Critical Survey

Bits of Shakespeare can be deleted or at least ‘dispensed with’. This is the possibility mooted by the editor of the Second Arden edition of Cymbeline (J.M. Nosworthy) and it appears in the notes to the wager scene, I.v. The element to be dispensed with is the difficult staging of the minor characters present: Philario, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a Dutchman.

In the 1770s, the painter Richard Samuel, a Royal Academy member, painted a group of British female artists and literary figures as the ‘Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’ (Figure 1).

Political readings of Treasure Island are rare, and of fairly recent date. David H. Jackson’s account, ‘Treasure Island as a Late-Victorian Adults’ Novel’, identifies a strong element of class antagonism. Against Robert Louis Stevenson’s claim that his early romances are amoral and ahistorical, Jackson proposes that ‘Treasure Island is a simplified account of eighteenth-century hierarchical society’, where ‘the premium virtue is duty – unquestioning loyalty to the hierarchy’, and in which Stevenson promotes ‘firm and conservative social values’. For Jackson, Treasure Island is mainly about good and bad children as defined by obedience to or disrespect for authority figures, engaging ‘the reader’s personal nostalgia for his or her own childhood’. In her postcolonial work Problematic Shores, Diana Loxley also counters the traditional view of this novel as a timeless romance. She finds that it is ‘in fact deeply marked by its moment of historical production in the heyday of Victorian imperialism’, and she convincingly provides ‘the colonial context within which Treasure Island should be read and discussed’.

In a 1909 article for the North American Review on ‘The American “Tramp” Question’, Bram Stoker turns his attention to the issue of vagrancy and urges the necessity of swift action to deal with the ever increasing problem of the ‘wilfully-idle class’: ‘When certain persons – or classes of persons – are manifestly dangerous to the more peaceful and better-ordered classes of communities’, he declares, ‘it is the essence of good government – indeed, a necessary duty to responsible officials – to keep them in restraint, or certainly under observation’. There is consequently a need for some means of identifying these ‘undesirable’ characters, so that they can easily be located and detained in order to be taught to be industrious. Anticipating the introduction of GPS (Global Positioning System) or electronic tagging, he suggests that while the primitive system of ‘ear-marking with a “hot yron”’may not be acceptable to the modern age, ‘surely the resources of science are equal to some method of personal marking of an indelible quality’.

On its publication in 1897 Richard Marsh’s The Beetle was more popular than Dracula. However, in the latter part of the twentieth century its popularity with both readers and critics waned, and it is only now that Marsh’s story of the Egyptian beetle-creature seeking vengeance on a British politician is attracting renewed critical interest. It is not my intention here to take serious issue with any of these important and revealing critical discussions, which variously explore the novel in terms of fears over ‘reverse colonisation’; depictions of the ‘abhumanness’ of the female body; and cultural debates on the nature and significance of trance-states. Rather, I wish to open up discussion of the novel by identifying some of the important and peculiar features of this – admittedly very peculiar – novel, that have not so far received the attention they deserve. These thus-far critically neglected features include: the significance of the opening chapters’ emphases upon vagrancy and destitution; the novel’s exploration of ‘political authority’ and its ambivalence towards its central male character, the liberal politician; and the representation of the New Woman. More specifically I wish to investigate the historical and ideological motivations for what I consider to be the novel’s conflation of its New Woman character with the figure of the emasculated and vagrant clerk.

A range of texts published since the late nineteenth century take for their theme the forest, presented as an ambiguous and ‘uncivilised’ space, as deadly as it is seductive, and as frightening as it is bursting with life; they portray the wooded realm as the habitat of shadowy supernatural presences which embody these contradictory qualities. The work of the anthropologist Sir James George Frazer suggested every wood to be teeming with imagined vegetation spirits; the eerie fin-de-siècle fictions of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood presented sylvan settings as the garden of the Arcadian Pan, reborn as a creature of ecstasy and terror. Latterly, such imagery has often centred on a supposed British wood-god, the ‘Green Man’. It is my contention that this marginal, though persistent, tradition can be understood in the terms of a theory that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan set forth, in a wholly different context, in 1959–1960: that of the Thing, the life-giving yet deathly object of the drive to escape the ‘original curse’ of language. This article aims to elucidate Lacan’s theory, and its relevance to ambivalent visions of the mythic forest, in a reading of Kingsley Amis’s novel of death, desire and the supernatural, The Green Man, published in 1969.

In Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age the narrator, William Cowling, gazes out of his aeroplane window at a United States alight with nuclear explosions. In Don DeLillo’s End Zone nuclear war rapidly develops after a nuclear device explodes in Europe, and cities around the world are destroyed. In Douglas Coupland’s Generation X a supermarket erupts in panic as sirens wail, jets are scrambled and a nuclear missile explodes. The opening frames of the film Thirteen Days are lit by the explosions of rocket propellant as a missile rises gracefully into the blackness of space. The earth’s horizon is seen from the top of the missile’s arc, and inverts as it heads back downwards. A nuclear explosion follows, more missiles leaping into the air are intercut with further explosions, and the sequence ends with a mushroom cloud boiling up to fill the screen.

After Dining Out In May On Being Diagnosed BARRY COLE

Two Poems From Iceland Requiem JOHN GREENING

The Progress Of Life The Progress Of Art RICHARD KELL

Tremors: New and Selected Poems by Andrew Sant (Melbourne: Black Pepper Press, 2004) 258pp. ISBN 1-87604-4-500, £9.99.

Notes on contributors