Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics

Back to the Future: Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics by Rachel McArthur A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Rachel McArthur 2018 Back to the Future: Edwardian Comedy and Progressive Politics Rachel McArthur Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2018 Abstract The Edwardian period is often figured as a garden party broken up by the First World War. Looking back on the early twentieth century from the perspective of the twenty first, a different, strikingly contemporary picture emerges: amidst social and technological change, world capitals were haunted by the threat of instability and economic inequality, while the political left faced urgent questions about its continued relevance. Contrary to the image of the period as complacent on the brink of disaster, my dissertation asserts that the Edwardians were deeply invested in building a better future through both political reform and literary comedy. Both comedy and progressive reform look toward the future; in both cases, the Edwardians negotiated between convention and innovation to attempt to create a more equitable future. The dissertation ultimately illustrates the crucial role of the period in literary history and how its lessons may inform our own, which it much resembles. In order to do so, my readings of specifically Edwardian texts are situated in relation to larger historical narratives of both comedy as a genre and political reform. The first chapter reads George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy” (1877) and The Egoist (1879) alongside Gladstonian Liberal reforms. Like those interventions, the “Essay” looks toward beneficial changes within existing traditions, while The Egoist puts them into practice. The second chapter analyzes George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905; 1907) ii alongside Edwardian discussions of social welfare. Shaw’s fictional Perivale St Andrews, patterned on contemporary company towns, critiques the shortcomings of Edwardian New Liberalism’s approach to a better future. The third chapter situates E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) in relation to the cascading crises engendered by the 1909 “People’s Budget.” Like its political moment, Forster’s novel makes failure the precondition of ameliorative possibility, a vision Forster carried beyond the writing of fiction. The persistence of Forsterian concerns is further examined in the final chapter on Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). Foregrounding Smith’s use of Forsterian elements to critique both the limitations of Forster’s vision and the attenuated futurity of neoliberalism, this final chapter asserts the resonances of the Edwardian period with our contemporary moment. iii Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the support and assistance of my supervisor, Prof. Alan Ackerman, and my committee members, Profs. Lawrence Switzky and Greig Henderson, at the University of Toronto in the completion of this project. I would also like to thank Prof. Maria DiBattista of Princeton University for her wonderful contributions as external examiner, as well as the other participants in my Final Oral Exam for their insightful and helpful commentary on the project. Parts of this dissertation were written with the assistance of grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, as well as funding from the University of Toronto. The last stages of the project could not have been completed without the Ontario Student Assistance Program. As for my parents, Kathryn and Murray McArthur, I simply could not have done any of this without them. Their unfailing support made finishing the dissertation possible, even when it often seemed completely impossible. The resourcefulness and fellowship of my graduate student colleagues helped me to navigate some of the most difficult parts of the doctoral process, and for that I will always be extremely grateful. To my friends outside academia, thank you for listening and sympathizing with such remarkable patience. My cat, Mark, knows what role he played. I dedicate this dissertation specifically to my grandmother, Joan (Winslow) Carrick, who unfortunately passed away before she got the chance to wear her infamous long frock and tiara to my convocation. She would have made an absolutely terrific doctor, had she had the chance. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: George Meredith ..........................................................................................................27 Chapter 2: George Bernard Shaw ..................................................................................................54 Chapter 3: E.M. Forster .................................................................................................................88 Chapter 4: Zadie Smith ................................................................................................................119 Epilogue: Back to the Future .......................................................................................................142 Works Consulted ..........................................................................................................................144 v Introduction Looking back on the first decades of the twentieth century from the first decades of the twenty-first, the resemblances are striking: amidst accelerated social and technological change, world capitals were haunted by the threat of instability and civil unrest caused by massive inequality, while in the political sphere, parties on the left faced pressing questions about their identity and continued relevance. In both cases, the calamities of the present threatened to eclipse the very idea of a future, let alone a better one. The ambiguity of both moments is reflected at the level of nomenclature: while we have settled on the limited label “Edwardian” for the former years, we still have no idea what to call either ourselves or our own recent past. And yet, “Edwardian” is also a label of exhaustion. In the Foreword to Edwardians and Late Victorians (1960), Richard Ellmann notes that the period between what literary studies calls modernism and what it calls Victorianism has been “pushed…out of focus” by the “force” of those other two. Understood as either “post-Victorian” or “pre-war,” the period known as “Edwardian” has “lost [its own] identity” (v). Similarly, in 2010 Rebecca Mead remarked that the failure to name the decade then just ending reflected its status as “an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to.” If anything, the problem has only become more acute in the eight years since Mead’s article. Given the startling political developments of the past year, people are asking themselves if a new era is beginning. If so, when did the old one end? For that matter, when did it start? Most urgently, where is this new one taking us? In 2017, the question is no longer merely “what shall we call ourselves,” but “where are we going?” Organizing historical time aims to create an ordered narrative to explain how we have gotten to where we are and, implicitly or explicitly, where we may go next. In a speech delivered two days after the 2016 American presidential election, Zadie Smith, subject of the last chapter of this dissertation, highlighted these facts. Narrativizing the recent past, Smith contrasted the “relatively sunlit uplands” of the turn of the twenty-first century with the overweening gloom of late 2016. The lesson to be learned from this shift is not that the hopeful outlook of the early 2000s was false, “but rather that progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive” (italics Smith’s). Not only is the future an act of imagination, but the 1 2 idea of a better future that underpins progressive change requires constant cultivation.1 Refiguring the notorious campaign slogan of the incoming American president, Smith argued that “the examples of the past still hold out new possibilities for all of us, opportunities to remake, for a new generation, the conditions from which we ourselves have benefited” (italics mine). As Smith figures it, the progressive task is not simply to recreate a mythic past of—dubious—“greatness,” but to actively re- engage with the ways in which the real past conceived of a better future. That is the project of this dissertation: through a reconsideration of the ways in which the Edwardian period conceived of the better future of progressive politics, this dissertation adds to and expands our own storehouse of better futures at a moment when we need them the most. One of the key literary ways for imagining the future is through the genre of comedy. Comedy is a genre of the future. According to the generic expectations established through New Comedy, the comedic plot traces a movement through opposition towards the “happy ending”—conventionally, marriage or the union of a heterosexual couple—in which the threats to a stable future raised by the plot are neutralized. Through

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