THE CRITIC AS CRITIC II : The fin de siècle

A Portfolio of Book Reviews

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No 53 : FEBRUARY 2011

With increasing coverage of books that reflect different aspects of the fin de siècle, this reviews section page was split into two with effect from August 2010, keeping the original OSCHOLARS numbering. After some tinkering, we can now post these in alternate months, beginning with this one. The first issue of THE CRITIC AS CRITIC I covered Oscar Wilde books and productions (this will be published again in March); THE CRITIC AS CRITIC II the other books that have come to our attention (this will be published again in April).

We opened the first edition of THE CRITIC AS CRITIC II with a section of French interest – reviews of two of Christine North’s books, and two reviews of Rosemary Lloyd’s book on Baudelaire, along with a review by Rosemary Lloyd of Contes symbolists, and, for good measure, links to other reviews we have published in the same field. This section was followed by books of more general fin de siècle focus, including the concluding novel in Floortje Zwigtman’s ‘Green Flower’ trilogy.. We hope to maintain this classification and we are grateful for the co-operation of the publishers. A final section notes books reviewed elsewhere.

The Editors responsible for THE CRITIC AS CRITIC are Helen Davies, D.C. Rose, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas and Anna Vaninskaya.

Shaw reviews appear in Shavings; all other theatre reviews in . Exhibition reviews and reviews of books relating to the visual arts now appear in our journal VISIONS which is reached by clicking its symbol

All authors whose books are reviewed are invited to respond.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Leanne Bibby on Louisa Hadley: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative
Bénédicte Coste on Douglas Mao: Fateful Beauty
Rebecca Crowley on Daisy Goodwin: My Last Duchess
R.J. Olney on Tamara S Wagner: Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction
Marco Pustianaz on Regenia Gagnier: Individualism, Decadence and Globalization
Rosemary Yeoland on Gillian Opstad: Debussy’s Mélisande
Reviewed elsewhere

Review by Bénédicte Coste

Douglas Mao: Fateful Beauty. Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. 319 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13348-5

Douglas Mao has written an ambitious study on the complex links between environments and growing individuals between 1860 and 1960, on the assumption that ‘a vast array of arguments, speculations, and practices converged in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, around the matter of the growing human organism’s moulding by surroundings and circumstances’. His thesis is double: the workings of environments on the children and youth were a source of preoccupation of experts, policy makers and parents, while some writers speculated on the influence of art and beauty on growing and mature individuals. What was new, Mao contends, was that the operations of experience were seen as unconscious and the human development was conceived as a series of transactions between an organism and its environment. The study of the influence of the environment on the human being linked different disciplines and practices: art, literature, architecture, psychology, education, social reform, and popular advice. The dream of those who engaged in the debates was to turn individuals to their world through beauty. Still, Mao is no cultural historian but focuses essentially on literary texts as they ramify widely through culture and society.

His brilliant first chapter examines several aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century thinking about developmental environments to detail how environments came to be conceived as stealthily shaping growing bodies and minds, how the discoveries of psychology and physiology along a new understanding of art and beauty formed a constellation centering on the idea that people become what they are mainly through unconscious experience.

Arguably the nineteenth century witnessed the invention of the modern category of the child, alongside the development of a focus on (in)direct influence. Mao thus retraces the idea of the unconscious from De Quincey to Freud, through an impressive study of writings by Taine, Lewes, W. Carpenter, Fechner, Helmholtz, von Hartmann, Bain, Tyndall, James, Maudsley, Charcot, Bernheim, Sidis, all of whom contributed to envisaging humans as malleable and susceptible to covert influence. He highlights how the organisation of education and the protection of childhood came to be managed by the State concomitantly to a interest in juvenile delinquency through the use of case studies with the aim of grounding the cultural management of delinquency or poverty on prevention. The scientific observation of children led to developmental psychology while adolescence became as category of experience and a field of study. Environments referring to nature and nurture acquired an increased importance which materialised in the interest in rational and beautiful housing and objects, before the moral motives of good furnishing gave way to artisticness as an end in itself. Beauty was also seen as wielding unconscious power. E.S. Dallas was certainly the first to clearly assert that the artist was connected to his unconscious and aimed at conveying it to give pleasure to the reader or viewer. Commerce with the unknowable became the secret of the artistic pleasure while Allen, Lee, Anstruther-Thomson studied the unconscious effect of art on the body. It is to those overlapping ideas about youth’s malleability, power of environments, mysteries of the unconscious, and office of the arts that the writers discussed by Mao responded.

Chapter 2 discusses British Aestheticism mainly through Pater and Wilde for whom the aesthetic had a double benefit since the stealthy action of the beautiful environment rendered the soul more beautiful while the highly conscious experience provided a sense of freedom from determination by external forces. Pater’s narratives trace the growth of young men, the development of sensitive individuals with an interest in the soul’s continuous shaping by the stimuli it meets, thus epitomising, along the renovation of Bildungsroman, the period’s concern for growing up. The material basis of his aesthetics made Wilde go further by recommending a provision of beauty for the young as the soul contains inmost places for material influences. Interested in adolescents as well as in workers in The Soul of Man under Socialism, Wilde soon came to dream about the creation of the new, perfect man... a utopia The Picture of Dorian Gray had exposed as such by the arrested growth of his hero, just as the heroes of Pater’s Imaginary Portraits had met an untimely death as the price to pay for the Aesthetes’ perfection.

Chapters 3 and 4 are respectively devoted to Joyce’s and Dreiser’s rebellion against Paterian and Wildean aesthetic ideals. Joyce saw the aesthetic as a liberation from circumstances and appetitive desires, whereas Dreiser envisaged the yearning for beauty as a desire from the organism and thus a means by which environmental forces wield power over individuals. Through beauty’s stealthy shaping aestheticism and naturalism come to be linked. They also partake, Mao convincingly argues, of a common genealogy, of shared ideas about art, society and their interrelation. Naturalism bids us to look at fatal combinations of forces, Aestheticism bids us to look at fatal combinations of forces, Mao adroitly summarises.

In Joyce’s Portrait sex comes as a hindrance to art, whereas in Stephen Hero impulses to sexual and artistic freedom seem productively connected. For Stephen, aesthetic experience is a pause in the circuit of stimulus and response and beauty is a necessary interruption of freedom into a world of determinations. Yet Joyce appears pessimistic about beauty’s power to change lives, because he lives in a world where beauty comes as a short-timed experience to illuminate the ordinary. What naturalism and modernism share is the depiction of environments’ shaping of human destinies, over a span of years but also the interactions between person and world in much more reduced time span.

Dreiser also found in the aesthetic a potent disruption of life’s physiological and social courses and at times pitted the liberatory promise of beauty against the naturalist plot of environmental determination. But he also recognised the longing for beauty as a species of desire rooted in biology, which precluded his faith in the capacity of aesthetic experience to transcend desire’s hold as was progressively shown by Sister Carrie, The Hand of the Potter and An American Tragedy.

Chapters 5 and 6 present a critique of aesthetic optimism by two writers and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century: journalist and writer Rebecca West and poet W.H. Auden. West sharply dismissed the belief that any milieu could remain secure against external forces of rupture, Mao contends in chapter 5. Partly influenced by Spencer, West’s oeuvre highlights the characters’ aesthetic sensitivity, is peppered with indictments of ancestral houses, attempts to ground a theory of art on research into conditioned reflexes, defends patriotism on the grounds of the human organism’s ceaseless struggle with its milieu. In short, aesthetics, psychology, physiology, educational theory and social analysis meet on the ground of West’s long-standing interest in environment. Mao offers a reading not only of the fictional Return of the Soldier but also of the essay ‘The Strange Necessity’ (1928, the necessity being that of art). West took her cue from Palvov’s Conditioned Reflexes (1927, English translation) to assert that art helps individuals to meet environments’ challenges by providing specific excitatory complexes. She evolved a theory in which guidelines for conduct and exemplary narratives play a strong role in moral development without requiring the participation of consciousness. Such theory culminated in the Left-baiting Meaning of Treason (1947) where she argued one must keep faith with one’s immediate milieu seen as responsible for what one is.

Chapter 6 focuses on the encounter between a poet (W.H. Auden) and a scientist (George Auden, his father) and on how some views on environment’s power could shape politics. Mao rightfully insists on the too often neglected influence of G. Auden’s scientific writings on his son. Young Auden started by declaring transcendence of one’s milieu was an imperative, before being faced with the conflict between the manipulation of juvenile conditions and the nurturing of free will. His final vision of the making of the artistic soul relies on dissonance between the environment and the growing organism. Mao accompanies the poet all through his oeuvre, from his early distrust in beautiful environments’ ability to engender artistic personalities to his later and elusive ‘In Praise of Limestone’ where Auden subsumes the making of art under the larger behaviour of showing off. In the 1930’s Auden had engaged in a critique of liberal education’s coerciveness-disguised-as-liberty and he believed in the unconscious’s ability to fashion individuals. However in the 1940’s the idea of managing such fashioning became less fascinating; Auden came to stress the need for moral instruction and no longer saw education in terms of the cultivation of neurosis and desire, but more in terms of a deliberate inculcation of some principles. The struggle between human beings and their recalcitrant milieux is good in itself, or is the structural or logical precondition of true moral goodness. ‘In Praise of Limestone’ may exemplify Auden’s paradise, but this harmonious situation is exceptional and would, if generalised, lead to the death of art and of goodness.

Indeed, Mao’s thorough study of such a variety of writers may be read as an array of answers to the question modern science engendered: how can we wield meaningful freedom in a world so determined? For Pater and Joyce, the lock of external laws can be subverted through acute feeling, Wilde and the naturalists claimed the hold of circumstances could be exploited to the benefit of humankind through efforts to improve social conditions, Dreiser thought the power of environment might constrain action while also exculpating those driven to non-normative courses, West came to see the milieu’s ability to conform the soul to itself in stealthy ways as a less pressing concern and Auden returned to certain commonsense assumptions about volition, and to the human organism’s active response to its environment. Indeed he anticipated much of what came after—the environment as a developed ecological system.

Mao concludes by a careful assessment of how some later writers (Wright, Burgess, Lessing and Sebald) have discussed beauty and environments. He rightfully underlines the impact of neurosciences inasmuch as they reconfigured links between children, experience, temporality and injury, while concern about the manipulation of juvenile environments became less central and beauty also lost its previous importance as a means of education. It simply flickers to contemporary individuals having adopted a more distanced position towards it.

This well-documented study certainly deserves attentive re-readings, let alone to exploit its wealth of secondary sources. Mao accompanies his reader through useful syntheses and reminders along his book, carefully striking helpful contrasts or highlighting similarities between various authors. The bibliography is impressive and we take great pleasure in reading this well-written and jargon-free study. Mao’s choice of the writers also illustrates and validates the contemporary trend seeking to bridge the gap between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

· Bénédicte Coste has mainly translated and written on Walter Pater. She teaches at City University, London. Her forthcoming book is Walter Pater, esthétique.

Review by Marco Pustianaz

Regenia Gagnier: Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859-1920. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Regenia Gagnier’s latest book may be usefully read as a companion to her previous volume, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. The earlier volume’s main concern was the colonization by economic thought – especially its market-driven, rational-choice-inflected individualism – throughout all areas of culture, ethics and aesthetics. In a similar vein, her new publication combines historical and cultural research into late Victorianism with an attempt to develop new alliances between literary studies and an expanding network of integrative knowledges. Whereas Insatiability contested the reductionist view of liberalism at the root of the dominant ideological role played by the market, the subsequent volume counters the notion of individualism as we have come to know it by reconfiguring it through the prism of late-Victorian thinkers, poets, (female) aesthetes.

The themes of this latest book are wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary: 19thC theories of individualism (Chapter One), New Women’s analytics of interpersonal relationships (Chapter Two), interiority and will between determinism and freedom (Chapter Three), cultural philanthropy in the Arts and Crafts movement, together with lesser-known philanthropic strands in late Victorianism (Chapter 4), cosmopolitanism ‘from below’ in the fin de siècle colonial landscape and beyond (Chapter 5). It would take a longer essay to review the vast range of cross-references tackled by the author; no less remarkable is the selection of late-Victorian writers whose work is reassessed here: I am thinking especially of Edith Lees (Mrs Havelock), the poet John Davidson, and Charles Leland, the eccentric gypsy-lorist (among other things). In my response, therefore, I have chosen to focus mainly on Gagnier’s overall strategy and on questions of form and relationship, which are crucial for the interdisciplinary project of her criticism.

Having seminally contributed to the reappraisal and re-politicization of Decadent aestheticism from the viewpoint of mass culture and late 19thC theories of value, consumption and specialization (see her ground-breaking Idylls of the Marketplace on Oscar Wilde), Gagnier has further spread her wings to embrace a critical writing responsive to interdisciplinary global connections and systemic convergences between scholars from traditionally separate fields of enquiry: not just the socio-economic vs cultural-historical disciplines, but also the (until now) more alien domains of biological vs human sciences. Taking up the three keywords of the title, Gagnier sets out to link them through the shared theme of part-whole relationship. Moreover, the critical routes exploring (mainly) late-19thC British and European culture are designed to sustain ‘an adequate dialog between the natural and human sciences’ (98). What this means is spelt out in the concluding pages of chapter 5, ‘Good Europeans and Neo-Liberal Cosmopolitans: Ethics and Politics in Late Victorian Cosmopolitanism and Beyond’, whose political dimension is clearly marked by the adverb beyond: ‘This book has employed an analytics of part and whole on a period of intensely creative social experimentation in order to keep alive models of freedom that are not confined to free markets, choice that is more than consumer choice, liberalism that is not neo-liberalism, and an individualism that is more than the maximization of self-interest’ (163).

The ambitious task, therefore, is to resurrect those alternative notions, or thought-experiments, around the problematics of freedom and individualism that sought an organic relationship between part and whole, in particular between individual and society, self and other. According to Gagnier, these part-whole relationships call for a new unit of analysis, which is neither ‘the tree’ nor ‘the forest’, i.e. neither any one individuated and separable item, nor the abstract system providing the law of coherence for all subsumed elements. Gagnier argues instead for a focus on functions and networks rather than ‘identities’. In doing so, the reader is invited to see her work as part of a growing number of networks referred to in the book: Egenis (the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at the University of Exeter); the Global Circulation Project promoted by the journal Literature Compass, of which Gagnier is Chief Editor; the approaches of sociobiologists, progressive evolutionists and advocates of eco-criticism whose published works make the bibliographical notes such a fascinating read (unfortunately a general bibliography at the end of the volume is missing). One such example is the collection of essays edited by Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammels, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (1998). This wide net of cross-references is one of the most interesting and useful aspects of the book.

In the Introduction Gagnier sums up the main arguments that will be reiterated in the course of the following chapters: that the genealogy of Victorian individualism and its belief in individuation as a sign of Progress are far more complex and plural than what has been acknowledged so far; that a host of ‘pluralistic and cooperative models […] ran alongside the deterministic and competitive models’ which have come to identify Victorian culture (11); that the well-known heritage of social Darwinism based on competition for survival has obscured its parallel emphasis on biological cooperation and interdependence, even on ‘altruism’; that the Victorian emphasis on individual achievement and ‘hero-worship’ can lead us to neglect the decisive importance of social, artistic and domestic networks in the fin de siècle, operative not just on a national and local level, but setting their sights also on a trans-national and transcultural scale; finally, that ‘Decadence’ itself is a term which calls for reassessment as a relational concept responding to the dynamics between individual and society (as well as to power relations more generally, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical). Gagnier reminds us that according to one of its definitions Decadence pointed to ‘a distorted relation of part to whole’, brought about by the proliferation of individual, autonomous values and tastes over against higher (normative) social needs and standards. Rather than functioning as a rational or empirical concept, the term ‘Decadence’ could not help registering the shifting cultural and social interpretations of the relationship of part to whole.

Taking late-Victorian fin de siècle as a kind of proto-contemporary seedbed – whose progressive and integrative stances have since been largely occluded – Gagnier’s revision of the period is designed to suggest counter-narratives which might contribute to the realignment of intellectual efforts necessary now. A similar connection was present in her previous book, whose Chapters 6 and 7 boldly brought the economic/aesthetic nexus of late 19thC up to the present (cf. ‘Practical Aesthetics II’ and ‘Practical Aesthetics III’). As the introduction to The Insatiability of Human Wants already stated: ‘one purpose of this book is to recall social visions that challenged modern market society, visions that under current conditions of mass communications are in danger of being erased from cultural memory’ (5). Likewise, in Individualism Gagnier takes her lead from the integrative and developmental approach of scholars studying the evolving relationship between systems (whether by looking at genomics, integrative systems biology, cross-species interaction and cooperation, network science, intersubjectivity, philosophical anthropology…), thereby weaving new threads joining the fin de siècle with our late-capitalist present. The author is well aware that such ‘ecological’ approaches, by opposing the pure realm of abstract economics, have to contend with an entrenched history of scientific (and economic) reductionism, obeying the logic of consumerist, neo-liberal capitalism. In a politically candid remark at the beginning of the book Gagnier praises ‘the compatibility in that period of individualism and socialism that has been increasingly difficult for later generations to comprehend’ (1). The re-orientations suggested by the book, therefore, are both academic and political: they are offered as a set of methodological tools ‘for a post-liberal analysis of Victorian (and our contemporary) institutions’ (17).

Viewed together, these statements add up to a plea for a considered return to certain organic strands of Victorian culture, pre- or trans-disciplinary. The same combination of scientific optimism, global reach and pragmatic radicalism are proposed as intellectual avenues for the present time. Some of the resulting affiliations between past and present sound slightly perplexing, though: ‘Contemporary philosophy of science, especially genomics and integrative systems biology, offer alternatives to methodological individualism and competition that the Victorians thought but could not prove’ (11). A few pages later we can read: ‘[…] the questions above – what are individuals, groups, and systems? what is fitness and the unit of selection? – were all nineteenth-century questions, that now, in light of contemporary microbiology and systems analysis, can be reopened. It may be that current developments in systems biology will support Victorian conceptions of interdependence’ (14). One is left to wonder whether Victorian conceptions really need a belated support rallied from contemporary science in order to be proven valuable, or whether the acceptance and influence of innovative approaches can positively be enhanced by demonstrating their forgotten Victorian pedigree. While the former option is perhaps questionable in terms of the cultural contingency of ‘values’, the latter is slightly disingenuous in terms of political effectiveness.

If the burning core of the book is an appeal for an eco-criticism embracing an alliance between the human and the natural sciences, the cultural readings of Victorian sources will somewhat appear to pale before the strategic thrust of the former: at best, they would be offering a body of scattered evidence for the argument that organic interdependence was already conceptualized and sought after more than a hundred years ago. By saying so I do not wish to underestimate the effort to provide alternative readings of Victorianism, especially if it is made to look even less stringently monologic and more resistant to totalizing appropriations. On the other hand, hinting at the supplement of ‘proof’ found in genomics and integrative systems biology would appear to flatten the historicity of both fin de siècles (19thC and 20thC), as though the earlier ‘thought-experiments’ excavated in the book lacked something, which can be furnished now. In other words, the continuities fleshed out by Gagnier risk weakening the claims for a functional/relational methodology set to complicate ideas of linear evolution and of mechanisms of cause and effect. The intellectual and political alliances advocated (and to a certain extent performed) by the book are undoubtedly necessary if the Humanities wish to play a role in the future development of education and culture; the search for an integrative methodology, however, is arduous and the shape of new knowledges will be decisively affected by the power-relations – more often than not, asymmetrical – between the participating actors.

As her previous books have so persuasively demonstrated, we should avoid an absolute separation of economics from aesthetics; neither should we consider value claims outside of the relations that bring them into being, whether these values be economic, aesthetic, or, I would add, scientific. Bearing this in mind, these related issues might be worth asking: what relationships obtain between the cultural and historical findings investigated by Gagnier and the scientific paradigms advanced, for instance, by genomics? In what directions is the evolving ecology of interdisciplinary discourse leading? What kind of ‘altruistic’ cooperation can be envisaged and put into practice in the abovementioned networks? Is it a part-whole rhetoric, too, that leads to interpret the models advanced by the natural sciences as more ‘general’ than the ‘specialist’ readings of, say, New Woman literature? How do funding mechanisms influence the creation of research networks, which in turn inflect the meaning of globalisation, as well as its vectors, politics and language? Even the definition of ‘partiality’ and ‘totality’ cannot escape the performance of power in discourse.

As I have already suggested, the part-whole relationship which is the ‘theme’ of the book ends up haunting it at all levels, both microscopic and macroscopic, with effects on the argumentative structure of the book, on the style of its writing and its essay form in general. Divided into five chapters and an introduction, each of them is in turn subdivided in several sections, thus creating a movement alternating between swift summaries, shortened analytical parts and historical anticipations. As in the previous book, there is also a long appendix (here, a case reading of Huysmans), virtually an added chapter contributing to the restless, precarious relationship between part and whole in the volume. Gagnier’s apt metaphor of the mutual implication of trees and forest would ideally require a formal solution capable of paralleling the dynamic tension of a living tissue. Neither close textual analysis, nor simple contextual survey, the book’s fragile structure reveals its own tentative search of a part-whole relationship. Yet, as we all know, the balance is hard to strike, which perhaps explains the odd sense of inconclusiveness I felt in the end, especially with so many methodological expectations having been set up (for instance, a less Eurocentric, more ‘cosmopolitan’ approach). In a way, we are again thrown back on the issue of text vs context, a vexed question in literary and historical criticism which also affects the interpretive relationship between past and present: whether we identify specific strands of Decadentism and connect them as elements within a certain ‘broader’ history coming down to the present is a reflection of which parts and wholes we see ourselves constructing. There are many different and competing ‘wholes’.

For all these reasons I believe that the interdisciplinary route helpfully traced by Gagnier still needs to take into account the power-analytics long teased out, through conflict, by feminist, queer and post-colonial criticism in order to search for new, non-identitarian, transversal matrixes of knowledge/power. As the author remarks at the end of the book, many of the actors discussed in the book were polyglots. Indeed, the languages one knows determine the kind of trees that will grow in one’s forest. This is another burning ‘ecological’ issue for the development of a rich, dialectical and dialogic cosmopolitanism. It is to be hoped that the Global Circulation Project led by Gagnier will help furthering the knowledge of past and present networks, as well as creating new ones capable to displace the power-relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ towards a different, anti-colonial ‘globalization’.

· Marco Pustianaz is Associate Professor of English Literature and Theatre at Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli (Italy). He has co-edited two collections of queer/gender studies: Generi di traverso (Queer Genders, 2000) and Maschilità decadenti : la lunga fin de siècle (Decadent Masculinities, 2004). For THE OSCHOLARS review of the latter by Chiara Briganti, click here.

Review by Rosemary Yeoland

Gillian Opstad: Debussy’s Mélisande: The Lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. London: Boydell & Brewer 2009. ISBN: 9781843834595. 392pp.

Gillian Opstad’s easily readable and well researched text, Debussy’s Mélisande: The lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte traces and interweaves the lives of the three opera singers associated with the early performances of Mélisande, the mysterious child/woman portrayed in Claude Debussy’s musical drama Pelléas et Mélisande. The composer’s opera is based on the play by the Belgian playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck. Set in a dark, medieval atmosphere rendered heavy with lurking mystical forces, the symbolist play portrays the perennial human emotions of desire, jealousy, hatred and fury surrounding a beautiful young woman.

Opstad emphasises in her introduction that the common thread that is central to the stories of Georgette, Mary and Maggie, is that ‘in spite of [their] inferior hierarchical social position’ as female opera singers at the turn of the nineteenth century, they had to be ‘tough, resilient, with an unshakeable belief in themselves’(p.4). How different from the character of Mélisande! This beautiful waif-like yet seductive creation of Maeterlinck imbued with a haunting sadness is doomed to her fate despite her guile and seeming innocence. Perhaps the helplessness of Mélisande provided an early inspiration in the lives of the three women to be strong and move forward resolutely in their careers or perhaps more simply, out of vanity, ‘they each wanted to be as innately attractive as the foreign princess’! (p.321) It is, in fact, the life stories of these singers that take precedence in the text which presents as a descriptive narrative, although in the first few chapters the dramas surrounding the first performance of Pelléas et Mélisande are examined.

The reader is introduced firstly to Debussy and Maeterlinck and the undercurrent of violence which pervades the opera, Pelléas et Mélisande seems also to be inherent in the personalities of both men, an observation made by Maggie Teyte (Opstad, p.7), who of the three women appeared to make the most impersonal and objective comments in her own autobiography.[1] Indeed, in the first chapter of Debussy’s Mélisande, the manner in which Opstad places such pertinent quotations gleaned from numerous sources brings both Maeterlinck and Debussy to life and sets the tone for her text. However we felt that besides the use of footnotes, a larger bibliography at the end of the book would have been of more assistance to scholars wishing to investigate further such resources. The author has chosen to provide a ‘select bibliography’.

Also in the first chapter, Opstad describes the events which enabled Debussy to procure the right to set the poet’s play to music. Maeterlinck, who knew nothing of music and who at a later date went to sleep during a performance of the score by Debussy (p.59), entrusted his friend, symbolist writer Camille Mauclair to judge whether the composer’s score was suitable. The reply came back from Mauclair, after having heard it played: ‘I’ve just heard a masterpiece’ (p.17).

The author then draws on Debussy’s various letters in his Correspondance, to elicit why after having settled negotiations with Maeterlinck in 1893, the composer had to wait until 1901 before Albert Carré, Director of the Opéra-Comique, Paris, promised to have the opera performed in the 1901-2 season.

A swing is then made to concentrate on the three ‘Mélisandes’. To introduce the three women, the next few chapters are pivoted around the premier production of Pelléas et Mélisande. The reader is first introduced to Georgette Leblanc. Of the three singers, Georgette appears to be the most flamboyant and colourful character or as Opstad puts it ‘a fulsome, extrovert, overpowering personality’. (p.59) The author gives a detailed account of Leblanc’s introduction to her operatic and acting career and then describes her connection to Maeterlinck. Leblanc initially came to know of the Belgian poet through her lover Camille Mauclair, fell madly in love with Maurice, then for twenty years as his companion suffered the vagaries of his temperament, whilst selflessly promoting his works throughout Europe, England and the United States. Opstad refers substantially to Leblanc’s autobiography Souvenirs: My Life with Maeterlinck in this chapter, backed by archival material obtained in Belgium. Still, one wonders if Leblanc’s artistic flair may have coloured the recounting of her life events which were eventually reproduced in three separate books.[2] Indeed, Opstad does comment that all three ‘Mélisandes’ aimed for a ‘veneer of romanticism’ when telling their stories (p.28) but nevertheless draws heavily from these accounts throughout her text.

Notwithstanding, the reader cannot but feel sympathetic towards Georgette when she discovered, after five rehearsals with Debussy for the part of Mélisande, that Mary Garden was to play the role. Georgette had already at this stage appeared at the Opéra-Comique in Alfred Bruneau’s L’Attaque du Moulin and Georges Bizet’s Carmen.

Opstad then switches tack and introduces Mary Garden, the young Scottish singer who was studying in Paris and for whom Debussy declared, on hearing her sing the part: ‘That’s her.... C’est ma Mélisande’(p.87) and indeed it was Mary who went on to perform the role some 140 times in her career, her last complete performance being at the age of 57 years. The author comments that Mary Garden would have thrived on the publicity of today as she developed ‘a gift for manipulating the press’. Whilst Opstad notes that it was virtually impossible to unravel truth from fiction in Mary’s autobiography (p.65)[3], her background research on the singer’s origins also helps to paint a fuller picture of this extrovert and resourceful woman.

Mary Garden’s incredible empathy for the role of Mélisande is recognised by Opstad and perhaps one of the most constructive comments in the text is a quotation from Mary herself: ‘Think only of silences in that opera – they are what make Mélisande – the silences that Debussy put there. In her silences, Mélisande has the orchestra to tell her what to do. On most operatic stages nobody is silent’. (p.104)[4] Indeed, when the orchestra was playing, Mary was like a ‘carved figure which had stepped out of a medieval frieze’ (p.104); a posture which would have also conveyed the image of a symbolist painting. We will come back to the importance of the symbolist aspect later.

The background to success in the opera circuit was often related to the casting couch or the ability of a woman to distance her career from romantic entanglement and throughout the book Opstad outlines the various trials and tribulations each of the three women underwent (or chose to reveal in their autobiographies) during their lives. In those early days, Georgette Leblanc believed she lost the part of Mélisande as she had not succumbed to the charms of Albert Carré whereas Mary Garden appeared to have succeeded in having both the Director of the Opéra-Comique and the conductor, André Messager as ardent admirers and she even hinted at a romantic interest on Debussy’s part. It seems much more likely, however, that at that time, physically and emotionally, Mary Garden resembled more closely the ‘waif-like’ Mélisande that was being sought. Her rival, Georgette, could well have also seemed too ‘overpowering, extravagant and intelligent’ (p.321) for the role.

Georgette went on to feature in many of Maeterlinck’s plays and later sang the title role of Paul Dukas’ operatic version of the playwright’s work, Ariane et Barbe-Bleu at the Opéra-Comique in 1907 but she had only one opportunity to sing in Pelléas et Mélisande and that was in Boston in 1912 at the age of 43 where she ‘preserved the naiveté of a childlike Mélisande’ whilst ‘penetrating with Debussy to the very soul of Pelléas et Mélisande’.(p.230) Curiously, a comment made by Georgette, in a talk later given in 1924 runs counter to the belief most people hold that a carefully constructed fusion existed between Debussy’s music and Maeterlinck’s word. She found the idea ridiculous that so much emphasis was placed on the ‘fidelity with which Debussy had followed Maeterlinck’s poem’ (p.275). She did not believe that the Mélisande of the opera was as childlike as in Maeterlinck’s conception. Perhaps this is more a reflection of Georgette’s personal beliefs. She was scornful of the symbolist era and what it represented, such as the desire of littérateurs and composers to create a ‘fusion of the arts’.[5] Despite including this controversial comment in the book, Opstad does not develop the point further.

The third ‘Mélisande’, Maggie Teyte, then takes centre stage in Opstad’s text. It was in fact jealousy that was behind Maggie’s introduction to the role. Like Mary Garden and of British origin, she had been in Paris studying singing, courtesy of wealthy sponsors. Carré’s fourth wife, Marguerite, who greatly disliked Mary Garden, took advantage of the latter’s departure from the Opéra-Comique to perform in America. Marguerite urged her husband to find an interim replacement until she herself had fully learnt the role of Mélisande. Maggie had been singing small roles at the Opéra-Comique at the time but on meeting and singing the part for Debussy, passed the critical test to be accepted for the role.

Her performance in Pelléas et Mélisande in the 1908 season received mixed reviews as she was understandably compared to Mary Garden. However, generally it was felt that she created an ‘almost childlike Mélisande’ with a ‘pretty pure voice’. (p.187) and as the season rolled on she gathered quite a following She was to sing the role nineteen times at the Opéra-Comique in that season and then in later life only three times in England and a couple of times in America. Nonetheless, her style of singing must have greatly appealed to Debussy as she sang several of his songs in concert with him at the piano. Debussy very rarely provided accompaniment for anyone in public. Maggie’s comments on approaching the composer’s music are noteworthy: ‘Every note of Debussy must have its full value – the music must not be pulled into the shape of the poem’. (p.178). Maggie firmly believed that the ‘chief characteristic of sung French is an absolutely equal balance between voice value and word value’ and that there was nothing ‘indefinite about Debussy’s music’. [6] When working on the part of Mélisande with Debussy, she had had to study for three hours a day for nine months to ‘satisfy the demands of her exacting taskmaster’. (p.179) Here, there appears to have been another opportunity for Opstad to have proceeded with critical analysis of the three singers’ different interpretations of Debussy’s music.

The remainder of Opstad’s text follows the lives of the three women after the early days of Pelléas et Mélisande in Paris. Mary Garden went on to a successful career, spending her time between England, France and America, singing a ‘huge repertoire in a wide variety of opera houses’ and ‘court[ing] the press’ (p.242) and in 1920 in New York, Maurice Maeterlinck attended the Debussy opera for the first time and saw her perform as Mélisande, making the comment: ‘Had I known, I should have come a long time ago’. (p.252).

Between 1926 and 1929, Mary Garden made recordings with Victor Talking Machine and today we can compare the voices of both Mary and Maggie Teyte. There is, however, only one song of Debussy, Beau Soir, that Mary recorded whereas Maggie made numerous recordings of Debussy songs with both Gerald Moore and Alfred Cortot. Georgette’s voice was also recorded in 1912 but not singing Debussy. Opstad draws our attention to these details and makes the comment on Georgette’s voice that it ‘compares favourably with Mary Garden’s demonstrating a ‘full tone [...] and expressive high register’.(p.251) Thus although Leblanc did not receive the same intensive training in her early years as the other two had done she must have developed her full singing potential. This is one of the very few places in the text where direct comparisons are made of the three singers’ voices.

It is more the resilience and determination of each woman that is emphasised. In Mary Garden’s case we are frequently reminded of her strength of character as she dealt with her various relationships, a strength which must have also stood her in good stead when she was appointed director of the Chicago Opera Association in 1921, a position she held for 12 months. The author also comments on Mary’s selfless efforts during World War II for which she received two medals.

Georgette’s resilience is revealed in the way she dealt with the different challenges in her colourful life. From organising the performance of the play Pelléas et Mélisande in the home she shared with Maeterlinck, the Saint-Wandrille abbey, in 1910, to undertaking a successful yet lonely operatic tour in America whilst the poet was falling to the charms of the younger Renée Dahon in France, to appearing in a couple of French films, to writing several books during poverty stricken days with her female companions in America and France, to facing, finally, the challenge of the breast cancer to which she succumbed.

Maggie’s career was also subject to highs and lows. After a short season in London in 1909-1910, she went on to receive greater recognition in America, particularly in Chicago. However, her two unsuccessful marriages contributed to her varying fortunes in the operatic world. Her first husband showed only a superficial interest in her music whilst the second, although offering her a wealthy lifestyle for ten years, proved to be both an alcoholic and a philanderer.

She had some difficulty in reviving her career and perhaps ironically one of her noteworthy appearances was at Covent Garden in 1930, to sing Mélisande again in Debussy’s opera. Re-establishing herself in America was not easy until her recordings of Debussy songs with Alfred Cortot in 1936 reawakened public interest. Maggie also made a contribution to the World War II effort with a series of concerts accompanied by Gerald Moore, featuring French music and for which she received the Gold Cross of Lorraine.

Biographically speaking, Debussy’s Mélisande provides a well researched presentation of the lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. For this reader, however, the first part of the book dealing with the production of Pelléas et Mélisande is the most engaging as the personalities discussed here seem to come to life and there is a real link between the three singers because of the circumstances surrounding the role of Mélisande. The latter part of the book becomes more a chronological presentation of facts and the ‘Mélisande’ relationship between the three women seems tenuous.

From an analytical viewpoint, there are areas that could have been more developed. Whereas one critic has stated that the book is ‘refreshingly free of [...] musicological mumbo-jumbo’[7] we felt that at certain points, more analysis of the Debussy style of music would seem appropriate. Opstad does point out that Debussy wished to eliminate any traces of a Wagnerian style in his score and that he believed ‘music should seem to emerge from the shadows and return to them […] always […] discreet’ (p.9) but she does not refer to the predominant influence that the symbolist writers had on his musical works. Debussy had a close association both with Stéphane Mallarmé and Pierre Louÿs and as the composer Paul Dukas remarked: ‘The greatest influence to which Debussy was subjected was that of the littérateurs. Not that of the musicians.’[8] What attracted him was ‘their art of transposing everything into symbolic images’.[9] He was also well aware that the symbolist writers aimed to create phrases using a poetic rhythm whereby ‘the links between the sonorities enlighten the meaning of the word and place the understanding on a symbolic level’[10] and he had recognised in the words of Maeterlinck an ‘evocative language whose sensitivity could be prolonged in the music and the orchestral decor’.[11] Debussy’s attention also extended to the lines and colours of the stage décor itself, where nothing was done without his agreement. (p.93). The importance of this was similarly emphasised by Mary Garden, in her own book where she commented that she saw Pelléas et Mélisande in Paris after the war and all the old sets had been thrown out, the new ones having ‘nothing to do with Debussy’s music’.[12] The impression conveyed by the opera as being a painted tableau was also commented on by Camille Mauclair in an early review of the opera’s performance.[13]

We have also drawn attention to the fact that each of the singers made pertinent comment about Debussy’s music which could have been further explored.

Finally, whilst it is evident that Georgette Leblance, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte were successful in their careers, in Debussy’s Mélisande their lives are treated in isolation and there is no comparison to other prominent women of their era. No comment is made about the fact that as their early days were spent in fin-de-siècle France, they would have been subjected to and probably influenced by the ebullient intellectual and artistic activity of Paris life. France was also the birthplace of such outstanding women as Nelly Roussell, Marguerite Durand, Sarah Bernhardt, Juliette Adam or Marguerite Rachilde. Recent research tends to take a different perspective from more traditional viewpoints on women at the end of the nineteenth century and points to the emergence of the ‘New Woman’.[14]

· Rosemary Yeoland was awarded a doctorate at the University of Tasmania, December 2006 for her thesis entitled La Contribution littéraire de Camille Mauclair au domaine musical parisien à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle . This has since been published as a monograph by Edwin Mellen Press. Several years previously, Rosemary had completed pianoforte studies to A.Mus.A level and her combined French and musical interest manifested first in her Honours thesis, on André Gide's literary connection to music: Le Rapport entre la musique et l'éveil de la spiritualité et de la sensualité chez André Gide which was followed by her Masters thesis: Romain Rolland et l'héroïsme: une perspective musicale. Dr Yeoland teaches part-time in the French department at the University of Tasmania and is currently translating Camille Mauclair's roman à clef Le Soleil des morts into English

· See also Response by Rosemary Yeoland to Norris, Review of Rosemary Hamilton Yeoland; with a foreward by Guy Ducrey, La Contribution litteraire de Camille Mauclair au domaine musicale parisien. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edward Mellen Press, 2008. xxii + 331 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. $119.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 0-7734-4860-8. H-France Review Vol. 10 (September 2010), No. 133. This response may be found on the H-France website at http://www.h-france.net/vol10reviews/vol10no133yeoland.pdf.

Review by R.J. Olney

Tamara S Wagner: Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: plotting money and the novel genre 1815-1901. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 2010. 232pp. £44.95.

The seemingly solid structures of Victorian middle-class life could rest on very unstable foundations. The prudent left their money in three per-cent Consols or well-secured mortgage loans, but many, looking for higher yields or quicker returns, ventured into riskier territory. As the nineteenth century went on the opportunities for losing one’s money in a spectacular fashion multiplied. A waterlogged Cornish tin mine, an Irish railway line that went nowhere in particular and a visionary bridge between Rotherhithe and Limehouse all helped to ruin Alaric Tudor in Trollope’s The Three Clerks (1857). In the worst cases folly turned into criminality: unprincipled speculators gambled with other people’s money, and brought others down with them when they fell. The century was punctuated with a series of bubbles, manias, crises and crashes.

So common were these dangers that Samuel Butler, who himself had lost money through following the advice of a banker friend, once proposed that the ancient universities should found professorships of speculation, to teach young men the prudent management of money. (But then he reflected that the only subjects in which Oxford and Cambridge excelled were feasting and sport, and no chair existed in either of these subjects, so perhaps on second thoughts ….)

It is therefore no coincidence that the novel-reading public devoured stories of financial misfortune. Just how many were written I had not appreciated until I read this book. The mysterious rise and catastrophic fall of a swindling rogue such as Augustus Melmotte did of course make a dramatic theme. But many readers must have read such tales with a sense of ‘There but for the grace of God’, whilst others - along with not a few authors themselves - had burnt their own fingers.

This book, however, is not about nineteenth-century financial history as such. It is about the novels of the period that have financial speculation as a major element. Tamara Wagner has read widely in this literature, and although she refers to many of what she calls the ‘canonical texts’ she also explores the uncanonical ones, novels by writers such as Mrs Gore, Mrs Oliphant, Mrs Henry Wood and Mrs Braddon. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, she starts with Jane Austen’s Sanditon and proceeds by way of the ‘silver fork’ novels of the 1820s and the ‘sensation’ novels of the 1860s to the (sometimes) more sophisticated works of the 1880s and ’90s.

Her interest focuses, for instance, on the evolution of the characteristic stock-market villain, and on the way that speculation could act as a metaphor for a wider concern with social uncertainties and instabilities. But her principal engagement is with the development of speculation narratives, the elaboration of the genre into sub-genres, and the subtle ways in which themes interacted with each other - the disruption of bourgeois domestic life, for instance, by one of these ‘exotic’ villains.

As she rightly observes, there was no straightforward chronological link between economic reality and the development of Victorian fiction. Once the speculation novel left the platform, so to speak, it gathered momentum under its own steam. This was not just a matter of literary fashion. The processes that Professor Wagner traces became increasingly complex and (to use one of her favourite words) self-reflexive towards the end of the century. Authors not only borrowed increasingly from each other but used irony to subvert the very clichés and conventions that were their stock in trade. One of her examples, though it is not of course a novel, is Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895).

All this is interesting, indeed stimulating, but it leaves this reviewer with three areas of discomfort or uneasiness. In the first place this is already a crowded field, and one thickly planted with books and articles devoted to Victorian studies. This has led Professor Wagner to seek new material among the non-canonical texts. Sometimes, as is the case with Mrs Oliphant, these productions are intelligent enough to repay her close if somewhat humourless scrutiny. Others one suspects are not worth detailed individual analysis, although taken en bloc they tell us something about the novel-writing industry as a whole. Even in the case of a writer such as Trollope, Professor Wagner brings the weight of her criticism to bear on brief passages that were surely not meant to be taken that seriously.

Secondly, although she is admittedly not writing social or economic history, one cannot help being worried by some of her references. She quotes, apparently with approval, another writer’s opinion that the years 1830-2 represented ‘the last flourish of English aristocracy’ (43). In her account of the speculative building trade in the nineteenth century she lays too much emphasis on the boom of the 1850s as destructive of the countryside around London: the boom of the late 1870s would have been a better case in point. And although much house-building was speculative in the sense that builders tried to anticipate demand instead of following it, the end product was generally, though admittedly not always, homes reasonably fit for human habitation rather than merely pieces of paper currency.

It may be significant that Professor Wagner seems more at home with spatial rather that temporal images, as when she refers to overlapping circles and Venn diagrams to put across her ideas (pp24-5). Further spatial metaphors occur in the following sentence: ‘The triangulation of doubles is realized with a self-reflexivity that foregrounds the porosity of the paper fictions that become confronted with the strawberries’ comparative solidity (even as jam)’ (p159). No doubt it is unfair to take this out of context. She is discussing Mrs Oliphant’s Hester (1883), in which the heroine’s mother talks to her over the tea-table of the approaching jam-making season, thus jolting her out of her thoughts of eloping with a reckless speculator (p146). But this way of writing does not make for easy reading. As a non-specialist I feel as if I am looking into a closed academic world, in which writers communicate with each other in a language of their own. They are dealing in a kind of paper currency only loosely related to the gold standard of intelligible English. Perhaps there should be a kind of academic chief cashier, whose job it would be to supply, on demand, appropriate translations.

Nonetheless there is much of interest in this well-researched, thoughtful and well-presented book. Heaven forbid that modern academic publishing should become a speculative business. Yet, written in a somewhat different way, and sold at a somewhat lower price, this study could have taken its chance in a wider market.

· Richard Olney was an Assistant Keeper with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1976 to 2003. His doctoral thesis was published by Oxford University Press in 1973 as Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885. Since then he has written books and articles mainly on English nineteenth-century political, social and local history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Review by Leanne Bibby

Louisa Hadley: Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hardback ISBN: 9780230551565. £50.00

Louisa Hadley’s contribution to the growing field of neo-Victorian studies is a concise, readable discussion of how and why the category of the neo-Victorian novel has developed, and of its significance in terms of broader understandings of history. Hadley relates the phenomenon of contemporary authors ‘writing the Victorians’ to the texts’ past and present contexts, reflecting the real need, as she puts it, ‘to understand the historical specificity of both the Victorian and contemporary/postmodern context of neo-Victorian fiction rather than blending them’. This dual framework is well balanced, and proves to be a vital way of firstly defining (as Hadley does well) and thinking about the term ‘neo-Victorian’ itself, as a phrase that allows us to contextualise the Victorian era without rejecting its historicity (3).

This category of fiction is here positioned critically in relation to traditional historical fiction and also as a ‘distinct critical practice’ engaging with multiple ‘historical narratives’ (5). This facilitates an engaging enquiry into how these fictions correspond with our conceptions and use of the past in art and education. The central question posed in the book’s introduction is remarkably topical: how far have we really moved on from Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Victorian values’ of the 1980s and the nostalgia and selective cultural memory they encapsulated, evoked perfectly by this book’s cover image? Hadley seeks to answer this question and many others that should not be ignored at the present time, when historical fiction is not only perennially popular and hotly debated by critics but continually evolving, as authors and readers attempt to look backward and forward simultaneously. In light of the continuing fascination with the nineteenth century, are neo-Victorian texts timely reminders to avoid resorting to nostalgia and political naivety in our view of the period? Hadley’s study suggests that they should be treated as such. Her introductory section on the issue of ‘Why the Victorians? Why now?’ is argued persuasively, with reference to period’s near-yet-far relationship to the twentieth century and its thorough documentation.

Ideas of the Victorian era as a key ‘narrative of national development’ (8) and the basis of modern society indeed separate the time from its actual historical context, as Hadley contends in her discussion of the heritage industry of recent years. The Victorian ‘ideology of progress’ (19) is still culturally prevalent, but obscures understandings of nineteenth-century textual culture. In this book, the complexity of neo-Victorian fiction’s relationship to actual Victorian novels is rightly emphasised. From the study’s outset, Hadley relates neo-Victorian texts to ‘Victorian and pre-Victorian forms of the historical novel’, in contrast to the more usual critical tendency to regard such fiction exclusively in terms of ‘postmodern fiction’s engagement with history’ (18). These novels are thus situated outside the ‘ahistoricism’ of much postmodern writing. Hadley downplays the importance of the term ‘historiographic metafiction’, which might concern some readers of neo-Victorian fictions as postmodern, but her argument is based compellingly in the Victorians’ evident awareness of their own place in history. Postmodern ‘self-conscious’ writing, in fact, has much in common with Victorian authors’ interest in how far it was really possible to narrate the past (21).

An additional, crucial context Hadley draws upon is that of the politicised teaching of history – how we ‘learn’ as well as use history. As the Victorians cultivated historical narratives such as fiction and biography to express a sense of their pivotal place in historical time, and sought to establish the study of history as a science (20-21), the teaching of history then and into the twentieth century was politically motivated. In Hadley’s survey of this process, fact-based learning in late-twentieth-century schools (which will evoke memories for most, if not all, of this book’s audience) is seen as a backlash against growing interest in postmodernism and history as textual (25). Against this familiar backdrop, neo-Victorian fiction emerges as a response to conflicting views of historical narratives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and indeed up to the present day: is history a collection of facts we have a moral responsibility to reproduce faithfully in our ‘retellings’, or a factually unknowable multiplicity of narratives?

The book is organised around five strategies of neo-Victorian writing: ‘Narrating’, ‘Detecting’, ‘Resurrecting’, ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing as’ the Victorians. Each chapter is in turn divided into sections according to Hadley’s ‘dual approach’ towards texts’ historical and contemporary contexts, making the study straightforward and rewarding to consult for any student of this category of fiction. Biography is arguably our major point of access to the Victorian era and accordingly, Hadley’s first chapter considers textual constructions of Victorian lives in both fiction and history, and how the two overlap. There is much here of value to readers of neo-Victorian biographical novels as well as specialists in the work of single authors, Oscholars included, with an interest in how to incorporate biographical readings; the section titled ‘Biographical decency’ is a fascinating and provocative account of how Victorian and neo-Victorian novelists have written about ‘private lives’.

The remainder of the book is ordered in terms of genre, with neo-Victorian detective fiction, ghost stories and ‘archival’ novels critiqued in light of their nineteenth-century antecedents and contemporary aims, although those genres’ complexity is examined and theorised in useful detail. The book is a well-timed companion to the numerous books and articles on individual neo-Victorian novels which do not focus on concepts of historical narrative. The major strength of Hadley’s new book is the emphasis she places on our imagination of the Victorians as a system of such narratives, constructed and politicised deliberately. Our culture, in which the nineteenth century remains central to school curricula, weekend television is dominated by Victorian-set dramas and many Victorian novels have never been out of print, Hadley supplies as a vital framework for thinking about how the past meets the present under the banner term of ‘neo-Victorian’.

Although Hadley’s readings of canonical neo-Victorian fictions and their theoretical contexts are never less than rigorous and original, some experienced readers of the same texts may find the book’s limited set of primary sources frustrating. For example, most neo-Victorianists will already be very familiar with A. S. Byatt’s work, which is covered at some length. The inclusion of some lesser-known texts, such as the growing number of original neo-Victorian films, would have been welcome, especially given Hadley’s focus in her introduction on the transformation of late-twentieth-century nostalgia for the nineteenth century by artists across cultural forms. However, this omission is probably deliberate and results in a study that anticipates and assists future work. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative is an invaluable exploration of the main issues in neo-Victorian studies to date and, as a result of its dual methodology, is also highly relevant to Victorian studies more broadly. It will be of particular use to readers and students approaching neo-Victorian fiction for the first time and seeking a thorough grounding in concepts of nineteenth-century and contemporary historical narratives, how they inform fiction, and vice versa.

· Leanne Bibby is a final year PhD candidate at Leeds Metropolitan University, working on gender and the figure of the intellectual in A.S. Byatt’s fiction.

Review by Rebecca Crowley

Daisy Goodwin: My Last Duchess. London: Headline, 2010. Hardback ISBN: 9780755348060. £12.99

Daisy Goodwin’s first novel My Last Duchess (2010) is a neo-Victorian romp of a fin-de-siècle romance. This novel cannot be described as anything other than a well-researched repetition of a ‘Chick-lit’ formula – albeit in a decontextualised setting – complete with another vacuous female heroine, a point emphasized through the front cover design which is reminiscent of an advertisement for Bailey’s Irish Cream (nice taste, unmemorable effect). However, Goodwin’s novel should not be dismissed on the basis of its frivolity alone. Why? Because Goodwin is reproducing a contemporary Anglo-American zeitgeist for frivolous portrayals of women. By transposing this froth into a less familiar setting, Goodwin succeeds in drawing attention to how Victorian imitations continues to haunt contemporary Anglo-American literary cultures, Chick-lit in particular.

It is therefore unfair to mock Goodwin’s detailed and totally un-ironic analysis of different types of corsetry lace available to unbelievably rich consumers during the fin-de-siècle of the 1890s. It is unfair because the same critical inquiry continues to be pursued to the nth degree through contemporary Anglo-American Chick-lit, a literary culture which reached its particular boom period during the more recent fin-de-siècle of the 1990s. Goodwin’s neo-Victorian romance offers a stark imitation of, say, Sophie Kinsella’s mind-numbing depictions of female characters with a love for nothing else but designer labels. Indeed, Goodwin should be applauded for drawing attention to contemporary women’s apparently insatiable need to consume such two-dimensional reproductions of Victorian and usually heteronormative depictions of femininity.

Thus what may at first glance appear to be a repetition of mere froth turns into a monstrously anachronistic portrayal of women which sadly still makes sense in contemporary Anglo-American cultures today. We recognise Goodwin’s female characters as pretty much the same beings which occupy our own literary universe; the same female ideals put forward in texts such as Sex and the City and the seemingly endless Shopaholic series. We as women, often for unclear reasons, continue to contribute towards the commercial success of such texts.

Instead of awarding her heroine a Master-card with a bottomless overdraft limit, Goodwin imagines her heroine, Cora Cash, to be one of America’s richest heiresses. Unlike most Chick-lit heroines, who find themselves unable to control their own destiny because they spent their time at university getting drunk or stoned instead of being intelligent female roles models who may encourage more women to go to university, Cora Cash is portrayed as putty in the hands of her deeply ambitious mother with half a face (‘the mirror cracked from side to side’). Cora’s mother is not a feminist, however, emphasised by this maternal character’s desperation to buy her daughter a product America cannot provide: an aristocratic and patriarchal English title of ‘Duchess’.

In order for Goodwin to weave a plot around this repetition of an English stereotype of American excess, the reader learns – at length – how Cora is duly despatched to Britain, after being clothed in the attire of Diana the huntress, and how she is told by her mother to stumble across an English aristocrat whilst doing a lot of fox killing. Thus whilst riding through the wilds of England on the back of a Black Beauty-esque horse Cora is accosted by a rich old man with a tattoo, a detail which he literally keeps flashing at her. As Cora is perturbed by this turn of events, presumably because she has never seen a tattoo before, she gallops off into the distance by herself. This development allows a bourgeois fantasy of middle-class sex in the bushes to be (re)introduced; Cora duly canters into a tree after being traumatised into amnesia at the sight of the tall, dark and brooding Duke of Lulworth bonking the married aristocratic Lady next door behind the proverbial oak trees.

Not that the reader is told this until the end of the novel, although this particular twist does become somewhat guessable quite a bit before Goodwin actually spells it out. At some point during her unconsciousness, presumably after experiencing a very Victorian twinge of sexual desire at the sight of Cora’s ingénue-like neck spread-eagled amongst the autumn leaves, the Duke of Lulworth decides to hitch up his breeches and to whisk her off to his shabby old castle (leaving his adulterous femme fatale partner out there amongst the bushes). The plot is underway and Cora is duly transported into a strange English man’s castle. Much is made, largely sincerely, about the lack of a working toilet in the Duke of Lulworth’s house, a detail which is used to provide a parallel between British and American life at the turn of the century.

As soon as Cora is unconscious in the Duke’s bed, Cora’s mother arrives from America and decides to dress her daughter up in a sexy night-gown. A few pages after the night-gown is introduced the Duke and Cora decide to get hitched: Cora because her mother says she needs to be a Duchess and the Duke because he needs access to a bit of Cora’s cash in order to pay someone to mend his leaking roof. It would be nice to suggest that this portrayal of a marriage of convenience is being offered up as a pastiche or even as a parody of (neo)-Victorian culture by a contemporary author but sadly this is not the case. This depiction of sex and gender roles in an anterior yet still eerily recognisable fictional context simply gives the angel in the house stereotype, complete with her turning of the other cheek, another airing.

Cora and her Duke’s marriage of convenience does not run quite as smoothly as Jane Austen suggested it would do in Goodwin’s limpid nod towards meta-textuality when she has Cora reading Emma by a window whilst she is still a virgin. Cora, like many a Chick-lit heroine with commitment issues, gets married after reading Jane Austen (usually Emma) and moves into her husband’s leaky castle only to realise that her husband is not quite the man he says he is. Despite this, and like most Chick-lit heroines, Cora decides to stay married to him anyway. This is where the novel ends. Or rather there is a climactic scene where it is revealed at a dinner party at the castle, and in front of the Lulworth’s house-guest the Prince of Wales, that Cora’s husband has been sleeping with the Lady next door. In response the Prince of Wales character advises this particular Diana figure ‘to pretend that nothing had happened…and [to] go on serenely like swans sailing over filthy water…never looking down’ (395).

Cora eventually takes this advice even though there is a short and strange scene in between the novel’s climax and resolution where she decides to escape the castle on a donkey cart (a scene which is made doubly strange when we realise that Cora has both a horse and a train station nearby). Her cheating husband arrives in order to obstruct the escape in a timely fashion and in order to make his excuses about why he could not help sleeping with the Lady next door. In a fake feminist twist Goodwin allows Cora to recognise that her husband is a liar but decides to pretend that Cora’s subsequent decision to stay with her wayward husband is actually a gesture of financial empowerment. This obscures just how terrifying a portrayal of female life such an image conjures up and projects into a popular literary consciousness. Goodwin decides to write Cora’s husband’s dishonest characteristics off as another enigmatic facet of his sullen nature, ‘Perhaps she would never really know him’ (465). Goodwin’s decision to suggest that a rich lifestyle is compensation for marrying a foolish husband facilitates the novel’s resolution which ultimately cements and buries Goodwin’s heroine inside a totally Victorian (and Chick-lit) heteronormative tomb-like lifestyle.

Daisy Goodwin’s novel is therefore a deep and profound analysis of Victorian culture at the time of the fin-de-siècle, a time when the British Empire was subject to fears of moral decay from within and at a time when America was still quite open to immigration and was building itself up into a superpower. Aside from the novel’s resonances with Chick-lit this thematic depiction of the rise of one superpower during the demise of another is perhaps another reason for why Goodwin’s book has appeared now; the recent recession has, according to some economists, cast doubts over whether the rise and rise of McDonalds, Pepsi Max and global capitalism will continue at an uninterrupted rate. In other words, perhaps Goodwin’s novel, possibly unintentionally, holds up a mirror to the West in order to reflect an image which shows the same unequal excessive cultural images which have continued to capture Western popular imaginations since the heyday of Victorian industrialisation.

Such a suggestion becomes most evident when one considers Goodwin’s decision to appropriate the title My Last Duchess from Robert Browning’s poem. The reasons behind this appropriation appear, at least at first glance, unclear. The paranoid and possibly murderous husband of Browning’s poem appears to have little in common with Goodwin’s lacklustre, excuse-making English Duke of Lulworth. Similarly, the friendly yet nevertheless distinctly dead ‘Last Duchess’ of Browning’s poem shares few resemblances with Goodwin’s Duchess - the rich, glitzy, sex-liking heroine Cora Cash. Yet because appearances can be deceptive in both Victorian fiction and in neo-Victorian Chick lit, a crucial connection between the two texts perhaps resides within the language of the title itself; the phrase ‘My Last Duchess’ may refer to a time and space which existed in the past but which now occupies the present, a time and space which is also identified as female through similar contextual forces operating in both the past and in the present. For example, how does Goodwin, in an echo of Browning, demonstrate the femininity of her Duchess?

In Browning’s poem the late Duchess’ femininity – and sexuality – is unveiled and problematised by her surviving husband in a portrait gallery where he has her picture concealed behind a curtain. Thus noble femininity and female sexuality are engendered through the male gaze, determined through the values that male viewers attribute to the female image. This is also the case in Goodwin’s novel. The new Duchess, née Cora Cash, is paraded around like a bird in a gilded cage whilst the Lulworth’s house-guests, the fictional Prince of Wales and his entourage, circle around her like visitors to the National Portrait Gallery. Cora’s social credentials as a Duchess are being defined through the Prince’s and her husband’s applause for whether Cora keeps her face in place when the men around her behave badly. Goodwin is determined to show that Cora does not crack up in her numerous confrontations with men with commitment issues and that she is a strong woman because of this. But is such a determination really what a third-wave feminist context needs at the moment? Especially when such a context is already saturated with so many similarly insipid portrayals of women? Because surely a denial of any fractures, fissures, cracks and gaps within a stereotype of white, rich, heteronormative, passive femininity cannot possibly be mistaken for feminism in a twenty-first century context?

Neo-Victorian writers such as Sarah Waters offer texts which often exorcise spectres of oppression in Victorian fiction, positively transforming such images into complex shape-shifting characters capable of resisting the repetition of such oppression. In contrast, Goodwin seems to produce a more limpid portrayal of women than even the Victorians managed to manufacture. Yes, Goodwin may give a bit more page space to topics such as child-birth and sex but does this really achieve anything experimental, subversive or liberating? Indeed such an attention to these previously hidden bodily female experiences succeeds in only chaining female representation into an ever tighter corset-like relationship with a biologically defined sex role.

It must be emphasized that Cora is not a ‘thinking’ woman. Yet perhaps Cora’s image of ornamental femininity explains one of the reasons why the author refrains from killing her heroine off at the end of the text. Browning has his Duchess immortalised at the hands of her husband: ‘I gave commands; / Then all the smiles stopped’. This is the glaring discrepancy between the two texts: by allowing the character Cora to live, Goodwin’s novel demonstrates how the sense of ornamental femininity woven around Cora (a sense of ornamental femininity which echoes many a contemporary Chick-lit portrayal of women) continues to be based on a Victorian moral code defining serenity as a natural counter-balance to excessive patriarchal action. The self-obsessed characterisation of Cora Cash appears to be an anti-feminist creation but possibly this apparent anti-feminism may also be read as a perverse way of partially reigniting feminist debate. In other words, Goodwin produces the infuriatingly vacuous character of Cora in order to incite feminist debate over how concepts of materialism, femininity and passivity all too commonly intersect in a way which often (re) produces an imitation of Victorian depictions of women.

Goodwin certainly captures one of the dominant messages of Browning’s poem; the sense that a feminine aesthetic imitates a passive female character. Goodwin also echoes the sense that a character like Cora Cash, like the Duchess of Ferrara of Browning’s poem, only becomes a possibility in contexts where power is defined and enacted as material excess and lack. Many of the characters in the novel, the rich ones at least, appear to have their cake and eat it without any of their sins ever being forced into a judgement day scene that causes much of a lasting impression. The characters in both texts are so unbelievable, being ‘great’ fictional figures from history, that a feeling of uncertainty invades one’s consciousness after reading both novel and poem. The reader is left wondering if some vital detail or profound issue has been overlooked.

Goodwin’s novel, saturated with glossy details of material decadence but also containing sub-plots about not-so-fortunate characters, is an interesting probing into the question of whether excessive behaviours cause moral poverty and oblivious ignorance. The central characters in Goodwin’s novel are all defined in terms of their ability to increase their material worth. Such a theme is present in Browning’s poem too; the reader becomes the consumer of such an attitude when consuming Browning’s depiction of wealth and power determined by patriarchal excess. By creating a poem for public consumption Browning helps to democratise this concept and to popularise its appeal. Goodwin demonstrates how Browning’s theme is mimicked in many contemporary visions of femininity – visions pursued through literary cultures such as Anglo-American Chick-lit – by concentrating on how femininity is determined and immortalised in art through violence against women. She creates characters obsessed with defining and symbolising power as wealth. In short, coincidentally or deliberately, Goodwin has a distinct knack for re-imagining the inequality and indifference of Victorian hierarchies of power. Such a knack may or may not have been absorbed from the author’s own contemporary Western context.

· Rebecca Crowley is a first year PhD student at Leeds Met University. She is writing a thesis on (‘mad’) women in post-Plathian British and American fiction. She is particularly interested in how 'madness' may be read as a self-reflexive form of feminism.

Reviewed elsewhere

Charles Baudelaire: Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose. Translated by Keith Waldrop. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009. xiii + 99 pp. $22.95 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-0-8195-6909-7. Review by William Olmsted, Valparaiso University. H-France Review Vol. 10 (September 2010), No. 134. This review may be found on the H-France website at: http://www.h-france.net/vol10reviews/vol10no134olmsted.pdf

Alberto Gabriele: Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  xxvii +275.  Figures, notes, appendix, bibliography and index. $80.00  U.S. (hb). ISBN 978-0-230-61521-2. Review by Beth Palmer, University of Leeds. H-France Review Vol. 10 (November 2010), No. 181. This review may be found on the H-France website at http://www.h-france.net/vol10reviews/vol10no181Palmer.pdf

Pascale Goetschel and Jean-Claude Yon, eds. : Directeurs de théâtre XIX^e-XX^e siècles, Histoire d’une profession. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, Collection «Histoire de la France aux XIX^e et XX^e siècles», 2008. 253 pp. B/W illustrations. 25€. ISBN 978-2-85944-600-0 (pb.). Review by Guy Spielmann, Georgetown University. H-France Review Vol. 10 (August 2010), No. 116. This review may be found on the H-France website at http://www.h-france.net/vol10reviews/vol10no116spielmann.pdf

Gillian Opstad: Debussy’s Mélisande: The Lives of Georgette Leblanc, Mary Garden and Maggie Teyte. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2009. xii + 348 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $60.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 978-1-84383-459-5. Review by Jolanta T. Pekacz, Dalhousie University. H-France Review Vol. 10 (June 2010), No. 89. www.h-france.net/vol10reviews/vol10no89pekacz.pdf

Harriet Ritvo: The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.  237pp.  $26.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-72082-1.Reviewed by Fredrik Albritton-Jonsson (University of Chicago). Published on H-Water (July, 2010): http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30573

The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon : Report of the Secret Commission. Originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. W.T. Stead. Edited and with annotations and an introductory essay by Antony E.Simpson. Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press, 2007. $65.00. 207 pp. Hardcover. ISBN-10: 0-9791116-0-9. ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-0-0
Witnesses to the Scaffold : English Literary Figures as Observers of Public Executions : Pierce Egan, Thackeray, Dickens, Alexander Smith, G.A. Sala, Orwell. Edited, with annotations, commentaries, and an introductory essay by Antony E. Simpson.  Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press, 2008. $65.00. 230 pp. Hardcover. ISBN-10: 0-9791116-1-7. ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-1-7
Vicarious Vagrants : Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860-1910. Edited, with annotations and an introductory essay by Mark Freeman & Gillian Nelson. Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press, 2008. $65.00. 327 pp. Hardcover. ISBN-10: 0-9791116-2-5. ISBN-13:978-0-9791116-2-4
Reviewed by Antoine Capet, Cercles December 2010. http://www.cercles.com/review/r38/stead.html

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[1] Teyte, Maggie, A Star on the door (London:Putnam,1958), p. 67: ‘Maeterlinck was a character with certain brutal aspects who was nevertheless capable of great refinement and delicacy of perception. Debussy himself was by no means free of violent feeling, which is no more than an undercurrent in his music – yet this undercurrent of violence and terror is, I think, in sympathy with Maeterlinck’.

[2] Leblanc, Georgette, Souvenirs (1895-1918), (Paris: Grasset, 1931); English version: Souvenirs: My Life with Maeterlinck, translated by Janet Flanner (New York: Dutton, 1932), La Machine à courage: Souvenirs (Paris: Janin, 1947), Le Choix de la vie (Paris: Fasquelle, 1904).

[3] Garden, Mary with Biancolli, Louis, J., Mary Garden’s Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1952)

[4] The importance of silence and its contemplation was inherent in the belief of symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé : ‘The credo of the modern artist is silence’ in Camille Mauclair’s Le Soleil des morts (Paris: Ollendorff, 1898), p.24.

[5] Leblanc, Georgette, Souvenirs: My Life with Maeterlinck p.56: ‘If anything troubles me [...] it is the symbolist epoch, more false than all the others, since everything in it was a simulation’.

[6] Teyte, Maggie, ibid, pp.54, 58.

[7] See Roger Neil’s review at www.opera-britannia.com

[8] Conversation between Paul Dukas and Robert Brussel, quoted in Brussel, Robert, ‘Claude Debussy et Paul Dukas’, La Revue Musicale, May 1921, p.101.

[9] Dukas, Paul, Les Écrits de Paul Dukas sur la musique (Paris: Société d’éditions françaises et internationales, 1948), p.521.

[10] Dubiau-Feuillerac, Mylene, ‘French mélodie through Debussy and Mary Garden recordings: Poetic and symbolic musical performances’at http://performa.web.ua.pt/pdf/actas2009/42_Mylene_Dubiau-Feuillerac.pdf.

[11] Debussy: ‘Il y a là une langue évocatrice dont la sensibilité pouvait trouver son prolongement dans la musique et dans le décor orchestral’. ‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit Pelléas’ Editions Dynamo Aelberts Liège

[12] Garden Mary, ibid, p.249.

[13] Camille Mauclair: ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ Revue universelle vol.II, 1902, p.331: ‘C’est véritablement un tableau où les sons sont employés comme des couleurs, s’influencent, se répondent, sans un effet imitatif’. ‘It is truly a painting where sounds are employed like colours, influencing and responding to each other, without an imitative effect’. Our translation.

[14] See Burr Margadant, Jo, ed. The New Biography: Performing Feminity in Nineteenth Century Paris (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2000) and Roberts, Mary Louise Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).