Victorian Transformations

Genre, Nationalism and Desire in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Bianca Tredennick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317002079
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Proposing the concept of transformation as a key to understanding the Victorian period, this collection explores the protean ways in which the nineteenth century conceived of, responded to, and created change. The volume focuses on literature, particularly issues related to genre, nationalism, and desire. For example, the essays suggest that changes in the novel's form correspond with shifting notions of human nature in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris; technical forms such as the villanelle and chant royal are crucial bridges between Victorian and Modernist poetics; Victorian theater moves from privileging the text to valuing the spectacles that characterized much of Victorian staging; Carlyle's Past and Present is a rallying cry for replacing the static and fractured language of the past with a national language deep in shared meaning; Dante Gabriel Rossetti posits unachieved desire as the means of rescuing the subject from the institutional forces that threaten to close down and subsume him; and the return of Adelaide Anne Procter's fallen nun to the convent in "A Legend of Provence" can be read as signaling a more modern definition of gender and sexuality that allows for the possibility of transgressive desire within society. The collection concludes with an essay that shows neo-Victorian authors like John Fowles and A. S. Byatt contending with the Victorian preoccupations with gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1
We Were Never Human: Monstrous Forms of Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Ian Duncan

Early in Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826) the protagonist recalls how friendship reclaimed him from a feral state:

This was the first commencement of my friendship with Adrian, and I must commemorate this day as the most fortunate of my life. I now began to be human. I was admitted within that sacred boundary which divides the intellectual and moral nature of man from that which characterizes animals. My best feelings were called into play to give fitting responses to the generosity, wisdom, and amenity of my new friend. (27)

Sympathetic socialization admits Lionel Verney to full membership in his species. “Friendship is the offspring of reason,” as the great natural historian, the Comte de Buffon, had proclaimed: “Thus friendship belongs only to man” (qtd. in Nash 7). Verney’s progress affords a stark contrast with Shelley’s earlier, more famous novel Frankenstein, in which the failure of friendship seals the monster’s exclusion from the “sacred boundary” of humankind. He retaliates by inflicting his own condition on his creator, exterminating his friends, reducing him to an inhuman solitude. This turns out to be Lionel Verney’s story too. Well before the end of The Last Man, he finds his matriculation into humanity mocked by the extinction of the species—and with that, the disappearance of the condition of possibility for being human.

“I now began to be human”: Shelley formulates as an ethical and pedagogical theme what authors had claimed as the philosophical foundation of the novel since its “rise,” its culturally acknowledged consolidation as a genre, in the middle of the eighteenth century. In one of the signposts of that event, the introductory chapter to Tom Jones, Henry Fielding justified the “new province of writing” (30) on the grounds that it could provide a complete, authentic representation of “HUMAN NATURE” (68). The developing technology of fictional realism fitted the novel above all other kinds of literature, even history, for that representation, and it would remain the guarantee of an otherwise suspect genre until (at least) the early twentieth century. The force of the guarantee (strong enough to override such defects as the novel’s lack of a classical genealogy, its identification with a mass market, with female literacy, and so on) derived from the ideological prestige newly attached to “human nature” as the all-inclusive theme or topical horizon of philosophical inquiry. On the eve of the appearance of the major novels of Fielding and Samuel Richardson, David Hume gave the title “the science of MAN” to the general project of Enlightenment (Treatise 42):

There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science. In pretending therefore to explain the principles of human nature, we in effect propose a compleat system of the sciences built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security. (Treatise 43)

The science of man would also provide a new and secure foundation for that modern, post-metaphysical literary genre, the novel. And indeed the high tradition of British philosophical empiricism as the science of man, from Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), coincides with the “classical” epoch of the British novel, from Richardson and Fielding to Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

The scientific account of human nature underwent a radical transformation in the period. “Man” remained just about stable enough, conceptually and categorically, to sustain a unified philosophical project until the end of the eighteenth century. After 1800 the science of man broke up into competing disciplines, theories, and ideologies—a disaggregation typified by the split between Herderian anthropology and Kantian transcendental philosophy in Germany after 17701—until Darwin made his bid to reunify the project under a decisively post-Enlightenment science of life. Natural philosophers, meanwhile, were grappling with a contradiction or scandal in the constitution of man as a scientific object from the mid-eighteenth century. Descartes had opened the modern tradition of philosophical rationalism with a reiteration of the absolute distinction between man and animals (1637); a century later Linnaeus included man among the other species in his Systema Naturae (1735), presenting his successors with a conundrum. Thus, Buffon admitted man to his Natural History while insisting on the impassable gulf that separated him from the “brutes,” an insistence that was reformulated as a first principle of the emergent discipline of anthropology by J.F. Blumenbach and his followers.2 Buffon erects a defensive barrier around man in two essays which address the problematic situation of the species—at once inside and outside the order of nature. In the first of these essays, Buffon contends that man’s physiological constitution places him among the animals while the soul, an inner immortal substance manifest in the work of reason, sets him absolutely apart. In formal terms, in short, man is a monster—a cross between alien orders of being.3 In the second of these essays, “Homo Duplex,” Buffon characterizes the taxonomic division between man and the other animals as an ontological state of “perpetual war” within man himself. He announces the birth of a key figure of literary Romanticism, the double: “The internal man is double. He is composed of two principles, different in their nature, and opposite in their action. The mind, or principle of all knowledge, wages perpetual war with the other principle, which is purely material” (3: 264).4 A traditional theological construction of human nature, intensified in the formulations of evangelical Protestantism, is forced to a crisis in the post-Cartesian attempt to define man as a scientific object.

Recently, Giorgio Agamben has argued that the western philosophical category of man has always been governed by an internal “mobile border,” an “intimate caesura,” which determines “the very decision of what is human and what is not” (15). The distinction between human and non-human entails a distinction within the human itself. Thus man, writes Agamben, “has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element”: in short, as something less than human plus something more than human, a composition in which the human itself remains elusive. Agamben suggests that we think of man, instead, “as what results from the incongruity of these two elements,” and “investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation”; that we understand man as at once the “place” and the “result” of “ceaseless divisions and caesurae” (16). In The Descent of Man Darwin would propose a decisive closure of those divisions and caesurae, a resolution of the chimerical figure of “Homo duplex,” with a biological accounting of all aspects of the human in which reason, sentiment, taste, morality and religion are subsumed within a unified natural order. (In the etiological, monist, and materialist drive of his argument, Darwin stands as Hume’s true heir.) At the same time (circa 1870), the newly established science of anthropology would found its disciplinary autonomy upon the disputed border between nature and culture—in effect saving and reinstating “Homo duplex.”

The major exponents of the crisis of the science of man in the early decades of the nineteenth century paved the way for Darwin’s synthesis even as they helped break up the Enlightenment consensus. Most conspicuous, because their work directly addressed (and aggressively unsettled) taxonomic premises, were the transmutationists (Pierre-Jean Cabanis, Erasmus Darwin, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck).5 Blumenbach affirmed the unity of the human species and the absolute division of man from the other animals as interdependent principles; transmutation threatened the stability of both. Its impact makes itself felt in novels written in the early 1830s, when the Lamarckian controversy was at its height, and in a subsequent tradition of the novel that disrupts realist norms by representing the deformation and mutability of the human. This tradition is also informed by two separate (although analogically related) scientific developments, in political economy and physiology, which dissolve the classical foundation of human nature upon the archetype of the individual body for a dispersed, dynamic, sublime conception of “life.” Political economists, after Malthus, recalibrated the conception of life to the macroscopic scale of populations and their historical wax and wane; Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, according to Catherine Gallagher, undid the traditional equivalence “between individual and social organisms by tracing social problems to human vitality itself” (37). Meanwhile philosophical anatomists, following Xavier Bichat, Theodor Schwann and Matthias Jakob Schleiden, and Rudolf Virchow, would affirm a new basis or unit of life at the microscopic level of tissue and cell; the ensuing redefinition of the organism as an aggregate of life-forms at the cellular level would be broadcast to the Victorian reading public by Herbert Spencer and G.H. Lewes (both part of George Eliot’s circle) in the 1860s–70s. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, “life” would absorb the figure of the human to become the philosophical principle of the novelist’s art. Henry James defined the novel in 1884 as not only “a personal impression of life” but itself “a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism” (“Art of Fiction” 174), while its raw material, “experience,” transcends the individual receptor: “Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every airborne particle in its tissue” (172).

The age of Malthus and Shelley (we call it Romanticism) marked a new threshold of experimentation in British fiction, as well as in the conception of the sciences of “life” and of “man.” Maureen McLane has considered Shelley’s Frankenstein in the convergence between an emergent, “specifically anthropological discourse of man” and the new claims being made for literature as the distinctive technology of the human—as the cultural instrument that not only represents but activates, through the work of reading, the process of becoming human (13). Frankenstein poses an explicit challenge to the Enlightenment figure of the human subject, with its creature that makes an eloquent claim on reason, sentiment and rights from outside the genealogy of the species.6 In The Last Man, Lionel Verney’s recognition of an internal, intellectual and moral border that he must cross in order to become human is the more usual scenario: investing his fall back out of species-being, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with that internal border, with its bizarre pathos.

Rather than following the ethical cue offered in The Last Man, the present essay will pursue the question of form: of what it means to think of the novel as the literary form of the human. The formal problematic of human nature consists in the relation between a uniform framework of kind or species and the degrees of variability it can tolerate. How much difference can man contain before he himself becomes different? In what follows, I shall sketch two aspects of the problematic—one historical, the other aesthetic—in relation to Romantic-period national fiction and late-Enlightenment aesthetic theory, before going on to consider the nineteenth-century rise of a sublime modality of the novel premised upon the deformation, mutation or dissolution of the human. With its hypothesis of an impossible subject who speaks from outside biological generation, Frankenstein posed an extreme version of the case that would not be taken up again until the last decades of the century, after the high tide of Victorian realism.7 Instead, the generative prototype of what would become a distinctively Victorian kind of fiction came from outside the British Isles. This was Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris, which enjoyed such wide currency in nineteenth-century Britain that it really deserves to be considered as part of the Victorian canon. Following extensive notice of the original in the British press, as many as four different English translations of Notre-Dame de Paris were circulating within a decade of its French publication in 1831.8 Hugo’s novel affords a vantage-point from which we can view the peculiar contours of the British tradition and understand its limits (limits that are, no doubt, integral to its achievements). I shall thus consider Notre-Dame de Paris as a naturalized English novel and a comparative case-study, rather than claiming to have anything to say about French literary history. Most striking, perhaps, among the radical gestures that set Notre-Dame de Paris apart from any British examples—including even Frankenstein—is that novel’s systematic representation of human being as an impossible condition.

By the time Shelley was writing, human nature had become a historical problem. In Northanger Abbey (published 1818), the narrator distinguishes her own work of fiction from the popular Gothic novels of the day:

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. (147)

Jane Austen may be characteristically ironical in ascribing a national and regional specificity to human nature; if so, the irony cuts both ways. Of course human nature must be a universal constant—in populating the Alps and Pyrenees with fiends and angels, Ann Radcliffe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 We Were Never Human: Monstrous Forms of Nineteenth-Century Fiction
• 2 Violence, Terror, and the Transformation of Genre in Mary Barton
• 3 ‘Nothing Will Make Me Distrust You’: The Pastoral Transformed in Anthony Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864)
• 4 On or about July 1877
• 5 Victorian Theater in the 1850s and the Transformation of Literary Consciousness
• 6 Reading Cant, Transforming the Nation: Carlyle’s Past and Present
• 7 Resurrecting Redgauntlet: The Transformation of Walter Scott’s Nationalist Revenants in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• 8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Remarketing Desire
• 9 Transforming the Fallen Woman in Adelaide Anne Procter’s “A Legend of Provence”
• 10 The Owl Flies Again: Reviving and Transforming Victorian Rhetorics of Literacy Crisis in the Internet Age
• 11 Feminine Endings: Neo-Victorian Transformations of the Victorian
• Index