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‘We do not need more men in pith helmets’: Environmental anxieties in the imperial romance novel

By Elly McCausland

Illustration by Charles Kerr in Rider Haggard, *Maiwa’s Revenge; or, the War of the Little Hand* (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1888)

In 2017, children’s author Katherine Rundell published The Explorer, a modern-day adventure novel that would go on to win the Costa Children’s Book Award. The novel follows a group of four children whose plane crash-lands in the jungle after the pilot suffers a fatal heart attack. They stumble upon the ruins of a magnificent ancient city, deep in the heart of the Amazon. Its guardian is a former explorer who has taken it as his life’s mission to protect the ancient city. He has built a jungle canopy to shield it from ‘people surveying the land from the air […] From people looking for El Dorado. From people looking to pack places like this into parcels of stone and sell them to curious ladies and gentlemen in Chelsea for the price of a bus driver’s yearly wages. From people exactly like me’.[1] He is determined to keep the magnificent ruins a secret until human society relinquishes its obsession with dominating and plundering the environment: ‘The time will come, I hope, when the world values people as much as it values land. But for now, we do not need more men in pith helmets marching through the jungle towards us.’[2]

We can read Rundell’s story as ‘writing back’ to the adventure novels of the later nineteenth century, often grouped under the genre ‘imperial romance’ and featuring an all-male band of heroes who venture into the unknown – usually darkest Africa or South America – stumble upon a lost city and escape its inevitable booby traps and hordes of avenging ‘savages’ in order to regale a Victorian reading public with tales of their derring-do. Rundell offers a clear counter-narrative to such tales, with her gruff explorer condemning the activities of colonialist soldiers and the havoc they wrought upon the forest ecosystem. At the end of the novel, its young protagonist Fred grows up to become what the newspapers call ‘A new kind of explorer’ – one who, it is implied, is respectful of the landscape he traverses and aware of his potential impact.[3]

The Explorer situates itself firmly in opposition to what it implies to be the single narrative of exploration that dominated the late nineteenth century: masculinist, colonialist, anthropocentric. It is a narrative often brought to life in the fiction of renowned Victorian adventure writers such as Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, with recent scholarship devoted to identifying the problematic environmental ideologies of these novels in addition to their noted racist and misogynist tendencies. Destruction of animal and plant life is rampant in many of these texts, but gathers relatively little critical attention, overshadowed as it often is by the gratuitous slaughter of native peoples that is also often a key plot feature. Yet it struck me, while reading Rundell’s novel for the first time recently, that the counter-narrative she offers is not a new one, and in fact exists as a haunting sub-text within many of the novels themselves.

Recently, scholars have begun to identify more ambiguity in these texts, and I have attempted to continue this conversation in my article for Victorian Review, ‘“The Game has Gone”: Animal Fantasies and Environmental Realities in H. Rider Haggard’s Imperial Romance’. I argue that we ought to pay close attention to the frequent, detailed depictions of the animal body and native flora and fauna in Rider Haggard’s novels, as these offer clues to a fundamental anxiety that underpinned his depictions of colonial adventure. In Haggard’s writing we can identify a paradox that inflects a large proportion of nineteenth-century imperial romance: adventure relied for its thrills on tempting travellers into the ‘blank spaces’ of the map, but simultaneously acknowledged that those spaces could only retain their appeal if left uncharted. This tendency is evident in multiple examples from the genre – novels by Frank Aubrey, J. Provand Webster, R. D. Chetwode and James Cobban, among others – all of which close with a dramatic incident or accident that sees their explorers unable to return to, or map, the lost worlds at their hearts. We might actually trace the seeds of Rundell’s counter-narrative back to these novels, which, even as they promoted anthropocentric, violent adventure in exoticised locales, were simultaneously haunted by the guilt and anxiety that they might be contributing to the irreversible disappearance of such places. There is little difference, in actual fact, between the stern warnings of Rundell’s explorer and the sentiments of Haggard’s Henry Curtis, over a century earlier:

I have no fancy for handing over this beautiful country to be torn and fought for by speculators, tourists, politicians, and teachers, whose voice is as the voice of Babel […] nor will I endow it with the greed, drunkenness, new diseases, gunpowder, and general demoralisation which chiefly mark the progress of civilisation amongst unsophisticated peoples.[4]

To learn more, see McCausland, Elly. “”The Game Has Gone”: Animal Fantasies and Environmental Realities in H. Rider Haggard’s Imperial Romance.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 235-254. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0021.

[1] Katherine Rundell, The Explorer (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 299.

[2] Rundell, The Explorer, p. 301.

[3] Rundell, The Explorer, p. 392.

[4] Rider Haggard, Allan Quatermain (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), p. 310-11.

Kipling’s Animal Worlds

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by Linda Shires

a cat walks through a grove of trees in this black and white illustration — Left: Rudyard Kipling, “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” in *Just So Stories for Little Children*, 1902. Courtesy of the British Library Board, MS 59840 f118r.

What is your very first memory or impression? Is it your mother’s holding you? Your father’s singing to you? An avenue of trees? I hope yours is positive. Rudyard Kipling’s certainly was. Born in Bombay to Anglo-Indian parents, he recalled: “My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder” (Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown, 1). After being nurtured by loving parents and a devoted ayah for his first five years, Kipling suffered a traumatic childhood when he and his younger sister “Trix” were abruptly taken to Southsea, England and left behind with paid guardians to start a British education. For the next six years he suffered cruelty and bullying. Kipling’s deep love for his own children, Josephine, John, and Elsie emerges throughout his writings, from his address to his “Best Beloved” Josephine in Just So Stories to numerous later illustrated letters from across the globe. One can only imagine the horror he and his wife felt upon burying their first daughter at age six and losing their only son at eighteen on the Western Front.

Yet what does any of this have to do with muteness, speech or survival in Kipling’s animal worlds, the topic of my recent ‘animal studies’ essay in Victorian Review? In re-reading his fiction and poetry over the last decade, I have increasingly come to question inflexible theoretical lenses used to interpret his works. Ideologies stressing binaries, including animal/human, repeatedly fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, and ironies of his corpus.

The most acute readers of Kipling, such as Daniel Karlin or J.M.S. Tomkins, have sought in various ways to complicate binary thinking. Moreover, numerous scholars, usually focusing on the Mowgli stories, have studied his representation of animals and humans, but few have explored Kipling’s lifelong fascination with animal language or his complex depiction of muteness. Begun as an MLA talk in 2017, this essay draws upon relevant theoretical contexts to examine differing language/muteness relations among animals and humans. I argue that Kipling’s frequent reliance on muteness carries a variety of meanings and values: the silencing of non-human animal sounds by instinct; silent yet communicating animal gestures and movements; a chosen human quietude; the muting of sounds by sleep or by caresses and lullabies; the silence that follows individual deaths, mass killings, and extinctions.

I purposely begin with three of the non-Mowgli stories that were collected in the 1894 Jungle Book: “The White Seal” and “Toomai of the Elephants,” and in the 1895 The Second Jungle Book: “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat.” Each dissolves human/non-human binaries in different ways. Kipling continues to explore how and why creatures communicate in his brilliant image/text collection Just So Stories for Little Children (1902). As he still investigates language and silence, across species, years later, he creates in Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots (1930) an animal mind, akin to a toddler’s, trying to process human speech. Rudyard Kipling cares deeply for children, animals, and, above all, for sameness within difference—that survival matters, that we all suffer, that we all die.

To read more, see Linda M. Shires, “Kipling’s Animal Worlds: Muteness, Speech, and Survival,” Victorian Review, 46.2, pp. 191-210.

For further information, consult:

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/

Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory

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by Amy Woodson-Boulton

Frederick Courteney Selous, Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa (London: R. Ward & Co, 1893), 65. Image source: The British Library, via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.

During the period of the New Imperialism, c. 1870-1930, animals intruded upon the society and culture of European empires and particularly the British empire in new ways. Animals came to play a prominent role in art, literature, and ideas, but they were also physically present, and shaped discussions about class, justice, economics, imperialism, religion, and anthropology. The animals of indigenous societies from Oceania and Australia to British Columbia to Africa to India helped shape anthropologists’ ideas about those societies and cultures. That cattle, sheep, and pigs thrived across the British and Irish countryside became a question of land reform and in debates over how to feed an expanding population; that they successfully adapted to new habitats from the Americas to Australia and New Zealand furthered colonialization. The animals of Africa became a justification for British presence there, whether to save, feed, or study the indigenous people, or to study and protect the animals themselves. Beautiful, dangerous, sympathetic, delicious, promising increased health, facilitating or threatening the expansion of “civilization,” marking off “wild” territories and people, decorating hats and baronial halls, animals were omnipresent, and their presence affected relations with humans and among humans.

In particular, the question of eating and killing became a point of debate and an important point through which imperialists marked the divide between “primitive” and “civilized.” Anthropologists heatedly debated the meaning of eating and worshiping totemic animals among the hunter-gatherer peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa then under (or coming under) European control, understanding these peoples (or at least their cultures) as mostly doomed to extinction, and in terms of set stages of social evolution. But even in seemingly unrelated cultural arenas, such as in the vegetarian movement or among big-game hunters, we see people applying similar logics about animals, identification, and consumption. Anthropologists, vegetarians, and hunters debated and defined “civilized” and “primitive” relationships with animals around questions of ingestion, relation, and prohibitions around what constituted allowable “meat” and what was prohibited (or sacramental) “flesh.”

The idea that animals are “good to think [with]” has become a truism in Animal Studies; scholars on both sides of the animal-agency divide, or debating various questions of social and cultural construction, have often used this declaration by Claude Lévi-Strauss as a foil for their own theories or arguments. But few in Animal Studies have considered the original context of that statement: Lévi-Strauss’ deconstruction and rethinking of the Victorian theory of totemism. This article considers how that theory was part of not only changing ideas about animals and human-animal relations at the height of British imperialism, but how those ideas were in fact responses to this growing presence of animals and animal products through imperial trade systems. In the shadow of Darwinian natural selection and new theories that connected animals to humans in radical ways, and surrounded by and dependent on animals and animal products, the late Victorians were constantly pushing animals and the “primitive” away even as they tried to understand all of history and biology on the spectrum of evolution. Animals were crucial to their own societies and systems of thought; they were both “good to eat” and “good to think,” and not just for “primitive” societies.

To read more, see Woodson-Boulton, Amy. “Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 211-233. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0020.

Dracula or Draculitz? Reading Stoker in Sweden

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by Melanie V. Jones

The title page for Morkrets Makter — ‘Bram Stoker,’*Mörkrets makter*, trans. *A_e, Dagen*, (10 June 1899). Image Courtesy of National Library of Sweden.

Recently, the field of translation studies was shaken to its core. The Icelandic Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness, 1901), long believed to be a faithful translation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 original, in fact contains serious deviations from the source text, creating a radically different work. Researcher Hans Corneel de Roos initially suggested that Stoker may have collaborated with the translator, Validimar Ásmundsson, to produce an alternate version of the classic vampire tale. Yet that supposition was quickly overturned by the discovery of an even earlier “translation,” the Swedish Mörkets Makter (Powers of Darkness, 1899), with striking links to the Icelandic text. De Roos now believes that both these texts and their prefaces — signed by a “B.S.” once assumed to be Bram Stoker — are in fact fantastic forgeries.

This blatant co-opting of textual bodies, and their ability to remain hidden for over a century, are just the most recent in a long history of the vampire’s connection to fraud, plagiarism, and literary piracy. As these creatures began to embody contemporary anxieties regarding origin and authenticity, nineteenth century authors began to freely use vampiric literature as a cover to engage in faux-translations, misattribution, literary piracy, and outright forgery.

“Dracula or Draculitz? Translational Forgery and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula” examines how Makt Myrkranna and Mörkets Makter exploit this trend on both a thematic and formal level. Both texts are fascinated with the vampire as a symbol of the very forgeries their works carry out. Their version of Dracula, “Draculitz,” can concoct much more elaborate and ultimately more successful frauds, and his vampiric doubles no longer need to be turned by him one by one — they proliferate the text, swapping identities at will. What might these acts of forge/ing tell us about the role of the translator as vampiric creator? Do these adaptations suggest that the fake, the stolen, and the copy are necessary to assert, or may even need to precede, the concept of an original?

To read more, see Katy Brundan, Melanie Jones, and Benjamin Mier-Cruz. “Dracula or Draculitz?: Translational Forgery and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula.” Victorian Review, vol. 45 no. 2, 2019, p. 293-306. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2019.0060.

Elizabeth Missing Sewell and the Challenges of Reserve

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by Lauren Simek

“Morning Prayer” by William Holman Hunt,1859, Photogravure of original oil on canvas Swan Electric Engraving Co. sc” — text beneath image Source: *Pre-Raphaelitism*, facing I, 60. Scanned image and text by George P. Landow from the Victorian Web.

The Victorians had strong opinions about the public expression of religious belief. Nineteenth-century Evangelicalism found sincerity in expressions that came straight, as it were, from the heart, unpremeditated and unprompted by the strictures of ceremony. High Church Tractarianism on the other hand rejected Evangelical outpourings as too solicitous of an audience. As Isaac Williams, author of the two tracts that formalized the notion of “reserve” into doctrine, put it, “A want of reserve, an artificial religious tone in conversation or prayer is…proof that the person is wishing to be, or wishing to persuade himself that he is, rather than that he really is religious” (“Tract 87” V: 8). Significantly, both religious traditions advocated unselfconsciousness as key to sincerity, but they had opposing methods for achieving it.

This unselfconsciousness was not only a religious but also an aesthetic mandate, one that women writers had a particularly conflicted relationship with. Literary unselfconsciousness appeared everywhere in the nineteenth century, from William Wordsworth’s claim that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and John Stuart Mill’s assertion that “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” to John Ruskin’s notion that “the most perfect human artists” work “without boasting,” possessing “an inner and involuntary power which approximates literally to the instinct of an animal.” Within this framework, writers who embraced a more didactic style were often accused of egotistical moralizing. Women writers most often received such criticism, but didacticism had been thrust upon them, in a way, as the lesser of two evils. Properly domiciled within the home, middle-class women writers were required to have an overt moral stance in their fiction lest they be accused of unladylike self-display for venturing into the public sphere. An embrace of a quieter modesty always threatened to associate them, ironically, with the self-knowledge of moral vanity and even licentiousness.

Nevertheless, primarily concerned with their own relationship with God, Tractarian writers like Williams and John Keble looked to women as models of the reserved unselfconsciousness they aspired to. High Church women writers like Christina Rossetti and Charlotte Yonge found this association with reserve allowed them a particular authority as women to represent religious issues in their work. But an embrace of women’s “natural” passivity always had its drawbacks, of course. In The Experience of Life (1852), Tractarian novelist Elizabeth Missing Sewell examines the difficulties posed by reserve, which required a lack of consciousness of other people and oneself in order to become closer to God. Sewell confronts the criticisms of pretentiousness that her fellow Tractarians faced for attempting such a state of reticence. Whereas Williams in his tracts on reserve ignores the impossibility of ever becoming purely unselfconscious, Sewell is compelled to address this problem head-on, having been perceived, like other women authors of the time, as trying to be selflessly unselfconscious only to impress others. Sewell’s strong connections to Tractarianism keep her committed to the idea of reserve, but a reserve that recognizes the limits of extreme unselfconsciousness and that allows for the subtle role other people play in one’s relationship to God. Forgoing her counterparts’ preference for poetry as the ideal genre for cultivating reserve, Sewell finds that the novel, with its implied relationship between author and reader, achieves a more realistic mode of reserved self-consciousness. In doing so, Sewell reveals the nuanced motives shaping her didactic literary style.

For more see Lauren Simek, “Revising Tractarian Reserve: Elizabeth Missing Sewell, Victorian Didacticism, and Novel Form.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 1, 2020, p. 101-121. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0005.

Prophecy and Pluralism in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Curse for a Nation”

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by Denae Dyck

Figure 1: Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Engraving by T.O. Barlow (1871) based on a photograph by Macaire Havre (1859). Image Courtesy Wikipedia under a Creative Commons License.

Today, many people remember Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter, EBB) primarily for her collection Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). But in addition to this romantic sequence composed for Robert Browning, EBB wrote a wide variety of poems that responded to a range of social, religious, and political issues. Perhaps the most controversial of her politically engaged compositions is “A Curse for a Nation.”

This lyric poem begins with a prologue in which the speaker recounts a dream vision about an encounter with an angel who summons her to write a curse pronounced against an offending (and unnamed) nation. The speaker initially protests, but she concedes after the angel challenges her understanding of what it means to curse. She then issues the curse as a powerful combination of warning and promise—a moral awakening that implicates the speaker and ultimately reaches toward readers as well. What is most striking to me about this poem’s religious and political rhetoric is its adaptation of the prophetic voice. Rather than rebuke a single “chosen people,” the poem uses the framework of prophecy to advance a pluralistic understanding of social justice, one that redefines conventional ideas about both cursing and nationhood.

The poem’s international scope is immediately apparent in its publication history, but I suggest that this work of redefinition invites close attention to its linguistic and structural patterns. “A Curse for a Nation” first appeared in the 1856 issue of the Boston abolitionist The Liberty Bell, a context that made the poem’s anti-slavery message apparent: the nation in question is clearly the United States of America. However, a few years later, EBB republished this poem in Poems before Congress (London: Chapman and Hall, 1860), a volume that focused on the struggle for Italian unification and independence known as the Risorgimento (Italian for “resurgence” or “rebirth”). In this context, many of EBB’s initial British reviewers interpreted the poem as a malediction against England for its failure to aid the Italian cause. EBB protested that this reading was a misinterpretation, yet “A Curse for a Nation” aligns in notable ways with the cosmopolitanism advanced elsewhere in Poems before Congress by this expatriate poetess, who lived primarily in Florence from 1847 until her death in 1861.

As signalled by the two indefinite articles in the poem’s title, “A Curse for a Nation” is ambiguous—but productively so. Through the conversation that unfolds between the angel and the speaker, the poem progressively redefines what a curse is, how it is delivered, and who may utter it. Like many other nineteenth-century writers, such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, EBB uses prophetic discourse for the purpose of social critique. Even so, EBB is unlike many of her contemporaries because she portrays this divine revelation not as a static denunciation but as a transformative dialogue. Whereas Carlyle takes up the prophetic voice to call attention to “the condition of England” question in Past and Present (1843), EBB addresses what might be better termed “the condition of humanity” as she calls her readers to take up their ethical obligations to a worldwide community. The poem’s performative language compels us to wrestle with challenging issues of identity, authority, and citizenship.

To read more, see Denae Dyck, “From Denunciation to Dialogue: Redefining Prophetic Authority in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘A Curse for a Nation.’” Victorian Review vol. 46 no. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 67-82.

Victorian Hairwork and the Brontës

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By Heather Hind

Snake hair bracelet circa 1840-60. Platt Hall (Manchester Art Gallery). M/C CAG: 1950.8

Hairwork—the art of crafting decorative objects, such as jewellery, from human hair—produces a uniquely tactile token of the body. It is hair made to bear the marks of exchange and possession. While locks of hair may be cut, exchanged, and kept as mementos of family, friends, or romantic partners, hairwork codifies the dynamics of these relationships in a way that unworked hair does not. The way hair is carefully plaited or coiled and tied becomes a metaphoric anchor for complex and sometimes contrary meanings and ideas, identities and alliances. Hairwork makes manifest touch, labour, creativity, and the desire to beautify and preserve in anticipation of distance or death. Yet, as a material memento, it also evidences the signs of wear, friction, pressure, and damage that follow its use and display.

In the course of my research on Victorian hairwork, I have come across many elaborate and impressive examples of the craft in museums: necklaces, bracelet, cufflinks, earrings, brooches, hat pins, lockets, decorative flowers, and embroideries. But the objects have caught my attention are not the most skillfully worked, pristine artefacts sometimes still in their original boxes from the hairworker. Rather, it is the simple, sometimes home-made and worn and broken pieces that, lacking a box, label, letter or engraving, raise more questions than they answer. First, how is one to deduce the identity of the donor, their relationship to the recipient, and the context in which the hairwork was made? And second, how did this hairwork come to be splintered or broken, and what implications does this carry for its metaphoric signification?

For some hairwork, framed in the context of a family’s personal effects, such as the many articles of hair jewellery in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, these initial questions may be partially or hypothetically answered. This pale blonde plait was likely Anne’s, cut by her father to remember her childhood. Perhaps this dark hair belonged to Emily and was worked and worn by Charlotte following her death. Yet the issue of the use and damage of this hairwork remains at once a warm and cold sign. Multi-strand bracelets with broken plaits stand apart as particularly well-worn and well-loved, yet reveal the susceptibility of this form of memento to breakage. Loose hairs that splay out from chains and clasps show at once the apparent vitality of the matter, the crimp of the hand that worked them, and the eroding effects of use and time. By tracing the desires and anxieties that such marks of use or misuse might encode, I argue that worn and broken hairwork at once denies and endorses the threats of distance, death, and decay it was intended to ease.

To read more, see Heather Hind, “‘I Twisted the Two, and Enclosed Them Together'”: Hairwork, Touch, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 1, 2020, p. 31-47. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0014.

Brothers in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

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by Anna A. Berman

A woman looks through a window at two men. — “Vae victis!” Wood engraving by Joseph Swain, based on the artwork of George Du Maurier, for Gaskell, Elizabeth. *Wives and Daughters*, The Cornhill Magazine 10 (October 1864): facing 385. Scanned by Simon Cooke.

Think of a nineteenth-century English novel that features a significant sister-sister or sister-brother pair. Easy, right? Now think of an English novel about two brothers.

As someone who began by studying Russian literature—which is full of brothers—it came as a shock to me when I realized that there are virtually no canonical English novels that focus on a brother-brother pair. Given the Victorians’ reverence for the sibling bond, why is strange omission? And why do the rare novels about brothers almost always have the same plot: two brothers—the “most faithful of friends”—fall in love with the same woman? (think of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Like and Unlike)

Comparing the English with the Russian tradition gave me my first clue to the answer. One of the primary differences between the two nations—as far as brothers are concerned—is that the English honored primogeniture, while the Russians split their estates amongst all their children. This has major implications for the types of plots authors in each nation could create. Courtship is central to English family novels, and with wealth as a requirement for single men in want of wives, only one brother had a desirable place in the English marriage plot.

This fact goes far in explaining the standard English brother-plot of romantic rivalry. Having a single beloved for the brothers helps maintain the linearity of the family and plot. While the Russians thought of family as a conglomeration of kin in the present and wrote “loose and baggy monster” plots that sprawl in all directions, the English focused on the family’s progression through time; wealth and title were to be kept together and passed on to a single heir who would continue the family line.

Brothers offer a challenge to this focused structure, but that challenge can be mitigated if only one marries and produces heirs. In the English novel, the brother who loses the romantic competition is removed from the family’s linear progression to restore harmony at the novel’s close. Most often he dies, or else he is turned into a “sister” who remains unwed and cares for his brother’s children (e.g. Seth Bede or John Martindale in Charlotte Yonge’s Heartsease or Brother’s Wife).

The two-brother-one-lover triangle also suggests mimetic desire at work. When—in novel after novel—brothers who describe their relationship as “something more than affection” and consider the other to be “an angel” fall in love with the same woman, it opens room for speculation that such romantic triangulation might be a strategy for displacing an illicit form of desire onto a “safe” object. The brothers’ romantic rivalries could be seen as a way of neutralizing an initial threat of incestuous, homosexual desire entering the family by replacing it with the more openly addressable threat of jealousy and hatred, which could then, in turn, be resolved. In essence, this resolution is the primary plot for English brothers.

The role of brothers is but one example of what looking comparatively at the Russian and English family novel can reveal. Such an approach forces us to rethink existing theories of the novel that assume a conservative function for the family, driven by the genealogical imperative and linear descent, and offers a new understanding of how family structure shapes plot in the nineteenth-century novel.

To read more, see Anna A. Berman, “The Problem with Brothers in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 1, 2020, p. 49-66. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0008.

Covid-19 and Convalescent Masculinity

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by Hosanna Krienke

A man lays in a bed in a cluttered room. — “Franco-Prussian War: soldiers convalescing in the Palais Royale Military hospital.” Etching by H. Tissot, 1870. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

The year 2020 has repeatedly witnessed male world leaders struggle to appear virile and masculine in the midst of physical illness and recovery. Britain’s Boris Johnson, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and of course the United States’s Donald Trump have all fallen ill with the coronavirus, a development that appeared to necessitate a shoring-up of their hyper-masculine political personas. In April, Boris Johnson’s aides insisted that the hospitalized prime minister was “still in charge of the government” even on the very day he was moved into intensive care. In July, Bolsonaro also contracted the “little flu” he previously dismissed, though he went on to tout his own recovery as a sign of his athleticism. Most recently, the White House counteracted the apparently unmanly optics of Trump’s hospitalization by releasing photos of him signing paperwork within the hospital, images that circulated on Twitter with the tag #TrumpStrong.

In each case, our cultural expectations surrounding a man’s experience of illness have played out predictably. Men perform their masculine resilience by refusing to give up work even as they fall ill; then, when no longer able to work, they redirect this strength to the Herculean task of achieving a speedy recovery. In a recent piece for The Atlantic, science journalist Ed Yong analyzed how the omnipresent metaphor of “strength” in the Trump recovery narrative is an inappropriate image for physiological illness, and particularly the biology of the immune system. Yet as I watch this narrative play out again and again within the news cycles of 2020, what I am struck by is the utter lack of alternative metaphors or values for the process of physical recovery, particularly for men. Though the work of Susan Sontag as taught us the dangers of using terms like “battle,” “fight,” and “strength” when it comes to physical disease, the question remains: if we abstain from these metaphors, what other language do we even have?

My essay in this edition of Victorian Review actually uncovers an alternative, forgotten history of men’s recuperation or (as it was more commonly termed) convalescence. Far from a battle or fight, convalescence in the nineteenth century represented a welcome relief from the stresses and demands of modern life. Many Victorian male writers—including W.E. Henley, George Whyte-Melville, and Wilkie Collins—even described their convalescence a beneficial reprieve from the taxing demands of masculinity itself, particularly the norms of overwork. These writers unabashedly reveled in the leisure of convalescence: the medical directive, as so many put it, “to do nothing.” In fact, this luxurious respite prompted an ethical awakening for some authors. Wilkie Collins, in particular, described how convalescence made him recognize the unsustainable work pressures—not of his own gender and class—but of the maids-of-all-work who provided his care. Using this context, I discover how Collins’s The Moonstone refashions novel-reading itself as a kind of ethical, restful convalescence: a necessary and illuminating respite from one’s average routines and social roles.

Such imagery of leisurely, pleasurable, and unexpectedly ethical ideals of prolonged physical recovery may seem utterly unfamiliar today. Yet we are seeing more evidence every day of our desperate need for new—or perhaps very old—narratives structures to describe the opportunities and responsibilities of bodily recuperation.

To read more, see Hosanna Krienke, “”The Wholesome Application” of Novels: Gender and Rehabilitative Reading in The Moonstone.” Victorian Review, vol. 46 no. 1, 2020, p. 83-99. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2020.0016.

“I wrote them all”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm

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by Katherine Anne Gilbert

A woman in Victorian crinoline in the foreground has three men behind her, and the town main street in the background.

‘Lady Mason going before the Magistrates’. Source: 1981 Dover Orley Farm, ii, p. 96 Hall, AT and His Illustrators, pp. 29-40.

As Victorianists, we often turn to sensation fiction as the genre in which disruptive challenges to social, legal, and gendered structures were narrated in the nineteenth century. Victorian condemnations of sensation fiction are read as traditionalist calls for conservation of the status quo, one in which individuals remain clearly organized into categories that reinforce inequities in class, gender, and wealth. Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1862), however, troubles such easy categorization. Trollope, long considered a consummate realist, tells the story of Lady Mason, the young, second wife of the deceased Sir Joseph Mason, who forges her dying husband’s will to redirect the line of inheritance to her son. Lady Mason is tried–twice—first for forgery and then perjury, and found innocent both times. Yet Trollope, while simultaneously detailing Lady Mason’s crimes, encourages readers not to judge Lady Mason too quickly. How might we read this novel in light of the categories of realism and sensationalism, continuity and disruption, gender and inheritance? And, how might we understand forgery in this light, a crime that brings to the fore concerns about how to classify something as original and true or an imitation and dishonest?

I suggest that it is not the acts of crime that bring together Trollope and sensation fiction in Orley Farm, but a near obsession within the novel with forms of classification themselves. Strikingly, this fixation on classification permeates the novel from the more sensational (is a beautiful Lady capable of crime?), to the mundane (is a lawyer a professional or a commercial man, and should he be allowed in the commercial men’s lounge at a traveler’s Inn?), to class and race (can Lady Mason’s son, Lucius, devise a new system of classification of humans, one that intertwines an analysis of the structures of languages with a racial mapping through history?). Building on the work of others such as Susan David Bernstein, who demonstrates that sensation fiction’s interest in classification intersects with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, I trace the ways that classification, and threats to it, appear repeatedly in Orley Farm, and argue that it is this interest in forms of classification and their permeations that the novel shares most forcefully with sensation fiction. Taking up Marlene Tromp’s recent problematizing of our own contemporary interest in classifying realism and sensation fiction even now, I then ask, what does it mean to contextualize Lady Mason’s acts as realistic or sensational? Whose stories, as Tromp suggests, are presented to us as within the realm of the likely and the everyday, and what are the political stakes of such classifications?

To read more see Gilbert, Katherine. ““I Wrote Them All”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm.” Victorian Review, vol. 45 no. 2, 2019, p. 307-323. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2019.0061.