Critical Survey

How we interpret a novel is inseparable from what kind of novel we take it to be, from what genre we assume it belongs to. As Peter Rabinowitz remarks in Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, ‘[…] what we attend to in a text is […] influenced by the other works in our minds against which we read it. Particular details stand out as surprising, significant, climactic, or strange in part because they are seen in the context of a particular intertextual grid – a particular set of other works of art.’ The truth of this axiom is strikingly illustrated by the critical history of what is possibly the most persistently misinterpreted novel in English literature, Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, or the New Crusade (1847). It has been read almost exclusively against an ‘intertextual grid’ consisting of both Disraeli’s earlier novels, especially Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), and what the contemporary reviewer of the novel in The Times called ‘fiction “with a purpose”’. What the reviewer particularly had in mind was a specific type of novel which Disraeli himself had a hand in creating and which later came to be known, variously, as the condition-of-England novel (a phrase borrowed from Carlyle), the social-problem novel, the industrial novel, or simply as a political novel or a roman à thèse.

Motherhood, for the Victorians, was seen not just as an organic phase of womanhood, but a responsibility that required a constant system of behavioural actions or inactions to make it a success rather than a danger. In this essay, I explore mid-nineteenth-century formulations of maternity through the ‘work’ of two women: Mary Ann Brough and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Both women played a significant role within the era’s popular culture. In 1854, Brough notoriously cut the throats of six of her children, killing them all, and then attempted suicide by cutting her own.1 From 1862 until her death in 1915, Braddon was one of Britain’s most popular and prolific novelists. Through analysis of the correlations and inconsistencies between non-fictional reactions to the crimes of Mary Brough and representations of dangerous maternities in the early fiction of Mary Braddon, this piece aims to explore the period’s biological and social ideas of motherhood in relation to emerging ideas on male professionalism and class mobility.

In the last thirty years, critical studies of George Gissing have tended to focus on the early social novels, from Demos (1886) to The Nether World (1889), and then the early 1890s social problem novels, New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893). However, to the late Victorians, Gissing was at his most powerful and popular during the mid-1890s, with works like In the Year of Jubilee (1894), Eve’s Ransom (1895) and The Whirlpool (1897). These put Gissing on the intellectual map and saw him move from writerly obscurity to man of letters, admired by Wells, Meredith and others. However, after his death, Gissing suffered from a reaction against what was seen as his pessimism, his egoism, and his bleak portrait of society. In one of the early studies of his work, Virginia Woolf criticised the personal in Gissing’s novels – seeing the protagonists as thinly veiled versions of himself and his own injustices: ‘…Gissing is one of those imperfect novelists through whose books one sees the life of the author faintly covered by the lives of fictitious people.’1 She considered that ‘…to use personal suffering to rivet the reader’s sympathy and curiosity upon your private case is disastrous.’ This strain of critical opinion continued even into the 1960s, scarcely questioned. V.S. Pritchett remarked that, ‘[n]o other English novelist until then had a chip the size of Gissing’s; self-pitying, spiritless, resentful, humourless, his lucid bleat drags down his characters and his words’, whilst Irving Howe suggests that only New Grub Street avoids ‘those impulses to self-pity which mar a good many of his books.’

Jack the Ripper is purported to have claimed: ‘I gave birth to the twentieth-century.’ In what follows I want to suggest that what Jack the Ripper ‘gave birth to’ was little more than a perpetuation of the paradox that lies at the heart of Western civilization: the dialectic of enlightenment. The rationalising impulse that led to the liberation of the modern subject from the tyrannical faith in myth, superstition, and sovereign power, and their embodiment in the objective world is, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, also responsible for its negation by reducing it to the status of that objective, or natural world from which it was attempting to liberate itself. A reading of Iain Sinclair’s 1987 novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, in relation to contemporary theorisations of modernity, such as that of Alain Touraine, suggests that any escape from the Ripper paradox, any ‘spiritual deliverance’ through historical investigation, requires a reconceptualisation of the relationship between subject and object, past and present – in short – a reappraisal of the project of modernity.

Fairy tales present Angela Carter with a range of subject matter for drawing out the beauty and violence in gender and sexual formations.1 In deconstructing the tales, Carter reveals the false universalizing inherent in many so-called master narratives of the Western literary tradition. Lorna Sage further highlights this strain in Carter’s work, arguing that by ‘going back to these preliterary forms of storytelling … she could experiment with her own writer’s role, ally herself in an imagination with the countless, anonymous narrators who stood behind literary redactors like Perrault or Grimm.’2 Thus, not only do fairy tales provide Carter with a radical content – fundamental and revolutionary – in their sexual and violent manifestations, but they also contest the authorial position, rejecting the romantic and modern authoritative voice in favour of the multiplicity of voices, often female, that have been repressed by the ‘official’ tellings of Perrault, Grimm, or Disney. Once the venue of women – mothers or governesses – passing tales from one generation to the next over the hearth, fairy tales were taken over by male chroniclers of culture in attempts to unify and totalize their belief systems.

The reviewers of the Booker Prize winning novel, Amsterdam, were generally of the opinion, expressed by Daphne Merkin, that its author, Ian McEwan, fully deserved the prestigious prize, but that this was one of those special cases in which ‘the right writer is tapped for the wrong book’, because it was his preceding novel, Enduring Love, that was ‘probably his best novel to date’.1,2 Other reviewers were more dismissive of Amsterdam; Richard Eder considered the ‘satire … flimsy’ and ‘set up … with a few pains too few’, while Nicholas Lezard felt that the euthanasia episode, which ‘gives the novella its title … is a little corny but is a way of telling us not to take it too seriously’. 3 Because of this ‘smart, synthetic ending’ that makes the two main characters ‘seem as cartoonish as they had hitherto been true’, Brooke Allen concluded that ‘the book is flawed, perhaps fatally so’.4 Nor was David Malcolm, arguably the world’s foremost expert on McEwan, particularly happy with the euthanasia ending.

Keep It Real Living In Quotations RENNIE PARKER

The Announcement Tulip NADINE BRUMMER

Reading Public-School Stories DERRICK BUTTRESS

William Payne SIMON CURTIS

A Poet’s Profession Hotel Lobby (after Edward Hopper) GILL GREGORY

Reviews

Notes on contributors