The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19Th- Century European Novelists

The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th- century European Novelists The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th- century European Novelists Edited by Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and Max Vega-Ritter The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists Edited by Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and Max Vega-Ritter This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar, Max Vega-Ritter and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6756-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6756-6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments .................................................................................... viii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 The Grotesque in the Nineteenth Century Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar Part I: Influences and Early Forms Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 L’Histoire du roi de Bohême and Oliver Twist under Cruikshank’s Patronage: The Dynamics of Text and Image at the Core of the Grotesque in the Novel of the 1830s Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 The Grotesque and the “Drama of the Body” in Notre-Dame de Paris and The Man who Laughs by Victor Hugo Sylvie Jeanneret Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 37 From Smollett to Dickens: Roderick (Random), Barnaby (Rudge), and the Raven Anne Rouhette Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 51 Of Giants and Grotesques: The Dickensian Grotesque and the Return from Italy Michael Hollington Part II: Expressing 19th-century Reality: Reason vs. Unreason Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 64 Grotesque Extravagance in the Fictional Worlds of Charles Dickens and Nikolai Gogol from the Perspectives of “Fantastic Realism” and the European Grotesque Tradition Florence Clerc vi Table of Contents Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 Figures of the Grotesque in The Snobs of England / The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray Jacqueline Fromonot Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 94 From “Absolute Realism” to Nocturnal Grotesque in Gérard de Nerval’s October Nights Bérangère Chaumont Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 108 The Flâneur and the Grotesque Figures of the Metropolis in the Works of Charles Dickens and Charles Baudelaire Isabel Vila-Cabanes Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 121 The Construction of the Monstrous in Charles Dickens’s Fiction from The Old Curiosity Shop to A Tale of Two Cities Max Véga-Ritter Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 133 An “Uncanny Revel”: The Poetics and Politics of the Grotesque in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge Thierry Goater Part III: Resisting and Negotiating Change Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 152 “Primitive Elements in a Modern Context”: The Grotesque in The Mystery of Edwin Drood Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 165 Arts of Dismemberment, Anatomy, Articulation and the Grotesque Body in Our Mutual Friend Victor Sage Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 180 The Grotesque and Darwin’s Theory in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Wilkie Collins’s No Name Delphine Cadwallader-Bourron The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century vii European Novelists Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 192 The Female Grotesque in Dickens Marianne Camus Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 203 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm: The Grotesque of not such a Gross Text Gilbert Pham-Thanh Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 215 The Return of Dickens’s Grotesques on Screen Florence Bigo-Renault Conclusion ............................................................................................... 227 Regeneration and Permanence of the Grotesque Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar Contributors ............................................................................................. 233 Index ........................................................................................................ 237 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like first of all to thank the members of the Board of the CELIS (Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique) of Blaise-Pascal University (Clermont-Ferrand), especially Pascale Auraix- Jonchière and Françoise Le Borgne, who kindly helped Max Véga-Ritter and myself organise the initial conference on “The Grotesque in Dickens’s Fiction and 19th-century European Literature” held in Clermont-Ferrand in November 2012. Thanks to the CELIS the contributors to the present volume were able to exchange ideas and insights on the grotesque in a spirit of friendly collaboration. Max Véga-Ritter and I are also deeply grateful to the SFEVE (Société Française des Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes) for their support. Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar of Cambridge Scholars Publishing merit special thanks for their kind help and expert guidance in this project. I am greatly indebted to all the contributors to the present volume for their rich and insightful input. My deepest gratitude goes to Victor Sage, who, when asked, one very, very cold winter morning, on a railway platform in Paris, immediately agreed to take part in the initial conference. Many thanks also to Michael Hollington for his constant generosity and kindness. My friends and colleagues at Blaise-Pascal University deserve my thanks, but none more so than Anne Rouhette for her encouragement and patience; and above all Sandhya Patel, to whom I am immensely indebted for kindly agreeing to proof-read the chapters which had to be translated from the French. Her expertise is invaluable, as are her constant kindness and support. Finally many, many thanks to Andy Farrar, for never failing in patience and understanding. INTRODUCTION THE GROTESQUE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ISABELLE HERVOUET-FARRAR “Real and apparent contradictions abound in discussions of the grotesque; it is an extremely flexible category” (Harpham 1976, 464). Whoever reads into the bulk of criticism attached to the grotesque will see instability as the first defining characteristic of an aesthetic category which Baudelaire called “this indefinable element of beauty […] that obscure and mysterious element” (Baudelaire 1956, 132). The purpose of this brief introduction is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the many nuances found in the exegesis of the grotesque, which would require a deep foray into historical, architectural, aesthetic and literary approaches, but to sketch in the theories deemed essential to a correct assessment of the prominence and meaning of the grotesque in the context of 19th-century European fiction. The grotesque was theorized in the 19th century notably by Hugo, Ruskin and Baudelaire, who shed light on its significance within Romanticism and Victorian realism. In the following century, the works of the two most influential critics of the grotesque, Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin, taken together with the comprehensive analysis offered in the 1980s by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, offer a reasonably clear insight into the fundamentally ambivalent concept. The grotesque famously borrows its name from the accident of the discovery around 1480 of the remains of Nero’s Domus Aurea and its elaborate ornaments. Its meaning then gradually expanded from the designation of the decorative grotesque of the Renaissance to what may appear as a vague or all-inclusive category. Critics agree, however, on the central idea that the grotesque achieves the harmonious or hair-raising, but always impossible, fusion of heterogeneous elements. The word has come more prosaically to designate an unexpected mixture of comic and horror or of comic and disgust. Laughter is central, since distortion, even taken to 2 Introduction its extreme, is not grotesque without laughter. “For an object to be grotesque, it must arouse three responses. Laughter and astonishment are two; either disgust or horror is the third” (Harpham 1976, 463). Harpham’s 1976 definition puts to the fore the idea that the grotesque originates in

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