History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction 9780230228580_01_prex.indd i 6/10/2010 12:23:53 PM This page intentionally left blank History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction Victorian Afterimages Kate Mitchell Lecturer in English Literature, Australian National University, Australia 9780230228580_01_prex.indd iii 6/10/2010 12:23:53 PM © Kate Mitchell 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 –10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–22858–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne 9780230228580_01_prex.indd iv 6/10/2010 12:23:54 PM For Adam, and for Ella, Grace and James 9780230228580_01_prex.indd v 6/10/2010 12:23:54 PM This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’ 1 1 Memory Texts: History, Fiction and the Historical Imaginary 12 2 Contemporary Victorian(ism)s 39 3 A Fertile Excess: Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime 63 4 (Dis)Possessing Knowledge: A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance 93 5 ‘Making it seem like it’s authentic’: the Faux-Victorian Novel as Cultural Memory in Affinity and Fingersmith 117 6 ‘The alluring patina of loss’: Photography, Memory, and Memory Texts in Sixty Lights and Afterimage 143 Conclusion: ‘What will count as history?’ 177 Notes 184 Select Bibliography 195 Index 215 vii 9780230228580_01_prex.indd vii 6/10/2010 12:23:54 PM Acknowledgements I am grateful to a number of institutions and individuals for their support, advice and assistance as I wrote this book. The University of Melbourne provided an intellectually engaging research environment. I would especially like to thank Clara Tuite whose judicious advice, warm encouragement and ongoing enthusiasm were invaluable. I am also indebted to Ken Gelder whose astute advice helped to shape this project in its early stages. I am grateful for the research support I’ve received from an Australian Postgraduate Award, the English Department and School of Graduate Studies at the University of Melbourne, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (ADFA), and the National Europe Centre at the Australian National University. I am par- ticularly grateful to the intellectual community at the National Europe Centre for providing both practical support and a stimulating and enjoyable research environment. This book would not have been possible without the friendship, forbearance and practical support of my colleagues, friends and family. I am grateful to a number of individuals who counselled, challenged, and assisted me in a variety of ways as I wrote this book: Nicola Parsons, Julie Thorpe, Amanda Crawford, Branka van der Linden, Adam Berryman, Paul Pickering and Simon Bronitt. I am profoundly indebted to my parents, John and Jean, for their faith in me and their practical support, and particularly for their generosity in caring for my children. Thanks go also to my brother, Chris, who has always shown great interest in this project and has been willing to discuss it at length and in detail over several years, and to Peter, Jeanette, Kristy, Jez, Tanya and Brett who have provided warm encouragement and support. Most importantly, I could never have undertaken nor completed this book without the boundless support of my partner, Adam. He has spared no energy in assisting me from the beginning of this process to its end. To Adam, and to Ella, Grace and James, I owe a huge debt of gratitude for their love and patience during what I know seemed at times like a never-ending process. An early version of the arguments presented in Chapter 3 appeared as ‘(Feeling It) As it Actually Happened’ in Literature Sensation (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 266–79. An early version viii 9780230228580_01_prex.indd viii 6/10/2010 12:23:54 PM Acknowledgements ix of Chapter 6 appeared as ‘Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories’ in Neo-Victorian Studies 1:1 (2008), pp. 81–109. Finally, I would like to thank Lee Jackson, creator of the Victorian London website (www. victorianlondon.org), for generously providing the photograph of London Bridge that appears on the cover of this book. 9780230228580_01_prex.indd ix 6/10/2010 12:23:54 PM This page intentionally left blank Introduction: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’ I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana. (Liz Jensen, Ark Baby, 1998) In 1918 Ezra Pound coined the term ‘Victoriana’ as a way of pejoratively characterising the Victorian past: ‘For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant ... that we are content to leave the past where we find it’ (cited in Gardiner, 2004: 168). In stark contrast to Pound’s confident marginalisation of the Victorian past at the outset of the twentieth century, a steady interest in things Victorian gained momentum in the second half of the same century until, in the final decades, a fascination with the period invaded film, television, trends in interior decoration, fashion, genealogy, advertising, museums, histori- cal re-enactments, politics and scholarship about the Victorian period. Far from an unpleasant odour detected and quickly left behind, the literature and culture of the Victorian period have been courted, sought and summoned across many facets of contemporary culture for more than three decades. If we are indeed invaded by Victoriana, we welcome the incursion and insist upon it. The sense of reiteration, of repetition and re-assertion that characterises our fascination with the Victorians is captured in the epigraph above: ‘I told you we’d been invaded by Victoriana’ ( Jensen, 1998: 165). A seemingly ever-increasing number of authors participate in, and contribute to, this fascination by recreating the Victorian period in their fiction using a range of narrative strategies. Some novelists, such as A. S. Byatt in Possession: A Romance (1990) and Graham Swift in Ever After (1992), critically engage this straddling of two historical moments by creating dual storylines that, read together, dramatise the process of reconstructing an earlier time. Others, like Gail Jones in Sixty Lights 1 9780230228580_02_int.indd 1 6/10/2010 12:24:27 PM 2 History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction (2004) and William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in The Difference Engine (1991), create a Victorian period that is overtly informed by their twentieth-century knowledge without dramatising this in the story itself. And still others, such as Beryl Bainbridge in Master Georgie (1997) and Sheri Holman in The Dress Lodger (1999), recreate a Victorian world by suppressing all reference to their own historical perspective. For their reconstructions of the Victorian period, novelists mine fea- tures of its history such as the cholera epidemic, the Crimean war, the invention of photography, the Anglo-Franco race to control the Nile, colonialism and the discovery of fossils, as well as the Victorian interest in spiritualism, the crisis of faith engendered by science, the emergent discipline of psychiatry, the experience of the expanding city, and burgeoning consumerism.1 Additionally, some novelists choose to ven- triloquise Victorian writers, such as Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004), which narrativises the life of Henry James. Others reinvent not writers but their characters, such as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which explores the character of Magwitch from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860–1), and Emma Tennant’s Tess (1993), which imagines a line- age for Thomas Hardy’s Tess, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Still others rewrite Victorian novels, such as Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) which reworks The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) from the perspective of a housemaid, and Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s novel The D Case: The Truth About The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1989), in which fictional detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes, attempt to solve the mystery of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sometimes contemporary reworkings of Victorian novels take the form of a prequel, sequel or paralellquel, in which novelists explore tangential, marginal or background events and/or characters, as in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) which explores the shadowy figure of Bertha Mason, both central to and marginalised in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Emma Tennant’s Adele (2003) which shifts the narrative focus to Rochester’s daughter.