Epistolary Encounters: Diary and Letter Pastiche in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Epistolary Encounters: Diary and Letter Pastiche in Neo-Victorian Fiction By Kym Michelle Brindle Thesis submitted in fulfilment for the degree of PhD in English Literature Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University September 2010 ProQuest Number: 11003475 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 11003475 Published by ProQuest LLC(2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract This thesis examines the significance of a ubiquitous presence of fictional letters and diaries in neo-Victorian fiction. It investigates how intercalated documents fashion pastiche narrative structures to organise conflicting viewpoints invoked in diaries, letters, and other addressed accounts as epistolary forms. This study concentrates on the strategic ways that writers put fragmented and found material traces in order to emphasise such traces of the past as fragmentary, incomplete, and contradictory. Interpolated documents evoke ideas of privacy, confession, secrecy, sincerity, and seduction only to be exploited and subverted as writers idiosyncratically manipulate epistolary devices to support metacritical agendas. Underpinning this thesis is the premise that much literary neo-Victorian fiction is bound in an incestuous relationship with Victorian studies. This can be identified and analysed in works that metafictionally and self-consciously engage the nineteenth century. My study therefore examines a diverse critical awareness refracted through epistolary strategies, investigating how neo-Victorian writers collaborate with or contest critical ideologies by way of perceptual and interpretative manipulation afforded by both diaries and letters. Diary form particularly refracts reflexive critical commentary on the novel and its processes and this study consequently sustains a greater focus on diaries than letters as strategic narrative devices in neo-Victorian fiction. In five chapters, I examine five novels by writers who share a common characteristic of critical, theoretical, and academic backgrounds. Chapter one investigates how A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) employs techniques of epistolary seduction to support a critique of fictional academics who construct Victorians to fit their own critical agendas. Chapter two considers the ways in which Sarah Waters’s novel, Affinity (1999), parodically foregrounds the Foucauldian ‘gaze’ with two diarists and secret letters that engage critical discourses of Victorian sexualities and nineteenth-century spiritualism. Chapter three examines Alias Grace (1996) to consider Margaret Atwood’s interrogation of the textual re-construction of past lives by way of a diary-style voice. Chapter four discusses Katie Roiphe’s 2001 novel, Still She Haunts Me, which plays to contemporary unease about Charles Dodgson’s relationship with Alice Liddell by exploiting archival gaps with invented diary entries that eulogise desire. My final chapter explores Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man (1997), which interpolates a diary with ‘official accounts’ in a form of textual autopsy that defends personal liberty and an eccentric viewpoint against communal testimony. This study demonstrates that neo-Victorian writers use documents creatively to interrogate history and our understanding of it in diverse strategic and intertextual ways. My study is grounded in theories of pastiche and builds on Linda Hutcheon’s work on historiographic metafiction. It is also informed by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose discussion of heteroglossia coincides with theories of diary form’s dialogic double voicedness outlined by Lorna Martens’s work, The Diary Novel (1985). My study investigates the intertextual processes of metafiction in neo-Victorianism as an area that has as yet received little critical attention, with no specific investigation of epistolary forms in the genre. Contents Introduction: ‘Rewrite, sign, seal and send’ 1 1. Epistolary Forms and Metacriticism 7 2. Diary Form 12 3. Epistolary Strategies Past and Present 15 4. Pastiche and Criticism 25 5. Neo-Victorian Topics and Themes 29 6. Strategic Epistolary in Five Novels 38 Chapter One: Riddles and Relics: Critical Correspondence in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance 43 1. Mythical Victorians 49 2. The Ash/LaMotte Correspondence: Ghosts and Letters 53 3. Postal Nostalgia 62 4. Diaries 67 5. Exchange 70 6. Erasure and Censorship 74 7. Audience and Addressees 80 8. Secrets and Omniscient Narration 83 Conclusion 88 Chapter Two: Diary as Queer Malady: Narrative Geometry in Sarah Waters’s Affinity 91 1. Writing with Authority: Waters 94 2. Writing in Search of Authority: The Victorian Spinster 97 3. Writing and Authority: The Medium 104 4. Reading: History/Women 109 5. Reading: The Panoptic Gaze 113 6. Reading: A Ghost in the Panoptic Machine 118 7. Reading The Self Reflected: Diaries and Mirrors 120 Conclusion: Reading: Invisible Letters 122 Chapter Three: A Deviant Device: Diary Dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 126 1. Historical Accounts 132 2. Authorial Intention and Diary Form 134 3. Unreliable Diary Performance 141 4. Dream or Hallucination? 151 5. Letters and Quilts 159 Conclusion 167 Chapter Four: Lewis Carroll and the Curious Theatre of Modernity: Epistolary Pursuit in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me 171 1. Unstable Evidence 178 2. Sexual Secrets 181 3. Event and the River of Alice 187 4. Flesh and Appetite 190 5. Alice: Fleshly Fantasies of a Dream Child 192 6. Dream Turned Nightmare 196 7. Framing the Unseen/Unread 198 8. Postscript: Letters and Power 209 Conclusion 213 Chapter Five: A Dissident Diarist: The Superfluous Other in Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man 216 1. Case History and Testimony 221 2. Diary vs. Gossip and Hypocrisy 225 3. Diary Defence, Sympathy, and Authorial Polemic 228 4. Conformity vs. a Non-Conformist Imagination 239 5. Madness, Hypochondria, and Gothic Imagination 245 Conclusion 255 Conclusion 258 Bibliography 264 List of Illustrations 4.1 Alice Pleasance Hargreaves (1852-1934) by Lewis Carroll p. 202 (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 1858 [The Beggar-Maid\ ‘Children and Childhood in the O xfordD NB’ Oxford Dictionary o f National Biography <http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/92/92731 .html> [accessed 18 August 2010] 4.2 Evelyn Hatch (1871-1951) by Lewis Carroll p. 208 (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), 1879, no title Wikimedia Commons <http://commons.wikimedia.Org/wiki/File:Hatch,_Evelyn_(Lewis_Carrol l,_29.07.1879).jpg> [accessed 18 August 2010] Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Kamilla Elliott, for her conscientious and tirelessly enthusiastic advice and support for this project. I also thank Lancaster University staff for their support and particularly acknowledge the help and advice of Dr Sally Bushell and Dr Catherine Spooner. I am also grateful to Dr Michael Greaney and Dr Tess Cosslett for their valuable guidance. This thesis could not have been written without the support and encouragement of my family, Andrew, Emma, Anthony, and Matthew. My special thanks go to my husband, Andrew, for his enduring confidence in me, and to my daughter, Emma, for her enthusiastic reading of neo- Victorian novels. I am also indebted to Dr Gill Davies for her early and continuing encouragement of my academic studies. I am very grateful that this study has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Arts & Humanities Research Council A version of sections of chapter two was published as ‘Diary as Queer Malady: Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’s AffinityNeo-Victorian Studies 2:2 (2009/10), 65-85. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date, with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity ’ cannot kill. Jonathan Harker Bram Stoker, D racula, 18991 It is best, then, that I should note down events daily as they occur; and to ensure, as far as may be, a continuation o f my narrative, fragment by fragment, to the very last. Wilkie Collins Basil, 18522 He felt for his idea o f what was behind all this diversity, all this interest. At the back was an intricate and extravagantly prolific maker. A. S. Byatt ‘Precipice EncurlecT 19873 1 Bram Stoker, D racula (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000 [1897]), pp. 31-32. 2 Wilkie Collins, B asil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1852]), p. 247. 3 A. S. Byatt, ‘Precipice Encurled’, in Sugar and Other Stories (London: Vintage, 1995 [1987]), original emphasis. 1 Introduction: Re-write, sign, seal and send 1 Endangered, disordered, and disorderly, fragmented letters and diaries fashion and fabricate the neo-Victorian past. Revisionist writers freely raid and adapt nineteenth- century texts and subjects in order to double-code the past and present in an intertextual project of ‘acknowledged borrowings’.2