Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Diaries and Letters

K. Brindle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137007162
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Neo-Victorian writers invoke conflicting viewpoints in diaries, letters, etc. to creatively retrace the past in fragmentary and contradictory ways. This book explores the complex desires involved in epistolary discoveries of 'hidden' Victorians, offering new insight into the creative synthesising of critical thought within the neo-Victorian novel.

1

Diary and Letter Strategies Past and Present

A fine frenzy of epistolary inspiration

Wilkie Collins

Armadale (1864–6)¹

This book proposes that an epistolary approach characterises the neo-Victorian concern with processes of fragmentation, as endangered, disordered, and disorderly documents fashion and fabricate a pastiche of the Victorian past. There are both similarities and significant differences between nineteenth-century and contemporary fiction’s use of epistolary devices. The epistolary novel comprised purely of letters famously had its heyday in the eighteenth century, developing from earlier examples like Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Noble-man and His Sister (1684–7) and the anonymous Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) to later well-known epistolary novels like Frances Burney’s Evelina: Or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World (1778), Samuel Richardson’s epic Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–8), and Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1741), to name but three of many. Notably, in this last most renowned epistolary novel, letter-writing conventions metamorphose into diary writing; indeed, as Tom Keymer points out, Pamela ‘is never far from (and at one stage becomes) a soliloquising diary or journal’.² An eighteenth-century epistolary novel also of particular significance to this study is Sophia Lee’s The Recess: A Tale of Other Times (1783), the success of which, April Alliston claims, was important in establishing both Gothic and historical fiction.³ Diana Wallace suggests that this novel proves influential for narrative strategies of historical fiction, as ‘one of Lee’s most important bequests to her successors’ lies in her ‘handling of narrative point of view and the use of a view from below or to the side of conventional histories’.⁴ The eighteenth-century epistolary wave has been the subject of extensive critical examination,⁵ often with a particular focus on women.⁶ The form lost popularity at the end of the century largely because of what Joe Bray suggests was the letter’s inability to continue representing psychological tensions.⁷ However, Bray acknowledges its impact on the style of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels⁸ and, as Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook points out, the form did not vanish at the end of the eighteenth century, but rather its rhetorical strategies and generic conventions were incorporated in fragmented form into some nineteenth-century fictions.⁹

The nineteenth century may therefore have been an era when epistolary forms were less in favour with novelists, but Gothic and sensation fiction writers continued to intercalate letters and diaries in plots that developed secrets and suspense for subversive agendas. Texts such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1858), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) all employ diary form. Letters are a significant presence in classic Gothic works, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Interpolated diaries and letters were also staple narrative strategies in nineteenth-century sensation fiction; as John Sutherland observes, ‘sensationalists specialised in a jagged style of narration that impacted on the reader’s sensibility like bullets’.¹⁰ Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s most famous novel, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), may not contain a diarist, but she nonetheless regularly incorporated diary writing into her sensational works.¹¹ Similarly, Ellen Wood’s and Charles Reade’s sensation novels contain or cite diaries.¹² Most conspicuously, however, Wilkie Collins pervasively embedded epistolary forms in his fiction as part of what one Victorian reviewer deemed a ‘peculiar new scheme of writing a tale in the words of a dozen different narrators’.¹³ Collins produced such notable diarists as Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866), Miss Clack in The Moonstone (1868), and Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White (1860), which James Wilson’s neo-Victorian novel, The Dark Clue: A Novel of Suspense (2001), revisits with similarly amassed epistolary devices and discovered secrets. Sensation novels were defined by Katherine Tillotson as ‘novels with a secret’;¹⁴ Kelly Marsh further suggests that ‘sensation novels, by definition, work on the assumption that present enigmas are the result of secrets hidden in the past, and that these secrets are discoverable’.¹⁵ Such a denouement recuperates breached knowledge to produce nineteenth-century plots that require resolution for all loose narrative ends. Unearthed and exposed, letters and diaries disclose documentary ‘evidence’ to avidly awaiting audiences, as illustrated by Collins: ‘If Miss Halcombe’s search through her mother’s letters had produced the result which she anticipated, the time had come for clearing up the mystery of the woman in white.’¹⁶

Collins’s later novels continue to embed documents with strategic variety. Diverse manoeuvring of letters, diaries, and addressee situations is evident in such works as Poor Miss Finch (1873), where blind Lucilla Finch’s diary is transcribed and interrupted by narrator Madame Pratolungo’s contradictory or explanatory interjections that, at times, refer readers to specific earlier points in the narrative for proof or clarity. The Law and the Lady (1875) features Valeria Woodville in an early role of detective figure, attempting to clear her husband of poisoning his first wife; ultimately, she provides proof of this by supervising the reconstruction of a torn and scattered confessional letter, as ‘precious morsels of paper’ are recovered (quite fantastically) from beneath three years of refuse in the ‘dust-heap’.¹⁷ A later work, The Legacy of Cain (1888), tests out theories of hereditary criminal tendencies via a strategy of two alternating female diarists that resonates with Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999).¹⁸ Neo-Victorianism’s debt to sensation fiction, particularly Collins’s work, is readily acknowledged by both novelists and critics of the genre.¹⁹ Waters states that her first three novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity, and, particularly, Fingersmith (2002), are pastiches of nineteenth-century sensation fiction. She specifically imitates the strategies of Collins’s The Woman in White to stage the twists and turns of her own fiction.²⁰ Beth Palmer discusses the legacy of the sensation novel’s ‘awareness of material culture’ evident in the intersecting diaries of Affinity, which she argues particularly resembles a Collins sensation text both in form and also materiality of print, with the two diaries printed in different fonts.²¹

Strategically echoing the conventions of Gothic and sensation fiction as they are, it is unsurprising that neo-Victorian writers who appropriate epistolary media continue to focus on topics that preoccupied these nineteenth-century genres. David Punter and Glennis Byron observe that

Sensation fiction, sometimes called ‘domesticated Gothic’ because of the way in which it transfers Gothic events to the heart of a supposedly respectable Victorian society, focuses upon secrets, social taboos, the irrational elements of the psyche, and questions of identity. Murder, adultery, bigamy, blackmail, fraud and disguise are common components of the plot.²²

Revisionist writers revisit and reinvent this thematic inheritance to again unfold adultery, madness, crimes of passion, and variations of dark desires or social transgression, as hidden diaries and secret letters come to light. Mapping an uncertain mix of citation and invention, neo-Victorianists evidence contemporary Gothic’s fascination with ‘spaces of absence’²³ and advertise their creative exploitation of what Margaret Atwood terms the ‘mere hints and outright gaps’ in the archive.²⁴

As suggested, within nineteenth-century plots of suspense and discovery, epistolary forms contain sensational secrets that are revealed sooner or later, but neo-Victorianism novels organise letters and diaries quite differently. Nineteenth-century texts treat letters and diaries as empirical or legal evidence to resolve disruption of property ownership, inheritance, marriage, and identity crises. Discovered documents provide restorative hermeneutic evidence for fictional worlds under threat from social and sexual transgression. Unlike nineteenth-century narratives of exposed and explained secrets, postmodern fiction tends not to emphasise documents uncovering ‘truths’, but rather deconstructs how investigatory reading and interpretation take place. For example, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is contemporarily reworked by Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (2003) to provide a housemaid’s diary account of the doctor’s very peculiar behaviour; similarly the epistolary strategies of Dracula are revisited in Elizabeth Kostova’s neo-Victorian novel, The Historian (2005), which begins with discovery of letters hidden in a library, addressed to ‘My dear and unfortunate successor’.²⁵ In their nineteenth-century pre-texts, epistolary formats explain events and restore order, whereas later neo-Victorian adaptations recover either a marginal character – history from below – or celebrate archival investigation that pieces together history with discovery of hidden documents.

Hidden or lost documents are regularly unearthed and brought to light in a substantial body of neo-Victorian fiction that concentrates, like A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), on revealing family secrets in documents as ‘folded paper time-bombs’.²⁶ Novels like John Harwood’s The Ghostwriter (2005) and The Seance (2008) both plot spectral suspense and secrets with epistolary strategies and manuscripts prised from secret drawers.²⁷ Archival questing turns into a genealogical mystery in Fiona Mountain’s Pale as the Dead (2005), which begins with an old bequeathed diary and culminates in the recovery of a letter that encloses fated Pre-Raphaelite model Lizzie Siddal’s mythical suicide note. Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (2006) begins another exposé of family secrets with an enticing letter that promises biographical revelation and culminates with a ‘fragmented and broken’ diary to unravel a tale of twins and incest.²⁸ Sarah Blake’s Grange House (2000) similarly connects a writer and reader by way of a diary text before revealing the secret blood relationship between them. These texts all concentrate on recovering the past, with belated readers piecing together shifting personal histories from unstable, fragmented textual remains.

In fiction, as in life, documents subject to the whims and vagaries of careless inheritors and caretaking censors emanate an air of fragility, mystery, and secrecy. Letter communications can be hazardous: interrupted, misdirected, intercepted, or undelivered by mischance or design; like diaries, they may also be deliberately expurgated, defaced, burned, or buried. Such perilous transmission of meaning fascinated nineteenth-century sensation and Gothic fiction writers and now absorbs contemporary revisionists, as illustrated in The Thirteenth Tale:

Hester’s diary was damaged. The key was missing, the clasp so rusted that it left orange stains on your fingers. The first three pages were stuck together where the glue from the inner cover had melted into them. On every page the last word dissolved into a brownish tide mark as if the diary had been exposed to dirt and damp together. A few pages had been torn; along the ripped edges was a tantalising list of fragments: abn, cr, ta, est. Worst of all, it seemed that the diary had at some point been submerged in water. The pages undulated; when closed, the diary splayed to more than its intended thickness.²⁹

Neo-Victorian novels exploit epistolary uncertainties by regularly teasing readers with ever-receding evidence. For example, in Michèle Roberts’s In the Red Kitchen (1991), the Victorian medium Flora Milk’s written record is tantalisingly glimpsed in a box containing old photographs before being whisked away by a mystery claimant; or in Andrea Barrett’s account of a doomed Arctic expedition, The Voyage of the Narwhal (2000), where an eagerly discovered diary proves disappointingly to be ‘only a shell, two covers with just a few pages remaining, all the rest torn out’.³⁰ In these ways, it is repeatedly demonstrated that neo-Victorian diarists may fail to be either legible or read at all. Destined to remain unread, private chronicles indicate unexamined and unsubstantiated life histories as fragmenting material remains frustrate posterity.³¹ Further frustration arises when diary writers may be self-censorious or deliberately deceiving, with those ‘“cautious” of exposure’ carefully concealing rather than revealing themselves in their ‘private’ texts.³² This scenario can be exploited in fiction: for example, Harwood’s novel The Seance illustrates that Nell Wraxham, a ‘gifted medium’ who supposedly freely confides in her diary, must find ‘the perfect hiding-place’ to secure it from her murderously inclined husband.³³ Yet, in fact, her diary narrative acts as a red herring to support her escape into anonymity, which a later reader of the journal reali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Re-write, sign, seal and send’
• 1 Diary and Letter Strategies Past and Present
• 2 Riddles and Relics: Critical Correspondence in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance and The Biographer’s Tale
• 3 Spectral Diarists: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Melissa Pritchard’s Selene of the Spirits
• 4 A Deviant Device: Diary Dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace
• 5 Lewis Carroll and the Curious Theatre of Modernity: Epistolary Pursuit in Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me
• 6 Dissident Diarists: Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White
• Postscript: Treasures and Pleasures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index