MORBID STRAINS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE FROM 1850 TO THE FIN DE SIÈCLE By Elizabeth Meadows Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2010 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Carolyn Dever Professor Jay Clayton Professor Paul Young Professor James Epstein ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the unstinting support and encouragement of my professional and personal community here at Vanderbilt. Thanks go first to Carolyn Dever and Jay Clayton, co-chairs of my committee. Carolyn’s perceptive questions have pushed my thinking at every stage of this project, and her support has been invaluable throughout my graduate career. Jay Clayton’s generous and honest critique of my writing has made me a better scholar as well as a better writer. I thank them both for the hours they have spent thinking through the complexities of Victorian morbidity with me. Both Paul Young and Jim Epstein have given me valuable insights into my own work, and I thank them for encouraging me to see my project from outside my own literary field and academic discipline. My research was made possible by a grant from the College of Arts and Science; by the Robert Manson Myers Graduate Award in English; and by a graduate fellowship from Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. In addition to thanking the institutions that have supported my work, I have to thank the individuals who made that support even more valuable. Mona Frederick, Professor Edward Friedman, Polly Case, and Katherine Newman of the Robert Penn Warren Center made the experience of my final year of dissertation writing better than it could otherwise have been through their hard work. At the Warren Center, I had the good fortune to work with a brilliant and challenging group of interlocutors. My thanks to Elena Deanda Camacho, Gesa Frömming, Patrick Jackson, Sarah Kersh, Gail McConnell, Rachel Nisselson, and Matt Whitt for sharing your work and wisdom with me. ii I have also benefited from the company, conversation, and camaraderie of the graduate students here at Vanderbilt. Not only have the members of my writing group listened to me endlessly, many others have offered valuable insights into my topic and into how to write a dissertation. My friends and colleagues have also offered personal encouragement and support that was vital in the completion of this project. Thanks to Lauren Hoffer, Natalie Champ, Donald Jellerson, Sarah Kersh, Yeo Ju Choi, Amanda Hagood, and Bethany Packard for listening to early iterations of my ideas. Thanks to Diana Bellonby, Elizabeth Covington, and Emily Hines for helping me shape the final product. Thanks also to Miranda Nesler and Ryan Jones. The Vanderbilt English Department has been a wonderful place to become a scholar. My thanks to Mark Schoenfield, Colin Dayan, Kathryn Schwarz, Dahlia Porter, Rachel Teukolsky, Lynn Enterline and Leah Marcus, who eased the growing pains and offered much scholarly and professional advice and encouragement. Thanks also to the staff of the English Department; without the generalship and assistance of Donna Caplan, Janis May, Dori Mikus, Margaret Quigley, and Sara Corbitt, the job of being a graduate student would have been impossible. Friends from before my current scholarly incarnation have helped me through this long haul. My thanks to all of them, especially Shannon Dugas, Jill Fischer, and Kelly Gilles. My mother has always pushed me to go further and try harder. I thank her for the encouragement and example she has offered me. For their generosity and support, I also thank my partner’s parents, Ellen and Ron Roston. Finally, my deepest debts are to Aaron and Nicolas Roston. No expression of gratitude can measure what they have brought me, so I am happy to remain indefinitely indebted to two people who bring me such joy. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................ ii TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................................iv Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: DEFINING MORBIDITY IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE ...........................................................................................................................1 II. MORBID FORMS IN TENNYSON’S IN MEMORIAM, A.H.H. .....................................26 Forms of grief ..............................................................................................................33 The “holy urn”: poetry and the corpse.........................................................................37 Reanimating the corpse................................................................................................42 Social themes, morbid forms .......................................................................................49 The broken marriages of In Memoriam .......................................................................53 Epithalamion as epitaph...............................................................................................60 III. LITERARY REPRODUCTION IN ELIZABETH GASKELL’S THE LIFE OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË.....................................................................................................67 Women writers and the marriage plot..........................................................................72 When is a woman writer like a graveyard?..................................................................81 Literary reproduction ...................................................................................................92 Morbid biography and women writers.......................................................................102 IV. MARRYING THE DEAD IN WILKIE COLLINS’S THE WOMAN IN WHITE .........107 Morbid marriages and the entropic plot.....................................................................113 Eros and the abdication of agency .............................................................................116 Sensational effects on characters ...............................................................................121 Sensational effects on readers....................................................................................129 Empty secrets and spectacular corpses ......................................................................133 Coda: Invisible corpses in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend............................141 V. “FIELD NO MORE”: TRANSCENDING MORBID AUTHORSHIP IN THE WORKS OF MICHAEL FIELD.....................................................................................................150 iv Revising elegy............................................................................................................157 “Praise of Thanatos” turns to “Grave Mould” ...........................................................168 Elegy and ekphrasis at the Paris Morgue...................................................................183 Reading Venus in Sight and Song..............................................................................188 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................196 v Chapter I Introduction: Defining Morbidity in Victorian Literature and Culture In Victorian Britain, a fascination with death was an ever present background to the social, industrial, and scientific changes that mark the era. Queen Victoria wore full mourning for her dead husband for forty years; people wore jet mourning brooches containing the hair of their beloved dead; gravestones, monuments, and funeral ceremonies became incredibly elaborate and expensive.1 In the twenty-first century, the visual evidence of Victorians’ preoccupation with death remains on display at Highgate Cemetery, one of the most popular tourist destinations in London.2 If you go to Highgate Cemetery today, you can either wander around Highgate East on your own, or join a guided tour around the older section, Highgate West. The guided tour begins in the cobbled courtyard just beyond what used to be the Anglican chapel, in front of a curved colonnade of brickwork. Once past the colonnade, the paths within the cemetery twist and curve, designed so that there are no clear prospects; you can never see very far ahead of you or be sure exactly where you will end up. All around the tombstones cluster in their variegated forms—some marble, others pink granite; some sunken and cracked, others rearing crosses elevated on triple plinths inscribed with the names and dates of the dead. The iconography of grave markers includes marble urns swathed with carved cloth, an empty 1 For details on Victorian mourning and burial practices, see The Victorian Celebration of Death, by James Stevens Curl, Death in the Victorian Family, by Pat Jalland, and Death, Heaven and the Victorians, by John Morley. For a broader historical and geographical context, see Philippe Ariès The Hour of Our Death and Julian Litten’s The English Way of Death. 2 The official website for Highgate Cemetery advises potential visitors to arrive early if they want to go on a guided tour and warns people that “Sundays are particularly popular and it is sometimes not possible to accommodate everyone wishing to visit” (highgate-cemetery.org). Clearly, the Victorians’ preoccupation with death