This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Neo-Victorian Cannibalism A Reading of Contemporary Neo-Victorian Fiction Ho, Lai Ming Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Neo-Victorian Cannibalism: A Reading of Contemporary Neo-Victorian Fiction by Tammy HO Lai Ming Thesis for the Degree of PhD King’s College, University of London 2012 1 DECLARATION I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma or other qualifications. Signed ……………………………………………… Tammy HO Lai Ming 2 ABSTRACT This thesis is about a body of contemporary neo-Victorian novels whose uneasy relationship with the past can be theorised in terms of aggressive eating, even cannibalism. Cannibalism operates on different levels throughout many works, and there is a sense of surreptitious insistence about it in the genre as a whole. Not only is the imagery of eating repeatedly used by critics to comprehend neo-Victorian literature, the theme of cannibalism itself also appears overtly or implicitly in a number of the novels and their Victorian prototypes, thereby mirroring the cannibalistic relationship between the contemporary and the Victorian. I argue that aggressive eating or cannibalism can be seen as a pathological and defining characteristic of neo-Victorian fiction. It provides a framework for understanding the genre’s origin, its conflicted, ambivalent and violent relationship with its Victorian predecessors and the grotesque and gothic effects that it generates in the fiction. Each chapter hinges on one type of ‘cannibal’ through which the discussion of the theory of neo-Victorian cannibalism is elucidated. The first chapter investigates the phenomenon of incorporating the biographies of Victorian celebrities in neo-Victorian fiction. Using Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), I discuss how Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin are portrayed as sexual and colonial Bluebeard cannibals, a form of representation which provides a revisionist critique of the misogynist, oppressive and racialist undercurrent of Victorian ideology. The second chapter examines the vampiric cannibal and analyses three neo-Victorian adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – Tom Holland’s Supping With Panthers (1996), Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008) and Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead (2009). In these works, the writers simultaneously cannibalise the original text and its author’s biography, and in so doing challenge Stoker’s authorial power and clear a creative space for themselves. In the third chapter, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is read as an important intertext. The chapter studies the representation of Bertha, a character often portrayed in cannibalistic terms, in Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and three relatively recent neo-Victorian novels – Lin Haire-Sargeant’s H: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights (1992), D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre (2000) and Emma Tennant’s Adéle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002). I argue that a narrative reorientation away from Bertha in the three later novels, which cannibalise both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, prompts us to reconsider the level of political engagement 3 of the neo-Victorian genre. The fourth chapter centres on the ‘academic cannibal’ and discusses the role of scholarly characters in neo-Victorian novels including A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), A.N. Wilson’s A Jealous Ghost (2005), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr Y (2006) and Justine Picardie’s Daphne (2008). I argue that the use of scholars in these novels reflects a mutual dependence between the neo-Victorian genre and the academy, a relationship that can be viewed as both cannibalistic and competitive. Finally, the Conclusion speculates on how, under certain circumstances, the Victorian can be seen to cannibalise the contemporary and how the relationship between past and present will continue to evolve in the neo-Victorian genre. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration………………………………………………………………………………..2 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...3 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………....4 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………...7 Introduction Neo-Victorian Cannibalism….………………………………………………10 I. Book-eating book: Tom Philips’s A Humument (1966)………….…………………...10 II. Aggressive ambivalence: Towards a theory of neo-Victorian cannibalism.................19 III. The chapters: An outline…………………………………………………………......35 Chapter One Dickens the Cannibal Cannibalised…………………………………………38 I. Neo-Victorian biofiction……………………………………………………………..38 II. The neo-Victorian appeal of Dickens………………………………………………...41 III. Introducing Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) and Wanting (2008)……………………….49 IV. Girl in a Blue Dress: Dickens the Cannibal Cannibalised…………………………...54 V. Wanting: A tale of multiple cannibalisms……………………………………………68 VI. Conclusion: The creation of new identities through cannibalism……………………91 Chapter Two Stoker and Neo-Draculas……………………………………………………..94 I. Cannibalistic Dracula (1897)……………………...…………………………………94 II. Neo-Victorian double cannibalism: textual and biographical………………………..98 III. Stoker’s authorial vulnerability……………………………………………………..105 IV. Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers (1996)……………………………………..110 V. Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008)…………………………...116 VI. Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead (2009)………………………...121 VII. Conclusion: ‘Dragging their fantasies’…………………………………………126 Chapter Three Contesting (Post-)colonialism: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea and Three Neo-Victorian Rejoinders…………………………………………………...128 I. Writing back: Victorian colonialism, neo-Victorian postcolonialism………………128 II. Jane Eyre: The colonial, cannibal and Caribbean connection……………………...133 III. Cannibalising text: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)………………………..142 IV. Cannibalising Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: Three neo-Victorian rejoinders...148 V. Conclusion: Literary ouroboros…………………………………………………….165 5 Chapter Four Academic Cannibals in Neo-Victorian Fiction…………………………….166 I. Academic cannibals…………………………………………………………………166 II. Editing and annotating the Victorian………………………………………………..172 III. Researching the Victorian…………………………………………………………..176 IV. Inheriting the Victorian……………………………………………………………..186 V. Conclusion: worthy heirs…………………………………………………………...195 Conclusion Victorian Memes...............................…………………………………..........197 Works Cited………………………………………………….……………..………….........201 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In Cannibalism: from Sacrifice to Survival (1994), Hans Askenasy writes: [A] most enjoyable moment has arrived: that of expressing appreciation to that person without whom this endeavour would