Print-Cultural Play: The Conflation of Fiction and Reality in The Doctor’s Wife and Belgravia

 While Mary Elizabeth Braddon has come to critical attention in the last two decades as one of the foremost Victorian sensation novelists, recent criticism has also been devoted to her lesser-known “realist” novels as well as her work as editor and co-founder of Belgravia magazine in the late 1860s.  The majority of this work has examined a tension between Braddon’s disavowals of the sensation genre, particularly in her 1864 work The Doctor’s Wife, and a championing of such lowbrow genres in the serialized novels and criticism of Belgravia from 1866-1876.  In the 1860s, the category of sensation became a hotly debated and widely employed term, though being branded a sensation writer often suggested that one was, or would become, as infamous as one’s sensational characters.  In this paper, I argue that Braddon’s work in the mid-1860s harnesses this discourse on the correlation between writer and character and extends it much further—she implicates both the general reader and critic in this process as well. I take as my primary texts Braddon’s most prominent attempt at penning a non-sensation novel, the Madame Bovary-influenced The Doctor’s Wife, and a strange little satirical response to allegations of plagiarism from French sources, signed “Captain Charles Shandon,” that she allegedly penned in the November, 1867 edition of Belgravia. The Doctor’s Wife injects an anomalous emphasis on material text objects and the process of writing, along with a bevy of characters whose skills as writers construct the narrative itself, into a lengthy meditation on women readers and, as critics have pointed out, the role of romance and fiction in mid-Victorian lower-middle-class life.  In the process, the novel continually draws the reader’s attention to the process of book-construction, both as material and discursive practice.  “Captain Shandon’s” response in Belgravia to the Pall Mall Gazette’s criticism a few years later functions as the inverse of this rhetorical move, in which the fictional is reinserted into the “real,” or non-fictious discourse of print criticism (as Captain Shandon is the character who founds the Pall Mall magazine, from whence the real Pall Mall founders took its name, in William Thackeray’s Pendennis).  By contrasting these two texts, I hope to show how Braddon goes beyond “sensationalizing” the realist novel or the critical tradition, towards an even more radical destabilization of the boundary between print culture and the fictions that it circulates.  

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Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden as Hybrid

Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden engages a central problem raised by Linnaeus’s System of Nature: the scientific hybrid’s disturbance of the accepted social order. Much current criticism on Darwin’s text is energized by the language of eighteenth-century botanical discoveries in cross-pollination and cross-fertilization, pointing toward what continues to be uncovered as a central obsession of eighteenth-century culture: the problem of the monstrous hybrid inaugurated by Linnaeus and other European botanists. Hybrids make a closed system impossible; Linnaeus’s discovery that specimens that can be multiply “authored” or infinitely parented disturbed his ordering system steeped in the language of monogamous heterosexual union. But the hybrid’s implications reach beyond botanical science to describe the interweaving between scientific, industrial, and publishing practices that dominated eighteenth-century Europe. The literary practice of extraction and anthologizing suggests infinite possible variations and combinations that result new and slightly different objects: printed books that “adapt” to the changing environment of publication and copyright law. The Botanic Garden participates in the hybrid genre of anthology; its verse-paratext relationship both enacts and describes a hybridization in genre and composition that uses polyamorous sexual reproduction as a validating telos for the contemporary mechanical and industrial reproduction it describes in its footnotes. Its multivocality and multiple authorship—assembled by Darwin as master-progenitor—are the result of a composition process of extracting from correspondence and published sources as well as translating and rearranging Linnaeus’s texts. Darwin’s practice of maintaining and experimenting in his own botanical garden can be read as another composition practice that parallels the generic hybridization of the text. I want to argue that Darwin’s text—and by extension eighteenth-century anthologies and miscellanies in general—is a hybrid that responds to and transforms Linnaeus’s theories.

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Both ballet and pantomime are, of course, non-lingual forms of performance that assert the primacy of the body, relying on movement and action to communicate narrative. What, then, happens to the primacy of the body when audience members have a playbill in hand that provides a lengthy synopsis of the performance's plot? Does the text of the playbill underwrite, or undergird, or undermine the performance? Is it even subordinate at all? Drawing upon a number of late-eighteenth-century playbills for ballets and pantomimes, my paper will distill from the language of the playbills a theory about the nature of the playbill's relationship to non-lingual performance. I am specifically interested in the relative power of the word (logos) as compared to that of the body. The traditional interpretation would be that the playbill makes manifest the body's inferiority. However, I will argue that the language of the playbills suggests a more complicated relationship by which the word and the body act as supplements to one another, supporting one another even as they reveal the other's inadequacies.

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British essayist Vicesimus Knox's two popular anthologies, Elegant Extracts in Prose (1784) and Elegant Extracts in Poetry (1791), signify the perceived cultural responsibilities and anxieties of the literary anthology and its editor—both relatively recent British phenomena. The early British anthologies (the most famous of which is perhaps Samuel Johnson's Lives of Poets) have undergone two late twentieth century critiques. The first, a product of the so-called canon wars of the 1980s and 90s, cites these anthologies as the textual embodiments of the "dead, white, male" authors who have, since the 18th century, been featured in the English canon at the expense of minority and women's literature. The second critique, based on the methodology of print and material studies, argues that these anthologies are essentially the outputs of economic functions prompted in large part by the 1774 copyright trial Donaldson v Beckett. This paper's analysis seeks to escape a one-note rehearsal of the representational politics of the first critique, while also pointing out that Knox's prefaces do not focus on legal concerns of copyright. Instead, it suggests a third interpretation based on ethical anxieties. Although Knox expresses some ambivalence about editing and extracting the work of authorial predecessors, he more earnestly defends his "borrowing" from contemporary anthologists. This reading suggests that Knox's ethics and the anxieties which created them regulate peers (brothers) and not the original authors (fathers). Understood psychoanalytically: Knox's ethics are akin to the ethics established by the primal horde of brothers after the murder, cannibalization, and subsequent "canonization" of the father (see: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, Group Psychology).

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Virtue, or the conformity of life and conduct with the principles of morality, was able to transform from an interior ‘goodness’ to exterior characteristics with the help of conduct literature and miscellanies in the eighteenth-century. It is important to study virtue within these contexts as women were excluded from political and economic sectors, but were viewed as the keystone of domestic society and, as such, needed regular reminders of their roles, which were most commonly conferred through textual examples. A dynamic relationship and intersection of textual instruction, female education, and the novel can be found in Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel, Pamela. An epistolary novel that tracks a young servant-maid’s struggles with the unwanted advances of her master, Mr. B, Pamela’s virtue is ultimately rewarded with an equitable marriage proposition that allows her to advance her position in society. As Pamela weds narrative to conduct literature principles, it is profitable to contrast conduct literature and miscellanies present before its publication, specifically 1730-1740, with those directly after its publication, specifically 1740-1750, in an attempt to determine a potential shift in definitions or concentrations as a result. While recent feminist work on female conduct literature has focused on its function in the solidification of a division between the sexes, I am more interested in the objectives of this role. I argue that the sole aim in the positioning of women as the moralizing agents of society is to preserve and improve the superior male social, political, and economic status, just as Pamela’s virtue is made to extend to Mr. B and ethically ground him. While females were supposedly naturally inclined toward the domestic realm, it is important to apprehend that conduct literature and miscellanies prescribed specific social practices to presumably indoctrinate females to their ‘natural’ roles. In consideration of Pamela’s affect upon instructional texts, I illuminate that the encouragement of a standard of female exclusion from the public sphere is so defining that by the end of the century, the prescription of female unfitness for political and commercial pursuits was almost unquestioned. The fact that it is not until very late in the century that some women, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, became aware of or even disputed these directives attests to the potency of the ideology contained in the conduct literature and miscellanies that I investigate.

Lyrical Ballads: Special Extended Edition Director's Cut

Last week I made an analogy between a film and a book of poems (film:book::scene:poem). I can't seem to get away from this admittedly presentist way of thinking. We have problematized the different editions of LB. Generally: 1798 is, for us, the most politically robust and the subsequent editions and eventual dispersal of the poems into other volumes go politically downhill. This revision is not unlike all of those alternate edition DVDs which revise classic films. I have Star Wars particularly in mind-- George Lucas adds characters and scenes, changes endings, music, etc. All this is done to the chagrin of many Star Wars "fans" who prefer the original edition. Presumably, not all of these fans are upset for Lucas' changes for a political reason. Some are upset that Han Solo no longer shoots first. Or that Han steps on Jabba's tale... hardly politically charged complaints.

I think there is another anxiety or paranoia which marks the revision of the popular text which might exist variably as political, aesthetic, or religious/canonical dissatisfaction. All of these instances, if they are more than academic observations, express an anxiety that a popular text can be re-written... that what is a considered public or shared by a community of readers (or perhaps even privately by one... think, Misery?) is still subject to the whims of an alien author. Re-writing works against post-mortem theories of the author. It troubles the phenomonology of the author/work. The political/aesthetic/religious desire to repress or at least dismiss revision might also be a manifestation to preserve a sense of reader agency: the work must be static so that I can read it over and impress my reading on it/me. If the author/work is given agency to change itself without my input, then this challenges the illusion that I ever had any input on the author/work to begin with. And this is most unpleasant.

Continuing Questions

To continue our discussion from last time in consideration of this week's readings, I think that an important question should be brought to tomorrow's discussion: to what degree and in what sense can Lyrical Ballads be said to form a unity? Obviously, the poems previously contained in Lyrical Ballads are now intermixed with new poems and grouped under a new heading, 1815 Poems. Can we consider this work to be "new" or simply another reformulation of the material that supplied the 1798/1800/1802/1805 versions of Lyrical Ballads? Can this work be viewed as a collection within a collection? If the 1815 Poems aren't considered to be more "new" than any version after 1798, does it enhance our understanding of Wordsworth as an obsessive reviser?

Last week, we discussed the tension between what Wordsworth articulates in his prose attachments and what Wordsworth produces in his poems. This proved to be the hang up for most critics and has created a vast amount of scholarship that is dedicated to reconciling the two. I would argue that tension can be found in the same space with this set of poems, though tension is also added to the reader as one must now look to the 1798 Advertisement, the 1800 Preface, the 1802 revised Preface, and the 1815 Preface to obtain an understanding of Wordsworth's ideas on Poetry. Did anyone else find themselves flipping back and forth to compare?