Edwardian and Georgian Fiction

BLOOM’S PERIOD STUDIES American Fiction Between the Wars American Naturalism The American Renaissance Edwardian and Georgian Fiction The Eighteenth Century English Novel Elizabethan Drama English Romantic Poetry Greek Drama The Harlem Renaissance The Italian Renaissance Literature of the Holocaust Modern American Drama Modern American Poetry The Victorian Novel BLOOM’S PERIOD STUDIES Edwardian and Georgian Fiction Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University ® ©2005 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications. ® www.chelseahouse.com Introduction © 2005 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwardian and Georgian fiction / [edited by] Harold Bloom. p. cm. — (Bloom’s period studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-8319-5 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Great Britain—History— Edward VII, 1901-1910. 3. Great Britain—History—George VI, 1936-1952. 4. Great Britain—History—George V, 1910-1936. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PR883.E34 2004 823’.91209—dc22 2004028204 Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover design by Keith Trego Layout by EJB Publishing Services All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with little to no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information on the first page of each article as well as in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The New Novel 41 Henry James A Parting of the Ways 63 Raymond Williams Conrad and Modern English Fiction 79 David Thorburn Obscure Writing and Private Life, 1880–1914 89 Allon White Edwardian Literature 123 John Batchelor Problematic Presence: The Colonial Other in Kipling and Conrad 151 John McClure The Late Nineteenth Century Novel and the Change Towards the Sexual— Gissing, Hardy and Lawrence 165 L.R. Leavis A Woven Tapestry of Interests 181 Peter Keating vi Contents The Other Victim: Jude the Obscure and The Whirlpool 217 Annette Federico The Pleasures of Imperialism 245 Edward W. Said The Opening World, 1900–1915 279 Malcolm Bradbury The Avoidance of Naturalism: Gissing, Moore, Grand, Bennett, and Others 309 David Trotter Incorporated Bodies: Dracula and the Rise of Professionalism 331 Nicholas Daly Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray 355 John Paul Riquelme Emotion, Gender, and Ethics in Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman Writers 375 Jil Larson Conclusions? Rainbow’s End: The Janus Period 397 Ruth Robbins Chronology 415 Contributors 419 Bibliography 423 Acknowledgments 427 Index 429 Editor’s Note My extensive Introduction traces the influences of Schopenhauer and allied speculative thinkers on a succession of novelists and story-writers from Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde through Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling on to E.M. Forster. Henry James, best of all American novelists, makes clear his preference for Joseph Conrad over H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. A strong Marxist critic, Raymond Williams, also surveys the split between “materialists” like Wells and Bennett, and the rather more transcendent James, Woolf, and Forster, after which David Thorburn celebrates Joseph Conrad as a High Romantic. The late literary and cultural critic Allan White considers the dialectic of revelation and concealment in the literature of Meredith, Conrad, and James. In an overview, John Batchelor takes us from Kipling on to the advent of Conrad, while John McClure brilliantly explores the presence of colonialism in both Kipling and Conrad. L.R. Leavis charts sexual nuances in George Gissing, Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence, after which Peter Keating surveys a varied tapestry from Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson to Conan Doyle. Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, is contrasted by Annette Federico to Gissing’s The Whirlpool, while the late Edward W. Said, father of anti- colonialist criticism, lingers ambiguously upon Kipling’s Kim, at once an aesthetic delight and a wicked pleasure. Malcolm Bradbury brings together Ford Madox Ford, Conrad, and Forster as pre-World War I seers greatly altered by its outbreak, after which David Trotter judges even Gissing and Bennett as evaders of Naturalism. vii viii Editor’s Note Bram Stoker’s deliciously grisly Dracula, as interpreted by Nicholas Daly, makes a charming juxtaposition with Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Walter Pater’s sly critique of Wilde, as set forth by John Paul Riquelme, after which Jil Larson brings together Hardy and the later Victorian feminist writers, Sarah Grand and Olive Schreiner. In this volume’s final essay, Ruth Robbins interprets Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and connects it to Forster’s A Passage to India. HAROLD BLOOM Introduction I For Arthur Schopenhauer, the Will to Live was the true thing-in-itself, not an interpretation but a rapacious, active, universal, and ultimately indifferent drive or desire. Schopenhauer’s great work, The World as Will and Representation, had the same relation to and influence upon many of the principal nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelists that Freud’s writings have in regard to many of this century’s later, crucia l masters of prose fiction. Zola, Maupassant, Turgenev, and Tolstoy join Thomas Hardy as Schopenhauer’s nineteenth-century heirs, in a tradition that goes on through Proust, Conrad, and Thomas Mann to culminate in aspects of Borges, and Beckett, the most eminent living writer of narrative. Since Schopenhauer (despite Freud’s denials) was one of Freud’s prime precursors, one could argue that aspects of Freud’s influence upon writers s imply carry on from Schopenhauer’s previous effect. Manifestly, the relatio n of Schopenhauer to Hardy is different in both kind and degree from the larger sense in which Schopenhauer was Freud’s forerunner or Wittgenst ein’s. A poet-novelist like Hardy turns to a rhetorical speculator like Schopenhauer only because he finds something in his own temperament and sensibility confirmed and strengthened, and not at all as Lucretius turned to Epicurus, or as Whitman was inspired by Emerson. The true precursor for Hardy was Shelley, whose visionary skepticism permeates the novels as well as the poems and The Dynasts. There is some technical debt to George Eliot in the early novels, but Hardy in his depths was little more moved by her than by Wilkie Collins, from whom he also 1 2 Harold Bloom learned elements of craft. Shelley’s tragic sense of eros is pervasive throughout Hardy, and ultimately determines Hardy’s understanding of his strongest heroines: Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye, Marty South, Tess Durbeyfield, Sue Bridehead. Between desire and fulfillment in Shelley falls the shadow of the selfhood, a shadow that makes love and what might be called the means of love quite irreconcilable. What M.D. Zabel named as “the aesthetic of incongruity” in Hardy and ascribed to temperamental causes is in a profound way the result of attempting to transmute the procedures of The Revolt of Islam and Epipsychidion into the supposedly naturalistic novel. J. Hillis Miller, when he worked more in the mode of a critic of consciousness like Georges Poulet than in the deconstruction of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, saw the fate of love in Hardy as being darkened always by a shadow cast by the lover’s consciousness itself. Hu gh Kenner, with a distaste for Hardy akin to (and perhaps derived from) T.S. Eliot’s in After Strange Gods, suggested that Miller had created a kind of Proustian Hardy, who turns out to be a case rather than an artist. Hardy was certainly not an artist comparable to Henry James (who dismissed him as a mere imitator of George Eliot) or James Joyce, but the High Modernist shibboleths for testing the novel have now waned considerably, except for a few surviving high priests of Modernism like Kenner. A better guide to Hardy’s permanent strength as a novelist was his heir D.H. Lawr ence, whose The Rainbow and Women in Love marvelously brought Hardy’s legacy to an apotheosis. Lawrence, praising Hardy with a rebel son’s ambival ence, associated him with Tolstoy as a tragic writer: And this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself, surpassing human consciousness. The difference is, that whereas in Shakespeare or Sophocles the greater, uncomprehended morality, or fate, is actively transgressed and gives active punishment, in Hardy and Tolstoi the lesser, human morality, the mechanical system is actively transgressed, and holds, and punishes the protagonist, whilst the greater morality is only passively, negatively transgressed, it is represented merely as being present in background, in scenery, not taking any active part, having no direct connexion with the protagonist. (Œdipus, Hamlet, Introduction 3 Macbeth set themselves up against, or find themselves set up against, the unfathomed moral forces of nature, and out of this unfathomed force comes their death.

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