if fiction is to be narrative at all, it must necessarily be linked to and coeval with the very process of life itself; and furthermore, if narrative is to be mimetic as well as productive, it also must be able to repeat as well as record the âfathering-forthâ, the âover and overingsâ (the phrases are Gerard Manley Hopkinsâs) of human life, the essence and image of which are biological self-perpetuation and unfolding genealogy based on the procreative urge, marriage and family.5
Mikhail Bakhtin, also, views genealogy as essential to what he calls the âbiographical novelâ - a type which he describes in his introductory history of the development of the genre as immediately preceding the Bildungsroman and the major forms of nineteenth-century fiction. Genealogy or âgenerationsâ place the single life-span within the scale of history, and this Bakhtin sees as crucial to the nineteenth-century novel:
Biographical time as real time cannot but be included (participate) in the longer process of historical, but embryonically historical, time. Biographical life is impossible outside a larger epoch, which goes beyond the limits of a single life-span, whose duration is represented primarily by generations.6
For Said, it is the repetition (the âover and overingsâ) demanded by the genealogical imperative which are crucial to fiction, and for Bakhtin it is particularly the juxtaposition of different time-scales.
Both repetition and scale are central to Thomas Hardyâs writing, and a glance at two of his poems, âThe Pedigreeâ and âAt Castle Boterelâ, may serve to clarify some of the reasons why genealogy is such an intense preoccupation in nineteenth-century writing, involved with contemporary anxieties and debates over free will and determinism, and over some of the disturbing conclusions drawn from new discoveries in geology and evolutionary theory -a few of the issues which will impinge upon my discussion of ancestry in Victorian writing. At the centre of Hardyâs poem âThe Pedigreeâ is the fear of genealogical repetition. A figure is seen at night studying his family tree: âI bent in the deep of night / Over a pedigree the chronicler gave / As mineâ, the poem begins. In the second stanza and those that follow the pedigree becomes increasingly disturbing to the man:
II
So, scanning my sire-sown tree,
And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that,
With offspring mapped below in lineage,
Till the tangles troubled me,
The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face
Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage
Enchanting me to gaze again thereat.
III
It was a mirror now,
And in it a long perspective I could trace
Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each
All with the kindred look,
Whose names had since been inked down in their place
On the recorderâs book,
Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow.
IV
And then did I divine
That every heave and coil and move I made
Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,
Was in the glass portrayed
As long forestalled by their so making it;
The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,
Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reasonâs reach.
V
Said I then, sunk in tone,
âI am merest mimicker and counterfeit! -
Though thinking, I am I,
And what I do I do myself alone.â7
The poem offers no answer to the quandary suggested by these last quoted lines: it presents an important opposition in nineteenth-century thought about ancestry: are we merely âmimickersâ, determined by our past, or can we act with free will and self-determination, free of the past (âI am I and what I do I do myself aloneâ)? During the French Revolution, French citizens were also anxious to be âfree of the pastâ - so much so that they created a new calendar, naming the first year of their âNew Eraâ the âFirst Year of the Republicâ, thereby erasing the past as represented by the Gregorian calendar and the dynastic history of their nation. For many nineteenth-century Britons this new French regime, self-fashioned, a tabula rasa, was written over with the horrors of the guillotine, mob violence, and particularly regicide. After the French Revolution, then, dynastic history and the traceable lines of genealogy were more than ever representative of continuity and national stability and even more attractive to nineteenth-century Britons than they had been to those of the eighteenth century. Thomas Carlyleâs The French Revolution: A History (1837) sentimentally portrays the family life of Louis XVI, and regards the execution of the king and queen as a blow against both dynastic and family history. Carlyleâs portrayal of Louis and Marie Antoinette as loving parents and a close family unit (especially in his redacted account of the family parting before the kingâs execution) is interesting because it brings together private moments of family history and public, dynastic history. Here, family history also provides a model of stable hierarchical relations: Louis is a father, and at the head of his family. The fact that he is also a king, and âfatherâ to his country, underlines the importance of the ânaturalâ order of patriarchy in both familial and dynastic history to the continuity and stability of the nation - this latter view being crucial to the conservative population of nineteenth-century Britain.
In the same year that Carlyleâs The French Revolution was published, Victoria, the great matriarch of nineteenth-century Britain, came to the throne. While Victoria was a strong ruler, her matriarchy presented little challenge to the patriarchal order of Victorian society. After her marriage with Albert, the royal couple and their growing family presented to the public an image of the family unit in comfortable, close domesticity, with Albert at the head. Indeed their family life agreed well with the growing emphasis in the nineteenth century on the bourgeois family unit. The intrigues, illegitimacies and infidelities of eighteenth-century aristocracy were now vilified, and replaced even at the throne with what would come to be known as âVictorianâ family values, those values which were supposed to uphold the home as a place of refuge and affection, and of the sexual fidelity which would ensure that the inheriting children were legitimate. Even after Albertâs death in 1861, the prince consort was still a powerful patriarchal presence - present in spirit as is clear from Victoriaâs almost obsessive widowhood and seclusion, and iconically present in paintings and, later, photographs which almost always include a bust or painting of Albert at the side of the queen in her widowâs weeds. In a century which was taken up with debates over the Matrimonial Causes Act (passed in 1857) and the Married W...