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Sex and Death in Victorian Literature PDF

271 Pages·1990·40.397 MB·English
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Sex and Death in Victorian Literature Edited by Regina Barreca Assista11t Professor of E11glislz U11iversity of Colllzecficut, Storrs ~ MACMILlAN «>Regina Barreca 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-46727-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sex and death in Victorian literature I. English literature, 1837-1900. Special themes. Sex relations- Critical studies 2. English literature, 1837-1900. Special themes. Death - Critical studies I. Barreca, Regina 820.9'353 ISBN 978-1-349-10282-2 ISBN 978-1-349-10280-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10280-8 8 7 6 5 4 3 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 Contents Notes on the Contributors vii 1 Introduction: Coming and Going in Victorian Literature Regina Barreca 1 2 'You did not come': Absence, Death and Eroticism in Tess James Kincaid 9 3 Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophiles and Necrofilles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Robert Tracy 32 4 Tennyson's Sword: From 'Mungo the American' to Idylls of the King Gerhard Joseph 60 5 'Beckoning Death': Daniel De ronda and the Plotting of a Reading Garrett Stewart 69 6 Against Completion: Ruskin's Drama of Dream, Lateness and Loss Mary Ann Caws 107 7 Controlling Death and Sex: Magnification v. the Rhetoric of Rules in Dickens and Thackeray Carol Hanbery MacKay 120 8 Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism Regenia Gagnier 140 v vi Contents 9 The Plot of the Beautiful Ignoramus: Ruth and the Tradition of the Fallen Woman Hilary Schor 158 10 'Death-in-Love': Rossetti and the Victorian Journey Back to Dante Robert Zweig 178 11 Death and Sex from Tennyson's Early Poetry to In Memoriam Sylvia Manning 194 12 The Double Death of Eurydice: A Discussion of Browning and Mythology Robert Steiner 211 13 The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights Regina Barreca 227 14 Dialogue with the Dead: The Deceased Beloved as Muse Elisabeth Bronfen 241 Index 260 Notes on the Contributors Regina Barreca is author of Punch Lines: Comedy and Subversion in Women's Writing. She is editor of Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy and editor of the critical journal LIT. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Elisabeth Bronfen is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich. She is the author of a book on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson and is currently writing a book on the representations of feminine death. Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Litera- ture, French and English at the Graduate School of City University of New York. Among her many books on poetics and contemporary writing are The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction, and most recently, The Art of Interference: Stressed Reading in Visual and Verbal Texts. Regenia Gagnier, author of Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, is completing a study of subjectivity, value and the uses of literacy in the lifewriting of Victorian working-class, public and boarding school, and canonical literary subjects. She is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. Gerhard Joseph is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is author of Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal and various articles on nineteenth-century and medieval subjects. He is currently working on another book, Tennyson and Silence. James Kincaid is the author of books on Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, and of several editions. He is now Aerol Arnold Professor at the University of Southern California. He is completing a study on Victorian pedophilia. Carol Hanbery MacKay, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, is author of Soliloquy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and editor of Dramatic Dickens. She has written several articles viii Notes on the Contributors on Ann Thackeray Ritchie as well as the critical introduction to The Two Thackerays. Her major work in progress is a study of Victorian novelists as thwarted dramatists. Sylvia Manning is author of Dickens as Satirist and Images of the City: London in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. She has written on Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, and other Victorian authors. She is a Professor of English and Vice-Provost of the University of Southern California. Hilary Schor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. The author of several reviews and articles on Victorian literature, she has completed a book on Elizabeth Gaskell, and is at work on a study of female narrative in the novels of Charles Dickens. Robert Steiner, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of five novels, most recently Dread and Matinee. He is currently at work on a comparative study of Finnegan's Wake and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Garrett Stewart is Professor of English and Film at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Dickens and the Trials of the Imagination and Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction, as well as of numerous articles on fiction and film narrative. Robert Tracy is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley where he specialises in Victorian and Irish literature. He is author of Trollope's Later Novels and has translated Osip Mandelstan's early poems in Stone. He is at work on further translations from Mandelstan, and on a study of nineteenth-century Irish writers. Robert Zweig has completed a full-length study of Dante and the Victorians. He has written on both Italian and English literature. He is an Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan College. 1 Introduction: Coming and Going in Victorian Literature Regina Barreca Sex is worth dying for. It is in this [strictly historical] sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct. When a long while ago the West discovered love, it bestowed on it a value high enough to make death acceptable ... sex claims this equivalence, the highest of all. 1 And a voice said in mastery, while I strove- 'Guess now who holds thee?'-'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang - 'Not Death, but Love.'2 Sex and death provide an important matrix of artistic possibilities for the Victorian writer; these apparently irreconcilable forces combine, occasionally explicitly but more often implicitly, to produce an ineradicable alignment of sexuality and mortality in nineteenth- century poetry and fiction. What are the significant points of convergence? The idea of sin frames both. Balancing mortality with sexuality sets up a dialectic for the interplay between fear and desire as the perpetual human con- dition. Fear of eternal damnation was placed beside desire for the 'eternity in a moment' of orgasm. Herbert Marcuse has claimed, in Eros and Civilization, that 'timelessness is the ideal of pleasure', paral- lel to the timelessness of death. Similarly, the loss of self during orgasm apparently mirrored the loss of self in death. Sex and death both indi- cated the limits of human control and were therefore to be feared. 1 2 Sex and Death i11 Victorian Literature Additional points of connection between sex and death include the fact that both are basically physical actions, more scientifically defined by the functions of the body than the spirit. Either the heart races or it stops altogether. The need to indicate sexual activity without being able to name it caused the repressed sexuality in a text to be reflected in speech patterns and rhetorical structures. Clearly, repressed sexuality and a fervid interest in mortality are not the exclusive property of Victorian literature. Yet, as a number of critics from Foucault to Gay, from Steven Marcus to Elaine Showalter have indicated, the twinning of sex and death provided the novels and the poetry of the period with a sort of counter-balanced framework within which fertile narrative strategies operated. The essays in this volume will carry the sex/death dialectic even further and will place the complex interweaving of desire and fear -love and death-at the centre of their wide-ranging arguments. She had the sort of knowledge which links love not only with clarity, but also with violence and death-because death seems to be the truth of love, just as love is the truth of death.3 The pleasures of death, in contrast to the pleasures of sex, have long been the focus for all forms of Victorian literature, from the intricate fugues of Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' to the stunningly obvious melodrama of the nineteenth-century stage. In his study of death and dying in the novel, Garrett Stewart comments that '[s]ome characters must die in any period of novel writing. As everyone allows, characters die more often, more slowly and more vocally in the Victorian age than ever before or since' (Stewart, 1984). Death scenes, ranging from Sikes' murder of Nancy (which, according to Philip Collins, certainly inflamed Dickens' passions to a dangerous extent during his public readings of the scene) to Maggie Tulliver's fatal union at the end of The Mill on the Floss, from Thackeray's report of George Osborn's death in an embedded clause to Pompilia's closing scenes in Browning's The Ring and the Book, could be relied upon to produce an ultimately satisfying conclusion to the nar- ration. Satisfaction, in fact, is what a Victorian death scene can be counted on to provide: either the satisfaction of our righteous indignation or the satisfaction of other-worldly recompense for an otherwise destitute and unthinkable existence. In contrast, of course, implications of sexuality in a scene could signal an ultimate refusal to offer any sexual resolution, despite the sexual tensions Introduction 3 plotted out. Death scenes could offer full play for language and enlarge the possibilities for emotion and indulgence. Such passages are certainly more convincing and moving than their erotic counter- parts. Wedding nights, unless they involve murder or abandon- ment, are rarely described. How does marriage fit into this set of literary structures? Marriage is to heaven as sex is to death: marriage seems to be the route to heaven and sex seems the route to death. The popular con- cept of nineteenth-century sex within marriage was, according to Foucault, 'acknowledged in social space as well as at the heart of every household, but it was .. . utilitarian and fertile', represented by 'the parent's bedroom'.4 Both happy marriage and heaven, however, are ideal states of little interest to the reader who has rarely met with verifiable instances of either. Even within the family, Foucault suggests, there existed the possibility for 'a net- work of pleasures and powers linked together at multiple points'.5 Victorian literature for the most part veils any sexual relation inside the domestic union and so readers must judge from the evidence of taboo sexual behaviour provided by adulterous, or at the very least adventurous, figures. And, based on such evidence, we must conclude that the mortality rate for immorality is exceedingly high. Not that the portrayal of sex was wholly absent from Victorian literature, of course. It did require what we now perceive as a sacrifice of verisimilitude for a writer such as Dickens to portray a character of passionate desire, like Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend, without overtly acknowledging his sexuality. Without being able to explore, except metaphorically, the sexual nature of charac- ters, writers fell upon the highly wrought and deeply upholstered symbolism so often associated with Victorian literature. An inability to explore sex without concurrently exploring morality is the hallmark of Victorian literature. Death was regarded, even by proclaimed agnostics, as a sort of passage rather than a final snapping shut of life. Against a belief in heaven, few deaths could sustain horror-thus the horror of Stoker's permanent non-death in Dracula. His tale managed to touch our deepest dread of mortality without raising the question of whether there could ever be horror in death considering that we inhabit a 'redeemed' world. Stoker grants us permission to have access to our own fears without sacrificing a shred of belief in our own ultimate salvation so that we can free our repressed emotion without accusing ourselves of

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