I do like Victorian literature, and the literature of nineteenth-century America. Nineteenth-century novels are big, and the best ones are beautifully structured. If one manages to dodge the worst excesses of sentimentality (I am looking at you, Wilkie Collins) they offer some of the best reading around.
Although I will say, I can do without some of the weirder stuff that tends to go down in Victorian sentimental literature. Heathcliff digs up a dead Cathy in Wuthering Heights, just to see her face. There is some similar business in La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas. Verdi and his librettist took this story and made it into La Traviata and I think that music aside, the absence of corpsehuggery in that opera is one of its great advantages.
That is what I like about Henry James, by the way. You may object that it is not clear, in The Portrait of a Lady, precisely why Isabel marries Gilbert Osmond, and you may think the clenched teeth thing at the end is a little weird, even though it's fairly clear what James means by it, but at least no one gets exhumed. Deeply and irreparably hurt, yes. But exhumed, no.
And then there are folks like Poe, and Baudelaire, who offer darker versions of the same. The great thing about Baudelaire is that he offers all the darkness that Dumas was aiming at, without actually resorting to necrophilia more than he absolutely has to.
Fresh as an autumn morning you may be
yet sadness rises in me like the sea
that ebbing leaves a bitter aftertaste
of iodine on my still-smarting lips
From "Conversation," in the Spleen and Ideal section of Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard.
Or,
February, peeved at Paris, pours
a gloomy torrent on the pale lessees
of the graveyard next door and a mortal chill
on tenants of the foggy suburbs too.
The tiles afford no comfort to my cat
that cannot keep its mangy body still;
the soul of some old poet haunts the drains
and howls as if a ghost could hate the cold
From "Spleen (I)" in the same.
This is the kind of thing that can convince a person that the thing to do is not read about the Corn Laws, or the Paris Commune, or the many significant and substantial policy differences between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, but rather that the thing to do is to write dim and gaslit stories of love and darkness.
And I am not the only one who thinks so. Here is a Battlestar Galactica story set in a fantasy Victorian world. And just this afternoon, there was a discussion over in what_fantastic about Victorian-themed mystery stories.
I myself am not immune to this, I should add. I once slashed Victorians and Puritans, just to see what would happen.
So, why is Victorian England (or nineteenth-century America or Europe) so appealing?
I think it is the combination of the familiar and the strange. Victorians are close enough to us that we can look at the world through their eyes without too much difficulty, but at the same time, we do not necessarily recognize everything we see.
Much about the Victorian age is familiar. There are trains, and umbrellas, and labor unions. There are lady doctors, and particle detectors, and machine guns. Slavery is abolished. Some people are atheists, and there is such a thing, in some circles, as free love. In the United States, Victoria Woodhull ran for president.
And, on the surface of it, the psychology of Victorian people seems modern as well. I think this is due in part to the fact that the nineteenth century is next door to the twentieth, and it is not a difficult task to walk down the block and bang on their windows. Also, it is probably also the result of those very novels I was talking about before. Nineteenth-century novels are above all explorations of character, and interiority. We cannot help but feel close to Jane Eyre, or Jean Valjean, or Effi Briest. In the face of so many similarities, the differences recede, a little.
And many of the social problems that drive Victorian and psuedo-Victorian novels are ratcheted-up versions of things familiar to modern readers. The hard decisions made by women who find themselves pregnant and wish they were not. The virgin/whore dichotomy. The gaping gulf between rich and poor. The complexity of family life. Religious difference. Dubious wars in foreign places. Abuse of workers by factory owners. On virgins and whores, and also on capitalists, I recommend Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, particularly Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton, and North and South. Dickens turns his guns on unregulated capitalism in Hard Times, but Dickens fails to hit the target in this case, because he believes that systemic problems have personal solutions.
Anyhow. The point is, we and the Victorians have a lot of common ground.
However, much about the Victorian age is unfamiliar, and strange. For starters, clothing is different. Much mileage, and much titillation, is to be found in the endless laces and buttons of Victorian clothing. I would lay money on it, that one of the main draws of historical movies is the opportunities they offer to watch beautiful people remove complicated clothing.
Houses are also different. Often, there is more than one stairway. Middle-class people have servants. The soles of shoes are thinner, and there will very likely be earwigs in your milk, and arsenic in your pickles.
This, of course, is why we like it. Not the arsenic as such, but the fact that it is there, along with the earwigs, and the coal smoke, and the mad wives in attics.
So, we have sympathetic people, in a strange, exciting and often dangerous world. This is a good pattern not only for historical novels, but also for fantasy novels, and science fiction novels too.
But at the same time, those social issues, and that seemingly so familiar psychology, are often stranger than they initially appear.
This, I think, is where the appeal of the nineteenth century becomes complicated. With the Victorians, the smoggy, corseted strangeness of it offers the thrill of the unfamiliar, but the fact that you do have abolitionists, and chain-smoking bohemians, and advocates of equality between the sexes, offers a psychological bridge between writer and characters that is very appealing. Everyone is wearing a top-hat or a crinoline, but your characters are people with whom you could have a conversation while waiting for a train. And you and they would agree on the meaning of most of the words.
But on the other hand, when you make use of this sort of bridge, you have to negotiate some subtleties that can be hard to deal with.
For example, we can write a story about a young nineteenth-century woman who has a child out of wedlock. Let us say she is the charming and witty daughter of a rich Boston factory owner. Because this is a historical novel, colorful and dramatic things will probably happen to her. She might have to leave home, and use her ladylike accomplishments -- piano-playing, let us say -- to earn her living. She can haunt theaters, and patronize cheap cafes. She can drink absinthe, and read Baudelaire when he was still considered shocking. But, we can also have her argue against the virgin/whore dichotomy, we can have her refuse to hide her pregnancy, we can even have her go and raise the kid on a transcendentalist commune in upstate New York, because such things were possible for her. Her world is, in some ways, much like ours.
The danger here, in other words, is a form of literary sockpuppetry. The differences provide the thrill, but we are really writing about ourselves. We would not stand to be called a whore, and we would refuse to be ashamed, and we would very likely be tempted by that transcendentalist commune. Fuck you, Dad, I'm going to Palmyra!
And because we are now writing about ourselves, the very real differences between how that young Bostonian might have understood her situation and how we understand it vanish. What happens when our Bostonian has to leave because some of those fellows at that commune seem to think that she is common property, and she begins to halfway believe them? What do we do when she shows very real, and very disconcerting, signs that she is not really sure, in the end, that she deserves the vote? What if our Bostonian, like many white Americans who were born in 1851, refuses to shake hands with a black man, or reveals herself to be an anti-Semite? This is troubling, and off-putting.
And in a lot of psuedo-Victorian novels, these kinds of things utterly fail to happen. The pastness of the past vanishes, and we get only the corsets, and the absinthe, and the transcendentalist communes in upstate New York. Everyone is an abolitionist, and believes in the minimum wage. Or, at least the characters we are meant to root for are abolitionists, and believe in the minimum wage.
This is what I dislike about a lot of the historical novels I have read. In Victorian-themed stories, it is often just barely noticeable, because of the reasons I have outlined above. It is relatively easy to get away with free love and atheism in 1876. In novels set in the eighteenth, or the seventeenth, or the twelfth century, what often smacks me across the face and causes me to close the book is the fact that the people I am reading about are not eighteenth-century people, or twelfth-century people, but modern people dressed up in funny outfits. We have done what we often get away with doing to Victorians, but we have done it to Elizabethans, or medieval Germans, and in this case, it shows.
Victorian stories, in other words, may look easy, but they are hard. As the editor of my edition of Edith Wharton's The Reef (1912) notes in the introduction, in his discussion of why the system of sexual morality operating in the book renders some of the characters unsympathetic in ways the author did not intend, "Why is it that we can put ourselves so easily, in reading historical fiction, into the shoes of barbaric emperors and slaveholders, and yet stumble our toes on yesterday's prejudices?"
Because we know that the Roman emperor, or the seventeenth-century Carolina slaveholder, are worlds away, and are very much unlike us. We can safely get into their heads, and it is no reflection on any of our own opinions. But inhabitants of the nineteenth century are enough like us that our Bostonian's simultaneous refusal to be ashamed of sex and tolerance for anti-semitic jokes is a little harder to process.
Good Victorian fiction, in other words, will almost necessarily make us uncomfortable.
And then there are folks like Poe, and Baudelaire, who offer darker versions of the same. The great thing about Baudelaire is that he offers all the darkness that Dumas was aiming at, without actually resorting to necrophilia more than he absolutely has to.
yet sadness rises in me like the sea
that ebbing leaves a bitter aftertaste
of iodine on my still-smarting lips
From "Conversation," in the Spleen and Ideal section of Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard.
Or,
a gloomy torrent on the pale lessees
of the graveyard next door and a mortal chill
on tenants of the foggy suburbs too.
The tiles afford no comfort to my cat
that cannot keep its mangy body still;
the soul of some old poet haunts the drains
and howls as if a ghost could hate the cold
From "Spleen (I)" in the same.
This is the kind of thing that can convince a person that the thing to do is not read about the Corn Laws, or the Paris Commune, or the many significant and substantial policy differences between Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli, but rather that the thing to do is to write dim and gaslit stories of love and darkness.
And I am not the only one who thinks so. Here is a Battlestar Galactica story set in a fantasy Victorian world. And just this afternoon, there was a discussion over in what_fantastic about Victorian-themed mystery stories.
I myself am not immune to this, I should add. I once slashed Victorians and Puritans, just to see what would happen.
So, why is Victorian England (or nineteenth-century America or Europe) so appealing?
I think it is the combination of the familiar and the strange. Victorians are close enough to us that we can look at the world through their eyes without too much difficulty, but at the same time, we do not necessarily recognize everything we see.
Much about the Victorian age is familiar. There are trains, and umbrellas, and labor unions. There are lady doctors, and particle detectors, and machine guns. Slavery is abolished. Some people are atheists, and there is such a thing, in some circles, as free love. In the United States, Victoria Woodhull ran for president.
And, on the surface of it, the psychology of Victorian people seems modern as well. I think this is due in part to the fact that the nineteenth century is next door to the twentieth, and it is not a difficult task to walk down the block and bang on their windows. Also, it is probably also the result of those very novels I was talking about before. Nineteenth-century novels are above all explorations of character, and interiority. We cannot help but feel close to Jane Eyre, or Jean Valjean, or Effi Briest. In the face of so many similarities, the differences recede, a little.
And many of the social problems that drive Victorian and psuedo-Victorian novels are ratcheted-up versions of things familiar to modern readers. The hard decisions made by women who find themselves pregnant and wish they were not. The virgin/whore dichotomy. The gaping gulf between rich and poor. The complexity of family life. Religious difference. Dubious wars in foreign places. Abuse of workers by factory owners. On virgins and whores, and also on capitalists, I recommend Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, particularly Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton, and North and South. Dickens turns his guns on unregulated capitalism in Hard Times, but Dickens fails to hit the target in this case, because he believes that systemic problems have personal solutions.
Anyhow. The point is, we and the Victorians have a lot of common ground.
However, much about the Victorian age is unfamiliar, and strange. For starters, clothing is different. Much mileage, and much titillation, is to be found in the endless laces and buttons of Victorian clothing. I would lay money on it, that one of the main draws of historical movies is the opportunities they offer to watch beautiful people remove complicated clothing.
Houses are also different. Often, there is more than one stairway. Middle-class people have servants. The soles of shoes are thinner, and there will very likely be earwigs in your milk, and arsenic in your pickles.
This, of course, is why we like it. Not the arsenic as such, but the fact that it is there, along with the earwigs, and the coal smoke, and the mad wives in attics.
So, we have sympathetic people, in a strange, exciting and often dangerous world. This is a good pattern not only for historical novels, but also for fantasy novels, and science fiction novels too.
But at the same time, those social issues, and that seemingly so familiar psychology, are often stranger than they initially appear.
This, I think, is where the appeal of the nineteenth century becomes complicated. With the Victorians, the smoggy, corseted strangeness of it offers the thrill of the unfamiliar, but the fact that you do have abolitionists, and chain-smoking bohemians, and advocates of equality between the sexes, offers a psychological bridge between writer and characters that is very appealing. Everyone is wearing a top-hat or a crinoline, but your characters are people with whom you could have a conversation while waiting for a train. And you and they would agree on the meaning of most of the words.
But on the other hand, when you make use of this sort of bridge, you have to negotiate some subtleties that can be hard to deal with.
For example, we can write a story about a young nineteenth-century woman who has a child out of wedlock. Let us say she is the charming and witty daughter of a rich Boston factory owner. Because this is a historical novel, colorful and dramatic things will probably happen to her. She might have to leave home, and use her ladylike accomplishments -- piano-playing, let us say -- to earn her living. She can haunt theaters, and patronize cheap cafes. She can drink absinthe, and read Baudelaire when he was still considered shocking. But, we can also have her argue against the virgin/whore dichotomy, we can have her refuse to hide her pregnancy, we can even have her go and raise the kid on a transcendentalist commune in upstate New York, because such things were possible for her. Her world is, in some ways, much like ours.
The danger here, in other words, is a form of literary sockpuppetry. The differences provide the thrill, but we are really writing about ourselves. We would not stand to be called a whore, and we would refuse to be ashamed, and we would very likely be tempted by that transcendentalist commune. Fuck you, Dad, I'm going to Palmyra!
And because we are now writing about ourselves, the very real differences between how that young Bostonian might have understood her situation and how we understand it vanish. What happens when our Bostonian has to leave because some of those fellows at that commune seem to think that she is common property, and she begins to halfway believe them? What do we do when she shows very real, and very disconcerting, signs that she is not really sure, in the end, that she deserves the vote? What if our Bostonian, like many white Americans who were born in 1851, refuses to shake hands with a black man, or reveals herself to be an anti-Semite? This is troubling, and off-putting.
And in a lot of psuedo-Victorian novels, these kinds of things utterly fail to happen. The pastness of the past vanishes, and we get only the corsets, and the absinthe, and the transcendentalist communes in upstate New York. Everyone is an abolitionist, and believes in the minimum wage. Or, at least the characters we are meant to root for are abolitionists, and believe in the minimum wage.
This is what I dislike about a lot of the historical novels I have read. In Victorian-themed stories, it is often just barely noticeable, because of the reasons I have outlined above. It is relatively easy to get away with free love and atheism in 1876. In novels set in the eighteenth, or the seventeenth, or the twelfth century, what often smacks me across the face and causes me to close the book is the fact that the people I am reading about are not eighteenth-century people, or twelfth-century people, but modern people dressed up in funny outfits. We have done what we often get away with doing to Victorians, but we have done it to Elizabethans, or medieval Germans, and in this case, it shows.
Victorian stories, in other words, may look easy, but they are hard. As the editor of my edition of Edith Wharton's The Reef (1912) notes in the introduction, in his discussion of why the system of sexual morality operating in the book renders some of the characters unsympathetic in ways the author did not intend, "Why is it that we can put ourselves so easily, in reading historical fiction, into the shoes of barbaric emperors and slaveholders, and yet stumble our toes on yesterday's prejudices?"
Because we know that the Roman emperor, or the seventeenth-century Carolina slaveholder, are worlds away, and are very much unlike us. We can safely get into their heads, and it is no reflection on any of our own opinions. But inhabitants of the nineteenth century are enough like us that our Bostonian's simultaneous refusal to be ashamed of sex and tolerance for anti-semitic jokes is a little harder to process.
Good Victorian fiction, in other words, will almost necessarily make us uncomfortable.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
baltimoreandme- baltimoreandme
Comments
Or I could always go to my old fallback-- have you read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? :D :D
Edited at 2008-08-07 02:29 am (UTC)
And even though this comment is 2000 years later, I had to comment because I've been reading Jacob's Ladder by Donald McCaig, which I feel like does a pretty good job of portraying historically accurate frames of mind. Granted, it's a little more loose since it takes place during the Civil War, so it's not that unreasonable that there are people opposed to slavery, but still.
And I just dug up a used copy of Jonathan Strange - I'm looking forward to that :)
If I think of any in the future I'll let you know.
I guess that's what you want, though, eh? We're shocked by Haggard and Lovecraft; they're closer to our time period even than the Victorians, and their blatant racism is appalling. Same goes for the early nationalists, the craniometricians, the asylum-keepers; John Ruskin and Rudyard Kipling and Francis Galton. They said what people actually thought at the time, and their opinions are worlds away from our own. 'The past is another country,' to quote the now-trite phrase.
Not sure this comment's even vaguely useful for you, but I'm glad that you're thinking on the topic, and speaking about it so eloquently and coherently. Hopefully, your discussion will be read widely. *grin*
Is the Karamazov sequel up on your journal? I'd love to read it.
A local medical school of great reknown used to keep Annals of Eugenic Science in its stacks (there was a break in publication during WWII, then it resumed for a brief run). I once opened the 1933 volume (a year in which the Eugenics Movement took a great leap forward), and saw it had an article by Karl Pearson, whom Pearson's correlation coefficient r is named after, on the cranial and intellectual deficiencies of recent Jewish immigrants to the United Kingdom.
It disappeared from the shelves at some point and isn't accessible in the eJournals either. Just as well, not much call for that sort of thing nowadays and citation would certainly be hazardous to one's career.
-- L.P. Hartley
For example, Gladstone, the liberal, was for creating an international body to work out the differences between nations before going to war, and Captain Yellow Mustard Suit was for forging some secret and not so secret alliances, or coalitions of the willing, not unlike Bismarck and George W. Bush.
I'm not sure whether it's because we share a political culture and history with the British and the Europeans, or whether it's something more fundamental to human nature.
That's so the servants and children could access the kitchen without disturbing their betters.
I've lived in four houses with back stairs, my favorite one ever (built c. 1910, Elkins Park PA when I was a child), two rentals (one c. 1910 and the other dating to 1874), and my present abode (1924). The top landing has been made into an impromptu closet and the bottom was taken out to make a pantry.
As far as Victorian literature goes, unless it is (M.R.) Jamesian horror, or good old Flashy, I will respectfully leave it on the shelf. My high school English teacher ruined Edith Wharton for me (not that it was hard to do) by making us read Ethan Frome.
English teachers ruin a lot of good stuff, unfortunately. I'm a Wharton fan myself, because I like the bitter irony of a lot of her work. Ethan Frome is an odd one, among her novels. It was one of the few cases in which she wrote a story in a setting entirely outside her own experience, and I think this shows in the novel.
That's exactly right. The fascinatingness and appallingness of the past are two sides of the same coin, but they try to cut the coin down the middle and pass the prettier part off, but it's counterfeit currency.