Sex and Death in Victorian Literature

271 Pages·1990·40.397 MB·English

by  Regina Barreca (eds.)

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
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First published 1990
Published by
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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