Victorian Literary Cultures Victorian Literary Cultures Studies in Textual Subversion Edited by Kenneth Womack and James M. Decker FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by [author name for authored books/Rowman & Littlefield for edited collections] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-61147-664-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61147-665-1 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America For William Baker, Bibliographer, Teacher, Critic Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Subversive Literary Cultures xi Kenneth Womack Part I: Subversive Women 1 1 The Mysterious Identity of Helen Dickens, Victorian Novelist 3 Troy J. Bassett 2 Moonrise and the Ascent of Eve, the Woman Titan: Charlotte Brontë’s Epiphanies of the Fourfold Elemental Feminine 21 Martin Bidney 3 Condoning Adultery: Problems of Marriage and Divorce in George Eliot’s Life and Writing 45 Nancy Henry Part II: Subversive Ideologies 63 4 Unraveling Orientalism: Dawe’s “Yellow and White” 65 James M. Decker 5 “A familiar kinde of chastisement”: Fasting in the Nineteenth-Century 77 Joseph Lennon 6 The Effect of Emerging New Media on Book Publishing: Lessons from the Origins of Cross-Media Storytelling in the Early Twentieth Century for Contemporary Transmedia Researchers 101 Alexis Weedon 7 “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth”: Reading Levinasian Ethics and Literary Impressionism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 115 Kenneth Womack Part III: Subversive Genres 127 8 “Count me in”: Comedy in Dracula 129 Ira B. Nadel vii viii Contents 9 “The seasoned spirit of the cunning reader”: The Textual Subversions of The Turn of the Screw 153 Ruth Robbins 10 “Fallen” Clergymen: The Wages of Sin in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, and Henry Arthur Jones’s Michael and His Lost Angel 165 Jeanette Shumaker 11 Sherlock Holmes: The Criminal in the Detective 187 Joseph Wiesenfarth Index 197 About the Editors and Contributors 201 Acknowledgments Special thanks are due to the many friends and colleagues who made this volume possible. The editors are particularly grateful to the supportive and highly professional team at Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, especially the esteemed Harry Keyishian, the Director of the press and Professor Emeritus of English. At Monmouth University, we would like to thank Lynne Clay, Nancy Mezey, Judy Ramos, and Michael Thomas. We would like to thank Penn State Altoona’s Lori J. Bechtel-Wherry, Brian Black, Michele Kennedy, Peter Moran, and Nancy Vogel. Finally, we are indebted to our Illinois Central College colleagues, including Su- san Hillabold and Stuart Boyd. Ken would like to thank his wife Jeanine for her steadfast love and support. James would like to thank Stephanie Guedet for her unflagging love and keen critical eye, as well as his chil- dren, Siobhan, Anastazia, and Evan, for their inspiration. ix Introduction: Subversive Literary Cultures Kenneth Womack In a recent study, Astrid Peterle considers a central paradox of subver- sion: its simultaneous ability to critique dominant ideology by “shifting hegemonic meanings and codes” and its “mainstream” tendency to rein- force prevailing social mores. Judith Butler implicitly concurs in her ob- servation that “subversive performances always run the risk of becoming deadening clichés . through their repetition within commodity culture where ‘subversion’ carries market value” (xxii). Such a variance in mean- ing calls to mind Terry Eagleton’s comment on overly broad definitions of ideology that it “threatens to expand to vanishing point.” By being both ideologically “dangerous” and utterly normative, the concept of subversion risks losing critical potency or, at the very least, forfeiting its ability to “enable the possibility of action” (Lui 56). Nevertheless, as Pe- terle somewhat grudgingly acknowledges, “artistic practice has the po- tential to open up alternative ways of perception by making visible, switching, affirming (and so on) hegemonic meanings.” Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion explores such artistic practice— from writers both socially committed and otherwise—and provides read- ers with close textual analyses regarding how subversion either critiques or reinforces the so-called mainstream. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the writers under review—including such canonical figures as George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as new read- ings of lesser-known works by Carlton Dawe and Helen Dickens—the critics in this anthology offer diverse example of subversion—both “in- tentional” and unintentional—as an enduring literary phenomenon. A notoriously unstable term, subversion can refer to multiple practices and concepts. At the center of the controversy lie the entangled relation- ships among writer, text, and reader. For some theorists, such as Leo Strauss, the writer initiates the subversive act, concealing “obtrusively enigmatic features” (36) in plain sight so as to pass along potentially radical ideas to a select group of readers who can see “between the lines” (24). In this way, as José Manuel Losada Goya and Marta Guirao Ochoa would have it, “subversion is carried out with an end in mind” (3). The effectiveness of this overt action, however, is called into question by theo- xi xii Kenneth Womack rists such as Louis Althusser, who argues that such subversion merely “contributes to the maintenance and nourishment” (157) of the dominant ideological state apparatuses, a position echoed by Stephen Greenblatt (via Foucault’s views on power in works such as Discipline and Punish): “power defines itself in relation to such [subversive] threats” (50). For Greenblatt, authority can quickly and seamlessly “contain” such “alien forces” (52–53). In other words, the active subversion proposed by Strauss may ultimately reinforce, rather than destroy, the dominant ideology, for it is merely co-extensive with it. Others, such as M. M. Bakhtin and Judith Butler, take a more sanguine view and submit that in certain circumstances “intentional” subversion can succeed in challenging the hegemony. Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, with its mockery and “grotesque realism” suggest, contra Greenblatt, that subversion could break through its sanctioned (contained) space and demonstrate that the dominant ideology could indeed be questioned in narrative (19). Butler, although aware that power relations such as those discussed by Althusser could negate or “postpone the . task of rethink- ing subversive possibilities for sexuality and identity” (42), nevertheless argues that intentionally subversive performances could expose the “phantasmatic structure” (42) of normative identity because “the very multiplicity of their construction holds out the possibility of a disruption of their univocal posturing” (44). For both Butler and Bakhtin, the pres- ence of multiple voices casts doubt on the naturalized state of the domi- nant ideology and implies that an intentional author—or series of inten- tional authors—can effect lasting change. Roland Barthes and Tony Bennett, however, minimize the role of the writer and highlight the subversive nature of the text itself, particularly when engaged by an active reader. In S/Z, Barthes outlines his concept of a “plural” text in which a “galaxy of signifiers” (5) resist a singular mean- ing and “subvert the opposition between true and false” (44). The infi- nitely connotative possibilities of such narratives are by their nature sub- versive in that no officially sanctioned interpretation can negate the pos- sibility of heterodox ones. Tony Bennett, thus, can claim that the task of a subversive reader (Marxist for Bennett, but the principle applies beyond a single ideology) “is not that of reflecting or bringing to light the politics which is already there as a latent presence [but of] producing a new position for it within the field of cultural relations and, thereby, new forms of use and effectively within the broader social process” (136). In other words, as Keith M. Booker writes, “the role of the critic [is] activat- ing the subversive potential of a text” (10). The critics in this volume stake a position that attempts to balance the roles of the writer, text, and reader as subversive agent. For a variety of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British novelists, subversion ex- isted as a central aspect of their writerly existence. Although—or perhaps because—a great number of Victorian authors composed their works for Introduction: Subversive Literary Cultures xiii a general and mixed audience, many writers employed strategies de- signed to subvert genteel expectations.