City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2020 The White Album As Neo-Victorian Fiction of Loss Lucas Kwong CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/723 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] • The White Album as Neo-Victorian Fiction of Loss *-(+' 34/"5 abstract While much has been written about Sgt. Pepper’s celebration of high Victorian culture, little scholarship, if any, has focused on the White Album’s relationship to the late Victorian period. !is paper examines !e Beatles through the lens of what Victorian studies scholar Stephen Arata has called “"ctions of loss,” a body of "n de siècle texts depicting intertwined processes of “national, biological, [and] aesthetic” decline. I argue that the White Album can be read alongside Dracula and She as a “"ction of loss,” revealing the degree to which a sense of “irretrieva- ble decline” returned to haunt Britain in the late Sixties. Indeed, decline and fall comprise one of 2e Beatles’s major concerns, not only because the album doc- uments the band’s nascent breakup, but also because it "nds the band address- ing (and o#en satirizing) a constellation of "n de siècle themes, newly relevant at midcentury: fears of reverse colonization (“Back In !e USSR”); half-ironic fascination with colonial adventurism and “Eastern” enlightenment as correc- tives to decline (“!e Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Dear Prudence”); Decadent critiques of over-interpretation (“Glass Onion”); nightmares/fantasies of apocalyptic destruction (“Helter Skelter,” “Revolution $”), and representa- tions of animal bodies (“Piggies,” “Yer Blues”).