ABSTRACT Title: the GYPSY AS TROPE in VICTORIAN and MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE. Abigail Rothblatt Bardi, Ph.D. 2007 Directed By
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ABSTRACT Title: THE GYPSY AS TROPE IN VICTORIAN AND MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE. Abigail Rothblatt Bardi, Ph.D. 2007 Directed by: Dr. William A. Cohen, Associate Professor University of Maryland College Park Since their arrival in the British isles in the early sixteenth century, the Romani people, known as Gypsies, were the objects of a complex mixture of both persecution and desire. Although early legislation reflects concerns about their alleged thievery and vagrancy, little factual historical information exists about them, and their identity is constructed in British discourse in large part by their functions in literature. In the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the wild, exotic Gypsy evolves into an established trope that can be readily deployed in texts as a challenge to normative forms of property ownership, gender, sexuality, and national identity. This dissertation takes as its central focus a twentieth-century text, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), in which an aristocratic man lives for 400 years, turning into a woman midway through, and absconding with a band of Gypsies. Here, gender is famously interrogated, but the novel also calls attention to the fundamental instability of norms regarding property distribution, erotic desire, and British national identity. Through the lens of Orlando, the dissertation examines a variety of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts in which Gypsies or Gypsy figures (characters with Gypsy-like qualities) appear and disturb the social order. Chapter One shows how, in works by Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Kenneth Grahame, Gypsy figures, sometimes in small or cameo roles, imperil the distribution of property through primogeniture. Chapter Two examines the ways in which Gypsies destabilize gender in novels by Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Elizabeth Gaskell. Chapter Three considers the way they signal non-normative erotic desire in works by Jane Austen, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. Finally, examining national identity in novels by George Borrow, Wilkie Collins, and Bram Stoker, as well as George Eliot’s narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy, Chapter Four argues that while the British national project involves the abjection of “others” in order to shore up the body politic, this project is doomed to failure because Gypsies, as internal others, are ultimately inextricable from this body. THE GYPSY AS TROPE IN VICTORIAN AND MODERN BRITISH LITERATURE. By Abigail R. Bardi. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007 Advisory Committee: Associate Professor William A. Cohen, Chair Associate Professor Elizabeth Loizeaux Assistant Professor Jason Rudy Professor Richard Cross Professor Richard Price © Copyright by Abigail Rothblatt Bardi 2007 Acknowledgements Many people have contributed to this project since its inception, and I would like to thank some of them. First and foremost, my advisor, Bill Cohen, has been a brilliant resource and guide, and the best kind of reader, one whose voice gets inside one’s head and continues to operate there. I also thank the members of my committee, Beth Loizeaux, Jason Rudy, Richard Cross, and Richard Price, for their insights. Jason Rudy’s advice about organization was particularly helpful. Special thanks, too, to my fellow graduate students, Dr. Liz McClure, Rebekah Benson, and Dr. Cameron Bushnell, whose support, intellectual and culinary, was invaluable throughout the doctoral process. Thanks, also, to Orrin Wang for his seminar on the Gothic, and to Susan Handelman, for her ideas about intertextuality. I would also like to thank the Gypsy Lore Society, whose 2004 conference in Newcastle was instrumental in shaping my thinking about this subject, and particularly Judith Okely and Yaron Matras, whose conversations were extremely helpful. Also very useful in formulating my approach was the 2003 Hystorical Fictions conference at the University of Swansea, which persuaded me to read nineteenth-century fiction through the lens of the twentieth century. I would also like to thank my friends, colleagues, and students at Prince George’s Community College. Special thanks to my girls, the Golightlies; and to my dean, Bob Barshay, and chair, Melinda Kramer. I also have to thank the Fallen Aardvark Society for our copious crab dinners, and Rachel Carpenter for years of stellar blahage. There are not enough thanks in the ii world for the Shrews—Vickie Baily, Barbara Bass, and Andie DiMarco—for all the support they have given me through the years. My kids, Andy and Ariel Bardi, have contributed to this project by being wonderful and making me proud, and Ariel has been a font of literary and critical knowledge. Thanks to my parents, Ben and Adele Rothblatt, for always being not only supportive, but interested. To my husband Tony McGuffin, that patient man, many thanks for being there for me through everything. Finally, I would like to thank the Romani people, particularly the woman who sold me a sprig of lavender in the Cirencester High Street twenty years ago. It is my hope that somehow beyond their mythic presence in the arts, their genuine profound strengths and sufferings will ultimately be universally acknowledged. iii Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………… 1 I. “Many Outlandysse People”: Historical Overview……………………………...7 II. Critical History………………………………………………………………… 16 III. The Gypsy as Trope: An Overview…………………………………………... 20 IV. Disco Dialectics……………………………………………………………..... 26 Chapter One: Gypsies and Property………………………………………………... 29 I. “From the Gipsy Point of View”: Gypsies and Property in Orlando…………...29 II. “A Dark Skinned Gipsy in Aspect”: Wuthering Heights………………………40 III. “Some Gipsy Blood in Her”: Gypsies in Dickens……………………………. 48 IV. “Cursed Alien Blood”: George Eliot’s Gypsies……………………………… 64 V. “But What, Then, Did the Gypsies Do?”: Gypsies and Sherlock Holmes……. 71 VI. “The Real Thing at Last”: Wind and the Willows……………………………. 82 Chapter Two: Gypsies and Gender………………………………………………… 89 I. “One or Two Important Particulars”: Gypsies and Gender……………………. 89 II. “Rather Masculine Than Feminine”: Gypsies in Guy Mannering……………. 98 III. “I Have Seen a Gypsy Vagabond”: Gypsies in Jane Eyre…………………… 108 IV. “The Indolent Gipsy-giantess”: Gypsies in Villette………………………….. 126 V. “A Gipsy or Make-shift Life”: Gypsies in North and South………………….. 145 Chapter Three: Gypsies and Desire………………….…………………………...... 157 I. “Rogues and Trollops”: The Gypsy as Erotic Trope…………………………....157 II. “A Party of Gipsies”: Gypsies in Emma……………………………………… 167 III. “That Wild Brotherhood”: Matthew Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy……………….. 176 IV. “More Like a Gypsy Nor Ever”: Maggie Tulliver’s Gypsiness…………….. 189 V. “The Drowned Phoenician Sailor”: Gypsies in “The Waste Land”………….. 198 VI. “Be Braver in Your Body”: The Virgin and the Gipsy………………………. 210 Chapter Four: Gypsies and National Identity……………………………………… 226 I. “The English Disease”: The Gypsy as Exotic Other………………………….. 226 II. “A Strange Set of People”: Gypsies in Lavengro and The Romany Rye……… 233 III. “A Set of Rascals Not Worth Regarding”: Gypsies and The Moonstone…… 246 IV. “A Mighty Nation’s Seed”: The Zincali and The Spanish Gypsy………….... 261 V. “An Empty Hole”: The Szgany and Dracula………………………………… 270 Afterword…………………………………………………………………………... 285 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………....... 290 iv Introduction It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. –Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection 1 In Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, an Elizabethan aristocrat, in the midst of a lifespan of 400 years, turns quite casually from a man into a woman. During the interval of this strange gender transition, the eponymous protagonist spends a brief interlude traveling with a “gipsy tribe” (140). In depicting the Gypsies’ ambiguous role in Orlando’s transformation from landed, sexually profligate Elizabethan man to disinherited, chaste Victorian woman, Woolf draws upon the long history of representations of the Romani2 people, whose existence on the margins of British society was recorded from the time of their arrival in the sixteenth century in a variety of literary and historical registers. This dissertation examines the way in which these historical representations construct the “Gypsy” as a trope in British literature as it is manifested in multiple texts throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building upon Woolf’s seemingly offhand placement of the Gypsies at the heart of the contestations of Orlando’s economic, gender, sexual, and 1 p. 4. 2 The question of what terms to use for the Romani people is a vexed one. Throughout their history in Europe, multiple terms have been used for them—“Gipsies,” “Egyptians,” “Zincali,” “Tsigane,” “Travellers,” “Zigeuner,” “Sinti,” etc. The World Romani Congress has recommended the term “Roma” or “Rroma,” while the Romani people of Britain call themselves “Romanichal” or “Romnichel,” a subset of the Roma “nation.” In this study, wherever possible, I have adopted the somewhat arbitrary practice of using “Romani people” to refer to the actual people and the term “Gypsy” to refer to the fictional representations of that group. While I was assured by Yaron Matras,