to the extreme necessitarian position that denied chance as a plausible force in the universe. For his time and scientific vocation, Peirce’s assertion of absolute chance was radical. Peirce was comfortable with the impossibility of being able to explain random events fully, despite helping advance the use of probability. Hacking concludes his study of chance and probability 67 with Peirce’s philosophy of absolute chance, arguing: “Somebody had to make a first leap to indeterminism. Maybe it was Peirce, perhaps a predecessor . . . although he was very much a nineteenth- century man, he was already living in a twentieth-century environment” (201). It is not difficult to read

Hardy as Peirce’s predecessor in making the leap to indeterminism in his fiction even before Peirce stated it so explicitly in his science. A Laodicean, so named for the lukewarm church of Revelation, not only traces Paula’s resistance to sanctioned belief based on authority, but it also explores the liberating possibilities of indeterminacy and chance.

Gambling and Morality

As a representative trope for chance, then, gambling becomes “raw material” for the romance of play in A Laodicean through a few critical scenes inside the casino at Monte Carlo. Seen as a moral vice and a threat to social stability and hierarchy, gambling was the target of many efforts of suppression.

Laws, tracts, sermons, pamphlets, and raids were employed in the effort to eliminate the sin.63 The casino at Monte Carlo was a frequent target of these. The characters in A Laodicean travel all over Europe, but it is only the casino at Monte Carlo that is mentioned, suggesting a very pointed response to a contested site of enchantment and disenchantment. Owing to several factors between 1868 and 1872, such as a new railway to Monaco and the closing of competing casinos in Germany, the Monte Carlo casino was relatively new when A Laodicean was written, having only become accessible and popular about a decade earlier.64 The novelty of this particular casino resonates with the presence of many other aspects of modernity in the novel, but it is also notable as a target of intense efforts at rationalization and

63 See Huggins Vice and the Victorians Chapter Four for a study of nineteenth-century gaming in relation to both class status and the law. Huggins argues that gambling was big business, constantly growing in the late nineteenth century, and was “highly resilient” to moral reformers and government legislation (88). Nonetheless, the increase in gambling across all classes in the later part of the century “generated an intense anti-gambling campaign, not seen before, which was especially strong in north-west England, with the churches especially active, producing pamphlets and articles against both betting and gambling” (90). 64 See Graeme Mount, “The Men Who Built the Bank at Monte Carlo” (1991) for an overview of the development of Monaco as a gambling centre. 68 disenchantment contemporary with the novel. An editorial in The Saturday Review of 1884 reflects the ubiquity of attacks on the Monte Carlo casino, and suggests that British efforts in particular seem misplaced but common. The article begins: “‘Come, let us make a Society for putting down somebody’s fun,’ is the invitation which Englishmen are continually giving each other . . . Monte Carlo, or rather the casino at Monte Carlo, has long been the biggest of all the game aimed at by friends of morality with plenty of leisure” (“Monte Carlo and Morality” 520). As this article suggests, the Monte Carlo casino would have been shorthand to Hardy’s readers for a space where English rationality competed with risk and uncertainty.

Indeed, one particular association was formed with the express purpose of eliminating gambling in

Monte Carlo—a fact of which Hardy must have been aware. As a member of the “International

Association for the Suppression of the Gaming Tables at Monte Carlo,” the well-known Baptist Minister

Rev. Charles Spurgeon lent his pen to the cause in favour of closing the Monte Carlo casino. He wrote a treatise against the casino in June 1879 called “The Serpent in Paradise: or, Gambling at Monte Carlo.” In his article, published shortly before Hardy’s novel, the moral rationalization of risk reaches hyperbolic heights:

We must apologize to our readers for introducing to their notice a subject which will neither

minister to their edification nor increase their pleasure . . . Our apology is the necessity of doing

something towards ending an abomination which reeks before high heaven, and has been too long

permitted to defile the earth; an abomination which has survived the removal of all others like it

from among civilized men, as dangerous to society and ruinous to public morals . . . Those who

have set up the gaming tables of Monte Carlo have no conscience; it remains for the public to find

them one, and this can never be till an enlightened public opinion is formed and expressed . . . No

sin hardens the heart like gambling. Inhumanity is only a natural result of it. The play burns the 69

heart, and dries up the milk of human kindness. While it renders a man weary of ordinary labor, for

he fancies he has found a swifter road to riches, it makes him fit for any villainy and vice. It arouses

covetousness, creates a selfish excitement, unfits for duty, and prepares for every iniquity. Need we

say more against it? Can more be said? (601, 606-7)

Spurgeon’s treatise seems an extreme example, but his religious dissent was paralleled in secular terms.

Though others may not have condemned the Monte Carlo casino so overtly as “sinful,” opponents of the well-known pleasure destination were concerned with its negative social effects.

A more obscure member of the Association, one John Polson, wrote an entire monograph entitled

Monaco and Its Gaming Tables, the fourth edition of which was published in 1881—the same year as A

Laodicean. Some of the themes and descriptions in Polson’s book are strikingly similar to parts of A

Laodicean, raising the possibility that Hardy was familiar with an earlier edition of Polson’s text, or at least with the existence of the Association itself. Before declaiming the vice of gambling, Polson describes Monaco and Monte Carlo at length, then the interior of the casino, then offers a study of the players, and the philosophies of gambling and probability, all of which resembles the progress and focalization of Hardy’s narrator when he arrives at the casino. Polson’s text not only affords comparison with descriptions in A Laodicean, but he also connects gambling to larger questions about chance, which are also implicitly raised in Hardy’s novel. Polson writes:

Are not the forces operative in the motion of the little ball, the same as those that guide the planets

in their courses? Is not the destination of the little ball, after it leaves the croupier's hand, as fixed

and determined as is the end of the world? In both cases the elements of the problem are all there,

but we cannot formulate them, and therefore we cannot work out the result. Yet, who can say that it

is beyond the power of human science to rise to the knowledge of these things? But even if that is

beyond human science, is there no science in the universe higher than that to which man can reach? 70

Though we know it not, is it unknown? Say not that it is foolish to compare such great things with

things so small. Things great or small have no place in relation to the infinite, and even in relation

to the finite, the greatest events often come from the smallest beginnings. (45)

Polson’s philosophical extension of gambling to the uncertainty of the universe is an articulation of gambling’s symbolism in the nineteenth-century novel, and his conclusions about the casino parallel the moral rationalizations of many novels as well. His description of Monte Carlo is ultimately subsumed into his Association’s moral admonition: “In the midst of this natural Eden stands Monte Carlo . . . and there, too, is the famous gaming hell, over the portals of which might aptly be inscribed “Forsake all hope all ye who enter here” (80). A religiously scorned space, the casino at Monte Carlo provided an opportunity for Hardy to resist the moral rationalizing of both social and literary discourses against games of chance in an effort to consider chance in a new light.

Probability and statistics were also used to vilify gambling and chance in Polson’s work. Though his tract is largely anecdotal, he attempts to buttress his argument against the moral menace by offering statistics on the suicides committed at Monte Carlo: “a gentleman in high official position in Nice, informs me that he estimates the number of suicides traceable to Monte Carlo at about three per week on an average, and that during last month, January, he has reckoned up the almost incredible number of twenty-three” (59). Polson goes on to debate official statistics: “the suicides caused by losses at Monte

Carlo, do not exceed one to every 100,000 who go there. The official statement of the number of visitors last month, January 1881, was 38,754. The number of visitors during last year, that is 1880, was 334,000.

This would give about one-third of a suicide for the month of January instead of twenty-three as stated by my informant” (61). Reflecting the shared interest in rationalizing chance, Polson’s tract combines religious and mathematical discourse in his attempt to abolish gambling at Monte Carlo. Hardy’s text signals its engagement with this rhetoric when Will Dare is seen carrying a book on statistics inside the 71 casino—Abraham De Moivre’s The Doctrine of Chances, which Ian Hacking lists as an early textbook on probability (Hacking 12). The inclusion of a book on probability in the casino suggests another angle at rationalizing chance: mathematical, instrumental conceptions of gambling become as limiting to the romance of Monte Carlo as Spurgeon’s moralizing. In formal terms, these attempts at “taming” chance establish norms of behavior along rigid patterns, either religious or mathematical, to assert the sort of mastery and control that Hardy redirects into an image of gambling as network.

The Romance of Gambling in A Laodicean

Initially, the dangerous potential of chance and gambling is suggested in A Laodicean by the story of Old De Stancy’s gambling misfortunes. With a familiar dose of Hardyean irony, Captain De Stancy’s financially ruined father offers advice regarding chance when Somerset first meets him. He counsels the younger man to chase his “lucky star,” and adds that, “Fortune likes new faces, and your wisdom lies in bringing your acquisitions into safety while her favour lasts” (40).65 Old De Stancy’s “wisdom” is to exploit Fortune’s favour for as long as possible in an attempt to prepare for landing at the bottom of her wheel. Meditating on the advice, Somerset rejects it as “Machiavellian” (40). Old De Stancy is depicted as a buffoon, suggesting that the intention to control one’s own fate by exploiting fortune and chance is foolish.

A more scientific approach to “taming” chance is carried out by Old De Stancy’s grandson, but with equally poor results. Will Dare, Captain De Stancy’s illegitimate son, is the melodramatic villain and degenerate gambler. Dare’s playful presence not only subverts bourgeois respectability, but as a trickster figure he also undermines the realist aspects of the text. The connotation of his name with risk, as well as his wandering, and his involvement with games of chance make him a figure of enchantment

65 Old De Stancy refers to Fortune as “her” and alludes to her favour. In the medieval conception of chance, the goddess Fortuna is depicted as sitting atop the wheel of fortune. In its rotations, humans are moving in a hierarchical direction from either top to bottom, so that her “favour” is only temporary. 72 and mystery who is not completely held to account at the end of the novel for his deeds. Yet while he borders on the ludic in his incongruous and overtly diabolic attributes, Dare’s insertion is not exactly comic. Dare is a more malign version of Hardy’s previous “Mephistophelian Visitant”— Diggory Venn in The Return of the Native. In all likelihood, Venn’s surname is an echo of John Venn whose 1866 book,

The Logic of Chance, Hardy had likely read, and which, as with Dare’s connection to De Moivre’s

Doctrine of Chances, shows Hardy working through his reading in chance and indeterminacy.66 Like

Venn, Dare is slightly demonic in nature, mysteriously popping up with offers to play dice or cards.

When Captain De Stancy first encounters his son and asks where he has been, Dare answers: “From going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it” (138)—a direct allusion to Satan’s response to God in the book of Job. Dare’s social sphere is the casino, specifically the roulette table, wherein chance and luck are great democratizers. His marginal status as racial, sexual, and biological Other prevents him from participating in the types of knightly competitions engaged in by Somerset that would allow him to prove himself, or provide him an opportunity for meaningful action and integration within society; thus, it is aleatory games which level the field and enable him to participate in a social ritual from which he would otherwise be excluded. We see his attempt at social integration as he gambles with his own father in the church, creating a field of action for himself while subverting the patriarchal and religious power structures that have relegated him to the periphery. His gambling represents a threat to the social order that has marginalized him, and it places him in a greater position of power by effectively nullifying birth, class, race, skill, and heroic character.

66 In her article, “Chances Are: Henry Buckle, Thomas Hardy, and the Individual at Risk” (2003) Helen Small suggests a link between Hardy, Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen and John Venn. Hardy engages with Buckle’s A History of Civilization fairly explicitly in Return of the Native, and John Venn was a detractor of Buckle’s. Moreover, Venn was Leslie Stephen’s cousin, and Leslie Stephen was Hardy’s editor at the Cornhill. Small hesitates to suggest Venn is named after the mathematician, but judging by Hardy’s direct use of De Moivre in A Laodicean it seems highly likely that he was reading current theories of chance and probability, and thus was likely to have come across Venn’s well-known work. 73

Notably, however, though Dare wins at cards with his father, he loses inside the casino. Although he wins later on, the only direct representation of him inside the Monte Carlo casino depicts his losses.

Crucially, it is in this casino scene that Hardy dramatizes the different approaches to gambling as akin to the different approaches to chance. As villain, Dare is aligned in this scene with the futile attempt to rationalize and “tame” chance, which causes his losses. Although Dare’s connection with a book on chance would seem to suggest he is a figure of romantic risk and irrationality, he is associated with the desire to subdue mystery and true daring. His name then, is somewhat oxymoronic, since his risk-taking is based on scientific assessment which paradoxically attempts to eliminate risk altogether. Dare’s outlook on gambling and chance in this scene competes with that of the narrator, and it is through this competition of differing views that Hardy explores the romance of chance. Instead of focusing on the cold selfishness and individuality of competition, the narrator re-casts the competitors into a magical web of relations and minimizes the sting of loss by emphasizing a communal space of enchantment and the renewal of hope.

As Somerset searches for Paula in the casino at Monte Carlo near the close of the fourth section, the scene can be read as a symbolic expression of chance as both romance and network—an important reformulation of the medieval trope of the Wheel of Fortune alluded to earlier in the novel. Chance in the form of a network is not structured as a binary opposition between gain at the top and loss at the bottom, but as a web of relations with others, and as a phenomenon far less determinate. The narrator imagines the gamblers gathered together at a gaming table as part of a “network of hopes.” This network bringing the gamblers together is not unlike the telegraph network imagined as a sort of nervous system. Their opposing wishes, though, are also figured as the gossamer threads of a web, recalling the warp of golden threads from the opening in which the maze of gnats is dancing. That the gossamer web is “magic,” and hope is renewed each time is fundamental to the enchantment of the play here, and to the use of chance as 74 a modern source of romance in the novel.

The narrator’s consideration of the casino at Monaco is so different from the common Victorian discourse on the casino town that a monograph on Monaco published a year later even references Hardy’s novel. In contrast to the fourth edition of Polson’s book published the same year, Thomas Henry

Pickering writes in his Monaco: The Beauty Spot of the Riviera:

It is a vast cosmopolitan playground; the people gathered together here come from all civilised

countries; the interests of all races are equal on these exquisite shores, where everything appears

tuneful and at ease, reciprocating with heartiness the rays of the splendid sun, where the

marblework of parapets and steps is unsplintered by frosts—where the whole scene along the

terraces is ‘like a conservatory with the sky for its dome,’ says Mr. Thomas Hardy, in his recent

novel. (9)

Pickering’s quotation marks here are deceiving. He lifts word-for-word from Hardy’s narrator before and after entering the casino, merely rearranging the portions of the narrator’s description and attributing fewer words to the novel. In Hardy’s description, the “rays of the splendid sun” recall the solar rays that form the warp of golden threads ignored by Somerset in the opening paragraph of the novel. Before entering the casino, the narrator notes that everything in the scene reciprocates these rays except for

Somerset himself, thereby setting the scene for a contest of impressions. The differences between

Polson’s and Pickering’s depictions of the Monte Carlo casino parallel the text’s awareness of Monte

Carlo as a contested space of enchantment and disenchantment, which the narrator highlights in his distance from Somerset’s perceptions.

As Somerset walks into the casino at Monte Carlo, suspense makes even “the air quiver,” introducing a captivating sense of enchantment (249). Although the casino is predictably introduced as the “negative pole of industry,” it is also described as a secular parody of the miracle of Pentecost, where 75 there is a gathering of people from “all civilized countries . . . familiar with many forms of utterance, that of each racial group or type being unintelligible in its subtler variations, if not entirely, to the rest. But the language of meum and tuum they collectively comprehended without translation” (249-50).67 Though on the one hand they are competitors vying to win, the group is introduced as though they share a collective transcendental language. The players exist in a “half-charmed spell-bound state” (250). With the world of disenchantment just outside its doors, the casino space is depicted here as a temporary escape. For the players (though not for the house or owners), the casino experience is divorced from utilitarian ends. Play becomes an end in itself, and the world of work and skill is immaterial. Here, chaos and irrationality are the prized experiences as an escape from a disenchanting modern life of logic, order, and rationality.

Yet the focalization in the casino scene is modulated back and forth through both the lens of the omniscient narrator and the rather Puritan Somerset, whose discomfort with other forms of play, such as

Paula’s stage acting, has already been witnessed. Somerset is distanced from the spellbinding action entrancing the other patrons, but it is already clear by this point that Somerset’s view is not always shared by the text.68 The scene juxtaposes Somerset’s view of the casino with the keen perception of the narrator’s sympathetic insight. For instance, he describes Somerset’s reaction: “As a non-participant in its profits and losses, fevers and frenzies, it had that stage effect upon his imagination which is usually exercised over those who behold Chance presented to them with spectacular piquancy without advancing far enough in its acquaintance to suffer from its ghastly reprisals and impish tricks, that strip it of all romance” (250). The narrator creates this “stage effect” within the novel by painting gambling in such

67 Polson’s description of the players at the gaming table shares the emphasis on the diverse group brought together in one pursuit: “It is a motley company which surrounds the tables. They are of all ages and conditions. The young and old are there . . . Some are rich, some are poor, some are “gentle,” some are “sempil,” — none are better than they should be, some are much worse than they should be. The noble and the plebeian, the rich and the poor, the polite and the vulgar, the good and the bad, are all hodge-podged here together without distinction” (36). 68 Even when Paula is duped by Dare into thinking that Somerset has run up debts by gambling, she immediately takes pity on him and sends him money, which is a far milder reaction than the one she has when Dare later fools her into thinking Somerset a drunk. Her lover is far less a reprobate as a gambler than as a drinker, and the lack of concern for a supposed gambling habit is not central to their split as it is to the rift between Fred Vincy and Mary Garth over Fred’s gaming habit in Middlemarch. 76 imaginative terms, rather than matter-of-factly describing it in more rational terms. In Hardy’s novel, the dramatic movement of chance is theatrical, enchanting the spectator by involving him or her in vulnerability. The very fact that chance can be both spectacular and ghastly is what connects it to romance and wonder and recalls the earlier sites of play in the gymnasium and on the stage. Observing the workings of chance here as Somerset does, and as readers of a novel do, is like watching Paula swinging from her ropes, and like experiencing Somerset’s concern over the audience’s gullibility during

Love’s Labour’s Lost. The stage metaphor is apt for the casino in particular. As Gerda Reith puts it, gambling acts “as a conduit for the alteration of identity . . . while engaged in it, individuals are temporarily released from the strictures, which usually govern their actions . . . they are able to imagine themselves in other identities and to explore alternative ways of being” (129). The complete immersion into a temporary space of play specifically aligned with passion and irrationality provides opportunities for stepping out of the bounds of socially prescribed roles.

In addition to dramatizing the spellbinding atmosphere, the narrator also registers an awareness of interconnection between the gamblers, shifting the focus away from the gambler as a solitary reprobate, rake, villain, or swindler, typical of the Victorian novel. The enchanted casino space throws players together, making them, in some way, co-competitors against the house. As part of the gossamer web that makes up the “network of hopes,” the players are intricately connected in this temporary sphere of dilated time. Gambling is still fraught with ethical controversy in the text, but it is less suggestive of dissolution than in other Victorian novels. 69 Instead, it converges with the visual trope of networked lines in the novel to suggest the enchantment of connection.

69 See Michael Flavin’s chapter “Doctrine of Chances” for a reading of this gambling scene in A Laodicean. Flavin ultimately reads the scene at Monte Carlo as a disapproving one, equating it with a similar scene in Daniel Deronda. Yet Eliot’s depiction of gaming at the opening of Daniel Deronda, which appeared five years earlier, differs in tone. Eliot’s narrator observes: “But while every single player differed markedly from every other, there was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action. Deronda’s first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull, gas-poisoned 77

The Network and Enchanted Perception

As the complicated and interwoven lines of the network suggest, A Laodicean challenges narratives of disenchantment that promote reductive mastery over modern life. The narrator’s intense focus on the players in the casino scene, rather than on the gambling itself, for instance, exemplifies the way in which

Jane Bennett suggests that enchantment can be fostered through “hon[ing] sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things” (4).70 This type of idealized connectedness inspires attachment to living and to the world, which is a key aspect of remaining enchanted, rather than alienated. The “network of hopes” in the casino scene is also reminiscent of an early passage in Tess, which affects a similar romanticization of connection by virtue of the narrator’s receptivity. A wild network is described as Tess approaches the barn dance at Chaseborough:

she beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance . . . the powdery residuum

from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the

nebulosity that involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty débris of peat and hay, mixed with

the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen,

the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure

was trodden out. (93)

The “nebulosity” here echoes the “network of hopes” and the “vegeto-human pollen,” another natural metaphor for the interconnections between individuals and surrounding nature is similar in kind to the magic gossamer “issuing from the murky intelligences around the table.” Both of these passages display

absorption was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys had seemed to him more enviable” (3). Eliot’s narrator, and Deronda himself, sees connection between the players only in uniform negativity, monotony, and dullness. In contrast, the focalization of Hardy’s narrator is less austere. 70 Both Gillian Beer and George Levine have noted a similar “sensory receptivity” in Hardy to the intricate connections between phenomena, and both argue that there is an enchanting, life-affirming quality to his fiction so often missed by his critics. Their arguments, however, are focused on Hardy’s vision as a distinctively realist one. See Beer, Darwin’s Plots (1985) and Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (2008) for a discussion of enchantment and realism in Hardy’s depiction of the natural world (Chapter Nine), and also Levine, “Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy” (2009). 78 the way in which Hardy enchants human connection and individual hopes, as well as the way that sites of moral tension for many other Victorian writers—the gaming table and a sexualized country dance—are sites of romance and enchantment for Hardy. His narrators convey a sense of life and wonder in these moments of human excitement, rather than eschewing the irrational and the playful.

In A Laodicean, even new technologies, as evident through the telegraph, become parts of this enchanted network of life. The railroad is romanticized by virtue of its connection with Paula where

Somerset notes “the absurdity of the popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous” (81). The railroad is romanticized by its fusion to nature: the overhanging trees hide it, and the steel rails gleam “like silver threads,” becoming part of the motif of network lines like the gossamer threads extending outwards from the gamblers, and the many other instances of threads, ropes, and lines that intersect throughout the text. The front of the rail tunnel has also been absorbed into its natural surroundings: “The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and mossed over in harmonious hues of rusty-browns, pearly greys, and neutral greens” (81). The use of harmonious suggests an organic connection between technology and nature, which distinctly contrasts with the narrative of alienation and disenchantment so common in depictions of modernity.

This imagery, like the connected web of the “network of hopes,” also parallels Darwin’s entangled bank.71 The gift of discernment granted Hardy’s narrator in the casino scene resonates closely with the famous passage as the trope of the network in the casino scene is used to describe the workings of chance imaginatively with similar characteristics to Darwin’s musings: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various

71 Beer also contemplates Darwin’s passage on the entangled bank, as well as his use of the “web of affinities” metaphor in her chapter on Eliot’s Middlemarch. Beer deconstructs the image of the web in its associations with the spider as well as the Victorian association with woven fabric. She even references an 1886 diary entry of Hardy’s referring to the human race as both network and spider web—a metaphor he was obviously already thinking about in this Monte Carlo scene. 79 insects flitting about . . . and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us . . .” (397). Darwin insists here and earlier in The Origin of Species that this entangled bank, though at first glance a scene of chaos and disorder, is not shaped by the workings of chance, but rather by laws such as inheritance, variability, and growth with reproduction (141; 397). Despite these rational laws, the beholder of this fascinating scene is transported by the type of wonder that emanates from noting the web of confluences existing in the natural world. The enchantment of random connections veiling the surface of the calculable laws of nature is similarly apparent to Hardy’s narrator:

That all the people there, including [Somerset], could be interested in what to the eye of perfect

reason was a somewhat monotonous thing—the property of numbers to recur at certain longer or

shorter intervals in a machine containing them—in other words, the blind groping after fractions of

a result the whole of which was well known—was one testimony among many of the powerlessness

of logic when confronted with imagination. (250)

Recalling Darwin’s simultaneously imaginative and rational description of the entangled bank, Hardy’s narrator makes the move from depicting a delicate gossamer web to describing the “monotonous” mathematical functioning of a machine in observing the same phenomena. Yet the narrator’s intent is not to destroy the enchantment, but to point out how much more powerful a romantic viewpoint can be when compared to the “eye of perfect reason.” The novel frequently emphasizes “the powerlessness of logic when confronted with imagination.” In this detached description of the casino, the narrator provides competing views of the same phenomena: the enchanted, spellbound, imaginative eye of the gamblers in this scene, or the coolly disenchanted and mechanized view in which Somerset shares at least a little. The narrator himself can see both, and it is critical to the novel’s negotiation between romance and realism that having a similar ability to romanticize common phenomena is valuable. Without the ability to see 80 enchanting connections, one’s view is disenchanted in the mundane, bumbling manner of Somerset, or else in the cruel, calculating manner of Paula’s uncle, Abner Power, who is described only four pages before this scene as “a frigid calculator whose thoughts were like geometrical diagrams” (246).

Calculations, fractions, and geometrical diagrams are replaced in this casino scene with the romanticized form of the network, which replaces the formal vision of chance as the wheel of fortune, or even as the atomic swerve of Epicureanism. The wheel, the epicurean clinamen, and the network are all ways of conceptualizing chance in a formal pattern,72 but figuring chance as both network and web of relations makes it simultaneously unpredictable and understandably human. The network affords Hardy a form in which to re-envision chance not as a closed binary, and not on the impersonal level of the swerve of the atom. Hardy’s might not be a divinely ordered cosmos, but in this text it is also not a vision of the cosmos that dwells pessimistically on the vastness of the impersonal universe; it is an intimately connected web of human hopes and relations. In this network form, chance becomes generative because it is not only a threat that requires disenchanting. Imagining chance as a network is a formal experiment in living outside the bounds of necessity, which is what Hardy usually imagined in the pattern of either social determinism or cruel fate.73 In A Laodicean, chance provides the opportunity for a heroine, who refuses to be limited by social laws, to have a happy ending. Paula might be mildly capricious, but her affiliation with play, chance, and uncertainty are celebrated rather than contained by forms of rationalization meant to erase mystery.

Jeffrey Franklin’s observations of play’s pervasiveness lead him to conclude that play links many

72 Leland Monk discusses the clinamen in such formal terms in his discussion of chance and narrative. He writes, “When atoms aggregate as the result of the clinamen, they form increasingly complex and stable entities. This is how I see the permutations and fluctuations of chance in narrative as giving rise to increasingly complex, innovative, and eventually stable (that is, conventional) narrative forms” (5). 73 See Monk’s appendix on chance in Hardy’s novels for a reading of Hardy’s use of chance in plot devices. Monk argues that Hardy’s use of chance is always malign in the novels, and that it is explicitly meant to counter the Providential view of plot and circumstance in the Victorian novel. In Hardy’s novels “the meaning and importance of coincidence and chance are inescapably determined by the providential framework they are designed to negate and invert” (165). 81 of the “culturally defining issues” of the Victorian period. He cites three of these “defining issues” specifically: “the artificial versus the authentic;” “false art versus true art;” and “chance versus necessity”

(4). All of these, for which play acts as signifier, are woven together in A Laodicean. Yet these binaries are re-envisioned in the novel as bent or indirect lines, which re-distribute their scale of values from hierarchical to horizontal and even non-linear.

Through this re-envisioning, A Laodicean captures each of the aspects of enchantment that Bennett suggests can be practiced intentionally. Bennett argues that enchantment might be pursued as a

“comportment” or “strategy.” She proposes: “One of those strategies might be to give greater expression to the sense of play, another to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things. Yet another way to enhance the enchantment effect is to resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity”

(4). Hardy employs all three of these “strategies.” The narrator’s focalization sees James’ “beautiful circuit” everywhere in the network of the telegraph, the tracery of the gothic, the web of character relations and hopes, and even in Paula’s inscrutable Laodiceanism. In these enchanted metaphors, A

Laodicean reimagines areas of uncertainty to provide space for modern romance.

Chapter Two

A Romance of Order: Detection and Dream Vision in Chesterton’s

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

All the terms used in the science books—“law,” “necessity,” “order,” “tendency,” and so on— are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis, which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, “charm,” “spell,” “enchantment.” They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 48

Described by T. S. Eliot as “the first and greatest of English detective novels” (Eliot 525), The

Moonstone contains two mysteries: the human mystery resolved at the conclusion when the thief is discovered, and a larger, metaphysical mystery intimated in the closing words of the novel after the

Moonstone is returned to its sacred place in the forehead of its deity.74 Although the thief is caught and order is restored with the help of science and the law, the open-ended questions at the close hint at further adventure for the inscrutable stone and suggest that, while the mysteries of human behaviour may be solved, the inexplicable nature of the universe cannot and should not be solved. Unlike The Moonstone, classic detective fiction of the late-nineteenth century limits its focus more strictly to human enigma, following the rise of science as the dominant epistemological paradigm for understanding the material world. At the fin de siècle, Arthur Conan Doyle’s overwhelmingly popular Sherlock Holmes stories embody such purely materialist mystery. Detection and mystery, then, are part of the mind-bounded,

74 The final paragraph of The Moonstone describes the Indian shrine to which the Moonstone has been mysteriously returned. The novel ends with the unanswered riddles of how it has been returned, what the stone’s next adventures might be, and who could ever know the answers (Collins 466). 83 immanent frame that Charles Taylor describes as arising from the increased space for unbelief in the nineteenth century (322-3). Yet G. K. Chesterton, an oft-overlooked contemporary of Conan Doyle’s, tests this frame. Across his prolific body of work Chesterton frequently challenges the privileging of science in both detection and Edwardian culture more broadly. It is not science itself that he opposes, but the hegemonic authority of scientism. Chesterton’s fiction suggests that confronting mystery purely though science is to begin with the wrong assumption, an assumption that ignores the possibility of the immaterial in the world. Consequently, he imagines detective fiction as romance, drawing attention to popular detection’s ideological constraints and insisting on a mysterious, divine realm beyond the reach of science and logic. In his 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, Chesterton re- enchants the detective story by combining this modern sub-genre with elements of older romance to pose a sort of “contest of orders” and create renewed space for mystery.

Despite the differences between Hardy’s A Laodicean and The Man Who Was Thursday,

Chesterton’s novel also embodies a “clash between ancient and modern.” In Thursday, Chesterton pairs modern detective fiction with the medieval dream vision as two disparate romance genres in which an aesthetics of order acts as a historical and formal bridge. Though different in obvious ways, the plots and conventions of both detective stories and dream visions share similar organizing principles. The two genres are organized as bounded narratives that promote the resolution of mystery through certain ways of knowing. Detection and dream vision are genres in which disorder poses a threat to epistemological certainty: both the crime’s subversion of social order and the dream sequence are narrative spaces in which threatening elements are imagined and then contained by the resolution of the crime or the end of the dream. Each genre reinforces the position of rationality over irrationality, and social and mental stability over disruption. The collision of their ideological frames (one material, one feudal) provides

Chesterton with space to explore mystery and uncertainty without such easy resolution. Where Hardy 84 sees enchantment in pure indeterminacy, though, Chesterton sees enchantment in genres that privilege order but also hint at the inscrutability of the transcendent.

Thursday was published in 1908 but it was written as a response to Chesterton’s personal struggle with disenchantment in the 1890s.75 Thursday’s dedicatory poem, addressed to Chesterton’s friend,

Edmund Clerihew Bentley, clearly frames the novel as a reaction to what he saw as Decadent pessimism, and establishes the novel’s position in the fin-de-siècle literary milieu. Chesterton dedicates the novel to

Bentley and the friendship they shared in the 1890s when there was “a sick cloud upon the soul” (line 2) and “the world was old and ended” (4). The poem’s speaker links these doubts and fears to the “white lock of Whistler” (7), the Green Carnation (23), and “leaves of grass” (24), explicitly connecting pessimism to the Decadents through Whistler, Wilde, and Whitman, respectively. To counteract the “sick cloud,” he hints that the Romance Revival has brought health back into the world. The speaker draws on similar tropes to those found in the Battle of the Books in the literary periodicals of the 1890s, which suggests that the conception of romance as “healthy” was not uncommon. The speaker holds up youth as the source of strength, drawing on the connection between romance and childishness: “Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we, / High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea” (15-16). The romance they read as children helps them in their battle against the “black Baal”

(14) of pessimism: “Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey, / Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day” (lines 27-28). It is R. L. Stevenson’s romance, here, that is held up as the healing tonic. The dedicatory poem establishes the connection between romance and health as the antidote to the “sickness” of pessimism, which continues as a trope throughout the novel. The novel itself

75 In part, Thursday recalls Chesterton’s spiritual and intellectual battle with the ideas he encountered in the 1890s at the Slade School of Art, as well as with the general pessimism of the final decade of the century. In his autobiography he admits: “when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age” (The Autobiography 92). For an in-depth consideration of Chesterton’s engagement with the philosophical trends of the 1890s, see Mark Knight Chesterton and Evil (2004), especially Chapter Two.

85 is also short, aligning it with the slim volumes of lofty subject matter that romancers praised and their opponents disparaged as simplistic in the Battle of the Books. The dedicatory poem makes it clear, then, that Thursday is intended to evoke the popular romance of the previous decade.

Before Conan Doyle’s ascendance, detective fiction was indeed linked with romance and sensation in literary periodicals leading up to, and during, the Battle of the Books. Maurizio Ascari offers what he calls a “counter-history” of detective fiction, examining narratives on the borders of the more classic formula that reveal the genre’s proximity to its romantic literary cousins.76 Before its Edwardian popularity, detection was a target of the same attacks as popular romance. In the 1860s, it was disparagingly linked to popular sensation fiction. For instance, a Saturday Review article of 1864 begins,

“Of all forms of sensation novel-writing, none is so common as what may be called the romance of the detective . . . It may perhaps be a little ungracious to object to what may be described as a well-tried, serviceable, common form which has sold a considerable number of popular novels . . .” (“Detectives in

Fiction and in Real Life” 712). Here, the writer’s emphasis on romance and sensation is linked derisively to popularity. A later 1895 article in the Westminster Review depicts detective fiction and romance as related by popularity, and yet unrelated in subject matter. Decrying detection as a travesty, J.F.

Rowbotham begins his article, “Modern Troubadours,” by lamenting the loss of the epic poetry of the courtly troubadours. Where stories of romance once raised the heroic ideal in fiction, modern novels are debased by “the story of some evil or low propensity of human nature, the exaltation of crime which is the tale of a murder, of fraud which is found in the romance of a forgery, of falsehood which may be read in those wonderful stories of deception and mistake which delight modern readers” (“Modern

76 Ascari casts a wide net, showing other historical influences and interconnections between modern detective fiction and Renaissance tragedies, criminal biographies, Newgate Calendars, gothic novels, Newgate novels, sensation fiction, the ghost story and melodrama (xiv). He even cites a critic contemporary with Thursday, Carolyn Wells (the writer of the rondeau that begins this thesis), whose “umbrella” definition of Mystery Story in 1913 categorized detective fiction with ghost stories and riddle stories (Ascari 165). Thursday merits a mere half page, however, despite being an excellent hybrid model that helps identify the ideological investments of the detective story. 86

Troubadours” 563). Though the writer longs for the romance of the troubadours, he dismisses detective fiction as romance and “lighter literature,” and he wonders: “Who could poetise about detectives?” (563).

Thursday offers an answer to this question. Employing the same language as Rowbotham,

Chesterton’s narrator describes the protagonist, Gabriel Syme, as “a poet who had become a detective”

(32). Thursday is an adventure romance that is at once of its time and not of its time, using police detectives and anarchists as modern-day knights and dragons. Chesterton both updates his modern “raw materials” of romance for a contemporary audience familiar with detective and spy fiction, and yet he links these to what Jameson calls “older categories of magic,” drawing on their sedimented ideological messages.77 The medieval chivalry, heroism, and sainthood that he consciously invokes embody the values of romance and a feudal aesthetic which privileges moral and social hierarchies; and yet, the dream vision provides an alternative space in which to work out ideas that thwart linear hierarchies and rigid rationality. Through this “clash” of old and new, the text seeks space where modern romance might evade the charges of childishness as escapism and simplicity by engaging squarely with contemporary epistemological contradictions.

Critical Reception

The story traces the adventure of Gabriel Syme, the poet and police detective who literally falls into a secret society of anarchists ready to carry out a bomb plot. Syme goes undercover to join the head council of the anarchists, in which each member is named after a day of the week (with Syme taking on the role of Thursday), and who report to the mysterious, larger-than-life leader, Sunday. The pessimistic, and at times, naïve, Syme eventually learns that the team of anarchists is far less insidious than he has been led to believe—rather than being the sole agent of law and order in the group, Syme discovers that

77 As mentioned in my Introduction, Jameson looks for the traces of meaning in romance elements that comingle with other forms as they reappear in different times (Jameson 141). 87 each of the members of the council is a fellow police officer in disguise. The confusion between good and evil alters Syme’s perception of the world. In the penultimate chapter, Sunday appears as a being vaguely resembling the Christian God, but his appearance raises more questions than it answers. The question of Sunday’s identity as both the head of the anarchist council and the mysterious police chief who recruits all of the detectives in the first place remains a riddle even after the close of the novel.

In the year Thursday was published, Chesterton’s brother, Cecil, argued: “‘The Man who was

Thursday’ is not so good a book as ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill.’ Yet one feels it was planned to be a better book. It is more lucidly conceived and in some ways more carefully written . . . Yet, after the former book, it is disappointing . . . In ‘The Man who was Thursday’ he took his art much more seriously. Yet he produced something which by comparison may be described as a failure” (217). Cecil’s evaluation of Thursday as both a “serious” literary artifact but also a failure places the book in much the same category as Hardy’s A Laodicean, Conrad and Ford’s Romance, and the fourth novel of Ford’s

Parade’s End. In the case of all of these novels it is clear to contemporary critics that the texts are technically complex, yet each of them was frequently viewed as defective for admitting romance elements. Altogether, Thursday combines quest, dream vision, parable, allegory, fairy tale, spy thriller, detective novel, and parody of all these things, mixing satire with the sacred and serious. For some members of its contemporary audience, the generic discontinuities were too much, causing one reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement to decry it as “only shallowness and high spirits disguised as profundity,” and concluding that “As literature, it is a hopeless confusion de genres; a scurrying, door- slamming farce that ends like a chapter in the Apocalypse” (Calderon 78). Another of Thursday’s contemporary reviewers from The Nation seems to have been likewise baffled by it: “The adventures of the first half of the book are so coherent as to be almost plausible; but through the last half the action becomes wilder and more farcical, till at last it exceeds all bounds, even of burlesque. The closing 88 chapters are allegory pure and simple; and what is worse, the point of this allegory is not wholly clear”

(“Current Fiction” 380).

More recent Chesterton criticism has engaged with this profusion of genres, but romance and detection have not received enough attention. John Coates discusses Chesterton’s medievalism, arguing for it as complex rather than simply nostalgic, but he uses The Return of Don Quixote, and saves

Thursday for a thematic discussion of sanity and fear, which is based on Chesterton’s own remarks about his time at the Slade. Joseph Kestner does pay attention to the detective aspects of the novel, arguing that the novel’s purpose is “to critique Edwardian cultural angst” (173), but despite drawing brief connections between the ideological basis of detective fiction and Chesterton’s cultural milieu, Kestner emphasizes the detective strain of the novel to the exclusion of its other genres. Mark Knight’s work on Thursday considers Chesterton’s novel in relation to evil, with particular attention to Chesterton’s use of the literary grotesque, but Knight does not focus on romance and gives little consideration to how Chesterton’s religious convictions affected the formal design of Thursday. Like Knight, Michael Shallcross emphasizes aspects of the grotesque in Thursday, exploring the presence of burlesque, carnival, and fairy- tale as significant generic elements in the novel.78 Shallcross also traces the nursery rhyme and folktale as other forms of nonsense incorporated into Thursday. He argues that the novel “navigates a course between the literatures of nonsense and Decadence and vernacular forms such as the nursery rhyme and folktale . . . The Man Who Was Thursday assimilates the influences of Lewis Carroll, Andrew Lang,

Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling, and mediates these voices through a series of intertextual parodic games” (320). Shallcross’ work on the disparate genres in Thursday is relevant to my work because he demonstrates some of the ways in which the form of the novel is Chesterton’s response to the fin-de-

78 In Re-Thinking G.K. Chesterton (2018) Shallcross argues: “In Bakhtinian terms, the plot’s progress from disarray to order represents a simultaneous shift between differing modes of the grotesque, from the Romantic to the carnivalesque” (41). According to Shallcross, this generic movement in Thursday is meant to establish a dialogue between differing ideologies of “Victorian nonsense” inherent to the fairy tale as both irrational and communitarian (38). 89 siècle literary milieu, as well as how multiple forms interact with each other, yet he does not focus on romance.

William Scheick is unusual in writing about Chesterton’s romance and he distinguishes

Chesterton’s “ethical romance” from other romancers of the time. However, Scheick’s rather schematic approach is mostly limited to The Club of Queer Trades, and by emphasizing Chesterton’s ethical intentions, he also leaves space for a more detailed analysis of Chesterton’s specifically formal use of romance. Elsewhere, Robert L. Caserio offers a perceptive discussion of indefiniteness in the novel, demonstrating the centrality of ambiguous and equivocal meanings in the text, and connecting these to

Chesterton’s aesthetic of order. Caserio argues: “The two processes, certainty and uncertainty, are inextricable, not because they are mutually undecidable and indivisible, but because the equivocation of meaning clears a space for, and helps secure, a final certainty” (66). Caserio’s emphasis, however, is on how this indefiniteness is resolved in the anarchist-terror plot; subsequently, he traces Thursday’s literary relation to modernist works that also feature anarchist-terrorism. Caserio’s emphasis on anarchist- terrorism and Chesterton’s sense of order leaves aside the question of Chesterton’s romance altogether.

Though Thursday contains elements of many disparate genres, Cecil Chesterton summarizes the work as detective fiction: “Why should not the universe itself be the subject of a detective story? . . . ‘The

Man who was Thursday’ is a detective story in which the criminal to be hunted and brought to bay is—

God” (210-11). The mystery does not revolve around the commission of a single crime but is more interested in exploring the riddles of the nature of the universe in a manner that Cecil Chesterton describes as theological mystery. To dramatize the complexities of such a mystery on a cosmic scale,

Chesterton turns, paradoxically, to tropes and forms that suggest limits and boundaries.

Limits, Order, and Enchantment

Reflecting back on Thursday in his autobiography, Chesterton refers to the novel as the “very formless form of a piece of fiction” and to the novel’s content as “groping and guesswork philosophy”

(The Autobiography 99, 101). Describing the novel as “formless” is particularly ironic given Chesterton’s repeated insistence that clearly defined boundaries and limits are not only part of his personal philosophy but essential to art. Recounting his early years, he explains: “All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of all grave dramatic critics, I will assert that the perfect drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the peepshow” (The Autobiography 28-9). Edges, boundaries, frames, and limits—all aspects of bounded wholes—afford not simply containment, but order, and a visual relief that brings focus to what is enclosed. More importantly, though, limits and frames also carry a reminder that there is something beyond them: for Chesterton, who would eventually convert to Catholicism, God was beyond the limits of the material world.79 In Chesterton’s fiction, the shapes and forms that are most limiting are paradoxically also signs of what he sees as the mental freedom of belief in the numinous more generally.

The striking metaphors that Chesterton uses for his formal and religious vision are suggestive of Taylor’s description of the enchanted frame. Where Taylor describes the growing shift in the nineteenth-century social imaginary towards a vast, disenchanted cosmos, he contrasts the older enchanted frame in language similar to Chesterton’s. Taylor depicts the enchanted frame as “limited and encompassed by certain notions of cosmos, world orders which imposed a boundary by attributing a shape to things” (323).

Taylor’s enchanted frame is defined by limits and boundaries in a way that parallels Chesterton’s

79 Though there is much overlap between Chesterton’s faith and his fiction, this chapter does not seek to limit readings of Chesterton’s fiction strictly through the lens of his religious beliefs. As Michael Hurley argues, “There is a danger of overdetermining the ethics of his fiction by conflating it with his faith . . . The problem with reading his stories as if they were the authentic expression of his religion denies, for start, that his fiction may be just that, a fiction” (32). 91 conceptualization of romance. These enchanted limits are everywhere in Thursday. For instance, the setting in which Syme and the anarchist, Lucian Gregory, first meet is described in terms recalling such a contrast between the enchanted and immanent frame. The sunset sky is described as a “heaven,” and yet this sky looks “like the end of the world” (3). Nonetheless, this “end” hints at enchantment: “The whole was so close about the earth as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret” (3). Earth might be bound by the mysterious sky, but this sky hints at something beyond its limits.

Thursday attests to a romance of design, and yet the workings of this design remain a mystery.

Chesterton’s theological work of the same year, Orthodoxy, contains such chapter titles as “The Ethics of

Elfland,” “The Romance of Orthodoxy,” and “Authority and the Adventurer,” pointing to the convergence he saw between his Christian faith and romance. In Orthodoxy his use of bounded forms shifts in a way that elucidates the collision of forms in Thursday, and reveals the way in which he uses limits only to gesture to what is beyond them. Near the end of the second chapter in Orthodoxy, “The

Maniac,” Chesterton reverses the symbolism of his metaphors to argue that the organizing principles of materialist thought are restrictive, rather than freeing: the determinist, he asserts, is limited by a “chain of causation” (19). Chesterton’s metaphor here reflects the formal and epistemological paradigms of detection, too. Holmesian detection employs the same metaphor but to different ends. At the end of “The

Red-Headed League,” for instance, Watson marvels: “‘You reasoned it out beautifully’ . . . ‘It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true’” (255). Watson admires the way Holmes connects the pieces of evidence as links on a chain. This chain of rational thought is a visual metaphor of order, but it is a chain of necessity that Chesterton argues limits imaginative possibility. Reversing this metaphor, Chesterton contrasts the chain of necessity with the form of the cross, which he sees as a symbol of epistemological freedom: 92

we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health . . . Christianity is

centrifugal [tending away from centralization]: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in

its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it

has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its

shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon

itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

(Orthodoxy 23)

Though on the one hand Chesterton might appreciate its boundaries, the circle contains a restrictive wholeness in contrast to the “collision” and “contradiction” of forms at the centre of the cross, which he sees as a source of mystery and fruitful uncertainty. Rather than celebrating the subversion of form, then,

Chesterton looks for where formal limits converge and conflict.

Chesterton’s contrast between the circle and the cross parallels a contrast of physical affordances in narrative structure. His contrast reflects the difference between a bounded whole and a collision of forms, the latter of which might produce something new, while the former on its own remains static. Thursday features a similar clash of romance forms, each of which contains its own specific set of limits—limits that are opened up as the forms meet. The detective story draws on strict generic conventions, follows a linear line of reasoning, and presents a perfectly closed narrative circle in which the end of the plot is already known from the beginning. The dream vision, on the other hand, takes the story into the realm of the oneiric and releases it from realist conventions. Nonetheless, the dream vision also requires a frame.

The dream frame itself captures the possibilities of Chesterton’s romance of limits: it is simultaneously a form of containment, and yet it also sharpens the reader’s focus on romance and irrational mystery.

In Thursday, the debate that frames the content of the dream vision establishes the terms of this romance of order. Most importantly, the debaters’ formal visions differ in their use of the natural world 93 for symbols of enchantment. In his argument with Syme, the anarchist, Lucian Gregory, points to both a lamppost and a tree, using what he believes to be obvious examples of the poetic and the prosaic. He exclaims: “There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold” (8-9). The tree seems the obvious example of poetry, romance, and even the order of nature, so it is a surprise when Syme disagrees: “All the same . . . just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree” (9). Syme sees wonder in something as mundane as the lamppost, which re-orients romance to the modern world. By using a tree to support an argument for anarchy, Gregory draws on a store of natural images for evolution and chance as in Darwin’s “entangled bank.” In contrast, Syme does not turn to examples from nature but rather to modern material objects.

Thursday dramatizes a world that includes boundaries and limits in symbolic material forms as diverse as police, nation, lamppost, and rail schedule—all of which point to design and intention. Gregory’s reference to the anarchy of the tree marks a crucial difference between the imagery of enchantment in

Hardy and Chesterton: though each of them turn to human-made objects in the modern world for sources of enchantment, Hardy does so only insomuch as they mimic the unpredictable chaos of the natural world, while Chesterton does so for their affordances of order, design, and predictability.

Detective Fiction: The Romance of Order

Detective fiction’s investment in restoring order from chaos accords with Chesterton’s philosophic and aesthetic ideals, inducing him to write both detective stories and essays about detective stories.80 In

“A Defence of Detective Stories” Chesterton claims the detective tale is a romance because of its teleological aesthetic of order:

80 Chesterton wrote on the conventions of the genre several times in “A Defence of Detective Stories” (1901), “Errors About Detective Stories” (1920), “On Detective Novels” (1928), “How to Write a Detective Story” (1925), and “The Ideal Detective Story” (1930). 94

the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of

modern life . . . it may reasonably be inferred that some of our descendants may see the chimney-

pots as rich a purple as the mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees .

. . No one can have failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London

with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland . . . The crest of the

flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in

the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some

man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook

and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it. (158-59)

Chesterton’s argument for the romance of detection invokes not only the princely figure of the fairy tale but also emphasizes the orderly nature of clues that detection employs for specific ends.

Chesterton’s engagement with detective fiction was lifelong and diverse. In addition to several critical essays, he wrote Thursday, a collection of detective tales titled The Club of Queer Trades, and the

Father Brown stories, which are closer to the classic model embodied in the Holmes stories.81 Chesterton was also the first president of the British Detective Club formed in 1932. Anthologies and scholarly works on detective fiction frequently credit Chesterton with one of the earliest definitions of the genre and acknowledge, in particular, his effort to elevate the critical discussion of detective fiction from low- brow popular novels to a respected literary category.82 In fact, his essay “A Defence of Detective Stories”

(1901) pre-dates both Thursday and his later Father Brown stories, the first collection of which was

81 The classic “whodunit” is considered the model of the “golden age” before the American “hard-boiled” detective story developed in the 20s and 30s. The classical model follows those of Edgar Allen Poe and Conan Doyle where a crime is committed (usually before the narrative opens) and is solved through the presentation and ordering of clues. The emphasis is largely on analysis over action. Thursday’s chief departure from the conventions of the classic formula is that no crime initiates the action of the narrative, and thus the mystery does not revolve around the recreation of a past event. Nonetheless, the novel retains the essentials of the detective genre: a detective protagonist, a mystery, and the imperative to safeguard and restore law and order in the face of chaos. 82 See Heta Pyrhönen “Criticism and Theory” (2010). Pyrhönen’s work here and elsewhere focuses on the history of criticism of detective fiction. According to her, the first critical discussions worthy of notice are G. K. Chesterton’s essays published in The Defendant in 1902 (45). 95 published in 1911.83 In “A Defence,” Chesterton argues for detective fiction’s legitimacy as literature rather than mere formula fiction. He compares a good detective story to a good epic, and insists: “Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal” (158).

Despite the frequency with which he is quoted, Chesterton’s fiction receives far less attention than that of Conan Doyle and slightly later canonical authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie,

Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. In Blackwell’s A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010)

Chesterton is given passing mention, and from a list of seventeen individual authors given their own chapters such as Edgar Allen Poe, Conan Doyle, Sayers, and others, he is noticeably absent.84 This is a surprising exclusion given his prominence in the British Detective Club, and in spite of the endurance of the Father Brown stories.85 The critical neglect of Chesterton is partly due to the overwhelming popularity of contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Conan Doyle, but it also owes something to Chesterton’s open resistance to the scientific rationality of the classical model of detection.

Part of Chesterton’s resistance to such scientific rationality is bound up in the history of detective fiction itself. In its medieval imagery Thursday bears witness, not only to to detective fiction’s romance roots, but to its religious lineage as well. The genre has been traced to metaphysics, religion, and supernaturalism through literary ancestors such as the Bible and mystery plays.86 As one part of its heritage, Maurizio Ascari contends that religion and detective fiction are intertwined, arguing that in an

83 The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927) and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). 84 See Charles J. Rzepka, and Lee Horsley, eds. A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010). Chesterton is referred to as one of Conan Doyle’s most successful successors, but he is ignored, or only mentioned as an influence on Borges. This 2010 companion is evidence of the continuing critical narrative that omits Chesterton despite brief acknowledgments of his success. 85 The popularity of the Father Brown stories is evidenced by the fact that they have been revived for television by the BBC as recently as 2012 and continue into the present. 86 See Kim Toft Hansen, “Knowing the Unknowable” (2012). Hansen claims, “The prehistory of crime fiction shows a noteworthy coexistence of rational investigation on the one hand and metaphysics, religion and supernaturalism on the other—and in some cases under the influence of one another” (165). 96

“increasingly secularized” society, detective fiction “reinstated truth and justice as the basic coordinates” of a system of meaning when traditional values were under question (158). He lists several Christian writers who were also writers of detective fiction: in addition to Chesterton, Monsignor Knox and

Dorothy Sayers were Christians who clearly saw a connection between their faith and detection (158).

William David Spencer sees a similar link between detection and religion: “As the literature of the mystery genre became a secularization of the concealing/revealing quality of the great mysterium, God as orderer and focal point of unity was displaced by secular society, priest displaced by police . . . The detective as secular priest now identified the person out of unity, the antisocial criminal, and exacted society’s punishment” (10). Ascari and Spencer both see a shared orientation toward order in religion and detection, which is what makes the genre attractive to Chesterton.

In his detective fiction, Chesterton emphasizes both religious and romance elements as agents of order: police detectives are Chesterton’s knights. In “A Defence of Detective Stories” he writes: “The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry” (162). In

Thursday, though, this romance is morally and epistemologically complex, which is partly evidenced in

Gabriel Syme’s evolution as detective-knight. Syme imagines himself as St. George out to slay the dragon, wandering in a wasteland: “But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire . . .The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup” (41). As a modern knight, he sets out to fight contemporary dragons—the pessimists and anarchists of the turn of the century. Syme’s chief attribute is a “hatred of modern lawlessness” (32), which he fights vehemently (though ineffectually) until he is picked up by the police force, and eventually, the mysterious leader of the anarchists. Syme is 97 also described as “quixotic” in his passion for order and his hatred of anarchy (33): his lofty but rash impulse to defend civilization invokes Cervantes’ medieval knight. The special detective force that he joins is a secret society, which Syme envisions much like the Crusaders, created to stop the pessimists of the educated and artistic classes from destroying the Family and the State. When he joins the special force he is even given a small blue identification card on which is written “The Last Crusade” (40).

Syme’s association with Don Quixote and also with the Crusades is a warning, however, that his perceptions of good and evil are narrow and simplistic. The novel may draw on religious and romance discourse to undermine the confident rationality of other detective stories from the same period, but its use of romance does not provide greater certainty.

Detective Fiction: Realist Detection

While Thursday’s romance elements draw explicit attention to the conflict between good and evil, rationality and irrationality, the detective genre’s attempt to master such chaos extends from its relation to realism. In the critical climate in which Chesterton turned to detective fiction, Holmes was the prevailing figure of detective myth, and his characterization as rational and scientific was central to the development of the genre as one of logical certainty. Both novelists and critics alike were preoccupied with “shap[ing] the identity of what was increasingly perceived as a new genre by denying its sensational heritage—with its vibrant appeal to the emotions—in order to emphasise its rational character” (Ascari 1). As such, the direction of detective fiction at the time Thursday was written was moving away from romance and its precursors and towards the realist codes and conventions that would establish the scientific Holmesian model as authoritative. If the popular detective tale afforded a sense of order, it also privileged a strictly scientific and material logic that concluded with the erasure of mystery. 98

Because of its rationalization of mystery and uncertainty, Edwardian detection has been read as a response to instability and shifting cultural values. Nationalism, anarchism, feminism, and labour agitation are just some of the movements that disturbed the supposed calm before the First World War.

Joseph Kestner argues that the function of detective fiction in the period is, indeed, to provide a sense of order, and claims that the detective narrative “was driven by uncertainty, anxiety and disturbance through its status as a ‘transitional’ period in British history” and that “Detective literature deals with disturbance and destabilization as much as crime per se” (Kestner The Edwardian Detective 5, 7). Likewise, Ascari contends that the detective story in early twentieth-century Britain “provided authors and their public with a discursive space that enabled them to share a common fund of certainties” (161).

Thus, the classic detective formula has been read as a sub-genre of realism in the seminal work of

Stephen Knight and others, based on its familiar reflection of society. Knight’s treatment of the ideology of the form argues that the realism of crime fiction creates a “pleasing, comforting world-view” (5).87

Likewise, Heta Pyrhönen notes that the genre’s adherence to codes of realism depict detection as conservative and reassuring, because it restores the order of everyday standards of perception rather than challenging them.88 The relationship between a materialist epistemology and classic detective fiction is indicated by their shared reliance on clues and evidence in the physical world to make meaning. The authority of the detective and his or her ability to reassure and restore order in society was established by the use of new methods in forensic science, and by the developing professionalization of science, which gave its practitioners an increasing monopoly over truth claims.89 Conan Doyle established the cultural

87 Stephen Knight’s seminal study, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980) suggests the “aura of science” in the methods of Sherlock Holmes offered his contemporary audience the fictional protection that the ascendancy of science was both comprehending and therefore controlling the world (79). 88 Pyrhönen notes that as a result of the genre’s investment in realism, “What is implied is that the genre is inherently conservative and reassuring, even soothing, because—thanks to its code of realism, which reproduces what is assumed by society to represent reality—it is not seen to contest habitual, everyday standards of perception and thinking. Instead, the genre helps to maintain such principles” (98). 89 See Ronald R. Thomas Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999). In a similar vein to Stephen Knight, Thomas also explores the connection between detective fiction and science, showing how new methodologies in forensic 99 paradigm for the image of the detective by aligning him with rationality and scientific procedures and attitudes. Rosemary Jann carefully examines Holmes’ particular type of scientific model. Rather than simply a computing machine, Holmes creatively invents several hypotheses (or narratives) that could explain the facts, working backwards from his observations, and then ruling out each story by process of elimination. Yet the hypotheses or narratives that he creates invariably lead him to the factual truth, occluding any sense of arbitrariness. Jann argues:

the power of Holmes’s inferences, as well as their appeal to his Victorian audience, rests on the

assumption that beneath the chaotic surface of life exists an underlying order to which all details

can be linked by the trained observer. In the face of a universe that often seems incoherent and

incomprehensible, Holmes affirms a fantasy of control by implying that all it takes to uncover

nature’s hidden order is a sufficient exercise of human intellect. Like many scientific essayists in

the Victorian period, he demonstrates that even the most insignificant of everyday objects

exemplify the working of scientific laws and thus testify to the systematic nature of reality. (50)

Though Holmes is not a “computing machine,” he depends on the presumption of scientific laws and the certainty of ratiocination to illuminate mystery.

Most criticism on the Holmesian model reiterates this same connection between science and rationality, though, as Michael Saler notes in his argument for the enchantment of the New Romance at the turn of the century, this pretension to scientific rationality also provoked audience wonder.

science established authority for the detective in various ways, in particular, in establishing individual and national identity through physical clues, which also established an illusion of control backed up by the authority of science and the police. See also: Lawrence Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence (2003). Frank provides a more balanced investigation of detective fiction’s relation to science, demonstrating that while the genre mined the various scientific concepts of the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was still self-critical about the nature of scientific evidence and its ability to fully explain mystery. He shows detective fiction’s engagement with a secular, scientific worldview and its accompanying methodologies for solving mystery, borrowing from philology, paleontology, geology, archaeology, and evolutionary biology (4). At the same time, Frank also argues for a vein of romanticism in Holmes’ characterization (205), for instance, carefully distinguishing between detectives as computing machines, and more developed, creative and analytical characters. 100

Chesterton’s contemporaries such as Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and in particular, Conan Doyle and his Holmes stories “emphasized analysis as much as fancy” and were grounded in realism through tactics that increased verisimilitude such as the use of footnotes, charts, appendices, and photographs (Saler, As

If 60). According to Saler, the goal of these romancers was to use enough scientific detail that readers could let their imaginations fly away with the wonders of fantasy while retaining an ironic degree of believability. Holmes’ “romance of reason” produced “rational and secular enchantments that provided an alternative to the supernatural enchantments of the premodern period” (As If 111-12). By contrast, I would argue that Holmes’ rational enchantment, though providing temporary excitement, did not perpetuate a new perspective that would re-enchant: rather, his rational enchantment resembles a temporary relief from boredom. After Watson compliments him on his reasoning at the end of “The Red-

Headed League” Holmes replies: “‘It saved me from ennui,’ he answered, yawning. ‘Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence’”

(Conan Doyle 255). Holmes is able to find temporary enchantment in solving mystery, but once it is solved and mystery dissipates, the enchantment is gone. Holmes can only provide temporary transcendence within a material world where wonder ceases as soon as the mystery is solved. Chesterton, on the other hand, pursues a model of detection that retains mystery. The realist conventions and the reception of the Holmesian model provided rich ground for Chesterton’s critique of a strictly materialist model of detective fiction, and his re-imagination of it as romance.

Detective Fiction: Metaphysical Detection, Anarchism, and (Dis)Order

Part of Thursday’s critique, then, is its resistance to restoring the conventional order of the detective novel. Despite Chesterton’s preference for order, the novel explores disorder without rationalizing and explaining it. The complication between rationality and irrationality is what makes Thursday a “romance 101 of modern enchantment.” Mystery and sites of modern disorder and uncertainty are sustained rather than eliminated for the comfort and assurance of the reader. Thus, Thursday re-enchants detection in its complication of what is good and evil, rational and irrational. In the spirit of metafiction, this complication is worked out as a detective novel that features ideological anarchy—a contemporary source of irrationality. The anarchist elements in Thursday are also significant to the novel’s promotion of epistemological uncertainty, which is not a theme for which Chesterton is popularly recognized.

Although Chesterton is often regarded as a conservative Catholic writer, his contributions to detective fiction have frequently been cited as precursors to postmodern tales of metaphysical detective fiction, such as those by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges himself praises Chesterton’s Father Brown stories as attempts to explain the “inexplicable” (Borges 84). In one of the earliest critical monographs on detective fiction from 1941, Howard Haycraft applies the label of metaphysical detection to Chesterton’s Father

Brown stories.90 Subsequently, Chesterton’s name appears in discussions of what critics have variously termed “metaphysical” detective fiction,” “anti-detective” fiction, “deconstructive mysteries,”

“postmodern mystery,” “analytic detective fiction,” and the “ontological detective story.”91 As a proto- postmodern form, the metaphysical detective story subverts the conventions of its traditional counterpart to interrogate the nature of mystery and the mystery plot (Merivale and Sweeney 2). Such stories also highlight the function of language, narrative structure, textual influence, and the nature of reading itself

(Merivale and Sweeney 7). Michael Holquist positions the metaphysical detective story against the classical model exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes stories, arguing that metaphysical detection lacks

“the narcotizing effect of its progenitor; instead of familiarity, it gives strangeness, a strangeness which

90 Haycraft argues that Chesterton “perfected the metaphysical detective story” and that “When Chesterton began to write the Father Brown narratives, the detective story had only two main classifications: increasingly heavy-handed romanticism on the one side, and the new scientificism on the other” (76). 91 See Patricia Merivale and Susan E. Sweeney “The Game’s Afoot: On the Trails of the Metaphysical Detective Story” (1999) pp.3-4; also, Pyrhönen lists Chesterton alongside Poe as the two fathers of the metaphysical detective story (Academic Angle 10). 102 more often than not is the result of jumbling the well known patterns of classical detective stories. Instead of reassuring, they disturb. They are not an escape, but an attack” (155). Where the classical detective formula creates an illusion of control over life’s mysteries, antidetective novels, in response, resemble a

“distorting fun-house mirror” to reflect the ambiguous and irrational mysteries of the world, “rupturing” the form (Cawelti 137). Thursday exhibits an early post-modernist impulse towards self-reflexivity and a suspicion of linguistic and narrative certainty in common with works by writers such as Borges, Vladimir

Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, and other metaphysical mystery writers, despite its Christian ethos.

In his 1928 essay “On Detective Novels” Chesterton outlines what he sees as the essential features of the detective story with details that are found in Thursday: the novel might even be read as a literalization of the metaphors that Chesterton would later use to characterize detection in his essay. At one point in the essay, for instance, he emphasizes the importance of disguise: “The chief difficulty is that the detective story is, after all, a drama of masks and not of faces. It depends on men’s false characters rather than their real characters” (“On Detective Novels” 5). While he clearly means masks in a metaphoric sense as insincerity, Thursday actualizes this metaphor. Each member of the anarchist council that Syme thinks he has caught is subsequently unmasked as another detective, each one removing physical disguises and inhibiting Syme’s ability to pinpoint the criminals and solve the crime. In “On

Detective Novels,” Chesterton goes on to use another metaphor to describe the character of the detective novel: “The author cannot tell us until the last chapter any of the most interesting things . . . It is a masquerade ball in which everybody is disguised as somebody else . . . we cannot really get at the psychology and philosophy, the morals and the religion, of the thing until we have read the last chapter”

(“On Detective Novels” 5). Again, Chesterton uses the image of the masquerade ball figuratively, but in

Thursday a masquerade ball is the setting for Sunday’s revelation—in the last chapter. In addition, the novel is filled with riddles that no logical train of thought can solve. Syme is consistently stumped by the 103 mysterious appearances and actions of the other characters because their appearances are always deceptive. Facial features, costumes, body types, and body language are artificial tricks, defying Syme’s ability to read the world and the people around him; in this dream world, he cannot even rely on his senses. In the complications central to metaphysical detection, good and evil are inscrutable and the linear narrative of detective fiction is undermined.92

The conventions of metaphysical detection also thwart Syme’s moral crusade against the evil of anarchy. The confusion between good and evil is particularly apt at a time when the treatment of anarchy occupied a space of both enchantment and disenchantment. In the period in which the novel is set, fears of anarchist activity were a persistent reality for late Victorian readers; and yet, anarchism itself could be a source of dangerous thrill and even romance. As Pietro Di Paola shows, anarchists often thought of themselves as knights and artists (Di Paola 14).93 In fact, anarchism could be romanticized by both sides.

One writer in The Speaker claimed: “It is this combined appeal to visionary aspirations and criminal instincts which gives to Anarchism its peculiar force” (“Anarchism in London” 716). Deaglán Ó

Donghaile argues that late-Victorian readers were attracted to anarchist dynamite plots, because they found “having their ‘nerves’, or political-conceptual faculties, shattered a very thrilling experience,” which is attested to through the popularity of narratives of revolutionary violence (3). Just as the Monte

Carlo casino was the frequent target of news articles, church pamphlets, and realist novels, the anarchist clubs of London were featured in the illustrated news, editorials, and political debates of the period as sources of both anxiety and fascination.

92 See Mark Knight, Chesterton and Evil for a broader discussion of chaos and order as good and evil in Chesterton’s work. 93 See Pietro Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917) (2013) for a further discussion of anarchists in London in this period. Di Paola quotes an Italian anarchist song, Addio Lugano Bella (1895), in which their exile to the North is the hope of the Knights-Errant. Gregory’s characterization as anarchist and artist in Thursday evokes the traveling artists that would stir up anarchist sentiment through recitations of poems and songs. See also, “The Anarchists” in The Speaker, April 7, 1894. The article discusses the position of the “trimardeur” who goes around (in France) from farm to farm stirring up anarchist sentiment by reciting anarchist poems and songs: “One of these trimardeurs is himself a poet—the Francois Villon of the movement, a true nomad, wandering over the roads at the whim of a Bohemian fancy, musing on his Utopia, stopping now and then to compose a couplet, and nourishing under a naïve exterior an implacable hatred of society and its laws” (388). 104

Chesterton draws on political anarchism in London as a recognizable space in which the contest between enchantment and disenchantment was being waged, not unlike the casino space in Hardy.

Contemporary periodicals are filled with details of police raids and infiltrations into the dens of anarchy in London. Di Paola describes London at the fin de siècle as a centre for international anarchist activity, with the most influential anarchists from across Europe taking up residence in the metropolis (7). As a reflection of this fear, Gabriel Syme comes to regard anarchists “as a huge and pitiless peril, like a

Chinese invasion” (33) after being temporarily blinded and deafened by a dynamite attack. His hyperbolic imagination not only transforms anarchism into a perilous enemy of the romance knight, but it also captures the racial bigotry and hysteria incited by the media about the ubiquity of anarchism at the fin de siècle.94 On the other side, official government policy allowed political refugees free access to

England and refused their extradition on the grounds of freedom of opinion: anarchists were at once a dangerous threat, but also, as Di Paola shows, political exiles seeking freedom of thought in a country that valued such freedom. Thus, the threat of anarchism was bound with fears of the foreign Other and anxieties about the permeable boundaries between England and Europe, but also with the spread of potentially liberating ideas. Police detective work, then, was not simply to solve mystery and crime, but also a sort of border monitoring that would keep out threats to the nation, to London, and to the English mind. Syme’s hatred of anarchists and lawlessness suggests he might also be complicit in such border monitoring. Though the novel does not, perhaps, clearly distance itself from the possibility that the threat of anarchism might be conflated with the perceived threat of foreigners, Syme’s understanding of the distinctions between good and evil, and right and wrong are persistently revealed as flawed. Chesterton’s

94 See, for example, “Dynamite Everywhere” The Graphic (1894), p. 202. The writer compares the ubiquity of anarchists to the Greek God Briareus with one hundred arms: “The ugly fact society has to face and deal with is that dynamitism is a Briareus, whose hundred hands cover pretty nearly the whole civilised world. Sometimes it breaks forth in one place, sometimes in another; the sole object being to create terror by the destruction of life and property . . . Clearly, therefore, there is only one way in which the pest can be kept under control . . .” (202). Anarchism is compared to monster and pest, not unlike racist Syme’s characterization of a Chinese invasion. These images capture the sense of anarchism as widespread and almost undefeatable. The monster imagery here is also reflected in the overwhelming size of Sunday, the lead anarchist, who is “enlarged terribly to scale” (45). 105 metaphysical detection is concerned, not only with the nature of good and evil itself, but also with how good and evil might be known. Thursday’s incorporation of anarchism draws on a contentious social issue that highlights the variability of perception and the complexity of moral judgments. Although

Lucian Gregory, the anarchist, remains an antagonist, Syme’s relationship with him at the end of the novel is far more amicable.

Because the novel emphasizes an irresolvable contest between extreme oppositions, it is also no coincidence that the dream vision in Thursday begins in an anarchist club in which the interchange of ideas and art is contrasted with extreme violence and danger. Di Paola explains that anarchist clubs in

London were known for their rich cultural production, and yet “were generally regarded as hotbeds of the most terrifying conspiracies” (10). The public imagination was fueled, most famously, by the Greenwich bombing and the subsequent raid on the famous Autonomie Club in London. The Club was famous in the

1880s and 1890s, raided in 1892, and finally shut down in 1894 after one of its members, Martial

Bourdin, was injured in his attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory—the event that inspired

Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Like Conrad, Chesterton uses such sites of anxiety to fuel his mystery.

In Thursday, Syme accompanies Gregory to his London club in which the upstairs barroom hides a basement meeting-place for the anarchists. The novel stages the beginning of the irrational dream by having Syme shoot down through the floor on a slide and into the eerie basement. The club is stark in its contrasts. The upstairs bar is dark and dingy, but serves fine champagne, lobster, and foie gras, while the twisted passages of the basement are lined with revolvers and bombs. The club itself is a symbol of the contrasts between appearance and reality paralleled in the detectives’ disguises. The detectives are all both European nationals and British policemen, which reflects contemporary accounts of spies infiltrating the anarchists. One article describes the Autonomie Club as having representatives from all of Europe on 106 their membership roll.95 Media attention suggests that the public imaginary was captured by both the threat of foreigners plotting terror on English soil, and inspired by the hope that the police were lurking in disguise to foil their plots.96 Thus, the anarchist club in London was a threatening space for the spread of disorder and violence, but also a space permeable by the forces of order and good: a space characterized by a contest between good and evil, order and disorder.

At the beginning of the novel when Syme and Gregory first meet, the contest between order and disorder is cast as a debate about anarchy and the nature of art. Gregory insists that the “artist is identical with an anarchist” because both the artist and anarchist are always in revolt (4-5). He argues that the true poet delights in disorder, otherwise something as predictable as the Underground Railway could be considered romantic. Syme counters with the surprising claim that the Underground Railway is indeed the most “poetical” thing (4). In response, the anarchist argues for the wonder of unpredictability: “Why do all the clerks and navies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? . . . It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! Oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!” (4) Gregory describes an enchanted reaction—“eyes like stars,” “souls again in Eden”—as the result of a deviation from the norm, something akin to Epicurus’ clinamen or swerve. Yet Syme asserts his conviction that order is enchanting as a miracle of repetition.

Syme replies: “The rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it . . . Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! It is Victoria. No, take your

95 See “Anarchists at Work” (1905), p.278. This article talks about police detective spies being in the Autonomie Club and being part of the Walsall Anarchists. 96 See “Anarchism in London” The Speaker (1893) pp. 715-16. After a lengthy description of the “savage virus” of anarchism, the article ends with the comforting reminder: “At bottom it is a police business, and the police throughout the world on the threshold of 1894 seem to be fully alive to the situation” (716).

107 books of mere poetry and prose, let me read a time-table, with tears of pride” (4-5). Syme offers a paradoxical view of enchantment: rather than celebrating the mystery of chance that might lead him anywhere, he celebrates the predictability of the time-table. Predictability infers design, and it is design that he considers “magical” or enchanting. For Syme, design and order do not diminish mystery, but increase it.

The novel does not exploit anarchism for sensational romance nor does it dissolve this contest between anarchism and the police, between chaos and order in a simple or even conservative resolution.

At the end of the novel, Sunday is not the head of an orderly police force. Rather, the novel juxtaposes the formlessness of anarchy with the orderliness of detection and situates these within the dream vision, which is a genre that also embodies the conflict between rationality and irrationality, order and disorder.

Dream Vision and Detection

Although Thursday has been described as dream-like, or even metaphorically as a dream, critics have not recognized its close affiliation with the medieval dream vision. Reflecting the spirit of both medievalism and metaphysical detection, the dream vision makes Thursday a new hybrid form of romance. It allows for a type of numinous experience that romance accommodates with its accompanying defamiliarization of reality, while at the same time limiting such an experience to the dream world and re- affirming the modern space of Edwardian London when the dreamer awakes.

Chesterton was insistent that critics had not given his subtitle enough attention. In fact, only days before his death, Chesterton’s June 13, 1936 entry for “Our Notebook” was still stressing the importance of this subtitle as the point of the story (“Trent’s Last Case—Again” 300). The subtitle—A Nightmare— aligns it with the dream vision while simultaneously pointing to Chesterton’s discontent with modernity.

When critics remember the subtitle or the presence of the dream is discussed, these elements are treated 108 as devices to heighten the atmosphere rather than significant formal elements that might aid with interpretation. More than a tool for sensationalism, or a device for character development, the dream frame paradoxically orders the narrative by enclosing it within tidy borders while also introducing the irrationality of the oneiric. The dream frame ensures that our attention is focused on the vision it borders, resonating with Chesterton’s feelings about the romance of the Victorian peepshow. Thursday exploits some of the conventions of the detective genre as a newer form of romance, and yet juxtaposes the ethos of this new secular romance with the older, medieval ethos found in the dream vision.

Medievalism informs a variety of genres at different periods in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but at the fin de siècle and under the early modernists, medievalism is often deployed as an anti-utilitarian antidote to the mechanization of the modern world. Early modernist poets, particularly recognizable figures like W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, mined medievalism for an ahistorical aestheticism, and for the symbols of a dead past, or, as Jameson terms it, an “absent presence.”97

Chesterton’s medievalism shares in this anti-utilitarian spirit, yet where the modernists saw an irreparable break between the enchanted and secular frame, Chesterton saw continuity: for Chesterton, medievalism did not belong to an older time of naïve enchantment—its values could also inform the present.

Thursday’s protagonist-detective is a poet rather than a man of science, and he draws on older medieval metaphors to battle crime and chaos. Not only does Syme pose as a crusading knight, but he also wields a medieval lantern as a weapon, which becomes a symbol of past wisdom in contrast with the philosophy of the present. Syme’s medievalism, though, is not simply a relic of the past. By introducing medievalism into his modern police drama, Chesterton is very clear about the continued relevance of the Middle Ages.

His was not an ahistorical, nostalgic longing, nor an aesthetic of decay; rather, his medieval impulse was

97 See Louise Blakeney Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past (2002) for a discussion of representative modernists and their use of medievalism as an idealized fantasy world of escape. In Chapter Two Williams argues that the early Modernists were even less politically progressive in their use of medievalism than their Victorian forebears like Carlyle and Ruskin. She argues that for Yeats, Pound, Eliot and Ford, medievalism was a purely aesthetic project or an “aesthetic tool to add atmospheric effect” (41-42). 109 part of an artistic vision that prized new forms.98 Writing in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton comments: “Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realise that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing” (St. Thomas Aquinas 16). Chesterton’s vision diverges from the commonplace conception of medievalism as nostalgia for a past age; for

Chesterton, medievalism inspires growth toward an unrealized future.

Thus, combined with detection, the medieval dream vision celebrates the modern world rather than focusing on the past. Unlike William Morris, for example, who wrote two dream visions in the decade before Thursday, Chesterton’s medieval dream vision has a distinctly modern impetus. In contrast to the idyllic setting of Morris’ dream vision of the future in News from Nowhere (1890), or his vision of the

Middle Ages in A Dream of John Ball (1888), Chesterton’s dream is set in the present and confronts all aspects of society that Chesterton found so dangerous. His contemporary setting is also a departure from

Edward Bellamy who set his dream vision in a utopian future in Looking Backward (1888); from Twain’s medieval setting in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); and even from Ford’s Middle

Ages in the near contemporary Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911). Chesterton’s setting avoids the “Merrie

England” construct of these visions. For example, Morris’ dream in News from Nowhere is set in a utopian future, and despite his newfound hope, the dreamer-narrator still reawakens in the harsh reality of modern life. By contrast, Chesterton’s dreamer re-awakens with a new appreciation for the modern world around him in which he now perceives God’s presence. Though both Chesterton and Morris emphasize the communal values of the medieval past throughout their work, their impulses for resurrecting this past

98 See also Thomas Woodman, Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature (1991). Woodman writes, “If the realist fiction of his contemporaries is associated with a materialist, bourgeois and secular ethos, the kind of prose romance which he offers as an alternative has analogues that are meant to evoke a whole cultural context without necessarily falling into any simple imitative ‘medievalism’” (22). See also, John Coates’ discussion of Chesterton’s medievalism in Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (1984) specifically his chapter “The Restoration of the Past.” 110 differ. 99 In his comments on Morris, Chesterton argues that Morris’ weak point was “that he sought to reform modern life, and that he hated modern life instead of loving it” (“William Morris and His School”

23). Chesterton maintains that despite the ugliness of modern London, its sublimity must be appreciated: he reimagines it as a “fabulous monster” full of “joie-de-vivre” that the poet must love. He even faults

Morris for focusing on traditional objects of art such as gates, fountains, cups, and chairs, while leaving aside the most modern Victorian objects so desperately in need of improvement—lampposts, pillar boxes, and engines. He gives credit to Morris as a prophet of beauty, but criticizes him for looking backwards, arguing that he was not truly a child of the nineteenth century. For Chesterton, medievalism should promote new things, not old. The medieval dream vision, then, affords Chesterton the opportunity to incorporate both this ethos of new creation from the Middle Ages, as well as a form of order.

Like fin-de-siècle detection, the medieval dream vision was a genre that promoted order in a time of upheaval.100 Despite its association with a historical construct of order and peace, the popularity of the medieval dream vision coincided with a specific moment of social turmoil much like the explosion of detective fiction at the turn of the twentieth century. Though dream visions were written during the

Renaissance as well, the genre reached its peak in the fourteenth century as a response to cultural fragmentation caused by recurrent plague, war, schism, revolt and heresy (Brown 44-45). As a result,

Peter Brown suggests, “We might therefore understand the widespread use of the dream vision in these terms: society itself was in a state where boundaries were breaking down under the pressure of severe,

99 See Yuri Cowan “‘Paradyse Erthly’: John Ball and the Medieval Dream Vision” (2007) for the connection Morris draws between the communal values of the Middle Ages and his own Socialist ideals in his use of the dream vision. See also, Mark Knight on the importance of a medieval Catholic type of community in Thursday. 100 See Steven F. Kruger Dreaming in the Middle Ages (1992). Kruger outlines some of the ideological motivations for the medieval dream vision, which might just as easily describe Chesterton’s Edwardian world. Kruger depicts the medieval environment as a time of conflict between science and faith: “In the later Middle Ages, new philosophical and theological movements tended to push God and the human being ever further apart, emphasizing the gap between divine action and human understanding. This situation elicited various responses: on the one hand, a mysticism that sought superrational unity with God; on the other, a science that concentrated its attention more and more fully on the mundane realm accessible to human reason. The late-medieval popularity of the middle vision can be read as one additional reaction to the perception of a growing distance between humanity and divinity” (Dreaming 130). 111 recurrent, and frequent crisis. What the dream vision provided was a radical means of representing, and reflecting upon, both those experiences and the pervasive sense thereby produced of being in a state of transition” (45). Brown further contends that dreams convey a sense of fragmentation between the self and the world, and the dream vision is thus an appropriate vehicle for the representation of alienation and declining social cohesion (44). Brown’s characterization of medieval fragmentation and alienation is also an apt description of Chesterton’s feelings about his time and the pessimism of the 1890s.

In the earlier enchanted frame of which the medieval dream vision was a part, the permeable self might be subject to prophetic or revelatory dreams; in the immanent frame, Taylor suggests that the mind of the buffered self is only open to material stimuli. Thursday enchants dreams by reconnecting them with an enchanted origin, rather than a physiological one. His dream is not oracular in the occult sense, nor is it physiological or individually subjective. Rather, in spite of Chesterton’s own description of the novel as “formless,” the text is carefully crafted using a literary form that provides space for romance.

Chesterton does not employ the dream in any of the ways typical of the fiction of the period in which dreams are variously relied upon to advance the plot, reveal character desire or fantasy, explore new scientific ideas about the body’s relation to the mind, or to convey interiority.101 The dream vision in

Thursday, which lacks the first-person narration that would suggest the interior development of a character, seems to originate externally, hinting at prophetic or divine meaning that comes from a source outside the self. Indeed, as Helen Phillips notes, “Medieval dream poetry is rooted in classical and biblical concepts of dream and vision that imbued dreaming with the potential for august, profound, even divine meaning” (374).

101 In addition, see Audrey Jaffe The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology (2016) for a recent discussion of the function of dreams as revealing characters’ and readers’ desire for the real in the nineteenth-century novel. In Chapter Five on Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel, Armadale, Jaffe suggests that dreams in the Victorian novel are “grounded in the events of everyday life” so that they imply greater realism, even in non-realist genres (121). Chesterton’s use of the nightmare is distinctly different here, not only from dreams as fantasy, but also from dreams as reflecting any aspect of daily life. Chesterton’s dream is of a revelatory nature in contradiction to the conception of dreams as stemming from material consciousness that Jaffe demonstrates was current in the Victorian novel (120). 112

Thus, though dreams and detection seem an odd marriage of genres, the combination is deliberate.

Both the dream vision and the detective story share a common preoccupation with the interpretation of mysterious events: the medieval belief in the working of divine providence required a sort of detection of dreams, in the form of interpreting their content for divine guidance. Like detection, interpreters of dream visions and dreams have to decipher dream symbols to fit them into an order for rational consumption.

Despite this commonality between dream visions and the detective story, there is also an important tension between the two: where detection and dream vision depend on a resolution of the inexplicable, they resolve this through completely different epistemological frameworks.

Dream visions, on the one hand, typically offer little explicit explanation, and though there is a hint at higher meaning, the reader is left with more mystery than solution. The initial frame of a dream vision often begins with a debate of some sort on the nature of poetry, which sets up aesthetic questions that ensue in the dream report. Steven Kruger draws attention to the frequent overlap between the medieval dialogue or debate and the dream vision, which creates a space for dissent or the interrogation of cultural values within the boundaries of the dream frame. Kruger contends: “Placing a debate/dialogue within a dream potentially has the powerful effect of putting the questions considered into a frame that emphasizes ambiguity, raising questions about whether the dream will reveal a truth or be empty of meaning

(“Dialogue, Debate and Dream Vision” 78). Kruger further argues that the combination of debate and dream vision “is especially useful to the Middle Ages for creating areas of uncertainty, ambiguity, and true dialogism” (“Dialogue, Debate and Dream Vision” 82). The dream vision features conflicts between spiritual and material forms of knowledge, but it is ultimately from a period in which even these debates were resolved within an enchanted frame.

The romantic contest between chaos and order in the detective tale operates, on the other hand, within a strictly immanent frame. Mystery merely provides the platform on which the rationality of 113 detection might display itself. Detective fiction solves mystery and supplies a logical, linear model of explanation that dispels mystery altogether and provides complete closure. Foregrounding debates, multiple points of view, and unanswered questions, the conventions of the dream vision are antithetical to the formula of the solitary detective genius, such as Poe’s Auguste Dupin or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock

Holmes. Thursday, on the other hand, insists on epistemological and ethical complexity despite Syme’s seemingly simplistic moral crusade. Syme’s certainty is frustrated by the dream vision, which destabilizes his understanding of the world around him.

Dream Vision in The Man Who Was Thursday

Syme never explicitly lies down to sleep, which may be the main reason contemporary and more recent critics have not treated it as a dream vision proper. In fact, Gregory assures Syme before he falls through the hole in the floor that he is not asleep (13). A dream vision, however, does not need to state explicitly that the dreamer has fallen asleep, as long as it is clear that he or she has entered into another realm (Phillips 375). The novel makes clear that Syme has done so with his fall down the proverbial rabbit hole, literalized as a slide in the floor of the anarchist club. The characters he meets are also reminiscent of the allegorical figures of the dream vision with names such as Professor de Worms,

Ratcliffe, Dr. Bull, Renard, and even Lucian (Lucifer), the anarchist. The most obvious indicator, the subtitle “a nightmare,” conjures the dream vision category, as does the presence of a distinct framing narrative.

In addition to the importance of the subtitle, there are several key features of the medieval dream vision proper that Thursday possesses. One such convention of the dream vision is the dreamer’s angst in the opening frame. The dreamer is often disturbed about something, which initiates the bizarre dream. In

Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century dream vision The Book of the Duchess, for instance, the dreamer 114 feels an inexplicable melancholy and depression, and consequently, he has “felynge in nothyng” (line

11). Though Syme seems in good spirits during his encounter with Gregory in the opening frame, readers learn later on that he was only a poet by disguise, and is actually a police detective who fell into his job on the special force because of extreme angst triggered by the growing number of anarchists (33). Syme’s anxiety mirrors the speaker’s mental anguish in the dedicatory poem in which he explains that the novel was initiated by “a sick cloud upon the soul” (line 2). In other words, the novel invokes the spirit of this inner turmoil as an initiating factor of the dream vision.

The opening frame of the novel establishes the debate between poets Syme and Gregory, in which they argue over “the whole nature of poetry” (3). In this case, the debate over the function of the artist and the nature of art sets up a metafictional novel preoccupied with the nature of romance. Another related feature is the débat, or less formal conversations with one or more characters throughout the dream report (Russell 5). Accordingly, Thursday frequently features conversations and debates rather than action, which is not customary for a romance with as few properties of realism as this one. The conversations are continuations of Syme and Gregory’s initial debate on the nature of poetry and its relation to chaos and order, but are importantly extended to larger epistemological and metaphysical questions such as the nature of different perspectives among the six detectives and the nature of the entire universe in the closing encounter with Sunday.

Perhaps the most obvious indicator that the action takes place in a dream is the progression of the uncanny, as familiar aspects of the world become unfamiliar. Though the early scenes are set in and around recognizable London landmarks, such as Leicester Square and St. Paul’s, Syme and the detectives move to France as the story progresses, where foreign soil takes on bizarre dream-like qualities as Syme duels on a “glistening meadow” (103); he can almost hear the “blood-red” flowers growing (105); and he moves through a dense forest that possesses “the dizziness of a cinematograph” (115), which alters his 115 perceptions and leads him to question his own sense of reality. When the detectives return to England to confront Sunday, even the familiar terrain of London loses all semblance of reality as the convention of the police chase is enchanted by the pursuit of Sunday who rides an elephant and a hot air balloon in turn.

Finally, the dream vision culminates in an enchanted castle where each detective is shown his own luxurious room and given costumes to wear that symbolize their respective days of the week. From there they move to a bizarre costume carnival, where the guests are dressed as windmills, elephants, hornbills, apple-trees, and lampposts (most of these feature as symbols earlier in the novel) and the six detectives are seated on six thrones.

Characteristically, Chesterton begins this process of defamiliarization in the most mundane and unromantic of all spaces—a suburb. Yet instead of a space that is orderly, planned, and ubiquitous, the first sentences describe the suburb as “red,” “ragged,” and “wild.” What also makes the space so interesting to the observer, explains the narrator, is that “The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream” (1). Beginning with the strange and wild suburb of Saffron Park and then in Professor de Worms’ pursuit of Syme across London, the familiar markers of the metropolis take on an eerie emptiness or silence that lends them the oppressive air of the nightmare. When Syme first meets the anarchist council in Leicester Square the narrator describes the recurring sensation Syme experiences here and elsewhere: “he had had through the whole adventure, the eerie sensation of having strayed into a new world. As a fact, he had bought bad cigars round Leicester

Square ever since he was a boy. But as he turned that corner, and saw the trees and the Moorish cupolas, he could have sworn that he was turning into an unknown Place de something-or-other in some foreign town” (44). The dream quality here is importantly used to destabilize landmarks in London, the centre of modern reason and stability. Rather than inventing a new dreamscape, Chesterton distorts familiar spaces 116 as a strategy of enchantment, paralleling the altered perception Syme has at the end as he walks back through Saffron Park with a renewed sense of wonder.

Finally, the presence of the dream vision is firmly established when the frame narrative is abruptly reintroduced following Sunday’s unanswered questions. The frame makes it clear that though there has been no actual moment of falling asleep, Syme has awoken from something: “When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme’s experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through” (171). The reinstatement of the frame narrative invokes the dream vision with direct reference to other examples of the genre, as if this tale is related to them, but also makes a pretense of distancing itself from the dream vision by casting doubt on the reality of the dream report.

Finally, as in the traditional dream vision, the dreamer’s perception is transformed when he awakens, having processed or worked through an anxiety in the dream. True to convention, Syme feels “an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind” (171-72). Certainly, there is no simple solution or hope offered by Sunday, who may or may not be a representation of God as he grows larger and fills the sky at the end of the novel. In reply to Syme’s questions about life and suffering,

Sunday’s last words are only more questions. Instead, the hope offered at the conclusion of the novel is grounded right back in the nightmarish setting in which the book opened—in the eerie suburb of Saffron

Park, returning readers to the contemporary world of the London suburbs. Nothing has changed except for Syme’s worldview. Despite the unsolved mystery of Sunday’s identity and the lack of change in his companions or environment, Syme “felt he was in possession of some impossible good news” (172). As he walks on in the suburbs he sees Gregory’s sister in a “fenced garden” cutting lilacs with “the great unconscious gravity of a girl” (172), which is reminiscent of Eve inside an enclosed, bounded garden, 117 unconscious or innocent (rather than self-conscious). In other words, the very mundane environs of the suburbs, which are initially a nightmarish version of Eden with “the big Chinese lanterns glow[ing] in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit,” (2) are altered at the conclusion just as Syme’s perceptions are altered. The provision of hope at the end occurs in the enclosed space of a fenced suburban yard, as well as within the closed framing device of the dream vision, which resonates with

Chesterton’s view of the importance of limits to the enchantment of romance.

Metaphor and Logos: Mysterious Order

The dream and the dream vision are, then, organizing principles of knowledge that, like romance, point to something simultaneously concrete and mysterious. The uncertainty of dreams and romance insist on phenomena outside the immanent frame that are not open to the factual knowledge of scientific detection. As a detective mystery set within the strange realm of dreamland, Thursday offers only “half- knowledge”: it is replete with riddles, secret codes and language games, which underscore the contingency of language and frustrate the detective’s ability to create a linear narrative that dispels mystery.102 This confusion is also a typical feature of the metaphysical detective story. This quality marks a departure from the traditional rationality of the detective genre where readers witness Sherlock Holmes enumerate facts in order, literally checking them off on his fingers as he goes (Conan Doyle, “Silver

Blaze” 45), or relying on language to clear up mystery as he assures a client, “It would cease to be a danger if we could define it” (Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches” 89). In contrast, Chesterton’s novel intentionally depicts the difficulty of naming and solving mystery with rational language.

102 Mark Knight argues, “Although [the novel] eventually concedes a grand narrative in which language has meaning, confusion reigns for the majority of the novel. This is significant because of the light that it sheds on the novel’s grotesque aspect—Syme persistently struggles to interpret a totality of events and circumstances that do not appear to make any sense” (115). Another way to read the linguistic confusion is that the novel’s invocation of the detective genre is intentionally paired with the illogical language games in a dream setting to challenge the genre’s privileging of logic and reason. 118

When Syme and another detective first learn of each other’s true identities they invent a secret code to communicate by tapping out words with their fingers. The finger tapping grows increasingly ridiculous as Syme further confuses their communication by adding nonsensical code words to the already secret language (84). Worse still, the apparent danger they are in is undermined to the point of burlesque when they begin to argue with their fingers while speaking about something else with their voices (89-90). The two different modes of communication at work here operate on two different symbolic levels, mirroring the operation of the two forms—detection and dream vision—in the novel. In a later encounter with the

Marquis, another of the supposed anarchists, Syme again uses language games as part of his scheme to stop a crime from occurring. He attempts to stop crime by confusing the Marquis with a one-sided conversation that lacks any context in order to infuriate him so far as to incite a duel (98-101). Instead of stopping crime through the rational, scientific means of logical deduction or ordering clues to construct a linear understanding of the crime, Syme employs gibberish. His nonsensical communications also resemble Sunday’s cryptic messages. The police chase grows increasingly parodic as Sunday escapes on the back of an elephant he has just stolen from the zoo and tosses little messages to each detective. Each message is a cryptic riddle or letter, generally fragmented, which remains unsolved and sheds no light whatsoever on the mystery. The fragmented bits of communication from Sunday also have no beginning or ending, resembling the middle of a conversation that leaves the reader searching for meaning and order. The message to Syme, for example, reads, “No one would regret anything in the nature of an interference by the Archdeacon more than I. I trust it will not come to that. But, for the last time, where are your galoshes. The thing is too bad, especially after what uncle said” (145). The notes parallel the larger fragmentation of the dream that ends abruptly with a question and without any clear understanding of the significance of Sunday. Whatever supernatural force Sunday represents, he provides no clear answers to the nature of his existence, instead perpetuating his own mystery. The instability of linguistic 119 signifiers in the novel, however, does not suggest that there is nothing solid beyond signs; rather, such instability suggests that language and rational thinking cannot name or conceive of the supernatural realm that Chesterton saw as the ultimate mystery. In Sherlock Holmes’ world, signs are incorporated into an orderly pattern: clues fit neatly into the inductive method he uses, because they have been arranged as such by Conan Doyle. In the world of Thursday, on the other hand, language, clues, and signs might illuminate or spur thought, but they do not always explain.

In the tradition of both metaphysical detection and the dream vision, then, Thursday calls into question the ability of language to express the irrational world of subjective experience. Not only is

Syme’s experience inexplicable through language, but each detective experiences something different and must use different metaphors to approximate his feelings (153-58). In the end, although Syme experiences “good news,” it is “impossible” to comprehend fully what the news is. Lucian Gregory reappears near the end to charge Sunday with human suffering, and in reply, Sunday offers only a further question: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” (171) The skeptic here is answered with the suffering of Christ, which can be read as an invocation of Christ as the biblical Logos in a text preoccupied with language and order. In the opening lines of the Gospel of John, Christ is figured as the Word at the beginning of creation. Christ as Logos is the original creator: present at the beginning of the world, bringing order out of chaos. Moreover, throughout the fourth gospel, John’s Christ-as-Logos identifies his own incarnation and his miracles as symbolic signs that reveal the nature of God. Sunday’s invocation of Christ is not just a question about suffering: he adopts the language of the Logos, which connects language to metaphors of order and form, rather than chaos and indefiniteness. At the end, Syme feels a breeze that “blew so clean and sweet that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky” (172). The reference here is to the other creative force of the Christian

Trinitarian God, the Holy Spirit, who is the biblical ruach, or breath that gives life. Notably, the first 120 appearance of the Holy Spirit in The Book of Acts also enables miraculous communication at Pentecost, dismantling the barrier of language to bring “the impossible good news” in a moment of divine revelation.

Thursday mimics the Logos ordering of signs that point to divine meaning, but, like the teachings of Christ in the gospels, these are not straightforward didactic tools. Because of its explicit allegorical conventions, Christian themes, and Syme’s altered vision of the world, the novel also evokes the form of the parable, indicating that, like the biblical parables of Jesus, the novel relies on a narrative strategy that requires metaphoric thinking rather than literal.103 Parables require readers to interpret the text on multiple levels of meaning, which is an act also demanded by Thursday’s use of two different genres.

Specifically, literary parables exploit the gap between everyday experience and the extraordinary or unpredictable, requiring a reader response to the subversion of understanding (Colon 15-16). The biblical parables suggest that everything we perceive is merely a hint of something otherworldly—an implication that Thursday makes consistently. Accordingly, the parables imply that true understanding—the attempt to think metaphorically—is demonstrated by a change in behavior and perception. Such an alteration in perception resembles the effects of enchantment.

Since parables and metaphors are paired with medievalism to enchant meaning in Thursday,

Chesterton’s deep interest in St. Thomas Aquinas is also significant. According to Aquinas, metaphor is a tool of poetry and the lowest rung on the hierarchical ladder of epistemology. In his Summa Theologica,

Question One, Article Nine, Aquinas raises the objection to metaphor in scripture by pointing out the lowly status of metaphor:

103 See Joshua Landy How to Do Things with Fictions (2012). In Part Two of his book titled “Enchantment and Re- enchantment” he argues that the form of the parable increases enchantment because parables bar easy access to the truth, and instead foster figurative thinking in the faithful who already know and believe in Christ. He writes: “salvation depends on our ability to think parabolically, to dwell in metaphors . . . it is the parabolic mode in general that does the work of gradually shifting the listener to a higher plane” (59). 121

It seems that holy teaching should not use metaphors. For what is proper to a lowly type of

instruction appears ill-suited to this, which, as already observed, stands on the summit. Now to

carry on with various similitudes and images is proper to poetry, the most modest of all teaching

methods . . . Such symbolism, however, obscures the truth. Therefore it is not in keeping with this

teaching to convey divine things under the symbolic representation of bodily things. (Ia. I:9, p.33)

Aquinas’ objection to teaching spiritual truths through metaphor in scripture raises the question of

Chesterton’s desire to exploit metaphor for spiritual truth in Thursday. Yet in Aquinas’ reply to the objection raised in article nine, he reconciles the use of metaphor and parable in the scriptures by arguing that the Bible uses such lowly methods of comparison to promote a negative principle of understanding.

He argues that God provides for his creation in the capacity of its nature: humans are given worldly metaphors, but these metaphors imply that God is greater than what senses and the intellect can rationally understand.104

In Chesterton’s monograph on Aquinas, he juxtaposes Aquinas’ medieval epistemology with the scientific skepticism of his contemporaries, insisting that Aquinas’ methods were even more skeptical. He claims St. Thomas is “like the best sort of modern biological anthropologist; of the sort who would call themselves Agnostics . . . St. Thomas Aquinas closely resembles the great Professor Huxley . . . He adopts almost literally the Huxleyan definition of the Agnostic method; ‘To follow reason as far as it will go’; the only question is—where does it go?” (St. Thomas Aquinas 104). By framing Aquinas and his approach to epistemology as medieval skepticism, Chesterton suggests that the medieval spirit informing his own work is more complex than a simple, reassuring order. The shared framework of detective fiction

104 In Question 1: Article 9 Aquinas’ reply states: “Holy Scripture fittingly delivers divine and spiritual realities under bodily guises. For God provides for all things according to the kind of things they are. Now we are of the kind to reach the world of intelligence through the world of sense, since all our knowledge takes its rise from sensation. Congenially, then, holy Scripture delivers spiritual things to us beneath metaphors taken from bodily things.” (Ia, I:9, p.33, 35). See also Stephen Shivone “Question 1, Article 9: An Analysis of Aquinas’s View of Metaphor in Scripture” (2011). 122 and dream vision inverts the hierarchy of metaphor and science so that the lowest of the sciences in the medieval world is privileged over the highest epistemological framework of the modern world: the forensic science of detection. For Chesterton, such an inversion strengthens understanding through

Aquinas’ negative principle of understanding, which is an epistemology akin to “half-knowledge.” In

Thursday this is evident where his parabolic mystery uses both clues and metaphors as signs requiring different epistemological frameworks, but which both point to an only partially comprehensible meaning.

In its combination of generic forms, Thursday ultimately offers a meditation on various types of mystery—secular and spiritual—suggesting that they are more related than they seem at first. William

David Spencer traces the etymology of the word mystery to its Greek root mysterion, outlining its biblical usage as spiritual mystery and spiritual knowledge, such as that granted to Daniel when interpreting King

Nebachudnezzar’s dreams.105 This early incarnation of spiritual mystery is linked to the oneiric, which has echoes in the dream vision format of Thursday. Chesterton’s text, then, reconnects the secularized detective mystery to its spiritual roots through the type of knowledge granted by the dream vision. In

Thursday, this becomes an encounter between the modern detective and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—an experience of the divine that both attracts and repels.

The clash between good and evil at first invites readers to consider the novel a simple moral tale; however, the conclusion and the inexplicability of Sunday challenge this reading. The novel’s formal discontinuities and the mixture of high and low make the text itself a sort of grotesque gargoyle—a medieval form that Chesterton much admired. In his essay “On Gargoyles,” from Alarms and

Discursions (1911) Chesterton frames the whole collection in much the same way that Thursday and the

105 According to Spencer, the word mystery later became a synonym for the sacraments and described the participation in the secret of God’s grace (8). The medieval mystery plays are also titled as such because they draw on the deep mysteries of God and take their subject matter from scripture, in addition to possessing the name based on their affiliation with the secrets of the craft guilds (6-8). Subsequently, Spencer connects spiritual mystery and literary mystery: “Perhaps the prior claim of God’s law on human law, God’s justice in human enforcement, God’s enigma on human secrets, God’s revelation on detection and exposure informs the secularized modern mystery genre as well. Because these tales are mysteries by designation, they point back to the great mysterium of existence. They are images of the hidden enigma of God” (9). 123 rest of his work might be depicted. Describing the collection of essays in distinctly formal terms, he writes:

This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of

separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant

for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing

else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the

architecture, and of the consecration of the church. (15)

Chesterton placed his “ungainly monsters,” amongst which Thursday might be counted, in a telling architectural metaphor—shapeless monsters in themselves, but part of the larger orderliness of the house of God constructed in an act of worship. Like Hardy, Chesterton views romance here in architectural terms, reflecting his consciousness that romance is a formal strategy that builds and produces something new. In his pursuit of new forms, Chesterton stages a contest of orders, not simply to subvert the scientific rationalism of the detective tale, but to re-enchant a form of romance from which mystery could not be dispelled.

124

Chapter Three

“The old thing . . . done in a way that is new”: Re-enchanting the “Boy’s

Story” in Conrad and Ford’s Romance

Adventure is the form of the work rather than its material.

—Jacques Rivière, “The Adventure Novel,” 116

the adventure, in its specific nature and charm, is a form of experiencing.

—Georg Simmel, “The Adventure,” par. 22

It is rather the old thing (if you like) done in a way that is new only through the artistic care of the execution . . . In fact it is a serious attempt at interesting, animated Romance, with no more psychology than comes naturally into the action (emphasis original)

—Joseph Conrad, “Letter to J. B. Pinker, 6 Jan. 1902,” 366

The adventure tale is almost synonymous with the late-nineteenth century revival of romance.

When Andrew Lang defends romance in 1887 he holds up Stevenson’s boys’ adventure as the epitome of the form: “But, with all his gifts, Mr. Stevenson intended only a boys’ book when he wrote ‘Treasure

Island’ and restored Romance . . .” (“Realism and Romance” 690). Tales such as Stevenson’s shaped perceptions of the imperial venture at the turn of the century, influencing the imagination of a generation of boys given such books as gifts for achievements, Christmases, and birthdays (White 57). When Joseph

Conrad claimed that Romance (1903), his second collaborative novel with Ford Madox Ford, was a variation on the “old thing,” he was insisting on the originality of his own boys’ adventure that both 125 resembles and diverges from the adventure romance pattern so popular at the fin de siècle.106 The title of their novel announces the text as metafiction, and perhaps even as parody. Conrad’s insistence, however, that the novel is a “serious attempt” at “interesting, animated” romance should be given more credit.

Published after both Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900), Romance is a metafictional experiment that suggests possibilities for the boys’ adventure romance beyond deconstruction: it is a tale about the form of adventure itself. Like the other “romances of modern enchantment” in this project,

Conrad and Ford’s novel experiments with popular tropes and generic conventions of the Revival in order to mine them for modern romance. In some of their other work, the two authors feature the disillusionment of romance; however, this novel is an attempt to rethink romance’s potential. In this text, romance converges with sites of uncertainty to challenge imperial ideologies of adventure, while also deploying adventure’s formal structure for exploring proto-modernist aesthetics of perception. What

Romance suggests is that one of the organizing principles of the highly formulaic boy’s adventure is, paradoxically, a loose episodic formlessness that aligns with the qualities of indeterminacy that make romance a modern mode. In drawing attention to the nature of the boys’ adventure form, Conrad and

Ford further develop the literary impressionism for which they are recognized.

Conrad insisted to his agent, J. B. Pinker, that, despite first appearances, Romance was “not a boy’s story,” and “You may take my word for it that it is a piece of literature of which we are neither of us at all ashamed” (“Letter to J. B. Pinker, 6 January 1902” 366). Acknowledging their debt to the genre’s conventions though, Conrad explains that Romance is the “old thing . . . done in a way that is new.”107

106 Romance was the second of three collaborations between Conrad and Ford. It was preceded by The Inheritors (1901) and followed by The Nature of a Crime (1909). 107 In this same letter to Pinker of 6 January 1902 Conrad insists that the novel is both something new, but also that it is “a promise of popular success. There’s easy style, plenty of action, a romantic atmosphere and a happy ending after no end of real hair’s breadth escapes” (366). In a letter to Ford of 9 March 1902 Conrad also emphasizes the duality of the novel as both a popular romance and a more complex literary experiment. Telling Ford that Pinker liked the book, he writes, “for though I appreciate it on other grounds than P, the fact is that he is greatly impressed by it. Now if he isn’t an average reader I want to know who is? My cleverness however lies in the fact that I did perceive the side that would impress a mind (?) of that sort” (387). 126

This “new” way was Conrad and Ford’s venture into literary impressionism, which has received little sustained attention in criticism on this neglected novel. What looks like parody in its emphatic conventionality is actually a theoretical examination of the adventure novel’s episodic nature, as well as a critique of the impulse to divide the world into stark hierarchical binaries. Like the other novels in this study, Romance critiques some of the simplistic divisions of the Romance Revival and promotes the destabilizing tendencies of romance. Yet where Hardy’s and Chesterton’s critiques are aimed at rationalizing discourses that limit perception to purely material explanations, Conrad and Ford’s text is critical of the certainty of perception itself. In other words, the novel is less concerned with exposing the particular atrocities of imperialism than with the way in which the boys’ adventure inspires the certainty of English Protestant superiority that propels its readers into the imperial arena.

As the most popular subgenre of romance at the fin de siècle, adventure fiction’s association with imperialism has been largely responsible for the criticism of romance itself as a conservative, falsely nostalgic, ideological tool. Margaret Bruzelius, writing chiefly of the adventure story, collapses it with romance in general, proclaiming: “Romance is a conservative genre, and it continues not only to reflect but to shape our ability to imagine new roles” (39). Linda Dryden’s criticism of the adventure story also uses similar language to the charges made against romance. Dryden describes adventure fiction as

“simple escapism: its appeal lay in the ability to transport its readers away from everyday concerns and to immerse them in uncomplicated exotic romance. It was pure escapism laced with patriotic overtones and a zeal for imperial adventures” (Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance 2). Critics like Dryden, whose careful analyses reveal fissures and complications in Conrad and adventure fiction itself, charge popular adventure fiction of the Revival with the same criticisms leveled at romance in the Battle of the Books.

Thus, at the fin-de-siècle when romance is perceived as a popular genre that reflects conservative imperial values, an adventure text emphasizing indefiniteness is subversive. 127

Ford and Conrad’s novel highlights such indefiniteness in the basic pattern of adventure romance itself, locating in this pattern a generative space for romance that might resist disenchantment. The novel’s emphasis on indefiniteness lends the romance a contemporary, rather than nostalgic, ethos. In his recent reconsideration of literary impressionism’s role in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, Adam Parkes argues against an ahistorical approach to the movement, because in this period

“indefiniteness was a necessary and perhaps inevitable component of impressionism’s cultural role” (11).

Such indefiniteness corresponds with the way in which romance is used as a strategy by the group of fin- de-siècle authors that the chapters in this project investigate.108 In contrast to Chesterton, however, for whom edges, boundaries, frames, and limits are important for the perception of romance and mystery,

Conrad and Ford highlight bewilderment and formlessness. Such bewilderment arises throughout the novel in the presence of impressionism and Catholicism as subversive discourses, which are striking in a sub-genre typically recognized for its clear hierarchical oppositions.

Because of the centrality of adventure fiction to his oeuvre, this chapter focuses on how Romance departs from Conrad’s other work and holds a unique place in his canon in particular. Conrad was already an established author who had published adventure romances, and Ford was just beginning his career.

While Ford wrote other romances, his engagement with the mode was more heavily medievalist, as the final chapter will show. Romance is unconventional for both authors in differing relations to the rest of their work, and yet, it bears early traces of their similar interest in perception. This chapter will argue that

Romance is an experiment for both authors to develop their emerging techniques, and it will seek to understand why the adventure romance, with its popular stereotypes, seemed the best literary space for developing impressionist strategies.

108 For instance, impressionism exposes the contingency of the process from phenomenology to epistemology, just like metaphysical detection exposes a similarly contingent process of ratiocination: both the impressionist moment and the mystery to be solved gesture to uncertainty. 128

Critical Reception

In its self-advertising title, Romance suggests parody. The boyish first-person narrator cast into adventures at sea alongside pirates and traders recalls Stevenson’s boy narrators in Treasure Island

(1882) and Kidnapped (1886). The plot of Romance revolves around John Kemp—an English country squire living in relative isolation in the south of England. The young, naive Kemp longs to leave his life on the farm, and his desire for adventure leads him to help a mysterious Spanish visitor, Carlos Riego, and Riego’s friend, Tomas Castro, escape from England. Kemp’s innocent mistakes propel him into an adventurous voyage with them to the Caribbean. After some time in Jamaica Kemp finds himself in Cuba in Carlos’ decaying gothic castle, the Casa Riego, where he is (ironically) re-named Don Juan. After

Carlos dies, Kemp is betrothed to the idealized, and Catholic, Seraphina Riego. He must then save her from an Irish villain and the Cuban pirates under his control, and eventually fight for his life in an

English courtroom by proving his own identity. Unlike Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, there are few representations of colonial, non-European characters, and almost all of the drama is between British

Protestants and Irish and Spanish Catholics. The lengthy novel contains all of the fighting, narrow escapes, suspense, and idealized love of the popular adventure romance, and is even based on the real historical transcripts of the last trial in England for piracy.109

Romance is not one of Conrad’s or Ford’s best novels, and its faults range from its copious length and the flatness of its action, to the treatment of women as one-dimensional objects in a male world; nonetheless, its experimental elements deserve more serious attention than they have received. Though

Romance initially met with some success, it has been forgotten in the shadow of both authors’ other work. The writing of the novel was a particularly painful process for Conrad, but it was released to very

109 In a letter to William Blackwood on 4 July 1901, Conrad notes that the premise of the novel had been “grubbed” out of the British Museum by Ford (Hueffer). He explains that Ford found the story of Aaron Smith in All the Year Round, vol. 3, 1870 called “Cuban Pirates: A True Narrative.” Conrad goes on to claim, “All the details of the political feeling in Jamaica (about 1821) are authentic. There was really a perfectly innocent young Englishman who was tried for piracy and escaped the gallows by the merest hair’s-breadth” (339). 129 positive reviews, and was a great success for him, as well as an early success for Ford.110 In a letter to

John Galsworthy on 1 November 1903, soon after Romance was published, Conrad tells his friend the reviews coming in are “really yum-yum!,” particularly the one in the Daily News that compared it to

Stevenson’s work (“Letter to John Galsworthy, 1 November 1903” 71). In a letter a few days later on 4

November to his agent, Pinker, Conrad exclaims, “Nothing I ever published had such enthusiastic reviews as Romance!!” (“Letter to J. B. Pinker, 4 November 1903” 73).

Despite its early commercial success, the novel has largely been judged according to its proximity to Stevenson’s work, which is also, in part, a reflection of critical feelings about popular adventure romance during the Revival. Linda Dryden recounts H. G. Wells’ warnings to Conrad about his collaboration with Ford and his disgust that Conrad would work on a romance in Stevenson’s vein, which was Ford’s original idea.111 Conrad’s own feelings about Stevenson appear somewhat ambivalent and are often related to the prolific speed with which the latter wrote. In one letter, for example, Conrad writes: “I am no sort of airy R. L. Stevenson who considered his art a prostitute and the artist as no better than one”

(“Letter to J. B. Pinker, 8 January 1902” 371). Though he was quick to dismiss comparisons, Conrad envied Stevenson’s success, as evidenced in the letter to Galsworthy in which he takes particular pride in the comparison between Romance and Stevenson’s work. A letter to Ford of September 1903 compares their six-year collaboration to Stevenson’s ability to have single-handedly produced his own masterpieces: Conrad suggests to Ford that they say the original text, Seraphina, was all Ford’s work, and that Conrad only joined the project three years later when it developed into the novel Romance (“Letter to

110 In his letters, Conrad’s struggle with Romance—or Seraphina, its earliest title—is apparent. A typical description of his own writing efforts is one to Galsworthy, on 19 September 1900: “I am drooping still. Working at Seraphina. Bosh! Horrors!” (295), or this letter to Edward Garnett of 12 November 1900: “A stone, I suppose will be my next gift to the impatient mankind” (303). Such melodramatic comments pepper his letters. Poor health, inadequate finances, and an inability to write plagued his collaboration with Ford. 111 In Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and the Making of Romance (1985) Raymond Brebach demonstrates at length the parallels between Romance and Stevenson’s boys’ adventures. See also Linda Dryden’s chapter on Romance in Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells (2015) where she discusses the contemporary comparisons made in literary reviews between Conrad and Stevenson, and Conrad’s contempt for these comparisons. Dryden argues that Conrad’s and Ford’s lack of success had much to do with attempting to write a romance in the same vein as Stevenson. (see Chapter Two, especially pp. 43-45). 130

Ford Madox Ford, September 1903” 59-60). His consciousness of the timeline here reveals Conrad’s contradictory feelings about the comparison to Treasure Island, as well as his sense that Romance is written in the vein of the popular adventure novel churned out rapidly for mass-market consumption.

The few critics who have taken the time to wade through Romance see limited merit in the text.112

Even Raymond Brebach, the only critic to focus a monograph on Romance and offer a balanced, thoughtful assessment, concludes that despite the greater self-consciousness granted to Kemp and some of its more intellectual content, the novel still retains the generic conventions of a popular adventure romance (14). Linda Dryden’s summary reflects the common charges against the novel, and the perceived reasons for its failure: “it never gained the power of Heart of Darkness because it lacked the subversive elements, the political thrust of that novella, and its overarching artistic challenge to the romance genre” (60). Andrea White has argued that in the 1890s Conrad’s “changing relationship” to imperialism “freed him effectively, if not entirely consciously, to subvert the usual celebration of the white man in the tropics” (134). Despite such a conclusion, White saves her one paragraph discussion of

Romance for the Coda of her book, where she is dismissive of Conrad’s novel: “That it was primarily

Ford’s story, that it was written in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner and frequently discounted by

Conrad notwithstanding, its existence be-speaks some ambivalence on Conrad’s part, a nostalgia for a heroic past, and a regret that such adventure is over” (199). In each of these assessments, the reason for the novel’s obscurity and relative failure is its relation to the popular adventure novel, as if an uncritical embrace of the genre can only be a sign of defect.

112 See, for instance, David Thorburn, Conrad’s Romanticism (1974). Thorburn, who writes about the novel more than many other critics, spends the vast majority of his chapter on Romance discussing Conrad’s motivations for writing and the extent of his part in the collaboration; comparing the novel to a Stevensonian adventure romance; and comparing the novel to Conrad’s other, more successful works. Thorburn treats the novel as though it is only useful for detecting the germ of Conrad’s genius and his major themes, rather than as something valuable on its own. He takes for granted, like other critics, that it is a failure. Most notably, he spends very little time in actual close reading of this novel. See also Frederick Karl, A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad: “But Romance, despite its elaborate trappings is only a simple adventure story, and all the high-minded theories applied to its development do not disguise this fact. The true test of their theories does not come in the collaborations, but in Conrad’s individual works” (Karl 46). 131

With a more generous focus, Ralph Parfect writes briefly about the staging of imperial identity in

Romance, noting that the novel presents a challenge to the valorization of John Kemp’s English heroics.

Yet where Parfect sees the deconstruction of English imperialism, his reading also insists on the disenchantment of romance in the novel.113 Katherine Baxter argues from a different angle, maintaining:

“If the novel comes to reaffirm the status quo of its social and political context through the reintegration of apparent difference, it also reaffirms its own status as romance fiction” (63). She sees its conservative impulse affirming “an anglicized British colonialism,” an “ideal imperial self-image,” and obscuring ideological conflict (57-58). Where Parfect sees the novel as a challenge to British imperialism but not, ultimately, a romance, Baxter sees the novel as legitimizing British imperialism, and thus, ultimately, a conservative romance. Though Baxter reads much of Conrad’s other work as more critical of imperialism, her remarks on Romance reflect the commonplace that adventure fiction is a conservative genre of romance, and that a happy ending is ultimately an affirmation of the political status quo.114 Yet

Romance is unique precisely because the happy ending and use of romance elements are combined with critique and new “raw materials” in order to re-enchant romance rather than promote its disillusion. To understand the novel as a departure from the norm in Conrad’s canon in particular, and to appreciate the novel’s experimental techniques, both Conrad’s use of romance, and the conventions of the boys’ adventure must be reconsidered.

113 Parfect argues, “In line with this self-deconstructing tendency within the novel’s discourses of nationhood, the overriding quality that it in fact pins to its English hero is the anti-romantic quality of disillusionment” (42). Parfect is correct to point to Kemp’s continuous disappointment, but Kemp’s romantic viewpoint saves him from the cold English rationalism that drives the imperial project. 114 Baxter’s perceptive study Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance (2010) provides a nuanced reassessment of romance in Conrad’s canon. Baxter classes Conrad’s works variously into philosophical and anti-philosophical romances based on how each engages with and exposes certain ideologies. She also includes a rare, extended discussion of Romance. Ultimately, however, Baxter focuses on the conservative resolution to the novel and reads it as anti-philosophical romance. Though she acknowledges the self-consciousness of romance in the text, she considers its affirmation of romance as a capitulation to nationalist and domestic ideologies, rather than, as this project does, a breakdown of these in the service of modern re-enchantment. 132

Adventure Romance: Conrad’s Conflicting Canon

Romance has been a fraught issue for Conrad’s critics, because his work wavers between disillusionment and the happy endings of texts like Romance and his later novel Chance (1913). F. R.

Leavis famously complained about romance in the last half of Lord Jim, and Thomas Moser’s

“achievement and decline” thesis charts Conrad’s affirmation of romance as evidence of his decline.115

Such seminal critiques have shaped the discussion of Conrad’s romance in terms of decay—of either his artistry, or of the mode itself. Dryden argues, “what we find in his [Conrad’s] stories is that the promise of romantic adventure . . . is reduced to an enervating pessimism” (Joseph Conrad and the Imperial

Romance 9). Bruzelius takes a similar approach, arguing that for Conrad the genre of romance was a prison, and that his romances reflect “decay and dejection,” because his “endings are suffused with a sense of a dying fall” (182). As previously mentioned, Conrad’s own words convey this ethos in a well- known letter to his agent referring to The Rescue (1920) as “the swan song” of romance: a remark that exposes his feeling he was working with a moribund genre (“Letter to J. B. Pinker, 15 February 1919”

362).116

In accordance with this sense that he was writing romance’s “swan song,” much of Conrad’s romance follows a narrative of fin-de-siècle disenchantment when space for romance appeared to be eroding. As the critical narrative goes, when there was no more room for mystery and romance in the disenchanted space of England, tales of imperial adventure mined colonial space for enchantment. In

Haggard’s She (1886), for example, Horace Holly leaves the confines of Cambridge for Africa, exalting in the change: “Gone are the quiet college rooms, gone the wind-swayed English elms and cawing rooks,

115 Leavis faults the turn to romance in Lord Jim as a contrivance that fails to “enrich the central interest” (190); Moser’s book is a diachronic examination of Conrad’s work that also views traces of romance as signs of his decline. 116 In a letter to his agent, J. B. Pinker, on 15 February 1919 Conrad writes: “I think sincerely that ‘Rescue’ has a particular quality. Novels of adventure will, I suppose, be always written; but it may well be that ‘Rescue’ in its concentrated colouring and tone will remain the swan song of Romance as a form of literary art” (362). Conrad makes these remarks in the context of his expectation that he may be the recipient of the Nobel Prize in the year that The Rescue is published, suggesting that by then he desired his legacy to be characterized by romance, or at least its decline. 133 and the familiar volumes on the shelves, and in their place there rises a vision of the great calm ocean gleaming in shaded silver lights beneath the beams of the full African moon . . . a faint booming sound rolls across the water to us from the distant land” (67). At the pinnacle of England’s imperial success, stories of young Britons traveling across the sea to the outer reaches of the Empire provided an imaginative space in which Holly’s same Cambridge rationality was simultaneously challenged and asserted. Paradoxically, this desire for romance reduces possibilities for the mode: imperial space is mapped and rationalized, which leaves even less imaginative space for romance. John McClure, drawing on Jameson, summarizes the perceived threat to romance in the wake of imperially rationalized space, noting that romance itself replaces the human victims of imperialism: “At this moment, when it became impossible to ignore the prospect of global modernization, the eradication of the last elsewhere, the writers of imperial romance began to become uneasy . . . In these little narratives, imperialism suddenly becomes the enemy of romance” (McClure 11). Joseph Conrad’s adventure tales famously register this disenchanting shift for romance, while also critiquing imperialism itself.

The familiar image of Conrad’s Marlow staring at the colourful map in Heart of Darkness captures precisely this crisis, both for imperialism and for romance itself. As Marlow reminisces about his childhood passion for maps, he remembers that during his boyhood the map of Africa “had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over” (73). Marlow remembers his adventure daydreams as a young boy, explicitly linking his youthful dreams of adventure to the imperial project. In Heart of Darkness the British readership is offered not a “delightful mystery,” but a startling critique, not only of the imperial project but of the boys’ adventure itself. Likewise, in the later Lord Jim, the young Jim’s illusions are inspired by the adventure romances he read as a boy.117

Romance breaks with this pattern and fails to fit into the common critical narrative of Conrad and

117 The narrator explains Jim’s adventurous imagination: “He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book” (Lord Jim 40). 134 imperial romance. The novel deserves reconsideration, because it has been read through the particular lens of Conrad’s conflicting feelings about romance, and has often been seen as evidence of Conrad’s slip into nostalgia. On the contrary, Romance provided Conrad and Ford with the space to critique conservative imperial values, while also re-routing the ideologies of the genre.

Adventure’s Content: Masculine Codes of the Boys’ Book

Writing about Conrad’s explicitly critical romances, Linda Dryden refers to the objects of his criticism as “The codes and ideals that govern behavior in the imperial romance, the very notion of the

English gentleman” (Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance 8). As aforementioned, the boys’ books of adventure fiction were marketed as gifts that would shape the next generation of English men. Writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1886 George Salmon discusses the trends in the publishers’ Christmas lists for boys’ gift books in an article representative of the discourse surrounding such fiction. In “What Boys

Read” he accounts for the increase in boys’ adventure novels at the end of the century, focusing on the reasons for the genre’s popularity and its moral merits. Salmon writes that the “flood of juvenile literature” released in time for Christmas is on a scale unseen for five or six decades. He explains:

It would seem as though, with the comparative cessation of exploits by land and sea—in other

words, with the conclusion of the exciting struggles between France and England, and the settling

down of colonial societies to enjoy the fruits of their enterprise and courage in distant and hostile

lands—Englishmen sought to gratify mentally a passion for romance, which it was yearly

becoming more difficult to gratify physically. As life has grown more prosaic, the records of

stirring deeds have acquired enhanced charm. The modern youth compensates himself for the

absence of the adventures and general excitement which characterised the times of Drake or 135

Nelson, Clive or Wellington, by devouring the stories of ‘the brave days of old’ poured forth

annually from the printing-press. (248)

Salmon’s explanation for the explosion of adventure novels in the Christmas lists bears out the critical narrative about romance: the lack of stimulus on English soil and even in the rationalized spaces of the empire leaves adventure novels as the last frontier for romance when life has grown too “prosaic.”

Salmon’s nouns and adjectives, though, reveal that what he really mourns is “struggle,” “courage,”

“passion,” physicality, and bravery—all characteristics that the adventure novel promotes as qualities desirable for the young, Protestant, British male. Salmon’s essay both captures these characteristics and suggests that adventure fiction should foster them.

The rest of his essay unabashedly upholds these characteristics as the virtues required to shape the young male reader. Salmon sees authors such as G. A. Henty, R. M. Ballantyne, W. H. G. Kingston,

Mayne Reid, and Jules Verne as influencing “the national character and culture.” He insists: “Mind, equally with body, will develop according to what it feeds on; and just as the strength or weakness of a man’s muscle depends upon whether he leads a healthy or a vicious life, so will the strength or weakness of his moral sense largely depend upon whether he reads in his youth that which is pure or that which is foul” (Salmon 248). The rhetoric here conflates health and a muscular masculinity with adventure fiction, which is reminiscent of the values celebrated by proponents of romance in the Battle of the Books.

Salmon is also very clear that these books are meant to “feed” or shape the mind, lending such romance an explicitly didactic purpose. Salmon makes it plain that the influential nature of the boys’ adventure book means that writers of this genre should have a “mission”: “By a mission I would imply that a writer should never lose the consciousness that the sentiments he expresses and the end he proposes will assist in the mental development—as the facts recorded may constitute the chief information—of the sons and daughters of England” (249). This “mission,” for example, might be found in G. A. Henty’s Facing 136

Death; or, the Hero of the Vaughan Pit in which Salmon explains that the hero “is a capital study of a boy courageous, simple, God-fearing, and dutiful, working hard and honestly to lift himself above the lowly position in which he has been born” (Salmon 254). As such praise suggests, Salmon’s admiration for courage, duty, work, and honour are the values upheld by the adventure novel, and they are values that should be consciously transmitted. Boys’ books, as evidenced by articles about their worth and their placement on gift lists, were meant for both implicit and explicit didactic instruction.

Critical scholarship on imperial adventure fiction reveals an underlying constellation of ideologies in the imperial adventure novel that extend from these qualities explicitly celebrated by Salmon. Like

Dryden, Joseph Kestner calls these qualities “codes of masculinity,” which adventure literature

“imprints” (1) on its readers. Similarly, White argues that the genre of adventure fiction both “reflected and constructed a social reality” and formed “the energizing myth of English imperialism” (6). Bruzelius also summarizes the adventure story as containing “obvious elements of extremely conservative fantasy, all of which are put in the service of the discovery of the hero’s adult masculinity” (23). Boys’ adventure books were not only moral entertainment, but also training in masculinity and masculine pursuits.

Stevenson’s ironic narrator in “The Beach of Falesá” provides a quintessential example: “You tell them who I am. I’m a white man, and a British subject, and no end of a big chief at home; and I’ve come here to do them good, and bring them civilization,” he explicitly links his white, male, British identity to his

“civilizing” mission (Stevenson, “The Beach of Falesá” 206). The narrator’s conflation of masculinity with the civilizing mission accords with the sort of “mission” Salmon looks for in the boys’ book. Such literary training in masculinity was not meant to shape minds and attitudes alone, but also to shape action 137 on the imperial stage. The “codes” of the imperial adventure novel were meant to create the next generation of British, Protestant males who would prove their mettle in the field of Empire.118

Often, scholars look to the ironic treatment, rearrangement, or failure of the significant elements of an adventure story in measuring how deeply a work interrogates the values of the genre. Because

Romance follows conventional plot lines and hierarchical divisions of imperial space, the novel appears to reinforce the status quo. Indeed, Conrad and Ford begin by exploiting tropes of adventure romance through the harrowing episodes and exotic cast of colonial characters (one of them even has a hook for a hand), which suggests the novel’s affirmation of the imperial imagination. The hero is a young English boy, while the arch villain is Irish and the rest of the villains are Caribbean pirates. Seraphina is Catholic and lives in a crumbling gothic castle. In the end, Kemp is saved by English justice, and returns to

England with his bride. On the surface, these elements are highly conventional; however, they are not entirely uncontested. The Irish villain evokes some sympathy; the British colonial rulers hang pirates unshriven by a priest; and Catholicism repeatedly undermines Protestant rationality, challenging the colonial rule contemporary with the novel and diminishing the historical distance of the setting. Focusing on the affirmation or subversion of adventure conventions alone, however, leads at best, to an ambivalent reading. A fuller picture of the novel’s formal strategy suggests it is more innovative.

In the context of this project, Romance can be read in a way that aligns it with each of the other

“romances of modern enchantment”—as deconstructive of conservative ideologies, and yet insistent on romance’s power as a narrative space for examining modern life. Conrad and Ford each wrote some of the most complex modernist novels of the early-twentieth century, and they themselves insisted they were not ashamed of their collaboration. In an appendix to his volume of literary criticism, The March of

Literature (1938), Ford lists authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that will give readers “a

118 As will be discussed in the next chapter, this would also become apparent in the collision between the masculine coding inherited from such romances and the stark realities of battle when the same generation entered the Great War in 1914. 138 real knowledge of the literature of these centuries” and are “indispensable to read in order to grasp the main literary currents of this era” (777). His entries for Conrad are Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Romance. It is hardly surprising that Ford would include one of his own books on the list, but listing Romance thirty- five years later, rather than one of his other collaborations with Conrad, reveals his own feeling that the novel “grasp[ed] the main literary currents of this era.” For Ford, one of these currents was surely literary impressionism. Contrary to its critical heritage, Romance might be described as a work of literary impressionism, a style that Max Saunders describes as setting “its face against value-judgments.”

Impressionism, explains Saunders, “is based on the belief that the last thing writers should do, if they have any aspirations to be artists, is overtly to disseminate values by explicitly judging their characters or the actions of their characters” (“Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical” 299). As didactic books mostly marketed at boys, of course, the popular fin-de-siècle adventure romance was full of overtly disseminated values and explicit judgments. Impressionism and imperial adventure seem completely antithetical. However, while their ethos is certainly contrary, I would suggest that literary impressionism and adventure fiction share a common organizing principle, which Ford and Conrad exploit in this “romance of modern enchantment.”

Adventure’s Pattern: “Quickly Changing Scenes” and the Form of Experiencing

As Caroline Levine maintains, the organizing principles of a work are relevant to how a text creates meaning. While imperial masculine codes and their cluster of associations have received significant scholarly attention, these are rarely discussed in conjunction with the formal organization of the adventure novel. The centrality of the male hero; his voyage into exotic, unknown territory; the imperial dangers he faces; flat villains and colonized women; triumph over an enemy; the return to England— these conventions of the boys’ adventure organize the world according to stark, hierarchical binaries and 139 enclosures of space often marked off from one another by oceans. Romance stages a collision between these hierarchical binaries of adventure fiction through inversion, producing a bewildering effect on the first-person narrator who relays his story as he experienced it in his youth. Such bewilderment stems from the inability to form impressions into preconceptions that follow imperial norms. The novel exposes a conflict between form and formlessness at the heart of adventure fiction that might be read as a critique of imperial certainty; this contest suggests that the enchanting possibilities for adventure romance lie in its formlessness.

When Salmon praises the boys’ adventure, he locates its value, not just in its didacticism, but also in its form: “Quickly changing scenes of the most stirring character are what boys desire” (251). Such stirring, quickly changing scenes emphasize sensory experience not development. A decade after the publication of Romance, French critic Jacques Rivière and German sociologist Georg Simmel each wrote essays appraising the “quickly changing scenes” of adventure in relation to modern life.119 Each essay treats the adventure as the essence of life, as a form of pure experience. Rivière’s essay “The Adventure

Novel” (1913) reads like a manifesto for the French novel of the future, insisting that the Symbolism of the nineteenth century is dead, and that the spirit of the age has undergone a change. Readers of the last century who were tired, weak, slender, precarious, and “shut themselves up with their minds,” have been replaced by contemporary readers who “know more violent and joyful pleasures, all of which lie in the pleasure of living” (Rivière 94). This new readership, more than anything, desires action and clarity.

Rather than being forced to guess at hints: “The desire that is beginning to beset us will soon be as strong in us as was the desire in the last century to see things involved and confused . . . our eyes naturally seek limits, angles, connections . . . We want to fasten our gazes upon nothing but clear, lively, clean, exact things, pure and decisive, each of which looks like itself” (104). Like Chesterton, Rivière desires limits,

119 See also, Kestner’s introduction in Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction (2010) for a broad overview of writers on adventure fiction at the fin de siècle in which he includes Salmon, Rivière and Simmel. While he also sees a shared emphasis on adventure as movement, Kestner does not draw connections between adventure fiction, impressionism, and romance. 140 angles, and shape, which he finds in adventure fiction because it is episodic. It is a genre of forward movement in which each part is self-contained:

the events recounted, the sentiments described overflow those of the preceding chapter . . . in no

way can they be reduced to the preceding events and feelings or result from them . . . The adventure

novel is a novel that advances through constantly new events. Instead of using the initial data with

wise economy, instead of making it last, the author spends all his wealth each time . . . he borrows

everything from the future. (115-16)120

Though he desires the contained shape of the episode, Rivière’s description emphasizes a constant flow of events that are unshaped by reason and experience, and do not rely on surrounding episodes for their significance. When he argues that adventure is the “form of the work,” he looks beyond the conventional content of adventure fiction and argues that all that is required for the material for adventure is that it

“reflects our state of newness before the world” and “the emotion of awaiting something, of not yet knowing everything” (116-17; 119). Rivière’s emphasis on the patterning of adventure fiction retains a contradiction: he sees solid shape and precision in the self-contained episode, and yet highlights a romantic quality of overall uncertainty in “not yet knowing everything.”

In the same period just before the First World War, Georg Simmel contemplates the ethos of adventure in his essay entitled “The Adventure” (1911). Rather than part of the constant flow of life,

Simmel identifies the central feature of adventure as a “dropping out of the continuity of life.” Like

Rivière, though, he offers a self-contained model of the adventure in which each experience has its own beginning and end. He writes that the adventure “is like an island in life which determines its beginning and end according to its own formative powers and not—like the part of a continent—also according to

120 In contrast to Chesterton, however, he sees detective fiction as the antithesis of the novel full of life and energy, because the ending is given away from the beginning, so that hope and the freedom of not knowing where the narrative is going are taken away. Detection inspires only curiosity, not arousal (Rivière 122). 141 those of adjacent territories. This factor of decisive boundedness . . . is organic . . . its temporal form, its radical being-ended, is the precise expression of its inner sense” (par. 4). Like Rivière, Simmel imagines adventure in terms of shape and form, emphasizing the limits and boundaries of each episode. Moments of adventure are cut off from each other as islands, none explaining the other, which suggests a radical challenge to a linear, rational model of imperial Bildung in which the meaning of an adventure is bestowed by a progressive narrative concluding with the triumphant return of the hero to England.

Against cohesive narrative, Simmel privileges the episodic and sees the adventure as an expression of youth, immediacy, and the romantic spirit, in opposition to age and its associations with objectivity and the historical mood: “This is what connects youth and adventure. What is called the subjectivity of youth is just this: The material of life in its substantive significance is not as important to youth as is the process, which carries it, life itself. Old age is ‘objective’; it shapes a new structure out of the substance left behind” (par. 24). What both Rivière and Simmel identify as a modern spirit of adventure is an affordance of its form: an emphasis on the process and on the inexplicable episodes of modern experience. In other words, the non-teleological form of adventure is contrary to the sort of didactic

“mission” Salmon envisions for the boys’ adventure.

In its formulation as isolated episode, the adventure is a bounded state separate from the regular pattern of life. At the same time, it is a bounded state that emphasizes phenomenological experience before consciousness and culture shape the processing of the event. This episodic form of adventure fiction allows Conrad and Ford to emphasize pre-conscious experience through techniques of literary impressionism. In turn, the focus on pre-conscious experience critiques the conventions of fin-de-siècle adventure fiction that shape the meaning of episodic experience through imperial attitudes. As will be shown, in Romance, the play of light, haze, obscurity, and confusion are the chief features of impressionist technique, and where these features accompany each new episode of Kemp’s adventure, 142 they add to his uncertainty as romance hero. Hierarchies and oppositions such as good and evil,

Protestant and Catholic, and imperial centre and colonial periphery lose their clarity, and in each new adventure, meaningful connections are omitted, leaving the reader equally confused. The power of stark binaries in adventure fiction to impose order on Kemp’s narrative is thus undermined by the episodic element of adventure itself.

Literary Impressionism

Although Rivière sees impressionism as an art form of the past, his description of adventure’s immediacy of experience resembles definitions of literary impressionism.121 He explains, “Every thought—whether it is an idea or an image—passes from energy to action. It first appears in a rudimentary and almost shapeless form; its elements are entangled in one another; now there is only one where there will be several later . . .” (97). This description of experience as a “shapeless form” describes the phenomenological experience of the sense impression before it is shaped and processed by the mind.

In Rivière’s conceptualization, the immediacy of the adventure episode captures the immediacy (and bewilderment) of sensory perception.

For emerging modernism, the moment of perception was a key area of interest, and, along with other canonical authors like Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Conrad and Ford sought formal possibilities for depicting the impressionist moment. Impressionism in the visual arts was already waning by the turn of the century making way for the famous post-impressionist exhibition in 1910; however,

Ford, who wrote extensively on literary impressionism, was defining and using the term to describe works we now characterize as modernist (Saunders, “Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the

121 In actual fact, Rivière contrasts what he wants for the new novel with Impressionism in the visual arts of the nineteenth century: “we are out of patience with the so-called formlessness of reality” (105-06). He uses impressionist art as an example of this formlessness. His emphasis on experience that is “not yet” known, however, recalls the ethos of literary impressionism. He contradicts himself by losing patience with formlessness, and yet emphasizing it when describing the constant flow of shapeless thoughts. 143

Ethical” 301). In his essay “On Impressionism” (1913) Ford explains that the “maxims” he holds for the practice of literary impressionism were developed in conversation with Conrad, suggesting that they had indeed been developed during the writing of Romance (38-39).

In Ford’s influential definition, a work of literary impressionism “is the record of the impression of a moment; it is not a sort of rounded, annotated record of a set of circumstances—it is the record of the recollection in your mind of a set of circumstances . . . It might even be the impression of the moment— but it is the impression, not the corrected chronicle” (“On Impressionism” 41). Ford’s uncorrected chronicle resonates with what Cedric Watts has called “delayed decoding” in Conrad’s work, which emphasizes the initial impression by delaying or even omitting explanation of phenomena: “the writer confronts us with an effect while delaying or withholding knowledge of its cause; and the eventual explanation may not entirely erase the strong initial impression of the event’s strangeness” (115). Akin to

Watts’ “delayed decoding,” John Peters differentiates between “primitive perception” and “civilized perception” in Conrad. According to Peters, “Primitive perception represents an initial sense impression before the observer organizes it into a meaning that accords with past experience, while civilized perception represents the impression after the observer organizes the initial experience and ascribes meaning to it” (37). Civilized perception, then, is affected by culture, personality, and material circumstance, which rob it of its immediacy and shape it toward particular ends. Peters explains, “the problem with mediating these initial sensory impressions is that civilized perception obscures primitive perception and implies that a particular meaning for the flow is inherent, whereas primitive perception demonstrates that such a meaning is not inherent but constructed” (42).122 In Peters’ distinction, civilized perception constructs meaning into a flow of relations, whereas primitive perception does not. Primitive

122 Peters uses the terms civilized and primitive in a way similar to how the Battle of the Books used the terms to describe realism and romance in the late-nineteenth century. The defenders of romance celebrate primitivism as well as childhood, which are the qualities supposedly found in boys’ books (and their readers). Yet primitivism might be wrested from its negative associations in the connection between romance and impressionism if it comes to mean a mode of perception before cultural shaping—a mode of perception that is thus previous to the masculine coding scholars identify in the boys’ adventure. 144 perception, then, accords with Rivière and Simmel’s conceptualization of the adventure that fails to construct a clear relationship between scenes, emphasizing the action of the individual episode, instead of its place in an overarching plot and theme.

Some of the specific techniques of literary impressionism include achronolgy, in medias res, central consciousness, limited point of view, and multiple narrators, as well as limited narration, verbal collage, subversive laughter, open plot and characterization, cognitive dissonance, and turbulence.123 These definitions and techniques characterize impressionism as a strategy that emphasizes phenomenological processes; as such, impressionism might also be seen as a strategy of realism in its attempt to mimic the raw workings of the mind, much like stream of consciousness.124 By contrast, Conrad uses impressionism in his romances to highlight an element of uncertainty, which he aligns with mystery. In particular, his narrators’ and readers’ inability to fully comprehend situations can, at times, be viewed as enchanting rather than threatening: the struggle for knowledge opens narrators (and readers) to new and surprising possibilities.

In the “Author’s Note” to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ Conrad discusses the insights of the impression, revealing its centrality to the whole of his work:

But the artist . . . speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding

our lives . . . Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses;

and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or

collective, is not amenable to persuasion . . . My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power

123 See John Peters, 22 and Todd Bender, 14. Bender describes “verbal collage” as the process of fragmenting and defamiliarizing pieces of conversation, scenes, objects by taking them out of context, but then recombined and juxtaposed to create a new significance (8). 124 Literary impressionism’s imperative is to record all of the sensory impressions of a moment, trying to capture every part of the sensory experience. Parkes compares it to a photographic impulse in Conrad’s fiction that threatens a reduction of the world into black and white: “It is writing as a form of photography . . . literary impressionism, in Conrad’s hands, often threatens to fine itself down to such a minimalist position . . . it represents one way of combating the perpetual tendency toward the vagueness and fuzziness for which impressionism has often been criticized: to reduce the world to black and white is to make it appear as clear and concrete as it is possible for the printed word to do” (16). 145

of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—

and no more, and it is everything. (129-30)

Conrad’s words here of 1897 were published originally as an Afterword in the serial version of The

Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ to describe his overall project as an author, and these statements have become part of the critical heritage tracing literary impressionism in Conrad’s oeuvre.125 In his Note, Conrad links wonder and mystery—sites of romance and enchantment—to the impression. Though Conrad’s work is central to studies of literary impressionism, the relation between impressionism and romance has been largely overlooked, despite the prevalence of both modes in his canon. Conrad’s romances are often bleak and disillusioned, but his persistent effort to “make you see” suggests his desire for an alternative mode of vision. Romance, like impressionism, elicits wonder and mystery, through “half-knowledge” and an emphasis on the sensual. Literary impressionism offers Conrad a way to capture the uncertainty of perception before culture, personality, and circumstance crowd in to arrange impressions.

Fredric Jameson does not explicitly link romance and impressionism but he does see Conrad’s impressionism as a distinctive aspect of his aesthetic strategy, as another non-instrumental impulse developed in response to rationalization. Jameson refers to literary impressionism as one of the “archaic functions of the psyche” in its privileging of senses like sight over the “‘rational,’ quantifying functions of the mind” (228-9).126 For Jameson, the primacy of perception is an end in itself (230), a way to resist the dominance of capitalist calculation. Ford also makes political claims about impressionism. In A

Personal Remembrance, Ford writes about how he and Conrad were characterized as impressionists early on, and that impressionism was then politically radical: “We accepted without much protest the stigma

125 For an early example of this critical heritage and an overview of the significance of these words, see Ian Watt, “Conrad's Preface to ‘the Nigger of the Narcissus'” (1974). 126 In The Political Unconscious Jameson argues “both positivism as ideological production and impressionism as aesthetic production are first to be understood in terms of the concrete situation to which they are both responses: that of rationalization and reification in late nineteenth-century capitalism” (225). He goes on to explain further: “The very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in which science deals with ideal money economy dominated by considerations of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like” (229). 146

‘Impressionists’ that was thrown at us. In those days Impressionists were still considered to be bad people: Atheists, Reds, wearing red ties with which to frighten householders” (194). Ford here makes a telling link: early impressionism was viewed as disruptive to social and cultural values—including the religious and imperial ones critiqued in Romance.

The radical political reputation of impressionism is supported by Adam Parkes’ argument that impressionism at the turn of the century does engage with social and political concerns, and shapes the way the nineteenth century could be imagined (19).127 Parkes pays particular attention to the relationship between certain historical forces and aesthetics in the period, arguing, for instance, that Conrad uses impressionism in The Secret Agent as a language for the bewildering effects of the dynamite explosions in fin-de-siècle terrorist threats. In Romance, impressionist techniques are employed as both an anti- rational aesthetic of the kind noted by Jameson, and as political and cultural critique. The context of the popular adventure novel afforded Conrad and Ford a specific arena in which literary impressionism might intervene with imperial politics and the disenchantment of romance, because the uncertainty of impressions upsets the certainties of the young male adventurer. It is this tension between capturing the totality of impressions in a moment and the totalizing impulse of rational explanation that Conrad and

Ford exploit in the adventure romance—a genre that presents the world in clear-cut hierarchies, and yet attempts to capture the pure experience of youth in which such distinctions have not yet been calcified.

An Impressionist Chronicle of Youth

As a record of uncorrected experience, Romance stages a collision between the Bildung narrative and the adventure tale. The Bildungsroman’s linear narrative of development clashes with the near

127 See Parkes, A Sense of Shock (2015), in particular Chapter Four, “‘Shocks and Surprises’: Conrad, Terrorism, and Languages of Sensation” for a discussion that historicizes Conrad’s impressionism as a language for terrorism. 147 stagnancy of the character in the episodic adventure.128 The older John Kemp recalls his ordeals on the verge of maturity, and his narrative follows the pattern of departure and return to England typical of the imperial Bildung. John Kemp evokes both Jim Hawkins and even Jane Eyre—the archetypal narrators of the adventure tale and the Bildungsroman. However, the older Kemp relates his story without the

“objective” corrections and judgments that, for instance, the older Jim Hawkins does. Recounting his enchantment at finally being on board the Hispaniola, Jim Hawkins interrupts, “But before we came the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had happened which require first to be known” (Stevenson,

Treasure Island 52-53). Hawkins repeatedly emphasizes the rational linearity of his romance, attempting to “write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island” (3). Indeed, his tale, and even first impressions of the first pirate (Bill) are told linearly, whereas Kemp’s narrative begins in medias res.

The shape of John Kemp’s narrative accords with Ford’s insistence that impressionism “is the record of the impression of a moment.” In contrast to Hawkins’ corrected chronicle, Kemp’s desire to establish himself as romantic hero is conveyed in a classic Conradian moment of “delayed decoding”: when describing a fight with a pirate, he mistakes mere water from a burst hose for the gore of blood and does not correct himself until after having described the full episode as he experienced it (226-27). His mistake parallels Marlow’s confusion over the impaled heads at Kurtz’ outpost in Heart of Darkness

(127). Kemp’s relation of pure impression without correction contrasts not only with Jim Hawkins’ retelling of youth, but also with Jane Eyre’s, whose youthful shocking experiences are often supplied with particular meaning through explanation and connections. For instance, when the adult Jane narrates her fearful shock in the red room, she supplies the meaning her childhood brain could not: “I can now

128 As White argues, the adventure hero “affects and even changes those he encounters, but remains stolidly unaffected by his experiences himself” (23). Like White, Bradley Deane sees little development in the protagonist of the adventure novel. In Masculinity and the New Imperialism (2014) Deane asserts, “As the developmental narrative of the Bildungsroman was displaced by the episodic adventure tale, the decisive question of successful manliness was no longer moral growth but conduct in a limitless series of competitive trials” (101). 148 conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern, carried by some one across the lawn; but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world” (74).

In this key scene, Jane makes sense of her youthful impressions, and in particular, explains the “streak of light” through her now more enlightened perception.

In contrast to Jane’s mature retelling, Kemp explains a frightening memory of sudden light uninflected by his later knowledge: alone on a hill waiting for a signal to save his friends, he remembers,

“Against the glimmer of dead light I thought I caught the outlines of a man’s hat down the tossing lines of the bracken” (11). Kemp’s vision leads him to an incorrect assumption here, which casts him into his first dangerous episode; however, he never admits to making a mistake, and it is only through the chain of events and a later comment by another character referring to Kemp “blundering [his] clumsy nose in”

(17) that the audience learns the truth. Kemp’s bewildering impressions draw attention to how his identity and preconceptions construct meaning. In particular, the play of light and shadow become symbols of

Kemp’s impressionist perception that also links his bewilderment to romance.

Impressionist Bewilderment: Candlelit Shadows and Uncertain Sight

On the afternoon that Kemp’s adventures begin, he describes himself “upstairs, looking at the reflection of myself in the tall glass, wondering miserably why I seemed to be such an oaf” (8). His moment in the mirror again recalls the familiar trope of the Bildungsroman in which the self-realization of the protagonist shifts. In a foil to this scene when he is in the colonial space of Spanish Cuba, Kemp begins to inhabit his new identity: “The strangeness and tremendousness of what was happening came over me very strongly . . . The night had come already, and I was putting on some of Carlos’ clothes by the many flames of candles burning in a tall bronze candelabrum, whose three legs figured the paws of a 149 lion” (111). The flickering candlelight provides a backdrop while he dons Carlos’ clothes—the clothes of a Catholic pirate and colonial Other. Candlelight accompanies this symbolic shift in his selfhood. A sense of bewilderment is created through the ubiquity of flickering candlelight and confused images that also suggest the “half-knowledge” of romance. Where glaring sunlight suggests full illumination and even clarity, the shadows cast by candlelight hint at an uncertainty that challenges the dulled sight of Kemp’s practical, rational, English morality. The recurrence of shadowy candlelight in Romance not only kindles a gothic mood but is also a metaphor for the fleeting impression or isolated episode that resists rationalization.

Walter Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, one of the defining texts for literary impressionism, also suggests a connection between impression and flickering light:

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a

sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when

reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force

seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour,

odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world,

not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable,

flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it

contracts still further; the whole scope of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the

individual mind. (118-19)

Pater himself uses an implicit candle metaphor for the impression, describing it as “unstable, flickering” and with a burning that is extinguished upon conscious reflection. Likewise, in its persistent use of candlelight, Romance conveys only flashes of understanding rather than full illumination or 150 enlightenment. As we have seen in his delayed perception, Kemp’s frequently obscured sight suggests a subjective vision that is often inadequate.

The opening scene uses Kemp’s memory impressions to introduce the common motif of contrast in the novel—light and dark—a contrast that initially signals Kemp’s division of the world into good and evil. This distinction, though, becomes increasingly confused when light fails to provide clarity and certainty. The text opens with a memory completely void of context or meaning until later, using in medias res as well as achronology to decontextualize Kemp’s experience and emphasize the momentary experience over the linear narrative. Reflecting on the moment he found himself in a darkened storeroom in Jamaica where his adventures really began, he notes that the shopkeeper’s spectacles retain a “glassy double sheen” (3) obscuring the eyes behind the glasses, and suggesting myopic vision; Seraphina’s glance is inscrutable to Kemp (4); her father’s sight is “not very good”; the light behind Seraphina loses itself in the shadows of her hair and dress; the white of her flower disappears into the darkness of her hair; and perhaps most importantly, the sunlight of Jamaica is described as “blinding” (4). He relates only his sense impressions of smell, colour, and sound, omitting memories of his emotions and emphasizing a negative epistemology rather than a retrospective certainty. Moreover, his emphasis on sight, sightlessness, spectacles, and diffused light anticipates Virginia Woolf’s famous gig-lamp metaphor from her 1921 essay, “Modern Fiction,” which she uses to describe the impressionist moment: “The mind receives a myriad impressions . . . From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms . .

. the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there . . . Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (8). Life is not illuminated either by

Woolf’s carriage lamps on a dark road or by Kemp’s spectacles—the other sense of gig-lamp. Both carriage lamps and glasses are aids to vision when conditions are less than optimal, designed to provide 151 reliable, consistent sight. For both Woolf and John Kemp, such aids are misleading. The play of candlelight and shadows in illuminated doorways destabilizes the intensely practical, but dull, Kemp.

From the very beginning, light does not provide enlightenment or rational understanding but instead alters vision, propelling Kemp on his adventures. When he sneaks out on his first dangerous mission to search for Carlos Riego in the downs, he mistakes a Redcoat’s hat for Carlos in the “dead light” (11), and before he can understand his mistake or that he is being arrested, a “blazing yellow light” blinds him. At this first pivotal moment in his career, light does not provide him with enlightenment or knowledge but is rather described as “dead” and as a “blazing” force that blinds him. Notably, Kemp himself never makes the connection or comments on his naïve mistake. Later, when he is first kidnapped with a sack thrown over his head, he has no light or vision at all, which forces him to consider the nature of romance: “I was in search of romance, and here were all the elements; Spaniards, a conspirator, and a kidnapping; but I couldn’t feel a fool and romantic as well. True romance, I suppose, needs a whirl of emotions to extinguish all the senses except that of sight, which it dims. Except for sight, which I hadn’t at all, I had the use of them all, and all reported unpleasant things” (76). His sense impressions here

“report” unpleasant things, suggesting that he is used to regarding his senses as data collectors that work together with his consciousness to make coherent meaning. Without sight, he lacks what he perceives as objective reality. Unwittingly, Kemp’s comments are metafictional: he lists the conventional elements of romance and dismisses them as inadequate, because he cannot see clearly. Yet the text suggests that uncertain vision, rather than clarity, is the material of his romance.

Candlelight dims or alters sight with the movement of the flame that simultaneously casts shadows and illuminates details that might be missed in the full light, thereby making them the central feature of vision when all else is dimmed. For instance, when Kemp awakens after being kidnapped he finds himself alone in darkness, and his first sensory impression is that of light that “grows” and “curves,” 152 revealing “The figure of a crowned woman, that moved rigidly up and down . . . silhouetted over [his] body” (77). The statue of the Madonna, which he has yet to consciously register, is figuratively overshadowing him, a moment that foreshadows how Seraphina’s Catholicism will do the same throughout the novel. Kemp will remain blind to the details and specifics of the Catholic faith of those around him throughout the story, but Catholicism will cast a “silhouette” (which is notably less threatening than shadow) over his life for the duration of his time in Cuba and on into his trial in

England.

As Seraphina enters and lights a lamp, the light is anthropomorphized: “There was a click of glass, and then a great blaze of light created a host of shining things; a glitter of gilded carvings, red velvet couches, a shining table, a low ceiling painted white, on carved rafters” (78). Here, the light actively creates, and what it creates is imagined as a host of shining things, as if the opulence around him is angelic. In the enchanted space of the ship’s cabin, Kemp is overloaded by his visual senses, and the impressions themselves are endowed with the sacred. He also romanticizes Seraphina in his conflation of her with the Madonna. Seraphina tells him to escape and to “Go with God”—the anglicized version of the

“vaya usted con dios” with which Kemp opens the novel, suggesting its importance to his memory. As

Seraphina tells him to “Go with God,” she points towards the crowned figure Kemp had earlier registered on an unconscious level: “Following the direction of her hand, my eyes fell upon the image of a Madonna

. . . with a gilt crown, a pink serious face bent a little forward over a pink naked child that perched on her left arm and raised one hand. It stood on a bracket, against the rubber casing, with fat cherubs’ heads carved on the supports” (79). The romance is deflated here, with the emphasis on pinkness and the “fat cherubs’ heads,” but curiously, this image recurs later in Kemp’s mind in the disorienting moments after he has told his story in the courtroom (425). When he reimagines this scene in court, he remembers the

Madonna with disorienting, dream-like sense impressions: “I thought I was bound again, and on the sofa 153 in the gorgeous cabin of the Madre-de-Dios . . . It was as if the candles had been lit in front of the

Madonna with the pink child, only she had a gilt anchor instead of the spiky gilt glory above her head”

(425). The candles of the courtroom, which have been “waving deliberately like elm-tops in a high wind”

(424) refocus his romantic vision and the accent of his memory falls differently, allowing him to envision the Madonna as salvific, which propels him into the narrative recounting that saves his life.

After Kemp is kidnapped from Jamaica and Seraphina comes to his rescue, his vulnerability and the inscrutability of his position lend romance to the only thing he can see. The light of the lamp in the cabin of the ship is brilliant but it also throws certain things into relief while simultaneously obscuring others.

The effect of the light becomes figuratively linked to Kemp’s own life, as he muses: “There was not any future that I could conceive, and the past seemed to be cut off from me by a narrow, very dark tunnel through which I could see nothing at all. The young girl was, for the moment, what counted most on the whole, the only thing the eye could rest on” (78). Just as the play of light in the cabin dazzles by

“creat[ing] a host of shining things,” the darkness of his ignorance about his future and his past lends romance to Seraphina. Because his “eye can rest” on her, because she is more visible when all else is invisible, she has an aura about her. His focus on her immediately moves into a blazon: “I had seen her gray eyes; I had seen her red lips; her dark hair, her lithe gestures; the carriage of her head; her throat, her hands” (78). However, as soon as she offers him his freedom, his romanticization of her suffers. He notes, “The idea of having my liberty, of its being again a possibility, made her seem of less importance; other things began to have their share” (79). Romance, even as it applies to Seraphina, requires not blindness, but intense focus to the exclusion of other phenomena, which mimics the play of the candlelight recurring constantly in the Cuban space. As Kemp moves towards the enchanting space of

Rio Medio and the Casa Riego in Cuba, candlelight becomes the main source of light, and the emphasis 154 changes from lack of sight or obscured sight to a more impressionistic flickering vision that also corresponds with the Catholicism of the colonial space, as well as his increased sense of interiority.

Impressionist Bewilderment: The Enchantment of Catholicism

One sensuous scene in a crumbling castle features a wealth of candlelight and shadow against the backdrop of a Catholic ceremony. Kemp’s betrothal to Seraphina over her father’s deathbed is a scene of confusion and excess that lends enchantment to Kemp’s bewilderment. Kemp describes the flames of the candles and the rich colours in the room, as well as the stillness and silence that pervade the scene. He explains: “The confused shadows and the tarnished splendor of emblazoned draperies, looped up high under the ceiling, fell in heavy and unstirring folds right down to the floor, that reflected the lights like a sheet of water, or rather like ice. I felt it slippery under my feet. . .” (142). The excess of Catholicism makes Kemp uncomfortable as it refuses to be regulated by his rational English senses; his perception is flooded, and the resulting impression of slippery ice reflects his growing uncertainty in his Protestant masculinity. The sepulchral, candlelit space resonates with enchantment and mystery in the closing words of the scene and chapter: “Father Antonio’s bass voice rose, aloud, with an extraordinary authority . . .

The arm of the nun touched the cords of the curtains, and the massive folds shook and fell expanded, hiding from us the priest and the penitent” (145). The draperies that shroud the workings of faith are another element of inscrutability here—an inscrutability that is profound and inaccessible to his

Englishness. Later, as he dons the disguise of a priest in order to escape, Kemp notices “The clumping staff of [his] heavy crucifix drew hollow echoes from the flagstones” (189). If the faithful rituals are hollow, they are specifically so to Kemp whose Protestant rationality bars him from the mystery.

Impressionist technique is paired here with Catholicism to demonstrate that they inhabit the same space as markers of epistemological instability. 155

The scene is also heavily evocative of the gothic, which is the most familiar literary space for

Catholicism in the nineteenth-century novel. Typically, however, gothic Catholicism is a source of anxiety or superstition, and such uncertainty is rationalized.129 In Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, for instance, the Protestant Lucy Snowe experiences a comingling of horror and desire as she is tempted by her lover and his Catholicism—a love that remains taboo in the end. In contrast, Kemp’s engagement to Seraphina depends on a promise to protect her Catholic faith. Unlike poor Lucy Snowe’s betrothal to a Catholic,

Kemp’s is not only successful, but he also takes Seraphina back to England with him, integrating the

Catholic Other into English society. The Spanish lines with which Kemp opens the novel are a repetition of Seraphina’s “Go with God,” hinting that her Spanish Catholicism has influenced him years later as he tells his story.

In the adventure novel, Catholicism is often linked to colonial superstition set in contrast to English rationality. In Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá,” for instance, the inhabitants of the island genuflect every time they see the narrator, Wiltshire, because they are told he is a devil. When he confronts the island chiefs he notices: “two of the younger ones wore Catholic medals” (206). He insists on his translator explaining to this crowd: “I demand the reason of this treatment as a white man and a British subject” (206). It is no surprise that the contest in which Wiltshire is embroiled on the island is also an ongoing one between Protestantism and Catholicism, which allows Stevenson to ironically accentuate the ideological connection between imperialism and British Protestant masculinity.

Adventure tales are more typically aligned with a Protestant masculine code of values promoted as part of Salmon’s “mission” for educating young British men. As previously noted, boys’ adventure books celebrated masculine displays of strength and virtue, which were reified as the proper birthright of

129 For an overview of Catholicism in the nineteenth-century novel see Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006). As Knight and Mason show, Catholicism was perceived as full of superstition and supernaturalism and was often found in the gothic and horror genres as a reflection of Protestant fear (Knight and Mason 193). 156

English Protestant freedom. Protestantism’s emphasis on individual freedom of conscience was translated into British identity as freeborn persons, unlike both the imperial subject and the Catholic faithful who were subject to papal absolutism. In this configuration, Protestant freedom signals British, masculine superiority. David Alderson explains:

Protestantism, then, was perceived as the guarantee of English superiority, moral and material, and

simultaneously of a rational freedom. It is in this context that the metaphors of maturity—of a fully

individuated acquisition of the powers of conscience and reason against an irrational childishness

dependent on external authority—came to potency and defined a national construction of

manliness. (13-14)

As part of this rational freedom, English identity was also liberated from mystery and superstition. The opposite of strong, free Britons of a robust masculinity in this equation, however, was weak, enslaved, effeminate colonials.130

In contrast to its more typical position in the British adventure novel, Catholicism upsets the scale of hierarchical binaries in Romance. British masculinity is undermined by sensational tropes of threatening Catholicism in its various guises. Not only is the villain of Romance both Irish and Catholic, but he also evokes a degree of sympathy; Kemp marries the Catholic Seraphina, taking her back to

England and growing old together; and most importantly, Kemp has a thinly veiled homoerotic relationship with the devout Carlos Riego. Each of these reversals of his power disrupts the generic conventions of Kemp’s Protestant masculinity. Kemp’s relation to Riego is particularly significant in

130 See Alderson for discussions of Newman, Hopkins, and Wilde and the charges of effeminacy that surrounded their Catholicism. Alderson explains, “Manly freedom, then, denotes autonomy and virtue, the two being inseparable in the Protestant experience. Moreover, virtuous independence is not merely characteristic of individuals, but is definitive of national maturity . . .” (11). See also: Ross G. Forman, “When Britons Brave Brazil” (1999) for a discussion of the contest between Protestantism and Catholicism in adventure fiction, which Forman shows was also part of narratives not set in England’s official colonies. Much of the action in Romance takes place in Cuba, which was not an English colony. Forman shows that adventure fiction often reinforced British imperial values by staging conversion narratives in Catholic colonies: such fictions substitute religious and moral authority for political authority. 157 disrupting the masculine codes of the boys’ adventure.131 When Kemp dons Carlos’ clothes, foreshadowing the moment he will dress as a priest, he also inherits Carlos’ betrothed as Carlos lies dying. Taking on Carlos’ clothes and his lover, Kemp gets as intimately close to Riego as the text will allow. As part of the challenge their homoerotic relationship presents to Protestant masculinity, Carlos’

Catholicism is clearly associated with effeminacy. Kemp remembers Carlos looking at him with “big, romantic eyes” and whispering “seductively” “I love you very much for your own sake” (37). A few pages later at their leave-taking, Kemp remembers: “His hand was grasping mine; it thrilled me like a woman’s; he stood shaking it very gently . . . He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek, then climbed away. I felt that the light of Romance was going out of my life” (40-41). The attraction Kemp has for Carlos is characterized as both “light” and “romance,” reinforcing the enchantment of homoeroticism itself. In contrast, though Seraphina is his ostensible love interest, her flatness suggests she is more of a symbol of Catholicism itself, than a sexual object.

As noted, Kemp depicts Seraphina in terms of the Madonna several times throughout the novel. A common lover’s trope, Kemp describes his love for her in terms of religious ecstasy, imagining his relation to her in the terms of the relationship between sinner and saviour: “the sense of my unworthiness made me long for her love as a sinner, in his weakness, longs for the saving grace” (126-27). Despite the conventionality here, she is actually associated with salvation at various points, and she raises Kemp one step closer to transcendence. When he describes her speech, he deifies her even further: “The sounds, faint and enchanting, like a breath of sweet wind, staggered me” (127). The sweet wind here evokes the

Holy Ghost, and the religious sound is, in particular, enchanting. Unlike Carlos, whose womanly association arouses profane love in Kemp, Seraphina draws him to Catholicism.

131 See Wayne Kostenbaum, Double Talk (1989) for a discussion of the homoeroticism between Kemp and Carlos as a sublimation of what he sees in the relationship between male literary collaborators like Conrad and Ford. 158

The symbolism of candlelight unites Catholic mysticism with the impressionist depiction of altered vision that simultaneously produces enlightenment (in the candlelight) and uncertainty (in the shadows).132 The comingling of Catholicism and impressionism in this fin-de-siècle novel emphasizes the sensuousness of the image—an emphasis recognizable in Pater’s influential work that celebrated both the beauty of Catholic imagery for aesthetic purposes and, as noted above, the centrality of the impression.133

The ubiquitous candlelight and other markers of sacred space in Cuba are part of its allure as something completely divorced from the colder, starker religion of England in the novel. Satiric irony is primarily reserved for the rationalism of the English Protestants who hang pirates unshriven in a graphic, unflinching scene, which inspires rage against the English “heretics” for their lack of mercy (58-59). A telling caricature of Protestantism is also found in the wife of an English captain whose severe decorum is challenged with Kemp and Seraphina’s romance. Having “learned life in some back chapel in Bristol”

(235), the captain’s wife must overcome her moral shock at the unwed couple traveling alone. Moreover,

Kemp enters an English church only once in the novel, and this is to witness a “condemned sermon,”

132 Conrad and Ford’s Catholicism has been read as purely aesthetic, but there is some anecdotal evidence to suggest they both remained marginal Catholics throughout their careers. Ford converted to Catholicism while visiting his father’s family in Germany in 1892 (Sutton 63), and Timothy Sutton has argued that Ford saw Catholicism, the faith of his fathers, as a tie to his past. In particular, he saw it as a tie to his Continental past, which he felt was a less provincial form of religious expression than English Protestantism. Conrad was born into the Catholic church, though there is little evidence to suggest that he ever participated in any Catholic activity after his childhood. Generally, religion in Conrad’s work is complicit in imperial atrocities, and is, for the most part, hollow. In Conrad and Religion (1988) John Lester writes at length about the portrayal of Christianity in Conrad’s work, both Catholic and Protestant, reaching the conclusion that “Wherever it exists and whatever its institutionalised form, therefore, Christianity, as practiced in Conrad’s fiction, is shown to be inadequate to the needs of the human race . . . All in all, the state of Christianity within the Conradian canon is pitiful” (86). Predictably, however, Lester’s study does not include any mention of Romance. Jameson also touches briefly on Conrad’s aesthetic religion as a part of his artistic project. He describes the ideology of aesthetic religion in terms of nostalgia, melancholy, and fable, adding that the fin-de-siècle intellectual of the market society is forever on the outside of religious expression even when employing it. Yet Jameson’s point is made in conjunction with his argument about Lord Jim and Conrad’s introduction of the fated pilgrims aboard the Patna: the Muslim pilgrims in this earlier novel signal the enchantment of the sacred from which Jim and the other British imperialists are barred. John McClure also sees aestheticized sacred space in Heart of Darkness. He argues that such religious enchantment leads to a further Othering of the colonized group where their religion is merely a source of primitive mystery. In Romance, Kemp is influenced by Catholicism. 133 See Claire Masurel-Murray “Conversions to Catholicism Among Fin de Siècle Writers” (2012) for Pater’s influence on Decadent Catholicism at the fin de siècle. For a discussion of Catholic sensationalism in Victorian literature more generally, see Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (2007). Moran also includes a chapter on sensational Catholicism in the Decadent movement in which she argues: “Conflicting views about the nature and function of art, and particularly the fascinations and dangers of sumptuous form, underpin the denigration of exotic, sensual and enigmatic Catholic ritual. The Protestant response to Catholic arts of worship inscribes a conservative moral and utilitarian aesthetic and emphasizes the cultural subversion implicit in an aesthetic of sensation” (233). 159 which he is to face on his own after his trial. Unlike the beauty of the Catholic spaces described throughout the novel, the center of English religion is, from the outside, “square, tall, bare, white- washed,” (392) and from the inside “ill-lighted by the tall, grimy windows, heavily barred” (393). In this space only “a pair of candles” flicker, one of which is extinguished. The lack of candlelight is starkly contrasted with the well-lit Catholic spaces, suggesting not only a cold dimness, but also a lack of flickering bursts of sight in the candlelit space, which parallels the impressionistic vision metaphorically embodied in the candlelight: the lack of candlelight suggests a lack of enchanted vision and a place emptied of the sacred.

Catholicism and the Ethic of Uncertainty

Seraphina’s Catholicism, on the other hand, engenders the sort of ethical enchantment that causes

Kemp to re-think his values and his level of engagement with the world. As one of the pirates suffers a torturously slow and painful death, Seraphina begs Kemp to pray with her for God’s mercy on the pirate, but Kemp admits: “I said nothing” (336). In contrast to the merciless hangings of the pirates perpetrated earlier by the British authorities in Jamaica, Seraphina tries desperately to sponge Manuel-del-Popolo’s parched lips despite her revulsion at both his life and his death. Seraphina’s selfless, empathetic actions, the only actual heroism in the novel, are motivated by her faith. By contrast, Kemp’s reflection on his own inaction leads him to question his entire approach to life: “I had had his life on the end of my pistol, and had spared him from an impulse that had done nothing but withhold from him the mercy of a speedy death. This had been my pity. But it was Seraphina’s cry—this ‘At last,’ showing the stress and pain of the ordeal—that shook my faith in my conduct . . .” (339). In the impressionist spirit, there is no authorial comment here, however, and no clear answer to Kemp’s moral confusion. 160

Kemp’s English rationality has proven insufficient, because, unlike in the typical boys’ adventure,

Romance suggests there is no deontic ethical answer to how or when to kill a pirate. Bradley Deane has argued that boys’ adventures at the turn of the century revealed a shift in moral coding, with the pirate tale in particular exhibiting a shift to amorality. With its emphasis on play rather than social morality, boyhood found sympathy with the amoral world of piracy in adventure fiction. Rather than vilifying the pirate as the opposite of Protestant English decency, “Pirates who had in mid-century fiction clashed with the virtuous youth of England began to look less like the heroes’ foils than their doubles . . .” (89).134

Deane credits Stevenson and Treasure Island with the shift to collapsing moral absolutes in the pirate tale. Romance, though, rather than resorting to amorality, suggests that such absolutes are less clear by employing the indefiniteness of impressionism.

In locating the ethical in impressionism, Max Saunders looks to narratives that emphasize lived experience, the significance of which is not explained or moralized by the author or implied author.

Saunders proposes: “The Impressionist approach to ethics in literature is thus to focus on the ethics of the act of narration rather than the ethical content within the narrative, or ethical judgments made about that content” (“Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical” 312). In Romance, the impressionism that resists value judgments highlights Kemp’s uncertainty about his own moral choices and what to look to as a guide—an uncertainty that Salmon would not allow for in the morals of his boys’ books. Though

Manuel-del-Popolo has been the pirate enemy, it is not clear that he is deserving of death at the hands of the English hero. Kemp has already been shaken by the earlier episode in which the British authorities hung pirates in Jamaica without a Catholic priest. The horror of dying pirates in this novel presents a

134 Deane outlines a new set of masculine codes, in which boyhood had shifted from the training ground for the civilizing mission of imperial expansion to a prolonged period of reckless adventure appealing to adult males. The late imperial adventure story reinterpreted these codes of masculinity: “As liberal narratives of progress, civilization, and enlightenment gave way to militarism, prestige, and a vision of permanent dominion and endless competition, imperialists found in enduring boyishness a natural and suitably anti-developmental model of identity” (Deane 86). Deane traces a transformation from mid- century masculine types such as the missionary, explorer and family man, to the “untamed frontiersman, the impetuous boy, and the unapologetically violent soldier” (1). 161 particular subversion to the norms of the boys’ adventure, in which stark moral binaries divide the hero and villain.

Instead of upholding amorality, Kemp’s hopelessness is contrasted with Seraphina’s meaningful action, which took self-sacrifice and was motivated by religious faith, unlike the paralysis that leaves him without intuition and empathy. Kemp’s unbelief in Seraphina’s Catholicism is not the point, but rather it is his observation that her enchanted vision as a believer in the transcendent provided her with a feeling of agency that he lacks. Kemp laments: “I was young, and my belief in the justice of life had received quite a shock. If it were impossible to foretell the consequences of our acts, if there was no safety in the motives within ourselves, what remained for our guidance?” (339).135 Seraphina’s orientation towards the suffering pirate invites narrative and moral uncertainty that Romance refuses to rationalize. Despite

Kemp’s generally irreligious perspective, the pervasive Catholicism of Cuba is inescapable and challenges his reason. Catholicism in the novel provides avenues for mystery through its emphasis on rituals, veils, sacraments, and limited access to God, all of which enhance a sense of the ineffable; yet it is also the framework in which engagement with the world is possible. As Mark Schneider’s description of enchantment suggests, a transformative experience of enchantment is similar to the bewilderment of impressionism:

We become enchanted, it can be argued, when we are confronted by circumstances or occurrences

so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that, were they to be

understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed. To be enchanted

135 Expressing a similar sentiment in Chance (1913), Marlow argues with another character, Powell, that his shipping master had not actually given him his start in life: “He was but a man, and the incapacity to achieve anything distinctly good or evil is inherent in our earthly condition . . . since for the most part, we cannot be certain of the effects of our actions” (21-22). These strikingly similar appraisals of the human capacity for effective action are no surprise to Conrad’s readers: they characterize the recurring conflict in his novels between the aims of the protagonist and the realities of his world. 162

is thus different from being “deeply delighted” or “charmed” . . . since we are faced with something

both real and at the same time uncanny, weird, mysterious, or awesome. (2-3)

The Catholic space challenges Kemp’s prejudices and understanding of the world, which, as Schneider suggests, is a prerequisite for enchantment. Catholicism and impressionism come together to challenge the ideological codes of adventure tropes through bewilderment, yet they do not subvert the form of the adventure itself. The episodic pattern meant to mimic pure experience mirrors Kemp’s own uncertainty; in other words, the novel’s organizing principles undermine the ability to make rational meaning out of

Kemp’s adventures. Catholicism, impressionism, and the episodic structure invite readers to reflect on the way in which a text is emploted and how meaning is constructed out of the raw materials of sensory perception.

Impressionist Vision and the Emplotment of Romance

When Kemp first mentions his father at the beginning of the novel he is contrasted with Kemp’s mother, who manages everything and leads an “out-of-door life” (5). His father, on the other hand, “used to sit all day by the fire, inscribing ‘ideas’ every now and then in a pocket-book.” Kemp believes he was writing an epic poem and was “happy in an ineffectual way” (5). In his family, Kemp explains, “my mother counted; my father did not” (5). Kemp’s introduction to his English childhood passes over his literary father who writes poetry by the flickering light of the fire. Despite his father’s irrelevance to both

Kemp’s early life and the bulk of the narrative, his father gives Kemp the inspiration he needs to tell his tale at the close of the novel. His father, associated with the flickering fire of impressionist vision and romance, becomes the model for Kemp’s subsequent vocation as a narrator of romance. In the concluding scenes of the courtroom drama, Kemp becomes aware that the storytelling that will save his life is an art passed down from his literary father: “I knew very well that I was carrying my audience with me; I knew 163 how to do it, I had it in the blood. The old pale, faded, narrow-lidded father who was blinking and nodding at me, had been one of the best raconteurs that ever was” (421). Kemp’s self-realization in the presence of his father is the catalyst for his own romance telling. His writer-father may have not have

“counted” for much (perhaps like romance), but his father’s ability to persuade and make people “see” is drawn from the power of storytelling.

As metafictional romance, the final scene features Kemp telling his own romance in an English courtroom as powerfully as his “raconteur” father. The courtroom scene embodies a contest between enchantment and disenchantment in the conflict between English law and piratic lawlessness, and in the rationality of legal discourse and irrationality of adventure romance. It is within this space that Kemp is forced to establish his identity. The reason, logic, and objectivity required in the courtroom are challenged in Kemp’s impassioned romance narrative, which he offers as his defense. In the world of the text, the art of romance is salvific where the rational certainty of the English authorities in Jamaica, and the English judges in the courtroom, is damning. Saunders writes in his essay on ethics and impressionism: “the ethical is inseparable from the narrative. It isn’t just how you tell a story, or whether you tell or show it; it is also a matter of the kind of story you tell or show. That is, the choice of material, the shaping of a plot into a particular direction or ending is already an ethical action, the enacting of moral decisions” (“Impressionism, Fiction, and the Location of the Ethical” 309). Kemp’s decision to relate his life as a romance, both in the courtroom and in the novel itself, ultimately affirms romance for its ethical possibilities.

Kemp’s story interrupts the legal and impartial discourse of the courtroom, mimicking light in the darkness cast by the false reason of the unfair trial. As in other impressionistic scenes in the text, the play of dark and candles are the background for his narration: “It was growing very dark in the court. I began to tell my story; it was so plain, so evident, it shimmered there before me” (419). It is the romance 164 narrative that enlightens rather than the false testimonies upheld in the court system that cloud Kemp’s true identity. As he tells his story, he notes “a man lit the candles on the judge’s desk, and the court looked different. There were deep shadows everywhere; and the illuminated face of Lord Stowell looked grimmer, less kind, more ancient, more impossible to bring a ray of sympathy to” (420). As elsewhere in the novel, the candlelight both darkens and illuminates, altering Kemp’s perception. In this case, the candlelight lends greater import to Kemp’s narration by suggesting the judge as the villain to be overcome in his romantic defense.

Kemp’s narrative has the power to save his life because it is a completely alternate discourse from the legal narratives that threaten to hang him. He initially coaches himself: “I had reasoned out that I must be very constrained; very lucid about the opening. ‘On such and such a day I landed at Kingston’ . . .”

(419). Yet as he loses his audience with his linear chain of facts, the candlelight of the courtroom inspires him to relate his impressions:

The candles made a yellow glow on the judge’s desk . . . I thought I was back in Cuba again. The

people in the court disappeared in the deepening shadows . . . If there were to be any possibility of

saving my life, I had to tell what I had been through—and to tell it vividly—I had to narrate the

story of my life; and my whole life came into my mind . . . I began to talk about Manuel-del-

Popolo, of his red shirt, his black eyes, his mandolin. (421)

It is striking that he concludes the description of his narration by ventriloquizing Conrad himself: “I glowed for a moment with the immense pride of my achievement. I had made them see things . . . I had made them see things” (422).136 He gives voice here to Conrad’s desire “to make you see,” from the

136 Contrast Kemp’s words here with Marlow’s in Heart of Darkness: “Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? . . . No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence” (97). Where Marlow feels the failure of Conrad’s desire to “make you see” as an epistemological impossibility, Kemp imagines a positive potential for romance to convey the impression through the senses, which leads to the sort of sight Conrad idealizes in his Author’s Note. 165

Author’s Note to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. Thus, the final space of romantic vision is in the act of narration itself and the altered sight it can produce.

Kemp’s emphasis on the impression resembles the more mature Marlow of Conrad’s Chance

(1913) who also gathers together impressions to tell a romance narrative. Yet where Kemp explicitly reworks the boys’ adventure to his own romantic ends, Marlow’s use of adventure is more ironic. When faced with emplotting the story of Flora de Barral, Marlow chooses to tell his story as the romance of a knight and damsel, and yet he eschews the conventional ideologies of the mode. When the frame narrator of Chance mockingly characterizes Marlow’s narrative, Marlow rejects the description:

“You are the expert in the psychological wilderness. This is like one of those Redskin stories where

the noble savages carry off a girl and the honest backwoodsman with his incomparable knowledge

follows the track and reads the signs of her fate in a footprint here, a broken twig there, a trinket

dropped by the way. I have always liked such stories. Go on”

Marlow smiled indulgently at my jesting. “It is not exactly a story for boys,” he said. (231-

32)

Marlow’s declaration resembles Conrad’s insistence to Pinker that Romance was “not a boy’s story,” but

Marlow does indeed track and emphasize the impressions of immediate experience as is implicit in the adventure form. Though the novels are told from differing narrative points of view, both Romance and

Chance are formally organized by the uncertainty of the impression and also announce themselves as self-conscious romances, suggesting Conrad’s interest in the shared nature of impressionism and romance.

Though their other romances frequently end with the dissolution of the mode, Conrad and Ford’s collaboration in this novel creates space for the essence of modern enchantment in affirming the ethical 166 potential of uncertainty. Much like the initial experience of the sense impression, looking at the world through the eyes of romance requires the reader to suspend disbelief; alter perception; allow for possibility; envision an ideal world; challenge assumptions; be open to sacred mystery; and, finally, resist the desire for certainty and rational answers. In Romance, Conrad and Ford use the adventure novel’s episodic and contingent organizing principles in order to critique the English certainty that shaped the imperial boys’ book.

167

Chapter Four

Saint Christopher in the Trenches: Spiritual Romance in Ford

Madox Ford’s Parade’s End

The burial of the Unknown Warrior on Armistice Day 1920 was a symbolic act calculated to capture the English imagination and supply a collective memory for official commemorations. To shape this memory, the Unknown’s remains were layered with the familiar tropes of a romanticized

Englishness. In the Armistice Day edition of The Times one journalist described him thus: “rough he was and abrupt of speech . . . Bravery was his as a matter of course, as much a part of him as his humour, his tenderness, or his discontent” (“The Unknown Warrior” 15). The Unknown was “Tommy Atkins,” a common soldier, and yet his title, “Warrior,” also connected victorious England with a Britain of the past, inspiring another newspaper to refer to him as the “Unknown Arthur” (Goebel 34). In 1923 the Unknown was even bestowed the title of Principal Knight and Supreme Head of the Order of Crusaders—a new patriotic organization that clearly relied on romance tropes for a national identity to which the Unknown might lend spiritual authority. The Unknown’s funeral added yet another heroic image to those of simple

Tommy and chivalric knight by honoring the body as the relics of a martyred saint. The first hymn sung in Westminster was “O Valiant Heart,” written for the lost soldiers of the war with lines that variously read: “All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave / To save Mankind—yourselves you scorned to save,” and “While in the frailty of our human clay / Christ, our Redeemer, passed the self-same way” or

“These were His servants, in His steps they trod, / Following through death the martyr’d Son of God”

(“Service Paper”). Such phrases established the Unknown as both saintly imitator of Christ, and a figuration of Christ himself, whose sacrifice redeemed triumphant England. In this layering of English 168 peasant, Arthurian knight, and Anglican Saint buried in England’s most hallowed ground, the Unknown embodied the constructs of romance most familiar to the nation. Formally, the grave functioned as a bounded whole, containing bodily remains within the literal and metaphorical wholeness of Westminster

Abbey. But it was also a containing image for memory and the trauma of the war itself. The unrecognizable corpse buried in the Abbey that day personified an enchanted ideal that might direct a nation’s trauma toward closure.

The burial of the Unknown Warrior provides an apt preface to this final chapter on fin-de-siècle romance for two reasons. As a monument that shaped collective memory through tropes of romance, it was marked from the beginning as a contested site of enchantment and disenchantment in the public imaginary. The term “warrior” was a source of controversy, as was the tomb’s placement inside the religious space of the Abbey (Goebel 44). As a site of public enchantment invested with the language of a hagiographical romance, the grave drew on the same literary tropes of romance that were also contested ground for how to represent the war in the new post-war literary world. For artists like Ford Madox Ford and his contemporaries, commemorations like the Unknown’s grave raised the question of how to represent the war and its lasting trauma without recourse to hollow consolations or the romanticization of the English dead that ignored the political will that had pushed them out to war.

Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy is his response to, amongst other things, pre- and post-war discourses that romanticized English involvement in the war. The tetralogy was published as four separate novels throughout the 1920s, just before the war books boom of the late 20s and early 30s.137

Some Do Not appeared in 1924 followed by No More Parades in 1925, A Man Could Stand Up in 1926, and finally, the oft-maligned Last Post in 1928. Like the other texts in this project, the tetralogy oscillates

137 See Andrew Frayn, Writing Disenchantment (2014) for an in-depth discussion of the late 1920s and early 1930s as a transitional period for representations of the war in literature. Frayn characterizes 1928-30 in particular as the years of the war books boom. See especially, Chapter Five. 169 between disavowal and renewal of the several strains of romanticized Englishness that pervade post-war discourses of consolation and structure collective memory. Where it does include romance elements,

Ford’s project does not fit comfortably into the wholly disillusioned war narratives of other modernist writers.

In the disenchanted literary responses of Ford’s contemporaries, romance is often the formal and discursive Other against which works of war trauma are positioned. Certain strains of Trench Poetry, experimental modernist prose, and post-war memoirs attempt to piece together the fragments of the conflict by avoiding romance because of its idealized use as a device in official and popular memory.

Siegfried Sassoon, for instance, rejected the ostentatious sentimentality of official memorials in his poem

“On Passing the New Menin Gate,” referring to the monument as a “sepulcher of crime” (line 14) and “a pile of peace-complacent stone” (7). Poems like Sassoon’s are what Samuel Hynes would call an “anti- monument,”—a term he uses to describe “works that rendered the war without the value-bearing abstractions, without the glory, and without the large-scale grandeur. Often they were conscious, aggressive rejections of the monument-making principles; they turned away from celebration, in search of war’s reality” (A War Imagined 283). In essence, Hynes describes works that actively disenchant the sort of enchantment layered on the Unknown.

Parade’s End is one of these “anti-monuments.” In part, the series participates in a post-war repudiation of romance. Ford’s technically complex modernist novels stretch from the pre- to post-war years, and tell the story of the heroic and yet reviled Christopher Tietjens and his difficult journey from the British upper class into the trenches and back after suffering the effects of shell shock. The tetralogy is epic in scale, but narrowly focused on a small cast of characters and, often, Tietjens’ interiority. The exceptional length of the “minute” attention to Tiejtens’ psychology recalls the characteristics of realism in the Battle of the Books at the fin de siècle, and contravenes the shorter, less introspective reputation of 170 popular romance. The novels’ psychological focus also resists simplified narratives of noble sacrifice.

Yet Ford’s “anti-monument” is consciously organized around a movement between discourses of realism and romance, enchantment and disenchantment that reflects a conflict in magnitude and suggests the impossibilities of representing war trauma through a single mode. In “Years After,” an unpublished personal essay written in 1929, Ford meditates on the proper form and magnitude of memorialization for

England’s role in the war. Ford’s own thoughts on memorialization echo Hynes’ description of “anti- monuments” that resist the grandiose sentimentality of such markers as the Unknown Warrior or the

Menin Gate. Ford writes of a tiny memorial in Notre Dame cathedral, a memorial “not very much larger than a pocket handkerchief,” noting that it is the only memorial in Paris to the million English soldiers who died on French soil defending the country (War Prose 275). He regards the diminutive size of the memorial as fitting: “And somehow, oddly, it is good that that memorial should be obscure and little and pretty and mostly ignored. Because, if it were an immense, vainglorious mass of stone, it would be less a symbol of the better world . . . Enormous gestures, swank, vast expenditures on ostentation have mostly gone” (War Prose 276). Though Ford appreciates the slight size of the monument here, his post-war tetralogy betrays a conflict at the heart of his own commemorative project. Parade’s End and its protagonist far exceed the size of a “pocket handkerchief.” The protagonist is humble, obscure, and often ignored, but Tietjens’ physical size is as massive as the lengthy tetralogy itself. He does not fit the constructed memory of the dead soldier, and his trauma cannot be conveniently contained. Tietjens is excessive. He returns from the war suffering the effects of shell shock; he rejects his family money and

English title; and he lives openly with his mistress, selling old furniture to Americans with little success.

And yet, Christopher Tietjens, bearing within his name St. Christopher and Christ himself, also follows a pattern reminiscent of hagiographic romance, and of Christ, as he returns to an Arcadian idyll. The hyperbole of Tietjens’ identification as saint and Christ figure collides with the realist aspects of this 171 psychological novel, and moves the text beyond a disabling disenchantment characteristic of Hynes’

“anti-monuments.” In this chapter I will argue that, on the one hand, Ford divests consolatory commemorations of their romantic nostalgia, but on the other hand, he re-orients romance as a mode for representing the uncertainty of trauma, and the possibilities for living in the post-war world.

Critical Reception

The tetralogy tells the story of Christopher Tietjens, a member of the land-owning gentry and a dying breed of English Yorkshire gentleman. The novels trace his experiences and interactions with others of his class from the time he takes back his adulterous wife, Sylvia, somewhere around 1912, through the growth of a love affair with a young suffragette, Valentine Wannop. In between, it chronicles his time at the front during the war, followed by his post-war life in a cottage with Valentine. Throughout the series Tietjens is plagued by the machinations of the beautiful but venomous Sylvia, as well as the misconceptions and prejudices of his godfather, General Campion, and the rest of the upper-class English society that hypocritically profess to share his values. Both at war and at home, Tietjens is a “lone buffalo” recognized for his individual conscience, which is perceived as saintliness by those around him.

Before leaving for the front a second time, he even thinks to himself: “Obviously he might survive, but after that tremendous physical drilling what survived would not be himself, but a man with cleaned, sand- dried bones: a clear mind. His private ambition had always been for saintliness: he must be able to touch pitch and not be defiled” (Some Do Not 230). Following a hagiographical pattern, he undergoes humiliation and alienation from the crowd; repeatedly, he is wrongly accused; he rejects status, wealth and land; he suffers; he desires purity and cleanliness of living; and at the end he is a symbol of hope and regeneration, both hated and revered. Yet this trajectory is both idealized and ironized: he retires to the country with his mistress, his dying brother, and his brother’s mistress, and he becomes an antique 172 furniture dealer without a penny to his name. His is a secular hagiography that at once critiques the cult of official memory, but raises a living martyr.

Both the tetralogy and Ford himself have a history of being criticized for romance and sentimentality. In fact, Ford wrote several romances, many of which have been forgotten or ignored. His earliest publications, The Brown Owl (1891), The Feather (1892), and The Queen Who Flew (1894), were all fairy tales. In the decade before the war he collaborated on romances with Conrad and wrote several other romances such as Mr. Apollo (1908), Ladies Whose Bright Eyes (1911), and his historical romance trilogy The Fifth Queen (1906-08). The Good Soldier (1915), however, is often considered his masterpiece, and that novel long overshadowed Parade’s End. The earlier novel draws on themes of romance but ends in disillusionment with the suicide of Edward Ashburnham and with the pessimism of the narrator, John Dowell. Ford’s use of romance elements in Parade’s End thus marks a surprising return, and the novel can be read as a sort of experimental romance in the vein of A Laodicean and

Romance in the varied canons of Hardy and Conrad.

Parade’s End is not often read as a romance, however, and early prominent critics who detected romance decried it as one of the tetralogy’s faults. The seemingly happy ending in the last novel of the series, Last Post, has been a particularly fraught issue for critics. Graham Greene even famously cut the final novel when preparing the Bodley Head editions because of what he read as an escapist happy ending. Another early influential critic, John A. Meixner, follows in Greene’s footsteps and ignores the elements of romance in the texts that lead to Last Post, also arguing that the series should be viewed as a trilogy. His dissatisfaction with Ford’s move in Last Post becomes almost a personal judgment, arguing that the novel’s resolution is in bad faith. The sense of betrayal stems from what Meixner reads as an incomprehensible shift from realism and disillusionment to romance, revealing the common critical bias that sees romance as escapist. When Meixner claims that Last Post is “a too facile, contentless gesture,” 173

(221) he assumes that only a realist narrative could encompass the complexity of postwar experience. In a more nuanced, but equally denigrating evaluation of romance in the tetralogy, Thomas Moser argues that the comedy of pantomime is present in the last novel to rescue the tetralogy from its inexcusable lapses into romance. Moser argues: “A whole range of passages in the latter work [PE] probably strike many readers as quite laughable; indeed, many of the romantic clichés I solemnly listed above . . . may seem forgivable precisely because they are funny” (244). The presence of romance in the tetralogy may even be responsible for its neglect until this past decade when the centenary of the First World War brought it back to scholarly attention.138 Though Samuel Hynes calls it “The greatest English novel of the war”

(430), he spends a mere three pages on it in a study of the Great War in literature, a work that stretches for nearly five hundred pages.

Some more generous appraisals of romance in Parade’s End have recognized the mixed signals of the novels, emphasizing Ford’s uncertainty about how to narrate Tietjens’ conclusion. Max Saunders accounts for the shifts in mode by tracing a duality throughout Ford’s life and work, which he sees as a mixture of irony and romance also at work in Parade’s End. Saunders argues that Ford “found ingenious ways of using the technical resources of his preferred romance mode to answer to this perplexing sense of unreality coexisting with the most real facts of life and death. This dual sense of the unreality of the real, or real unreality is central to all Ford’s best work” (A Dual Life, vol. 2, 259).139 Ann Barr Snitow similarly contends that in Parade’s End Ford uses romance undercut by comedy and irony: in its variety of tones romance is deflated so as not to appear false. For both Saunders and Snitow romance is used to

138 See, for instance, more recent work on the texts in Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, War and the Mind (2015), and Chantler and Hawkes, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: The First World War, Culture, and Modernity (2014). In 2012 HBO and the BBC also produced a mini-series of Parade’s End written by Tom Stoppard, which increased the text’s popularity. 139 Other work on Ford insists on a similar “duality” and uncertainty that makes space for romance. In Fragmenting Modernism (2002), Sara Haslam argues for some of Ford’s work as “positive fictions.” His “positive fictions” do T.S. Eliot’s work of “shoring against ruins” and “give him the opportunity instead to rejoice in the multiplicitous nature of the modernist quest” (8). Haslam’s argument identifies several techniques in Ford’s canon as regenerative, rather than techniques that simply enact an ironic deconstruction; nonetheless, she does not include Parade’s End in her discussion of “positive fictions.” 174 temper the overwhelming irony, but it is not a source of progressive representation in its own right.

According to Samuel Hynes, elements of romance in Parade’s End are the sort of sentimental tropes against which Ford depicts the decline of the modern world. He argues: “We may object that Ford’s

Golden Age, an England governed by self-abnegating, honorable country gentlemen, is unrealistic and unhistorical, but such objections do not negate the value of the conception . . . Ford used romance to lament the absence of noble values from his world, and his lament is both proper and moving” (“Ford and the Spirit of Romance” 23).140 Similar to Saunders and Snitow, Hynes sees romance in Parade’s End only as a foil to irony and disenchantment rather than as a generative formal strategy. In a slightly different vein, Rob Hawkes offers a perceptive reading of Ford’s multiple modalities. Hawkes includes romance as part of what makes Ford a “misfit” amongst the modernists. According to Hawkes, dividing

Ford’s work into formal categories between romance and non-romance obscures the recognition of his

“in-betweenness” (3). Overall, each critic operates under an assumption that romance might serve an aesthetic function and provide balance at best. Though some critics recognize a tension between romance and realism in the tetralogy, romance makes little sense as a formal strategy that might generate new possibilities for representing war.

The critical confusion over mode, and the resistance to romance in the novel are reactions not only to romance’s association with play and resolution but also to romanticized discourses that have become central to a narrative about literature’s role in the war. Identifying Parade’s End as a “romance of modern enchantment” is particularly difficult in light of the shifting perceptions of battle and romance before,

140 In his article, Hynes divides Ford’s work into his romances and novels, separating Parade’s End into the latter category with The Good Soldier. Hynes argues that all of the early romances were derivative of popular romance and specific writers such as Stevenson, Twain, Wells, etc. (19). Hynes’ contention is that until Ford admitted the “unromantic realities” of money and sex into his novels, he did not find his stride: “one might say that until he was forty, Ford had no themes, and that he consequently imitated not life, but other men’s romances” (20). While acknowledging the significance of romance to Ford’s aesthetic vision, his dismissal of the more explicit works of romance as imitative reflects a reductive conception of romance elements within Ford’s two masterpieces. Hynes dismisses many of Ford’s romances as “not very good” (20), claiming, “As a writer of conventional fictional romances he was on the whole a poor performer” (24). 175 during, and after the war; yet this same difficulty suggests that Ford’s use of romance elements is even more explicitly experimental and intentional.

Romance, Disenchantment, and War

The outbreak of the war posed a challenge for literary romance, particularly because it occurred not long after the height of the Romance Revival at the fin de siècle. From the beginning of war the book industry was faced with the question of what the place of literature might be during the conflict, and what sorts of books might be written. An article in The Academy from September of 1914, the month after the start of the war, is entitled “What of the Book Season?” and it bemoans the war’s effects on the fall releases. The author encourages the publishing world not to focus solely on books about war, despite their profitability: “it surely asks no prophet to foresee the growing need for books which will provide the minds of their readers with temporary relief from the all-pervading topic. Very soon, thousands of people, as keenly patriotic as any, will be thankful for a good novel or an entertaining budget of reminiscences”

(Berlyn 334). If there was to be a place for romance, it might be as a respite from the topic of war.

In addition to offering escape, though, romance could also play a role in shaping the image of war.

In their seminal works on how the First World War was imagined in literature during and just after the conflict, Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes both detect a movement away from pre-war conceptions of battle largely inherited from romance. Fussell notes where romance plays a part, both in the larger cultural constructs of war during and after the conflict, as well as in post-war literary responses by disillusioned soldiers. The modernist distaste for the Victorian and mass-market romance was amplified by the conviction that romance had been responsible for an entire generation’s false view of warfare before the conflict began. As Fussell explains it “The war began for the British in a context of jargon and 176 verbal delicacy, and it proceeded in an atmosphere of euphemism as rigorous and impenetrable as language and literature skillfully used could make it” (190).

This sort of euphemism is exposed in Parade’s End when Tietjens returns from the war for the first time with shell shock, and his wife fails to recognize that his war stories can be taken literally. When

Tietjens describes his traumatic memory of the pieces of a nurse’s body being carried past him, Sylvia asks “You mean that? . . . It’s not just a way of talking?” (Some Do Not 208) Sylvia’s confusion stems from her familiarity with the high diction that obfuscated the truth of the war. Fussell even offers a glossary of euphemisms about the war that reflect a “raised feudal language”: danger is “peril,” a friend is

“comrade,” warfare is “strife,” to win is “to conquer,” and a soldier is a “warrior” (22-23). An editorial from The Graphic of 1918, for instance, carried the tagline: “St. George vanquished his dragon, and today his people are as determined to overcome their dragon, which is Deutschland” (“The Way of the

War” 506). After the war, such medieval and romantic diction would be redeployed to commemorate the dead. As Stefan Goebel has shown, interest in the Middle Ages played a particularly large role in commemorating the war dead. More specifically, he claims that the “building blocks” for this medieval mode of memorialization can be traced to the nineteenth century: “the Gothic revival in architecture;

Romanticism in literature; the cult of chivalry in popular culture; the Arthurian revival and the Arts and

Crafts movement in British art and design . . . the idealisation of the Middle Ages had pointed to . . . a desire to return to (or at least remember) the imagined harmony or purposefulness of the remote past”

(13). Goebel’s genealogy demonstrates that the romance tropes layered on the Unknown “Warrior” were drawn from a common store of euphemistic language that can be traced to the Romance Revival.

Thus, as Fussell argues, the young men of 1914 who entered the war had been “tutored” in a romanticized diction by the “boys’ books” of G. A. Henty, the masculine romances of Haggard, the 177

Arthurian poetry of Tennyson, and the medieval romances of Morris.141 Fussell’s list draws an ill-fated connection between the Romance Revival and the discourses that encouraged and euphemized war for the generation raised on the works of the revival. He concludes: “The experiences of a man going up the line to his destiny cannot help seeming to him like those of a hero of medieval romance if his imagination has been steeped in actual literary romances or their equivalent. For most who fought in the Great War, one highly popular equivalent was Victorian pseudo-medieval romance” (Fussell 146). This connection to medieval romance is apparent in a 1917 review of an abridgement of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, which describes the new Arthurian legend as illustrative of the young men at war. The reviewer claims that the author “has seen into the human souls that were hidden by the panoply of armour and cloth-of-gold, much the same souls that underlie ill-cut khaki in this stressful year of 1917” (“Romance and Fairy Tale”

6). Like boys’ adventure books, medievalist romance was encoded with a cluster of values that linked masculinity, heroism, and Englishness. Even after the war, in 1920, one defender of a new post-war romance by Haggard could still claim in The English Review that the romance of imaginative literature was “especially welcome to the Anglo-Saxon temperament, because it appeals to certain innate racial instincts, which can neither be eradicated nor stifled” (Rashleigh 45). The reviewer, Edward Rashleigh, loses patience with another critic “in these latter days of disenchantment” who blames romance by

Haggard and others of the revival for “awakening in the young of the feudal ideal, which it has cost the world such a deluge of blood and tears partly to get rid of” (qtd. in Rashleigh 45).142 Rashleigh defends

Haggard’s When the World Shook (1919) in which three Englishmen embark on an otherworldy adventure, save the world, and then return to an England embroiled in World War One. In Haggard’s

141 For instance, Fussell describes Morris’ The Well at the World’s End (1896): “But for a generation to whom terms like heroism and decency and nobility conveyed meanings that were entirely secure, it was a heady read and an unforgettable source of images” (147). 142 Rashleigh here quotes a much earlier Norwegian-American critic, Hjalmer H. Boyesen writing in The Forum in the 1890s, who blamed popular romances such as Scott’s, Stevenson’s, and Haggard’s for the false notions of chivalry that he thought threatened American democratic ideals. See Boyesen “The Great Realists and the Empty Storytellers.” 178 novel, after watching the near destruction of the world, one of the adventurers “like a patriotic

Englishman, volunteered for service at the front,” explaining to his friends how much better it is “to help the bodies of his countrymen” than “pelt them with vain words” (Haggard, When the World Shook 179).

The generation affected by the war saw romances like Haggard’s as responsible for those high abstractions like glory, honour, and courage, which Hemingway labeled “obscene” (Fussell 22) or terms like heroism, chivalry, patriotism, and others that Ford Madox Ford called the “Big Words” (Saunders, A

Dual Life, vol.2, 224).

Both Fussell and Hynes track a reversal in literary representation from the language of romance to one of disenchantment. As the grand abstractions became less tenable, the language of rationality and instrumentalism was deployed to challenge a failure of language directly linked to literary romance. In

1915 one editor in The Academy set up his opinion piece, “The Relationship of Literature to Life,” with the old contrast between romance and realism, which led him to meditations on how best to represent war. He explains: “Previous to the outbreak of the war there was no man or woman but had some theory as to war itself, in the case of the present generation, actually derived from books . . . We conceived of war as at once something picturesque and romantic . . . It existed in our minds as a medley of Greek heroes and Crusaders, knights in armour and Elizabethan seamen.” Such naivety, he concludes, has ill prepared this generation for the fact that “war is not an art, but a business . . . where in the long run success depends not on bravery or on power of generalship but on the superior resources of the countries interlocked in deadly struggle” (“The Relationship of Literature to Life” 375). Here, romance has been altered to “business,” so that the literature of enchantment has been replaced by a term of rationalization.

This shift to imagining the war in instrumental terms is reiterated in a 1920 article in The Athenaeum in which one reviewer of new books about the war “thanked his stars that he was never able to read Henty” 179 and instead, was used to books that gave him a realistic picture of the “bloody business” of war. He wonders how the next generation will represent war, and if it will ever be a source of romance again:

Helping to carry away the sentry, spurting blood from twenty wounds . . . or watching a red-faced

sergeant gathering into a sandbag with a shovel the poor vestiges of his corporal, we doubted

whether any boys would be left to decide our point about the romance of it . . . If the war had been

fought with tennis balls we would have written the romance ourselves. (“Stories of War” 781)

The decade after the war in which Ford wrote Parade’s End, presented, then, a dual challenge for romance. The rise of even more experimental modernism, and the disillusioned post-war literary milieu in which war was a “business” compounded the hostility to romance.

Despite such disavowals of romance, the diction and imagery used to describe the Unknown

Warrior show that romance survived the war, and in the immediate postwar years, enchanted language about the war was still used as consolation despite the deepening disenchantment it provoked. In short, the war did not engender a complete rupture with romance. The perception of complete rupture is what

Samuel Hynes has called the Myth of the War: this myth depicts the old enchantments as completely eradicated by an overwhelming tone of irony and disillusionment. In the myth Hynes traces a “radical discontinuity” between past and present, in which the romanticized view of warfare gave way to the ironic, disillusioned view. According to Hynes, however, “It is not true, as is sometimes assumed, that a general wartime enthusiasm for war and its values was overwhelmed and replaced at the war’s end by a total disillusionment . . . Rather, both existed throughout the decade . . . a conservative culture that clung to and asserted traditional values, and a counter-culture, rooted in rejection of the war and its principles”

(A War Imagined 283). Andrew Frayn likewise claims that the modes of representation did not change so dramatically, but rather, co-existed: “The immediate post-war years see a complex negotiation taking place in literature about the memory of the war. The legal restrictions of wartime are gone, but tacit 180 restrictions on representation remain” (Writing Disenchantment 26).143 Frayn situates Parade’s End as a transitional text in this period, marking a shift to what he calls a “post-war discursive field” that depicted the grim, disenchanted view of the war more familiar today (“This Battle Was Not Over” 201). He points out that such a polarizing figure as Wilfred Owen “had almost no contemporary reception” and that the largest collection of his poems was not issued until 1931. As Frayn notes, Owen’s “‘old lie’ was not understood as such in 1918” (Writing Disenchantment 24).

The model of complete rupture ignores the language of disenchantment that was already a part of cultural discourse before the war. In addition to noting the slow change from romanticized representations after the war, Frayn demonstrates that a rhetoric of disenchantment existed before the war.144 He outlines the discourses of decline and mechanization with which the previous works in this project also engage. Yet while the depictions of war and trauma are disenchanted in the tetralogy, the space for romance remains. I argue, then, that while Parade’s End is a transitional text that moves away from pre-war romanticizations of war, it does not move unilaterally towards disenchantment; rather, the tetralogy alternates between enchantment and disenchantment like the other texts in this project do.

Parade’s End contains a loosely progressive trajectory that moves from disenchanting the myth of the

143 See Frayn’s introduction to Writing Disenchantment (esp. pp. 4-7) for a review of Fussell, Hynes, and others and his own break from their “model of rupture.” See also, Jay Winter Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (1995). Winter draws attention to the coexistence of themes and forms during and after the war, which provides an apt description of the literary cultural background of Parade’s End: “The overlap of languages and approaches between the old and the new, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’, the conservative and the iconoclastic, was apparent both during and after the war. The ongoing dialogue and exchange among artists and their public, between those who self-consciously returned to nineteenth-century forms and themes and those who sought to supersede them, makes the history of modernism much more complicated than a simple, linear divide between ‘old’ and ‘new’ might suggest” (3). 144 Frayn traces the discourse of disenchantment as it was present before the war, as well as the alternative discourses simultaneously present but less well-known than the disenchanted hallmarks of high modernism. Frayn argues: “disenchantment existed long before the war, just as its enchantments endure long after” (Writing Disenchantment 25). Frayn cites Tietjens’ rejection of the hypocritical bureaucracy he works for, and his critical awareness of the disenchanting mechanization of war and civilian society as evidence of Ford’s own disenchanted depiction of the war. See also, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, ‘“The Foul System”: The Great War and Instrumental Rationality in Parade’s End” (2009). McCarthy, like Frayn, sees Ford as drawing attention to disenchantment in the pre-war context. McCarthy describes Tietjens’ world as a “dehumanizing technocracy and an economic order calculated to undermine individual identity . . . Parade’s End focalizes one man’s experience of the Great War to show that the specter haunting twentieth-century Britain is reifying logic” (179- 80).

181 pre-war Edwardian idyll, to re-enchanting the post-war world in favour of engagement rather than withdrawal.

Disenchantment in Some Do Not

The first novel, Some Do Not, highlights the movement away from pre-war romance explicitly. It frequently underlines the conflict between enchantment and disenchantment in the pre-war world, and emphasizes a sort of Weberian disenchantment in its ironic depiction of the modern lifestyle of the ruling class. The pre-war first part of Some Do Not is the most straightforward of the four novels in the tetralogy: it lacks much of the chronological experimentation used in later volumes to represent the general trauma of the war and Tietjens’ shell shock in particular. In its language, imagery, and organizing principles, Some Do Not parallels the certainty and rationality that characterized pre-war Britain. The romantic myth of the golden summer swept away by the war is portrayed ironically as an age that was already instrumental and artificial.

At the outset, Tietjens is depicted as a Yorkshire gentleman symbolic of English reliability, safety, and assured supremacy. Tietjens, a member of the “official class” who works for the Department of

Statistics, is introduced as a metonym for Weberian disenchantment. He is a representative of the bureaucratic rational spirit and even the taming of chance: “His chief, Sir Reginald Ingleby, when

Tietjens chose to talk of public tendencies which influenced statistics, would listen with attention.

Sometimes Sir Reginald would say: “You’re a perfect encyclopedia of exact material knowledge,

Tietjens” (6-7). Tietjens embodies Ian Hacking’s rationalizing spirit of probability as a statistician and human calculator. When Tietjens sees Valentine disappear into the mist on a romantic night drive, the narrator remarks, “The constation interested him” (156). Constation denotes the act of ascertaining or verifying his observations, suggesting his privileging of analysis and rationality over the magic of the 182 romantic moment with his lover in the fog.145 A few paragraphs later he returns to his “constations of the concealing effect of water vapour” (156), analyzing the science behind his perception. Even under the romance of a starlit sky with his lover, Tietjens is aware of how his mathematical mind affects his perception: “though a mathematician, he despised astronomy. It was not theoretical enough for the pure mathematician and not sufficiently practical for daily life. He had of course calculated the movements of abstruse heavenly bodies, but only from given figures; he had never looked for the stars of his calculations” (157). Rather than meditating on star-crossed lovers or the beauty of the night sky, Tietjens calculates the stars. His view of the world resembles that of Paula’s uncle in Hardy’s A Laodicean, that

“frigid calculator whose thoughts were like geometrical diagrams” (246).

The pre-war instrumentalism of Tietjens’ English rationality is captured in the imagery of the first and last scenes of Part I of Some Do Not. The opening scene of the novel takes place on a train—the familiar marker of modernity, industrialism, and change: “The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage” (3). This “official class” is depicted ironically in its “perfect appointment” as a signifier of British stability, but the “perfect appointment” also describes the intentional shaping of the formal metaphors that represent this certainty, such as the network system for which the railway is merely one symbol. More specifically, the inside of the railcar might be read as a metonym for the characteristics of the pre-war “official class.” The railcar contains

“bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves” decorated with “an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne” (3). Regulated, intricate, minute, design, geometry— taken together, the diction connotes a perfectly arranged image of a network far different from the enchanted webs of A Laodicean. In this description, the geometric design implies precision and

145 The mist itself is symbolic of the confusion and irrationality that begins to shake Tiejens’ sense of himself, accompanied as it is with Tietjens’ musings on his identity as a stolid Yorkshireman, (156), on himself as a bureaucrat (159), and on the social conventions that make their night drive improper and prevent his union with Valentine (161). It is not accidental that he feels the mist physically envelope his body, as if clouding his sense of identity. 183 rationality, rather than uncertainty and enchantment. The regulated precision of the geometric design contrasts, however, with the bulging, luxuriant upholstery into which it is woven. The description of the upholstery conveys a combination of instrumental rationality and falsely romanticized ideals. The image of the dragon is especially indicative of the perils of false romanticization: the dragon is designed by a geometrician from Cologne, which intimates the future enemy is not only Germany but also the romanticized tropes that will be redeployed in wartime, such as the image of the German dragon slain by

St. George.

Tietjens and his friend Macmaster are the likeness of this regulated, geometric pattern. As the narrator explains, “Their class administered the world, not merely the newly created Imperial Department of Statistics under Sir Reginald Ingleby. If they saw policemen misbehave, railway porters lack civility, an insufficiency of street lamps, defects in public services or in foreign countries, they saw to it, either with nonchalant Balliol voices, or with letters to the Times . . .” (4). Tietjens and Macmaster are part of a hierarchical network shaping the pre-war world. Their class ensures the forms of order remain certain through avenues such as the university and the newspaper: spaces in which thoughts and opinions are constructed along rational, linear lines. The last three novels of the series will disrupt the structure of this discursive control by relying on gaps, omissions, and achronological (dis)order to communicate a lack of control. In Some Do Not, though, the text inhabits the consciousness of all of the major characters to establish not only their traits but also to reveal the tightly connected network of the English upper class.

Walking out with his lover, Valentine, after a brunch, Tietjens connects their pairing to the propriety of this social network: “This, Tietjens thought, is England! A man and a maid walk through Kentish grass fields . . . he of good birth; she of birth quite as good . . . Each come just from an admirable appointed establishment: a table surrounded by the best people, their promenade sanctioned, as it were, by the

Church—two clergy—the State, two Government officials; by mothers, friends, old maids” (131). Their 184 connection is as perfectly “appointed” in the larger network of Englishness as the railway carriage in the opening paragraphs. Tietjens is ironic here, however. His own foresight sees the destruction of this idyll by the impending war. The closing lines of Part I of Some Do Not re-emphasize this imagined network of

English certainty on the eve of the war, but also hint at its imminent disruption. Tietjens, faced with the decision of whether or not to uphold the social codes of his class, is tempted to “Damn all principles!”

But then he reflects: “But one has to keep on going . . . Principles are like a skeleton map of a country— you know whether you’re going east or north” (180). Conflating English principles with a basic map, he overlays ideals of British certainty on both the landscape and the map as a symbol of rationality. The skeleton map recalls the railway from the first paragraph as a network that zigzags across England, establishing mastery and control over the landscape; and yet, like the dragon woven into the upholstery of the railcar, the “skeleton” map foreshadows not only the approaching bodies of the war dead but also the death of principles built on English certainty. In these opening pages, the novel renders an already disenchanted Englishness.

Some Do Not intimates that it is this pre-war rationalism that develops into the bureaucratic instrumentalism of Tietjens’ class during wartime. Before and during the war, the same members of the official class who issue commands in their “Balliol voices” ask Tietjens to manipulate statistics that can be used for the British government to justify its positions on various policies, from the number of soldiers it sends to France, to the number of available boots (Some Do Not 288). Tietjens can develop correct statistical models to support the government’s claims, but he refuses, because he knows the calculations, though accurate, will send soldiers to their deaths. All the major characters, including both Valentine and

Sylvia, believe Tietjens’ mathematical brilliance can better help the war at home, but the boots conflict exposes the lie that his bureaucratic work is actually helping the war effort. He argues to Valentine that 185 staying home and carrying out the orders of his superiors “means unnumbered deaths” (288)—loss that cannot be rationally calculated.

Some Do Not depicts a closed hierarchical network that is later disrupted by the elements of

Tietjens’ saintly romance narrative, as he moves from an integrated member of the British official class to an excoriated saint. The enchantment of romance in Tietjens’ characterization, then, is not a nostalgic post-war return, but a disruption and re-direction of the rational and hierarchical discourses that pervade the first novel.

Representing Trauma: Romance and Formlessness

The overwhelming irony and disenchantment of the pre-war period set up in Some Do Not is only part of the tetralogy’s depiction of the two decades it encompasses. Though the tetralogy reflects a sense of literary disenchantment that would eventually deepen in later post-war novels, the transitional state that Frayn identifies in Parade’s End might be usefully recast in Hawkes’ conception of “in- betweenness”—not on a time scale of movement towards disillusionment, but on a formal scale that seeks the best mode for representing the trauma of the war. It is not simply that old ideas or tropes are insufficient, but that all modes of representation are insufficient. After depicting a “perfectly appointed” pre-war England, the second part of Some Do Not registers the difficulty of finding a mode in which to record war trauma that exceeds the “regulated” rational network of the opening scene. The formlessness of trauma presents a particular challenge to the containment of the pre-war world.

In a rare, honest exchange between Tietjens and Sylvia, Tietjens tries to convey the experience of shell shock to his wife. Conjuring an image of his brain, he explains: “It’s half of it, an irregular piece of it, dead. Or rather pale. Without a proper blood supply . . . So a great portion of it, in the shape of memory, has gone” (207). He imagines that his mind has a pale dead spot where memory once was. The 186 dead shape itself is reminiscent of what was there previously: an absent presence, or a reminder of loss that Tietjens then attempts to write over by reading the encyclopedia. In his frustration, he reads and helps his friend write journal articles, hoping to recover his memory and sense of self. He tries to fill the empty space of his dead memory by shaping it with words and narrative, but it resists formulation. The shape of dead memory is, paradoxically, formless.

Tietjens’ pale dead spot is symbolic of his traumatic wound, the sort of wound that Cathy Caruth describes as different from the physical wound that can be seen and healed (4). As Caruth explains, trauma is caused by an inassimilable event in the past that is never fully experienced except in its distorted reappearances: “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11-12). The dead space in

Tietjens’ brain mirrors the traumatic event that resists understanding—a sort of formlessness that lacks the organizing power to control or regulate recurring memories and reactions. The formlessness of the pale dead spot can be read as an image in the tetralogy for the way in which trauma undermines the containing structures of memorialization.

Tietjens’ effort to write over his trauma with the Encyclopaedia Britannica resembles the writing of collective memories over the shape of the Unknown Warrior’s body. Like the dead body of the soldier, his pale dead spot holds space, but has no memories to organize it into a meaningful form. Tietjens attempts to fill his memory with words and narrative, just as official memorials overlay the Unknown

Warrior’s body with their own organizing forms that promote tidy closure. The formation of collective memory often results in what some critics have ascribed to tombs like that of the Unknown Warrior, which become sites of the “dominant memory” usually “of the community’s leading social and political 187 groups” (Sherman 7).146 Such a connection between official collective memory and collective identity often involves a process of manipulation that Paul Ricoeur describes as “abuse,” and which he connects to instrumentalized memory as a category of Weberian rationality in which memory is commanded in the service of identity (Ricoeur 80-81). The blankness of the Unknown was opportune for such manipulation and so, as an emblem of English trauma and identity, the grave was quickly overwritten with a script that granted the remains the characteristics of an embodied ideal rather than allowing space for a negotiation of meaning. As an anti-monument, Parade’s End avoids the rationalizing work of fixing memory into a single, fixed shape. The formlessness of Tietjens’ pale dead spot suggests the tetralogy is highly self- conscious of its own form and the struggle to find a mode for writing about the trauma of the war.

The ways in which Ford handles the formlessness of trauma reflects the crisis of mode apparent in the tetralogy. His techniques both coincide with, and diverge from, many of his modernist contemporaries. Familiar modernist conventions for narrativizing war trauma often privilege the absence symbolized by the pale dead spot in Tietjens’ brain. Holding on to formlessness becomes a way to subvert the solid forms endowed with an enchanted Britishness, such as the Unknown Warrior’s tomb.

Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room offers only a pair of the dead soldier’s shoes. Hemingway’s hard-boiled veterans bear mysterious but unnamed wounds. In the work of such writers, ellipses, omissions and fragments draw attention to where traditional epistemologies fail, and Ford’s tetralogy uses many of these techniques to communicate his protagonist’s shell shock. Tietjens, who had an encyclopedic knowledge before the war, comes home stuttering, forgetting names, and constantly drifting in his interior monologue. Much of the story is told achronologically. Each novel encapsulates only a very small amount of time and almost none of the story proceeds in linear order. Often, readers are presented with an event, and then a character’s interior monologue takes over, jumping into the past, and sometimes leaping

146 In Imagined Communities (1983) Benedict Anderson also suggests that tombs of Unknown soldiers are the most “arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism” as they are “saturated with ghostly national imaginings” (9). 188 into the future, rather than returning to the present. These ellipses and narrative omissions convey

Tietjens’ memory loss and his refusal to talk about the events he witnessed in the trenches. On the other hand, just as Tietjens reads the encyclopedia, some writers attempted to account for the war in a sort of linear recorded history that might fill in memory, rather than occlude it. Vera Brittain’s Testament of

Youth, for instance, overlaps with a good deal of the material in Ford’s equally expansive history. Both

Parade’s End and Brittain’s memoir attempt to capture the waning of Victorian values, the war years, and the immediate post-war years, or what Vera Brittain refers to as “the smashing up” of her generation.

Though Brittain is also keenly aware of the difficulties of depicting the period, she explains in the

“Foreword” her attempts to “write the exact truth . . . since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest”—a project she undertakes by including old letters and diaries in a sort of written documentary, which she begins with her parents’ history and the detailed minutiae of her childhood (Brittain 11-12).

The first novel of Ford’s tetralogy also dwells on the trivialities of life before the war, but his project is impressionist fiction that violates the conventions of memoir, fact, single point of view, and totalizing history. As the other texts in this project have demonstrated, romance lends itself to representing the inassimilable that cannot be contained by the realist novel’s conventions. In a similar vein, Parade’s End suggests that romance might be used to represent the uncertainty of trauma.

Two key strategies of romance are its interruption of the totalizing narratives of realism, and its emphasis on delay. Romance as mode exceeds genre boundaries and periodization, and in the novel, often signals that which realism cannot convey. Romance additionally uses the narrative strategy of a liminal time and space before the achievement of the quest. It is frequently a mode that evades explanation and the movement towards an “end.” Resistance to endings is also an aspect of trauma narratives in which the traumatic event recurs to disrupt the tidy closure of successful mourning. Jean-

Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega trace a kinship between trauma and romance in the resistance to tidy 189 narrative closure. They build on both Patricia Parker’s dilation of time in romance and Diane Elam’s understanding of romance as an excessive, postmodern form. Similar to trauma, Ganteau and Onega describe romance as “a hyperbolical idiom bent on conveying that there is something in excess of representation” (Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature 10). Because of the shared affront to formal organization in the two discourses, Ganteau and Onega argue that romance might be an appropriate vehicle for the representation of trauma. Elsewhere, Ganteau further connects the repetition of trauma in a novel to the operation of romance. He writes: “the inassimilable nature of the traumatic event provokes a collapse of memory and understanding and creates the conditions for a return of the unassimilated . . . the past is seen to be repeated in the present, multiplying anachronistic and hallucinatory occurrences in which temporal logics are overturned in pathic moments generally associated with the affective excesses of romance” (Ganteau, “The Logic of Affect” 87). Ganteau’s emphasis on repetition and excess demonstrates common elements between trauma and romance: trauma that is not fully assimilated and that defies simple knowledge behaves like romance, disrupting totalizing narratives that attempt a rational, linear account of the traumatic event.147 Trauma, then, is not akin to chance, mystery or impressionism as something mysterious and romantic in itself, but after the war, trauma becomes a threatening discourse that must be contained and mastered by narratives of certainty.

In other words, trauma is a site of uncertainty open to the process of rationalization. For artists working to reject such rationalization after the war, romance becomes a particularly suitable mode for representing trauma.

The impulse to rationalize trauma is symbolized in Tietjens’ attempt to write over the blankness of his wounded brain with the encyclopedia. The process is also evident in Tietjens’ conviction that the

147 In her seminal study Unclaimed Experience (1996) Caruth also describes texts that convey traumatic experience as those that resist traditional epistemological models: “If traumatic experience, as Freud indicates suggestively, is an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs, then these texts, each in its turn, ask what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). 190

Department of Statistics will push him out because he is a reminder of the inassimilable in war. Through his shell shock, Tietjens is a physical reminder of trauma and represents the repeated interruptions of traumatic memory to the tidy rationality of the bankers and English administrative class that stay home. If romance challenges logical, rational models of history and rational models of trauma, then it is a fitting mode for Ford to weave into a war narrative that depicts a protagonist who simultaneously clings to calculation, precision, and the perennial “stiff upper lip,” but also subverts these same values. Romance in Parade’s End does not write over the pale dead spot of Tietjens’ memories to contain them; instead, romance draws attention to the uncertainty and excess of trauma. Tietjens himself is a symbol of traumatic repetition, making the romance elements in his characterization experimental, rather than simply representative of the “golden age” of English country gentlemen.

St. Christopher the Giant Mealsack: Secular Hagiography and Excess

Tietjens literally embodies the excessive and inassimilable. He is physically described as a giant mealsack, and even an elephant, but equally excessive is the magnitude of vicious rumours surrounding his personal life, which unjustly mar his worldly reputation. The list of allusions used as epithets is also extensive. Within the first few pages of the novel Tietjens refers to himself as Jeremiah, and in the final pages, his brother, Mark, stammers through a rhyme that figures Tietjens as Noah on Mount Ararat. In between, he is variously imagined as a fabulous monster, a Great Panjandrum, Captain Dreyfuss,

Bluebeard, Chaunticleer, Apollo, a heraldic unicorn, an Anglican saint, and even Christ himself. Tietjens is repeatedly accused by his wife, Sylvia, of imitating “Our Lord,” which is anathema to her and the rest of the hypocritical society of Parade’s End. When Sylvia tells his godfather that Tietjens desires to

“model himself upon our Lord,” General Campion springs to his feet “as if she had stabbed him with a hatpin.” “Extreme discomfort overcame him” and he regarded Tietjens “as if he had been the unicorn of 191 the royal arms come alive” (No More Parades 179-80). The analogy is telling: the two figures associated with Tietjens in this passage—Christ and the unicorn of British heraldry—suggest the troubling nature of his character to national memory. Alive, Tietjens cannot be absorbed into the English imagination as a martyred follower of Christ safely enclosed in the floor of Westminster Abbey. His association with

Christ stabs like “a hatpin” and causes “extreme discomfort” in those around him.148

In 1935, Ford wrote a letter to the novelist Anthony Bertram in which he criticizes Bertram for his invocation of the Christ narrative: “The Christ progression is, you know, really too vieux jeu and too provincially Middle Class English. You must shake that off, if only because it is a source of continual slackness” (“Letter to Anthony Bertram, 15 October 1935” 245). But Ford continues:

When the Englishman—who is almost never a Christian but always, or almost always, a Christ-

ist—takes the Christ saga in hand it means that he is treating a subject that is already more than half

written for him . . .We as Englishmen have gone on for long imagining that if we as individuals

model ourselves on the English ideal of the Redeemer we shall have a good time—for so long that

we expect the Redeemer to touch his forelock like a good footman and give us supernatural market

tips and advantages . . . The process is wanting in respect to the Son of God. (245-46)

Ford’s criticism is aimed, not so much at the Christ narrative, but at the English treatment of it. After establishing his position on Christism, Ford turns from the hollowness of an overused motif to what he sees as the proper essence of the narrative: “to attain the really authentic . . . you must give up being a

Christist and become a Christian or something else that is fierce and bitter as Christians have to be.

148 Aside from a passing mention, Christopher Tietjens’ characterization as an Anglican saint has been underexplored in criticism of the novels. Saunders, one of the most prolific critics of Ford and Parade’s End dismisses the importance of religious elements in the novel, pointing out that it is Sylvia who “spread the malicious rumour that Christopher ‘wants to play the part of Jesus Christ’. . . It would be more accurate to say that Ford is testing his view that ‘Christianity as a faith died a few days after the 4th August, 1914 . . .’” (A Dual Life vol. 2, 223). In “A Tribute to Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford,” Julian Barnes also comments briefly on Tietjens’ sainthood, but only as a foil for the rest of the hypocritical society. Sara Haslam also reads Tietjens’ sainthood as part of his characterization through the eighteenth-century cultural value of humiliation (“From Conversation to Humiliation” 48-49). While each of these arguments provides nuances to his characterization as saint, they do not engage with sainthood at length, nor as a structural element in the novel. 192

Christianity isn’t you know a Sunday supper with the maids given the evening off; it is eating flesh and drinking blood” (246). In Parade’s End, Ford uses the Christ motif precisely for the fierceness he identifies here. Rather than adhering to an English tradition, Ford’s use of the Christ saga is a sort of radical re-enchantment. If enchantment is an encounter with the inassimilable that disrupts one’s view of the world and re-orients thought and behavior, then enchantment might be used as a vehicle for representing the similar effects of war trauma. By disrupting the palatable construct of the soldier as saint figure and replacing it with a discomfiting imitator of Christ, the tetralogy insists on excess as a formal strategy that spills over the shape of traumatic memory.

As St. Christopher, Tietjens represents the excess of romance to his community. The legend of St.

Christopher holds that he was a man of great stature, just like Tietjens, the giant mealsack. St.

Christopher’s size and great strength make him fit to stand at a dangerous river and carry travellers to safety on the other side. One day St. Christopher is asked to bear a child across the river, but the child is so heavy that he struggles and nearly drowns—an almost exact parallel to Tietjens, who carries one of his soldiers through the mud with great difficulty, almost drowning in the trench. The reconfiguration of this scene from the hagiographical account is unmistakable. In the saint’s legend, however, the small child is revealed to be Christ, and thus St. Christopher became known figuratively for bearing Christ in his heart, and his name came to mean “bearer of Christ.” By drawing on this hagiographical pattern, Ford evokes the romanticized discourse written on to the Unknown, but also deflates it through a collision with secular romance.

Secular hagiography is itself a form born of collision, which critiqued both secular and spiritual ideological values in medieval saints’ legends and secular romance. As saints’ lives were translated into the vernacular and passed down, “grand leaps of fiction” were added as projections of the saint’s internal spiritual experience. Secular hagiography was a hybrid form that arose from the cross-influence of saint’s 193 lives and Middle English romances. Manuscripts show that romances were read alongside related genres such as hagiography and chanson de gestes resulting in a dialectic relationship between them, which also resulted in a critique of romance ideologies (Gaunt 49). Both the legends of St. Christopher and St.

Valentine are recounted in William Caxton’s Golden Legend (1483), which Caxton translated from

Jacobus de Voragine’s saints’ lives. In addition to the translations of the hagiographies, Caxton edited Sir

Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (1485). Caxton was responsible, then, for giving the English medieval world two widely popular forms of romance: the Matter of Britain in secular, courtly romance, and a collection of hagiographies, which were bestsellers, making it likely that the two were read alongside each other.149 Barbara Newman describes such a relationship between secular and sacred in medieval texts as a dialectical “crossover”: “Crossover is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms” (ix). Crossover between secular romance and saints’ lives is largely centered on the hero, which Newman describes as lending an “idealizing luster” to the protagonists in both genres (37).150 Both hagiographical and secular romance heroes might follow a pattern of removal from their environment, and then return or be martyred, becoming exempla around which new communities form their values. Newman’s definition of crossover recalls Caroline Levine’s description of the collision of forms: in the case of hagiography and secular romance, such a collision reassigns heavenly and earthly value. Saints’ lives promoted a sort of

“contemptus mundi” or rejection of this world as well as a passive imitation of Christ, whereas the secular romance elevates chivalric action and an idealized world. Just as the stories of Lancelot, Percival, and

149 Ford was doubtless familiar with these medieval bestsellers based on his predilection for romance and the middle ages, as well as his certain knowledge of William Morris’ Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend (1892). Also influential for Ford, was his deeply religious aunt by marriage, Christina Rossetti, who wrote Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), a book of saints’ lives with which he would have been familiar. 150 Newman explains, “Translated or adapted from Latin vitae, vernacular saints’ lives freely introduced romance elements, while romance heroes were made to teeter on the brink of sainthood” (Newman 37). 194

Galahad, especially since Chretien de Troyes, embody the struggle between the courtly and spiritual calling of a knight, Tietjens’ story is a crossover of soldier and saint, worldly and unworldly.151

In Parade’s End, the world is disenchanted and true chivalric action is impossible, which is why

Tietjens must be a saint, rather than a knight. In a world of empty romance and euphemism, it is his deceptive friend, Macmaster, who is knighted. Macmaster, an administrative non-combatant, and his adulterous mistress-turned-wife become figures of the disenchantment of English romance itself. Tietjens gives Macmaster the calculations he needs in order to distinguish himself as a bureaucrat in the

Department of Statistics, and Macmaster uses these calculations to gain a knighthood. Macmaster’s knighthood also turns his wife, the hypocritical Edith Ethel, into Lady Macmaster—a reversal of courtly romance that values purity and chastity in noble Ladies. The ironies are multiple. In this declining age it is the bureaucrats who are knights. Macmaster’s immersion in the worldly values of the modern nobility earn him a title, whereas Tietjens’ rejection of worldly recognition reifies his status as a saint—a term of derision in this society. As Mark muses in Last Post: “That was what was the matter with Christopher. It was the soft streak. A Tietjens had no business with saintliness in his composition! It was bound to get him looked on as a blackguard!” (Last Post 72). Moreover, Macmaster is not only knighted for work that belongs to Tietjens, but also for work that enables England to lie to its allies.

In contrast to Macmaster’s trajectory, Tietjens begins as a caricature of English rationality, but following the conventions of the saint’s legend, he moves away from the false, hypocritical society.152

151 Simon Gaunt argues that one of Chretien de Troyes’ innovations in romance was that love became an experience that led to spiritual progress, which may have been based on its interaction with hagiography (52). His example is Lancelot’s adventure in the cart, which results in Lancelot’s humility, but also draws on the typology of Christ, and is an example that resonates with Tietjens’ ride in the dog-cart with Valentine. Gaunt claims that Lancelot is a secular saint imitating the asceticism of heroes of hagiography when he rides in the cart and risks becoming an outcast (also similar to Tietjens). Gaunt’s point is that Troyes uses the influence of hagiography to problematize Lancelot’s worship of the queen rather than God, and that ultimately, the two genres work in relation to each other. 152 Virginia Woolf’s character, Septimus, in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is a useful foil for illuminating the structural work of spiritual romance in Tietjens’ character and the movement away from society. Although Septimus’ characterization also relies on tropes of sainthood, these are ironic and are not part of the larger structure of the novel as is the case with the 195

When his godfather, General Campion asks Tietjens what determines a saint, he answers that it is in living in harmony with one’s soul, and since God created the soul, it is living in harmony with heaven

(No More Parades 303). This quest for harmony with one’s soul is what determines Tietjens’, and to a lesser extent, Valentine’s, motives and actions throughout the tetralogy. Parade’s End is a love story between these two saints marked by both contemptus mundi and an idealized world. Throughout the first three books their romance is a contest between spiritual love and fleshly love as they struggle against their sexual desire for each other, but also as they struggle with the conventions of pre-war England. In the new post-war world of the final novel, Tietjens is able to turn away from the English principles that resemble the “skeleton map” of the country and live in harmony with his soul, which means both eschewing the social values of his world, but also embracing an idealized world in the country with

Valentine.

As a secular saint, though, Tietjens does not actually practice Christianity in its orthodox forms. In charge of his soldiers before an expected German attack, Tietjens muses, “Don’t we say prayers before battle? . . . He could not imagine himself doing it . . . Otherwise he found that he was meditating on how to get the paper affair of the unit into a better state . . . ‘Who sweeps a room as for Thy cause . . .’ It was the equivalent of prayer probably” (A Man Could Stand Up 125-26). His allusion here to George

Herbert’s poem “The Elixir” parallels the way he enacts spirituality throughout the tetralogy, with an ironic twist on the lyrics changing “laws” to “cause” that overturns the bureaucratic war machine. He

hagographical pattern in PE. Septimus’ god delusions are a result of his shell shock, unlike Tietjens’ sainthood, which is part of other characters’ understandings of him. Septimus imagines: “Look, the unseen bade him, the voice which now communicated with him who was the greatest of mankind, Septimus, lately taken from life to death, the Lord who had come to renew society, who lay like a coverlet, a snow blanket smitten only by the sun, for ever unwasted, suffering for ever, the scapegoat, the eternal sufferer” (22). Later, he dreams: “he was free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free; alone . . . he, Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning . . .” (57). In these passages, Septimus imagines himself as a sort of redeemer, but his shell shock detaches him from the world, and his death is a sign of disillusion and withdrawal, rather than a new form that reimagines possibility for the post-war world. Despite these differences, Woolf and Ford both use their characters to disenchant easy post-war consolations. In Mrs. Dalloway, though, it is Clarissa who is the inexpressible life force, whereas Septimus commits suicide.

196 breaks with the War Office’s “laws” to carry out his own “cause.” In the poem, Herbert’s persona meditates on how humble, everyday actions can be glorified. The “cause” for Tietjens is not the government’s war but the minutiae that will ensure his men have enough supplies. In looking after his unit Tietjens does everything as carefully as possible, constantly being harassed for caring too much about toothbrushes, shoes, and paperwork when he could have any position in the army he wants. His saintly evolution is to embody the humility and empathy of Christ that draws him to care for his men in the trenches. He meditates, for instance, on how to calm his men: “he could appear unconcernedly reflective and all there—and he could tell them, at trying moments that, say, their ideas about skylarks were all wrong . . . That was tranquillising” (A Man Could Stand Up 134). Like the biblical story of

Christ calming his disciples in the boat during the storm, Tietjens earns the trust of his men by presenting a calm appearance. Though he cannot save them from the war, he can bring his men comfort by paying attention to the small matters of their lives, which subverts the instrumentalism of the war as a machine effort.

Trauma and Romance in Last Post: Resurrected Christ and Returned Soldier

Tietjens’ explicit imitation of the saintly Anglican, George Herbert, and his daydreams of Herbert’s country parish in Bemerton also foreshadow his placement back on English soil in the final novel, Last

Post. In this final volume Tietjens’ characterization is closer to a type of Christ than to a saintly imitator.

Last Post is set some years after the war where Tietjens and Valentine live together openly in the country near Tietjens’ ancestral estate in Yorkshire. The novel is comprised of several characters’ streams of consciousness, and though he is the central subject of each character’s musings, Tietjens himself is strikingly absent. Yet at the end of Last Post, he returns. His re-entrance is so marked because his absence has been felt so obviously, and then, slouched over and beaten, but embodying a sort of 197 resurrection, he appears holding a fragment of the mystical Groby Great Tree: the tree that has always grown on the grounds of his Yorkshire estate, and is symbolic of both England and the cross of Christ. In this final novel, strains of spiritual romance and Englishness are re-oriented and re-enchanted in Tietjens’ return.

Throughout the tetralogy Tietjens is figured as Jeremiah, unicorn, saint, and in Last Post, both as

Noah and Christ. This cast of biblical characters marks him definitively as a type in the sense of a prefiguration of Christ; subsequently, his return as a Christ figure in the last novel carries connotations of prophetical fulfillment. By drawing on Christological typology, Ford employs a familiar Victorian (and largely British) biblical and literary convention. George Landow’s seminal study of Victorian typology establishes the device as a form of scriptural interpretation that identifies anticipations of Christ in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament. The “type” can be a person or symbol (such as a rainbow or animal sacrifice), which prefigures Christ and his life, which are the “antitype.” The antitype fulfills or completes the meaning of the type, which in turn lends to history a meaningful structure.153

The symbolic import of typology is layered: the type carries with it a sense of the temporal and eternal; it conjures the entirety of the Gospel scheme; it is part of a divine system of revelation; and it is part of a line of interpretation and iconography, which hold significance in themselves as historical traditions (Landow 108-09). Importantly, though types are endowed with the spiritual significance of the antitype they prefigure, they are never meant to represent the full reality of Christ. They are at once

153 In Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (1980), Landow distinguishes between character type as a pre-established pattern from history or a literary work (ie. orphan, lonely maiden), and Christological typology as a symbolic mode that gestures towards a greater spiritual event that will be fulfilled in the future; in other words, the latter is part of a scheme of revelation (108). Typological reading was not only one of the most common Victorian methods of reading the Bible, but was also as a habit of mind for extra-biblical reading, even after some had lost their faith, including major Victorian artists such as Ruskin and Carlyle (Landow 118). Typology provided a sense of meaning for historical events as part of a divinely ordered plan that pointed forward to spiritual fulfillment in Christ. Some artists and politicians even harnessed the symbolism of typology for secular purposes—in particular, the Pre-Raphaelites. As Landow demonstrates, Dante Rossetti’s painting is full of typological symbolism, which suggests Ford was very familiar with Victorian experiments in typology as a family member and leading authority on the Pre-Raphaelites.

198 generative of multiple meanings (representing themselves and their antitype), but also inadequate as symbols of something much greater. The type is both symbolic of a meaning that cannot be fully understood or contained, and points to something inassimilable itself.

As a type, Tietjens’ character is structured by conflicting formal principles. On the one hand, his characterization is granted meaning both in the enclosed wholeness of teleological time and in a narrative typological pattern of foreshadowing and fulfillment. Also, as a soldier saint, Tietjens recalls the

Unknown whose sacrifice is significant within a divinely ordered cosmos; the blank meaninglessness of the soldier’s death is written over with a containing narrative of sacrifice, salvation, and ultimate meaning in resurrection and reward. On the other hand, however, these containing, bounded forms are disrupted by trauma, which is structured by less certain principles. As Anne Whitehead explains in her book on trauma narratives: “The experience of trauma has not yet been assimilated by the individual and so cannot be possessed in the forms of memory or narrative. On the contrary, trauma assumes a haunting quality, continuing to possess the subject with its insistent repetitions and returns” (12). Such repetition and return are inherent in the story of the traumatized soldier. For instance, in Parade’s End, Tietjens is haunted by his partial memories of the death of one of his soldiers, O Nine Morgan. His memories return haphazardly, and are sometimes confused with earlier events so that the story is not told simply and chronologically. Tietjens’ traumatic confusion is also evident when an earlier pre-war accident with his horse is blurred with his memories of his men in the war. The jarring repetition of Tietjens’ trauma confounds the containing meaning of the typological pattern set within an orderly cosmos.

Rather than writing over the trauma with a consoling fiction, though, the hagiographical pattern and

Christ narrative provide meaning to Tietjens’ trauma in new ways. Though of a different nature, the

Christ story also bears within it the repetition of trauma, because the suffering and wounds of the cross are repeatedly remembered through Christian ritual. As a figure of Christ carrying the fragment of Groby 199

Great Tree, Tietjens is a reminder of this suffering. Though Christ’s wounds carry a teleological significance, they also find meaning in the response they elicit from the hearer who is charged, by Jesus himself at the last supper, to remember his suffering. By invoking a living Christ whose woundedness is ritually remembered and repeated in the life of the saint, Parade’s End suggests that if the trauma of the soldier is to be absorbed into the Christ narrative to give it meaning, the emphasis must be shifted.

Tietjens’ depiction as wounded Christ negates falsely consolatory memories of dead soldier saints now detached from the world, and replaces them with an active remembrance of the returned soldier’s struggle with trauma in the here and now.

In the resurrection, the Christ story makes demands of the faithful: not only that they remember the traumatic events of the crucifixion, but also that it changes their mode of living in the world. It does not inspire contemptus mundi, but rather an engagement with the present. The biblical Christ physically dwells in the world, engaging in menial tasks, getting his hands dirty, feeding the poor, healing the sick, and bringing comfort to his followers in the midst of the storm. So too does Tietjens do all of these things for his soldiers, transforming a figure of consolatory Englishness into something transformative and enchanting. As Jane Bennett insists, “Enchantment, that energizing and unsettling sense of the great and incredible fact of existence, reflects a stubborn attachment to life that most bodies seem to possess. To be enchanted is, in the moment of its activation, to assent wholeheartedly to life—not to this or that particular condition or aspect of it but to the experience of living itself” (159-60).

Bennett’s definition is realized in Tietjens’ insistence on living. Tietjens’ attempts to engage with his soldiers and re-establish himself after the war suggest a new life that has significance for a renewed future. On Armistice Day we see Tietjens in the middle of a circle of crippled, dancing soldiers—a circle that includes the soldier he carried to safety who now has one glass eye and a half-crown jubilantly stuck in the other eye. Tietjens’ grotesque body and his new community of wounded soldiers cannot be 200 contained in post-war discourses of triumphant warrior saints or humble “Tommies.” When Valentine first sees Tietjens after the war she is prepared to be “the cold nurse of a shell-shock case” and tries to steel herself against the blow; however, he appears the opposite of an empty shell: “He charged upon her.

There in the open. More like a lion. He came, grey all over, his grey hair . . . shining, charging down the steps, having slammed the hall door. And lopsided” (A Man Could Stand Up 183). His body exceeds the expectations she has for detachment and a bleak, unfeeling future. Rather than a bed-ridden shell-shock case, he appears like a lion. Tietjens’ overwhelming leonine, Christ-figured body exceeds the containing narrative of the Unknown Warrior celebrated on Armistice Day.

Juxtaposing hagiography and the Christ story with the tale of a returned soldier enacts a sort of collision that challenges both easy consolation and detachment. Tietjens with his chunk of wood is not the easily idealized martyr of the Unknown’s funeral hymn, but a type, gesturing to the inassimilable.

Tietjens as Christ figure is more than a comforting symbol of salvation, hope, and rebirth: his physical and psychological sacrifices command the difficult attention Christ asks of his followers in the story of the last supper when he transmogrifies food to flesh and blood. Ford’s comments in the letter to Bertram suggest that his own treatment of Christopher Tietjens as Christ relies precisely on the sort of fierceness and bitterness he identifies as authentic and believes to contrast with the comfortable English gentleman-

Christ. Tietjens is no respectable Jesus, but rather the Christ who preached eating flesh and drinking blood: a figure of discomfort and excess who stabs like a hatpin and re-orients the hearer’s mode of being in the world. In the final novel, Tietjens is recast as a wounded soldier struggling to make ends meet, and through whom the text re-orients attention and memory.

201

Trauma and Romance: Resistant Mourning and Return to Arcadia

As part of this re-orientation, the novel again turns to romance and excess, but through romanticized space. When Tietjens returns in Last Post, he is not lost in the anonymity of London: he is home in the idyllic English countryside in the Arcadian landscape of national identity. His return to the countryside transgresses the connotations of the English greenworld in which English soil is a common motif of consolation. The remains of Rupert Brooke’s combatant in his 1914 poem “The Soldier,” for example, contain traces of an “English heaven” that hallow the soil of the foreign field on which they lie

(Brooke line 14). The body of Brooke’s soldier is enclosed in a circumscribed set of English associations, claiming a spot of foreign soil and making the dust richer with the pride of English air, much like the bounded conceptions of Englishness in the grave of the Unknown. Tietjens’ body, on the other hand, overwhelms in its presence and contaminates that “English heaven.”

Rather than falling into the mutually exclusive categories of paralysis or successful catharsis that might be expected in a post-war novel, the conclusion to Tietjens’ secular hagiography is a form of resistant mourning. Patricia Rae writes of resistant or “ethical mourning” as a deliberate decision not to accept compensation or participate in normative mourning practices that might lead to forgetfulness.

Resistant mourning fights against “a forgetting of, or an abdication of responsibility for, what has been lost” and against an “amnesia has been too often demanded and paid in the interests of preserving the status quo” (Rae, “Introduction” 18). Tietjens’ return as saint and Christ figure in the final novel presents a challenge to the amnesia of successful mourning and insists on a changed future. Though the final return to Arcadia is often read as consolatory romance, the mythic, unreal space of Arcadia also re- channels a romanticized English landscape into a space where trauma can be remembered, rather than forgotten. 202

When Graham Greene published his 1962-63 Bodley Head edition of Parade’s End, he excised the idyllic Last Post as if it never belonged in the series and cited the Arcadian elements as part of his reason.

The bizarre removal of the final Tietjens novel was not only based on Greene’s conviction that Ford himself did not approve of the final novel (though he took the trouble to write and publish it), but it also reflects Greene’s judgment that the final novel somehow fails in comparison to the first three because of its conclusion. In his introduction Greene opines: “I think it could be argued that The Last Post was more than a mistake—it was a disaster, a disaster which has delayed a full critical appreciation of Parade’s

End” (5). Greene’s hyperbolic language highlights his prejudice. He further argues, the ambiguities “are brought into the idyllic sunshine of Christopher’s successful escape into the life of a Kentish small- holder” and solved in “the carefully arranged happy finale of Last Post” (6-7). Contentious debates about the place of Last Post in the tetralogy similarly dismiss the Arcadian setting as falsely nostalgic and consolatory—the exact opposite of the tone of the other novels—or, in some more nuanced readings, claim that its break with the other novels signals the impossibility of imagining a post-war life.154

Reading Last Post through the lens of the earlier strains of spiritual romance, however, suggests the novel is an attempt at forming new space. The jarring relocation in Last Post to the idyllic countryside can be read as a deconstruction of formulaic post-war romance, but also as a strategy of resistant mourning that depends on romance to reroute ideology.155

154 Ann Barr Snitow views the romance positively, but outlines multiple tones that are intentionally combined with romance in order that “Ford’s sentiment, his gift to his characters of love and peace and hope, can convince, satisfy, and not cloy” (233). Eve Sorum sees the dual tone of Last Post as an intentional sign of failure: it fails in order to avoid successful mourning and remain melancholic. Sorum mistrusts the hopefulness of a “healthy regeneration” in the setting and situation of Last Post, preferring to dwell on Tietjens’ absence and Mark’s silence, claiming that Mark’s death is not tragically hopeful, but rather robs the narrative of its “guiding voice.” It is hard to see, however, how Mark’s bitter, impotent internal dialogue is a guiding voice. In the end, the character who refuses to forget the war and the injustices of the Armistice—who refuses to move forward—dies. Ultimately, critics who insist on irony to temper the romance elements in the novel still repeat a typical bias against happy endings and romance itself, and fail to see how romance can be a strategy for re-directing ideologies. 155 As a performative element, the Arcadian setting recalls the most successful Edwardian musical before the war: The Arcadians. A self-conscious performativity of Arcadia is indeed suggested in the novel. A description of the rustic groundskeeper is an explicit sign of this sort of theatricality: “[Marie Leonie] came round the rough balks of the side of the stable upon Gunning, seated on the stone-sill of the door, cutting with a broad-bladed clasp-knife considerable chunks out of 203

In Patricia Rae’s examination of Arcadian Englishness in the inter-war years she demonstrates the frequency with which the English countryside was used in post-war books as a “consolatory resource”

(“Double Sorrow” 216). Arcadia was a place of solitude and peace, but it was also a space that needed protecting; it was “a cause that made war’s losses worth enduring” (Rae, “Double Sorrow 219). Paul

Fussell similarly explains the function of Arcadia in post-war narratives: “Recourse to the pastoral is an

English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them. Pastoral reference, whether to literature or to actual rural localities and objects, is a way of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable; at the same time, it is a comfort in itself, like rum, a deep dugout, or a wooly vest” (255). In Fussell’s analysis, Arcadia can be a tool for irony and absurdity, but it is also a protection, comfort, and even escape. Arcadian imagery, then, was another frequent source of romanticization invoked to sustain both the war effort and provide comfort afterwards.

One book, commissioned by the YMCA in 1917, The Old Country: A Book of Love and Praise of

England, was sent to soldiers at the front. The book of songs, poems, and stories by the likes of

Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Tennyson, Hardy, and others was also filled with illustrations of English landmarks, as well as country scenes. The foreword reads “yet is England’s ground ‘sweet soil,’ mother and nurse in one, to English men and women, which holds them with a powerful charm, never more than when they are far away” (Rhys v). English soil as “mother and nurse in one” not only endows the countryside with healing properties, but the sentiment also consoles through its justification of the conflict. English soil provides a reason to strive for and celebrate victory in the face of meaningless destruction. This vision of Arcadian Englishness is a form of romance organized by the principle of

a large meat pasty. She surveyed his extended leggings, his immense be-mired boots and his unshaven countenance and remarked in French that the shepherds of Admetus were probably differently dressed. They certainly were in all the performances of the Alceste that she had seen” (Last Post 32-33). Gunning’s character is literally drawn from the stage, and in the final pages Mark’s internal commentary describes the group around his deathbed as “like a pantomime” (Last Post 202).

204 wholeness. As an imaginative escape from the realities of war, it operates like a bounded whole in which both the rural safety of England outside the primary theatre of war is conflated with a deeper dugout—a physical boundary of safety that excludes undesirable elements. Tietjens’ inconvenient traumatic return mars this space of wholeness, however.

The connection between English identity and the soil is forged early on in Some Do Not, and finds both its apotheosis and inversion in Last Post, again signaling the movement between disenchantment and enchantment in the tetralogy. In its pervasive irony, the first novel subverts the connection between

Englishness and the land. Walking through the fields with Valentine, Tietjens imagines their pairing as

“So racy of the soil” (Some Do Not 132). The scene is filled with the death of the pure England that

Tietjens knows is partly an illusion, as well as with foreshadowing of the war that will demolish this sentimental England completely. Tietjens muses:

‘God’s England! . . . Land of Hope and Glory! . . . All absolutely correct!’ just before swinging his

walking stick at the flowers in the field: The structure collapsed, gracefully, like a woman killed

among crinolines! ‘Now I’m a bloody murderer!’ Tietjens said . . . He slew two more mulleins and

a sow-thistle! A shadow, but not from the sun, a gloom, lay across the sixty acres of purple grass

bloom and marguerites, white: like petticoats of lace over the grass! (Some Do Not 133)

Here, his first romantic scene with Valentine is conflated with both English soil and approaching war.

Some Do Not suggests that a dangerous mix of English romance and nationalism have shaped a discourse that has contributed to the war. The English field is a source of romance, but its romanticization fuels a nationalist fervor for “God’s England” upon which there is already a “shadow, but not from the sun.”

In Last Post, the English countryside becomes the setting for conflicting visions of the future.

Tietjens’ survival as contrasted with the death of his non-combatant brother, Mark, is essential to reading

Last Post as a reformulation of Arcadia’s associations with nostalgia and escape. Mark’s coma and 205 eventual death enact a withdrawal from the world as he lies in silence in the English countryside, either unable or refusing to speak. His thoughts frequently run to the signing of the Armistice and his (and

Ford’s) eerily prescient predictions of another war. For Mark, there are no future meaningful acts, thus detachment and death are his form of resistance. Tietjens, on the other hand, survives. He is no longer, however, a Yorkshire gentleman, having given up his estate. Invoking the same trope of the English gentleman-Christ for which Ford castigated Bertram, Tietjens’ brother Mark wonders with bewilderment why Tietjens has given up his title: “Old Campion had once said that he believed—he positively believed, with shudders—that Christopher desired to live in the spirit of Christ. That had seemed horrible to the general, but Mark did not see that it was horrible, per se . . . He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs” (Last Post 90-91). Through Mark’s despair over the changes to

Groby and his land-owning class, Last Post evinces a more complex return to the English countryside:

Tietjens returns to Arcadia, but as a wounded soldier rather than as an English gentleman. He and

Valentine do not dwell in the same greenworld as when they originally walked “clean and upright” in the

Kentish fields under the approval of their class. Tietjens’ return envisions a future that demands attention to the survivors and the necessity of helping the living. Last Post is an ironic engagement with another narrative of romanticized Englishness, and yet one in which Tietjens as Christ figure dwells, not to return to the past, but to forge a new future.

Where critics have seen the idyllic romance of Last Post as superficial, its presence might instead be read as a disruption to a more totalizing master narrative that romanticized the buried soldiers and homogenized memory. By contrast, through his inassimilable hero, Ford privileges the living. In the same

Armistice Day edition of The Times memorializing the Unknown Warrior, officers and “war leaders” called for the sort of memory Ford strives for with Tietjens. Using “debt” terminology, leaders of the 206

British forces begged readers of The Times not to allow the Unknown Warrior ceremonies to overshadow the living. As Field Marshal Douglas Haig put it: “I cannot discharge my debt unless I can awaken my fellow-countrymen and women to an active recognition of theirs” (Haig 15). Tietjens’ survival demands a similar recognition. His body offers marked resistance to the tragic romanticization of the English soldier-saint easily contained in a palatable memory, as well as to the peaceful consolation of an immortal

English innocence. Tietjens’ particularity is emphasized in Last Post through the network of memories and impressions each character has of him.156

Ford’s project resembles Thomas Hardy’s similar efforts at post-war commemoration, demonstrating a shared ethos between the authors and their common approach to memorialization. In his introduction to A Book of Remembrance, the record of one Dorset family’s wartime participation written just before the end of the war, Hardy wrote: “these chronicles, even when they become musty with age, may be interesting not only to descendants of the family but to others who are not of their blood or name.

It often has happened that an account of what befell particular individuals in unusual circumstances has conveyed a more vivid picture of those circumstances than a comprehensive view of them has been able to raise” (Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice 393). His introduction prizes the account of “particular individuals” over a “comprehensive view,” emphasizing particular memory in order to resist the generalized and often exclusionary construct of dominant memory. In a similar spirit, Ford re-orients romance tropes like sainthood and Arcadia that were being used to shape collective memory, especially in monuments. One writer in The Sphere of 1920 called for “an altar dedicated to France’s warrior saint” at the head of the Unknown’s grave, and “a stately enclosure, fashioned out of the costliest materials which the British Empire can supply” (“A Shrine” 192). Tietjens’ individuality is the “anti-monument” that resists such grandiose constructs of collective mourning.

156 The diffuse construction of his character resembles that of Woolf’s Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room; however, Tietjens returns, whereas Jacob is represented in memory only by his empty shoes. Like Woolf, though, Ford privileges particular memory and history over the communal. 207

In January of 1913 Ford wrote to poet Lucy Masterman to give her advice on the poetry she had sent to him:

remember only that you live in our terrific, untidy, indifferent empirical age, where not one single

problem is solved and not one single Accepted Idea from the past has any more any magic. Our

Lord and his teachings are dead; and the late [Samuel] Smiles and his, and the late William Morris

and John Ruskin and Newman and Froude . . .” (“Letter to Lucy Masterman, 23 January 1913” 55)

Ford wrote this advice to Masterman only a short time before publishing The Good Soldier, and his words correspond with the disenchanted tone of John Dowell’s “saddest story” in this early novel. On the brink of the Great War all “Accepted Ideas” from the past did indeed seem dead, and as the religious imagery in The Good Soldier suggests, the story of Christ and the Catholic teachings of Ford’s church included. Yet Ford goes on to suggest a way forward for Masterman’s poetry: “It is for us to get at the new truths or to give life to such of the old as will appeal hominibus bonae voluntatis. Only to do that we must do it in the clear pure language of our own day and with what is clear and new in our own individualities” (55). Ford may have dismissed the magic of the past in 1913 before the Great War, but his search for meaning a decade later, after the war, suggests that magic, romance, and “Our Lord and his teachings” had life in them yet. Like the earlier romances of modern enchantment in this project,

Parade’s End is an experiment in building new forms from old. In his tetralogy Ford’s vision again turns to non-instrumental modes of knowledge and representation to depict the post-war world, not by simply resurrecting traditional faith and “Accepted Ideas,” but by re-shaping them in the “language of [his] own day.” Parade’s End suggests that it is forms of romance that might best be able to represent inassimilable trauma and the uncertainty of the post-war world.

208

Conclusion

In the same month that Ford’s Last Post was published, Thomas Hardy died. Hardy died on 11

January, 1928, and on 22 January Ford wrote an obituary for him in the New York Herald Tribune. Ford begins his panegyric with a memory of a house gathering in 1911 at which Ford and Hardy were both present. The two were houseguests of Edward Clodd, “the Rationalist,” as Ford describes him. Ford recalls that in the evening the guests began to talk about religion, which was a favourite subject of

Clodd’s, who was a popular freethinker and supporter of Huxley and Darwin. As Ford explains, “he liked to talk about religion in order to demonstrate how completely the accursed thing had been rooted out”

(“Thomas Hardy, O. M. Obit. 11 January 1928” 2). Ford remembers that Clodd was disappointed that his guests felt differently: “when it came to our all confessing to our faiths how bitter was his disillusionment” (2). Ford groups himself here as a “Papist” with Hillaire Belloc (a Catholic and close friend of Chesterton’s) and the other Catholic guests. Ford’s surprising revelation is that in the same moment “Thomas Hardy shyly averred that he was a practicing member of the Church of England” (2).

Ford prefaces his obituary with this anecdote and allows Hardy’s unexpected confession to stand without comment. What impresses Ford, however, is that after Clodd “tore at his white hairs” and lamented that

“the leaders of English thought” were allowing religion to “infect” them, Hardy told a story. Hardy’s tale was a ghost story of “Wild Darrell”—not at all a defense of religion. In his impressionist way, Ford does not explain the connection between the conversation on religion and Hardy’s ghost story. He emphasizes the listeners’ awe-struck wonder at Hardy’s narrative powers, and eventually he ends his obituary on an odd note of humour and hope: “if practicing Anglicanism ever took any man into Paradise it will have there taken this great poet” (3).

Ford’s vignette evokes some of the repeated strands of this thesis, and his arrangement of the memory from that night is suggestive. At the home of Edward Clodd, banker and rationalist, a fin-de- 209 siècle crowd of serious literary figures debates the possibility of religious belief, and Thomas Hardy ends the night telling a romance. What Ford’s obituary captures is what the texts in this project also intimate: that religion and romance occupy a shared space of enchantment in contrast to the prevailing narratives of disenchantment. The pairing in Ford’s mind of Clodd’s hysteria over religious belief and Hardy’s response with a fantastical ghost story, links belief and the telling of romance in ways that the “romances of modern enchantment” in this project often do. To illustrate the enchantment of Hardy’s tale-telling,

Ford presents it as a foil to Clodd’s disbelief. The texts in this project are not religious romances, not even Chesterton’s, but each frequently includes religious elements as foils to instrumental discourses.

Though Weber himself saw religion as active in the disenchantment of the world, space for the possibility of the numinous remains a key theme in the texts of this project.

At times, I have touched briefly on the more recent approach to Victorian enchantment as distinctly secular. George Levine, preeminent for both his work on Victorian realism and his work on secular enchantment, has suggested that discourses of enchantment truly engaged with the world must be limited to the strictly material. Outlining the premise of a collection of essays, Levine argues: “the world is to be understood and explained—as far as it is possible to explain it—in natural terms; it works always and everywhere without miracles or supernatural interventions” (Levine The Joy of Secularism 1). For

Levine, modern enchantment is found in the particular wonders of the natural world, which he perceptively traces through realism in Hardy’s work. Levine’s contributions to the conversation about

Victorian enchantment and disenchantment are especially insightful for the way in which he locates this division as a central issue for the period. Levine writes:

Dualism was at the center of virtually every Victorian argument. On the one hand there is the

natural world, open to understanding by way of empirical study and rational analysis; on the other,

there is the world behind it, a world of mystery, a world of spirit, an enchanted world. The struggle 210

to preserve ‘mystery’—the place of enchantment—against science was, among the Victorians,

intense. (Realism, Ethics, Secularism 65)

For Levine, enchantment presents a duality, and one that is also formal. He insists continuously on realism’s secularity, demonstrating that choices of narrative mode are necessarily entwined with the issues that drive this project. He maintains that a predominance of Victorian literature “was pervasively at grips with disenchantment, struggling with it in an extraordinary variety of forms and styles” (Realism,

Ethics, and Secularism 60). Levine’s work focuses on realism as a dominant tradition at grips with disenchantment.

Levine’s work is important, because it demonstrates that enchantment can be found in realism and secularism, which are discourses often aligned with disenchantment. The connections Levine draws between secular enchantment, materiality, and realism, however, push romance outside the discussion of enchantment in Victorian life. For scholars looking for new spaces of Victorian enchantment, realism makes sense. Romance is already aligned with enchantment, so why do a study of enchantment in romance? The answer has to do with how enchantment has been re-defined as strictly immanent, which in

Charles Taylor’s matrix of definitions, means disenchanted. The more recent discourses of enchantment like Levine’s, Saler’s, and even Bennett’s locate enchantment in the material only. Levine cites the topos of contemptus mundi and defines modern enchantment against any discourse that dismisses the material world as transient in favour of a permanent spiritual realm. He rejects contemptus mundi as a trope that promotes detachment from this world and degrades a view of earthly life. In this configuration, romance, the mode of the otherworldly, retains only naïve enchantment—the kind of enchantment that Weber said was gone by 1917. The romances in this project are fundamentally concerned with finding a way out of this bind where a literary mode that supersedes strict materialism can still prompt engagement with this world. I argue that romance, through its (dis)organizing principle of uncertainty, lacks the conservative 211 ideological agenda with which it is often charged, and is thus capable of affirming the uncertainty of modern experience as enchanting.

This thesis is an attempt to open discussion about non-material, non-immanent enchantment in the fin-de-siècle British novel that re-orients contemporary readers to their own moment. The novels in this project variously contain elements of medievalism, imperial romance, spiritual romance, risk, and mystery, but these are signs of their orientation towards the world. In these experimental texts, romance is not a rejection of the realities of this world; it is not nostalgic for the past; it is not a space for naïve belief; and it is not simplistic. As a strategy, romance enchants the material through recourse to the immaterial. Turning to romance becomes, for the authors in this study, a space for serious epistemological contemplation. These novels interrogate the ideologies that lie beneath some of the most popular romance forms of the revival; yet rather than simply subverting them, they invent new space for enchantment by creating new forms of romance.

212

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