THE OSCHOLARS

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THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

A Portfolio of Theatre and Book Reviews

No 44: May 2008

Wilde theatre reviews appear here; Shaw reviews in Shavings; all other theatre in .

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Maria Kasia Greenwood on Leslie Clack’s Oscar Wilde in Paris
Elżbieta Baraniecka on Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury in Augsburg
María DeGuzmán on Junot Díaz on Oscar Wao
Elisa Bizzotto on Michael Kaylor on Oscar Wilde, Pater and Hopkins
D.C. Rose on Alexandra Warwick on Oscar Wilde
Liberato Santoro-Brienza on Elisa Bizzotto on Imaginary Portraits
Laurence Taliarach-Vielmas on Andrew Mangham on Violent Women
Susan Cahill on Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on women’s bodies
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on Ann Stiles on neuorology
Michael Patrick Gillespie on Madeleine Humphreys on Edward Martyn
Chantal Beauvalot on Georges-Paul Collet on Jacques-Emile Blanche
Linda Zatlin on Rodney Engen on Aubrey Beardsley

THEATRE

OSCAR IN PARIS

« More Lives than One »

A play on the life of Oscar Wilde, at the Sudden Theatre, Paris, December, 2007.

Review by Maria Kasia Greenwood

When Les Clack, the ultra-talented actor and playwright, put together this one-man show about the life and works of Oscar Wilde, he used existing biographical material, but gave it his own, up-dated, slant. He played it before, prior to the December run at The Sudden Theatre in northern Montmartre, sometimes to acclaim and sometimes to abuse.

For at the centre of this hour-long performance is the famous man’s trial, something which earlier biographers had skipped or shirked. Understandably, for the trial at law of Oscar Wilde is problematic: should it have happened at all? how far was it fair? and why, for what psychological quirks of the protagonists themselves, was it necessary? By bringing in the trial right at the start (after the light-hearted recall of the Paris of the naughty nineties), Les Clack sets the tone of the play: tragic as well as comic, serious as well as flippant, guilt-ridden as well as blandly innocent. The witty sayings and humorous sallies are all there, but it is not simply a question of adulating Wilde’s outrageous gaiety and charm. When Les Clack gives us a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Bracknell comes over as far more sinister than Dame Edith Evans ever played her (in Anthony Asquith’s film classic), a kind of sussurating serpent who assesses the man who wants to marry her daughter with a stupidity so crass that its cruelty is masked by laughter.

With his actor’s grasp of complexities, Les Clack has intuited Oscar Wilde’s depths. However much activists for homosexual rights would wish to see the author as a guiltless ‘gay’, it is doubtful that Wilde could ever have seen himself as such. The man who famously quipped that he could resist everything except temptation, would hardly clamour for the social respectability of homosexual marriage – he had a heterosexual one already, complete with offspring, on his hands. Yet if, to-day, the politically correct designation of ‘gay’ confers innocent normality on the homosexual, the word ‘pederast’ still points to vice and crime, and Les Clack has the courage to use it (only once, admittedly) of Oscar Wilde.

So when we follow passages from Oscar Wilde’s trial – with the actor conjuring up now the barrister for the persecution, now the author at bay, we are caught in the drama of an agonized conscience; in the torturing of the secret sinful self as by religious inquisition, very different from attending to a logical argument, a rational demonstration, or an indulgent account of the facts, and Oscar Wilde’s predicament emerges in a newly lurid light. We are both touched and horrified, coming away feeling that the poet was the scapegoat for a psycho-drama, concocted by the real criminals – the Greek tragedy-like father and son – the Marquis of Queensberry and Lord Alfred Douglas. The hate between these two was driving them to mutual murder with bare hands, but successfully deflected on to a third party: so it was Oscar Wilde who was condemned, imprisoned, exiled, ruined, punished, penanced and perhaps, in the end, strangely saved, if not in the body at least in the suffering soul.

· After reading English at Oxford (Somerville) and French/ English Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne, Maria Kasia Greenwood joined the University of Paris 7 as lecturer in English art and literature.  Specialising in British Art (thesis), and mediæval literature (habilitation), she has also published on 20th century novelists, and produced with students plays by Shaw, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.

BUNBURY IN AUGSBURG

Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury oder Ernst sein ist wichtig: Eine triviale Komödie für ernsthafte Leute. Deutsch von Rainer Kohlmayer.

Reviewed by Elżbieta Baraniecka

When I sat down in the slightly antiquated chair of the Komödie Theatre in Augsburg, on the 29th of January, 2008, almost all the seats had already been taken. It was one of the last performances of the play, which premiered on the 24th of November, 2007, and I was wondering whether the presence of such a large audience was a promise of high-quality acting and an entertaining show or rather simply the consequence of a few previous performances being cancelled due to one of the actors catching a cold.

The play began very traditionally with Algernon’s manservant, Lane, creatively arranging a silver plate with cucumber sandwiches on a very decorative chaise longue in Art Nouveau style. In combination with the golden walls erected around this only piece of furniture on the stage, the overall impact was indeed impressive and promising, as was the double-role performance of Anton Koelbl. With his artistic chaos of hair and the wonderfully reserved irony in his voice the actor played Lane in the first part of the play, and later the butler Merriman, perfectly unmoved by anything occurring on the stage, this time his hair combed and neat. This small modification of Wilde’s play interestingly pushed the duality of having both city and country identities even further, opening it to the speculation that Algy and Jack might not have been the only ones who led the exciting double life of a Bunburyist.

A touch less successful but still very convincing was André Willmund in the role of Algernon Moncrieff. The studied nonchalance of his appearance, his stubbly beard and his posing like a Roman god on the chaise longue on Jack’s arrival, together with Wilde’s brilliantly epigrammatic text made him a very credible representation of the incorrigible dandy of the fin de siècle. Unfortunately, some of this supremely hilarious dandyism, pointed with Algernon’s statements of uttermost ‘stylish’ cynicism, was lost due to Alexander Koll’s rather stiff and pompous interpretation of his role as Jack Worthing. Watching Koll’s performance made it very difficult to believe that Jack could ever be capable of inventing himself a second identity to enjoy the less moral but more fashionable side of life. Even his very dandy-like costume and slightly overdone make-up did not help much. Jack did not seem to be able to keep up with the refined eloquence of Algy’s statements, much less join in his brilliant play of mischievous rhetoric. His responses seemed to be too straightforward and to lack the same playful tone.

Willmund and Koll’s female counterparts, Mirjam Smejkal as Gwendolen and Ines Kurenbach as Cecily, both seemed to be very good choices for these roles. Clever, ironic and eloquent, Smejkal made a perfect younger version of her fierce mother Lady Bracknell (Eva Maria Keller). With her very skilful acting, she created a figure of a woman whom you easily believe to be able to always get what she wants. Equally convincing was Ms. Kurenbach with her angelic appearance veiling her less-than-angelic plans.

Entertaining as their acting might be considered separately, some bizarre interpretative choices of certain scenes spoiled the effect of the actresses’ good individual performances. An idea that seems to have completely backfired is the fight between the two women, who believed they are engaged to the same man. Not only was this exchange of blows, kicks and hair-pulling very brutal (Gwendolen kicked Cecily in the face while the latter was lying on the floor), it was also extremely overdone, out-of-place and simply disturbed the aestheticism of the understated, ironic tone of Wilde’s play. Also the decision to perform with the curtains down the scene in which the two women, having discovered the ‘true’ identities of Algernon and Jack and deciding to feel offended for a while, hide in the tea-room, did not achieve spectacular effects. Quite the opposite, placing Gwendolen and Cecily before the curtains threatened to break the illusion of the fourth wall at any time. The audience thus suddenly became part of the tea-room and the impression of the autonomous world of the play was disturbed for no justifiable reason.

The promise of a good performance faded even farther away with the appearance of Miss Prism, who, if we are to believe Lady Bracknell’s description, should be ‘a female of repellent aspect’ and, calculating the years passed from the unfortunate incident with the bag, should be in her fifties, and who in the Augsburg production was neither. Ute Fiedler, who played the part, was not only extremely attractive with her curly blond hair and very pretty face but also behaved in a rather over-the-top manner, being anything but the ‘picture of respectability’ (Pastor Chasuble). When she was supposed to examine the bag, she actually managed to put it onto her head, and in the final scene she jumped on Pastor Chasuble (Martin Herrmann), almost knocking him down, and bestowed on him what appears to be a very prolonged kiss.

The evening seems to have been saved by the brilliant figure of Lady Bracknell with her pointed remarks and Eva Maria Keller, whose skilled acting kept the audience in stitches. Farcically flat and mono-dimensional as her character is, Keller yet managed to portray her figure elegantly, her voice always dignified and never attempting to force certain responses from the audience.

A successful traditional stage interpretation of a farce turns out to be a very challenging task, the performance constantly at risk of becoming a caricature of itself. Regrettably, this also seems to have happened with some of the scenes and actors of the Augsburg performance. Although the evening can by no means be pronounced a complete fiasco, the show left the reviewer with rather mixed feelings and a number of unfulfilled expectations.

· Elżbieta Baraniecka teaches a course on The Theatre of the Absurd at the University of Augsburg.

BOOKS

Oscar Goes Dominican

Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead 2007. 352 pages ISBN 9781594489587

Review by María DeGuzmán

What’s Oscar Wao [Wilde] Doing After Trujillo?

What follows is an examination of Dominican-born, New Jersey-raised Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for what it does with iconic figures in relation to gendered ethnicities and nationalities. In particular, I focus on this novel’s Oscar Wilde factor. ‘What’s Oscar Wao [Wilde] Doing After Trujillo?’ What work do Oscar Wilde allusions perform in a novel by a U.S. Dominican writer? That ‘Oscar Wao’ is indeed a reference to Oscar Wilde is made explicit in Chapter 4 of the 8 chapters, in the center of the narrative: Yunior, a New Jersey Dominican and the narrator of the novel, says of his friend Oscar, the chief protagonist and tragic-comic ‘hero’ of the narrative:

… I could not believe how much he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, and I told him so. You look just like him, which was bad news for Oscar, because Melvin said, Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him that: Hey, Wao, what are you doing? …

And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.[1]

Both the title of the book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and passages such as this one make of Oscar Wilde a shadow-silhouette (with the word ‘silhouette’ I reference the book cover’s visual appearance remindful to me of African-American installation artist Kara Walker’s cut-out silhouettes of slave narratives) as inescapable as that of fukú (cursed and cursing) Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.

In other words, as much as by the Trujillato, the chief New Jersey Dominican protagonist Oscar, whose actual last name is ‘de León,’ is marked by images of the Irish Victorian playwright, poet, novelist, short story writer, philosopher, married man and Socratic homosexual, aesthete and anarcho-socialist (born 1854 – died 1900) who fell from social grace at the hands of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry (John Sholto Douglas), Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, who dragged Wilde into charges of gross indecency (section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885) for his sexual relations with men including Lord Alfred Douglas. These charges led to Wilde’s criminal prosecution and repeated imprisonment that landed him in Reading Gaol (30 miles west of London) where he was condemned to two years hard labor as prisoner C.3.3. This punishment broke his health and hastened his early death of cerebral meningitis. During this time in Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde wrote the 50,000-word letter of sorrow to Lord Alfred Douglas later published as De Profundis (1905).

Junot Díaz’s character Oscar de León, alias Oscar Wao, is not Irish but Afro-Dominican (49), is not ostensibly homosexual (though scholar Lyn Di Iorio Sandín argues persuasively for the homoerotic homosocial dimensions of Oscar’s desires and of Diaz’s novel’s preoccupations with male sexuality), is not a Victorian, but a young man who is around 23 years old in the ‘early Clinton years’ (263). Nevertheless, Díaz’s novel constructs numerous layers of resemblance between Oscar de León (alias Wao) and Oscar Wilde. Like his Irish antecedent, Oscar de León does not conform to the proper gender codes. He is taunted for being ‘un marícon’ (222), the Spanish equivalent of ‘a fag.’ He is not masculine enough on account of his nerdy bookishness, his flabby fatness, his lack of female conquests, his fanciful writerliness (he concocts science fiction and fantasy-role playing stories remindful of Oscar Wilde’s investment in fairy tales, hagiography, ghost stories, and allegorical works of various kinds), his romanticism that impels him to suffer unto torture and death for love (he, like Oscar Wilde, becomes a martyr for ‘love’) and alternate-world utopianism.

Of course, ironically, the alternate-world utopianism conforms to an earlier code of masculinity pre-dating both the Victorian gentleman and the Dominican homeboy—and that is the code of chivalric romance, the code of the gallant knight errant willing to sacrifice for his ‘lady,’ whether that be the pretty-boy Lord Alfred Douglas (as in the case of Oscar Wilde) or a middle-aged, hard-drinking, often unconscious, semi-retired Dominican prostitute Ybón in the case of Oscar Wao. Oscar Wao’s blind, sacrificial love for Ybón brings him as close to Don Quijote deluded by his novels of caballería as it does to Oscar Wilde, but then all codes have their contradictions and hybrid complexities—even codes of masculinity.

Ultimately, the most important resemblance between Oscar Wao and Oscar Wilde, Díaz’s novel suggests, may be their sheer defiance of what Walter Mosley, African American novelist and writer of ‘afrofuturist science fiction,’ among other genres, refers to as ‘bone-cracking history’ in his book jacket blurb of Oscar Wao:

Set in New Jersey [and I would add the Dominican Republic], and haunted by the vision of Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is radiant with the hard lives of those who leave [the DR] and also of those who stay behind—it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.

Lyn Di Iorio Sandín takes a less salutary view of this novel, reading it through René Girard’s claims in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and The Scapegoat (1986) that human desire emerges from the experience of lack (the zero sum game) and that this basis in lack leads ineluctably to mimetic rivalry and violence.[2] Whether one sees the novel in Mosley’s radiant terms or not—one thing is clear. Oscar Wao is both suicidal and sacrificial (one might say masochistic) in his behavior toward the objects of his affection. In the middle of the novel he nearly kills himself by drinking too much ‘because some girl dissed him’ at the end of his sophomore year in college (169). At the end of the novel, he has given himself over entirely to his obsessive love for a middle-aged, semi-retired prostitute who is, unfortunately the girlfriend and later fiancée of a brutal member of the Dominican National Police—‘the capitán.’ This ‘capitán’ had ‘been young during the Trujillato … wasn’t until the North American Invasion that he earned his stripes … supported the U.S. Invaders, and because he was methodical and showed absolutely no mercy to the leftists, he was launched … into the top ranks of the military police. Was very busy under Demon Balaguer’ (294). For a short time Oscar Wao believes that his American citizenship will protect him as he tries to woo Ybón away from el capitán, but a near-fatal beating by the capitán’s henchmen shows him otherwise yet only increases his ill-founded and ill-fated belief that his relationship with Ybón is viable. Family members in the United States try to rescue him from his fatal fantasy by bringing him back to the States to heal, but at the first opportunity he returns to the Dominican Republic to continue courting Ybón. This time the capitán’s men kill him in a cane field, completing what they tried to do to him the first time and what was nearly done to his mother Hypatía Belicia Cabral for similar reasons in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo dictatorship.

The pattern of obsessive love for a lot of pain to the point of torture and death in return resembles Oscar Wilde’s response to the troubles that Lord Alfred Douglas and his father (his capitán, so to speak) brought upon him, Oscar. Readers may find both Oscar Wilde’s and Oscar Wao’s behavior disturbingly foolish, self-destructive. About Oscar Wao’s pursuit of Ybón and his defiance of el capitán and all he represents, Lyn Di Iorio Sandín writes:

One is an evil man [the capitán] and the other [Oscar] has been an idealist and an innocent, and the third [Ybón] seems mostly indifferent [passive], and yet they are all three driven and compelled by the violence attending Oscar’s challenge of the Capitán and his pursuit of Yvón. (32)

Here Di Iorio Sandín sees Oscar’s sacrifice not as transcending the colonial system of power and oppression, not as outside ‘coloniality’ (to borrow Peruvian historical social scientist Aníbal Quijano’s phrase) but as part and parcel of it—caught in mimetic triangles of desire. The scapegoat/slave desires more than anything what the master, el capitán, desires—this Ybón who hardly seems to have a will of her own. A similar analysis could be and has been made by biographers of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas to the extent that both Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde seem to have allowed the Marquess of Queensberry to dictate their fate—seems to have gotten ensnared in Queensbury’s damning slanders against the ‘love that dares not speak its name.’ Was it the patriarchal punishing heterosexist father that both Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde desired? This line of analysis cannot be overlooked particularly with regards to a larger investigation of the effects of coloniality (the ways in which colonialism structures what is thought, felt, imagined, and practiced).

And yet at the same time, I do not want to ignore the general movement of the end of the novel, which is to turn Oscar Wao into a posthumous hero in the eyes of Yunior, another Dominican from Paterson, New Jersey. If a younger cynical philandering Yunior participated in alternately pitying and poking fun at Oscar when they were at college, an older, wiser Yunior enshrines him in his memory: ‘Years and years now and I still think about him’ (324). And, a bit later on:

When I’m not teaching or coaching baseball or going to the gym or hanging out with the wifey I’m at home, writing. These days I write a lot. From can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. Learned that from Oscar. I’m a new man, you see, a new man, a new man. (326)

So much does Yunior come to admire the previously pitied and misunderstood Oscar that he becomes Oscar Wao’s faithful archivist, keeping his ‘books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers’ carefully stored in four refrigerators (330).

Díaz’s novel itself grants the romantic, utopian Oscar Wao the last word taken from ‘a long letter to [his sister] Lola, the last thing he wrote, apparently before he was killed’ (333). This last letter claims that, despite Ybón’s passivity toward the untenable situation of being the capitán’s girlfriend and fiancée and also using Oscar for emotional comfort, Oscar and she did actually have one whole happy weekend together ‘on some beach in Barahona while the capitán was away on ‘business’ (334) and that Oscar finally lost his virginity of twenty-three years and, furthermore, had a taste of ‘the little intimacies that he’d never in his whole life anticipated, like combing her hair …’ (334).

Ybón encourages Oscar to see the wait for this experience not in terms of lack, but in terms of ‘life,’ a gesture remindful of John Lennon’s famous quip, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ The novel’s final words are Oscar’s reaction to this new perspective’ ‘The beauty! The beauty!’ (335), a phrase which Lyn Di Iorio Sandín points out functions as:

a wonderful piece of mimicry itself it imitates, and subverts … Joseph Conrad’s late nineteenth century novel Heart of Darkness: ‘The horror! The horror!’ In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz’s last words are meant as self-critique of the darkness in his own soul. (31)

In contrastive resemblance does Junot Díaz’s novel encourage readers to read Oscar Wao’s last words as an affirmation of his own being, an improperly Dominican boy and man who becomes more than a ‘Latino scapegoat’—but a hero—by embracing his Dominican Republic experience in the form of Ybón despite the terrible punishment (one might say fukú, fuck you–curse) that awaits him for doing so? And how are readers supposed to process that affirmation at the end of a long transnational tale of trouble and torture? Is this ending one of the novel’s ways of trying to transcend or at least offer an alternative to the oppressive colonial hierarchies and colonial triangles of violent mimetic desire? Walter Mosley’s description of Díaz’s novel leans strongly toward a YES to answer this question when he describes the book as ‘a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.’ In fact, one might even point out that the novel is engaging deliberately in multiple levels of mimesis. Not only is the ending a mimetic reversal of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but also speaking of Irish icons such as Oscar Wilde, it is imitating the ending of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) where Molly Bloom repeatedly exclaims ‘Yes.’ To support this observation I highlight this passage from Chapter 2 of Oscar Wao written from Oscar’s sister’s viewpoint:

By then I [Lola] had this plan. I was going to convince my brother to run away with me. My plan was that we would go to Dublin. I had met a bunch of Irish guys on the boardwalk and they had sold me on their country. I would become a backup singer for U_2, and both Bono and the drummer would fall in love with me, and Oscar would become the Dominican James Joyce. I really believed it would happen too. That’s how deluded I was by then. (68)

So, undeniably, James Joyce as well as Oscar Wilde haunts this long transnational tale of woe, torture, wanderings, and, also, survival.

But, one may well ask, ‘So what?’ What’s with these Irish figures of Ireland? What do they have to do with Dominican characters, writers, literature, history? An answer might lie precisely in the fraught colonial legacies of these two islands—a legacy alive and well with contemporary versions of colonization: Ireland by England; the Dominican Republic not only by Columbus in the past but also by the American invasion in the 20th century, the continued U.S. presence on the island, and by the ongoing coloniality of its ethno-racial, class, and gender formations, formations oppressively tied to the desire for whiteness (the eschewing of African ancestry) and for macho status, desires embodied most blatantly in the historical personage of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina who persecuted Haitians and had an obsessive phobia of maricones and was forever proving his virility with the women on whom he preyed. How does casting Oscar de León in the role of Oscar Wao reflect upon all these conflicts internal to Dominican identities on and off the island? In terms of codes of masculinity, Oscar Wao clearly represents a kind of counter-balancing to the patriarchal macho attitudes of a character such as the narrator Yunior. But, this critique only goes so far—for Oscar Wao is not, like Oscar Wilde, a literal lover of men and boys. So, the critique is postcolonial to a point but does not enter the zone of queer diasporic identities. It does not venture that far.

With regard to ethno-racial formations, the move to create an Afro-Dominican Oscar Wilde-like Oscar de León is a mimetic gesture more complex than admiration and/or rivalry would suggest. Oscar Wao does not actively copy Oscar Wilde. He is hailed into this similarity under the sign of mockery—‘that fat homo Oscar Wilde’ (180). And yet he is a kind of Dominican Oscar Wilde up to a point, as I have attempted to demonstrate. Why bother to drag the silhouette or—referencing a Franz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks analysis[3]—a white mask of a ‘fat homo’ from Ireland over to Paterson New Jersey and down to the Dominican Republic to place over the face of a young Dominican man such as Oscar Wao? Could it be to express the impossible position of Oscar de León, literally not allowed to be both a black man (in particular a Hispanic black man) and a nerd, an intellectual? Is this Oscar Wilde–white man’s mask (and Oscar Wilde would have approved of the use of masks, for he used them all the time himself, masks and fans) not a way of speaking of the internalized colonial ideology that, on the one hand, bars black people from having generative intellects and, on the other hand, simultaneously insist that blacks conform to, mimic, whites. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín points out that such colonial copying is usually deemed a failure; it is never thought of as good enough. Chilean-based cultural theorist Nelly Richard makes this point in her highly incisive essay on the ‘First World’s’ ritual invocation of a ‘Model/Copy’ paradigm of geo-political and cultural relations.[4] But in Díaz’s novel, the so-called copy ‘Oscar Wao,’ failed according to the colonial codes of Dominican manhood to the extent that he seems like Oscar Wilde (‘that fat homo’), discovers that he has had a life, after all, his own life such as it is. And this life ‘signifies’ not in mere imitation, but in its own right. This discovery seems to be the one gift that Ybón gives to him—the experience of ‘life’ (brief, wondrous) to which they both toast as an antidote to Oscar Wao’s confession to her that he tried to commit suicide as a response to romantic rejection. This is the idea that concludes the novel and, of course, begins it in the title —The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

· María DeGuzmán is associate professor of English and Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the book Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire published by the University of Minnesota Press August 2005. She is also the author of published articles and essays on the work of Achy Obejas, Mariana Romo-Carmona (Centro: Journal: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies), Ana Castillo (in Aztlán), Graciela Limón (in Revista Iberoamericana), Rane Ramón Arroyo, John Rechy, and Floyd Salas. Currently, she is working on a second book project concerning Latina/o aesthetics of night and is continuing to produce photo-text work as Camera Query (http://www.cameraquery.com), both solo and in collaboration with colleagues and friends.

Men from Uranus

Michael Matthew Kaylor: Secreted Desires. The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Brno (Czech Republic), Masaryk University, 2006, pp. 457.

Review by Elisa Bizzotto

Michael Matthew Kaylor’s volume explores the personalities and oeuvres of three major writers of British Aestheticism, Hopkins, Pater and Wilde highlighting their response to ‘Uranianism’, that is in the author’s own phrasing, ‘the distinctly paederastic elements in their life and works’.

Kaylor notices how such ‘paederastic elements’ not only in these authors, but also in several of their predecessors and contemporaries—Winkelmann, Whitman, J. A. Symonds, to name but a few—has been too long eschewed, or better consciously and willingly avoided, even in homoerotic critical approaches. Despite the proliferation of gay studies in the final decades of the twentieth century, he feels that scant attention, if any at all, has been paid to such a pervasive aspect of late nineteenth-century culture, which becomes instead the central focus of his analysis. The result is remarkable, both one of great novelty and unexpected revelation.

Of course Kaylor is well-aware of the hostility and censurability his approach might encounter. In fact, both reactions are testified by a letter—re-produced in the Appendix—he received from another scholar long involved in Uranianism, Timothy d’Arch Smith, author of the pioneering Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (1970). While commending Kaylor’s efforts to release the topic from ostracism, d’Arch Smith deplores the diffused tendency to deal with Uranianism as if it were tantamount to homosexual, or better gay, culture—a preconception ultimately deriving from gay scholars themselves, who ‘have completely ignored the facts and turned the writings to their advantage’. On the contrary, d’Arch Smith clarifies that ‘“Uranian” is not synonymous with “gay” which, to avoid such a conflation, is the reason I (historically incorrectly) labelled [these writers] “Uranians”’. All the same, Kaylor proceeds undauntedly in order to bring to light an essential component of aesthetic culture, without which criticism of the late nineteenth-century period would be forcedly partial and biased.

Fundamental to Kaylor’s study is the distinction between two types of ‘Uranians’, ‘the conciliatory’ on one side and ‘the dissident’ on the other. Whilst Hopkins and Pater belong to the first type, Wilde—mainly discussed in Chapter Five ‘‘‘Paedobaptistry”: Wilde as Priapic Educationalist’—exemplifies the second. Kaylor points out that ‘Wilde and his coterie had taken the easier, less profound of the two Uranian paths, hence would never have appreciated the expression of love and the beauty of self-martyrdom that Uranians like Pater and Hopkins sought to actualise, to legitimise, and to capture aesthetically’.

Based on such premises is Kaylor’s assessment of the relationship between Wilde and his mentor Pater, whose influence he could not help escape although never fully managed to come to terms with. Despite the attraction of both for the paederastic ideal, transposed in the often coded though ubiquitous Uranianism of their corpuses, their approaches to the issue appear distinctively different. This is also proved by Pater’s review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in The Bookman in November 1891, where in considering the two most patent Uranian characters in the novel he disapproves of the facile hedonism and loss of moral sense of Lord Henry Wotton, though applauding the more authentically Epicurean philosophy of the ‘ethical’ Basil Hallward.

Further evidence of Pater’s and Wilde’s different responses to Uranianism may be found when reflecting on the latter’s list of literary desiderata to be had in prison, in which the whole of Pater’s oeuvre was included except Marius the Epicurean. Kaylor offers a satisfactory account for what may be termed a crux in Pater-Wilde criticism, hitherto remained somewhat of a dilemma. In his view, the episode can only be explained if we consider the unmistakably paederastic contents of Marius, which Wilde had misunderstood and interpreted according to his own ‘aggressively buoyant’ form of Uranianism. But now, forlorn in his cell, there had come a time when he did not need unpleasant mementoes of what had led him to that predicament. At present he

had no place […] for a book that would have acted as a conscience […]. It would have reminded [him] […] of exactly what he had sacrificed and killed through the hubris of his legal attack on Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, as well as through the sordid evidence submitted against him during his subsequent trials for ‘gross indecency’: not only his reputation, his literary career, his family and his health, but also the aspirations of many like Symonds and Pater who had attempted to keep a tactful, homoerotic and paederastic flourish while yet in the public eye.

Further fascinating points—possibly the most compelling in the volume—are advanced about Wilde’s fairy tales. Kaylor’s statements here may sound a bit daring, but they nonetheless give substantial proof for a new approach to Wilde’s children literature which fully recognises its radically subversive nature. Close reading of The Young King is persuasive enough for Kaylor’s explanation of the story as ‘paederastic tour de force’ specifically created—and here his reading becomes as ground-breaking as captivating—for the voyeuristic enjoyment of Wilde’s sons. Kaylor goes so far as noticing how ‘Wilde’s tale begins with a pair of sensual images, images seemingly constructed as an invitation for his sons Cyril and Vyvyan to admire voyeuristically the young king as exhibitionist—the first, this youth reclining provocatively in a sensual pose; the second, racing about the woodlands, barely clothed’. Besides, he sees the young king’s passionate response to beauty as possibly meant to familiarise the children with the aesthetic tenets Pater expressed in The Renaissance and to which Wilde had proved extraordinarily responsive. The ‘miseducation’ of the Wilde children is even more evident when we consider that Pater’s book had been much blamed for its perilous influence on boys. Thus through The Young King were not only Cyril and Vyvyan put face to face with their father’s shameful penchant for certain forms of beauty, but also confronted with an ad-usum-delphini version of Pater’s dangerously unedifying credo.

Apart from the import and originality of such statements, what mostly strikes the Wilde and Pater (and—I presume—Hopkins) specialist is Kaylor’s merge of militancy and objectivity. His stances are pursued with both fervour and independence of judgment. This will necessarily foster contrasting responses: enthusiastic reception generating further debate on one hand and fierce attacks on the other. However, even detractors should recognise the new light the volume sheds on an unacknowledged, though crucial, component of Aesthetic culture.

It would be worthwhile, in fact, to apply this category of Uranianism to the study of other Decadent authors, also adopting a transnational and transcultural perspective. Untrodden paths will certainly open for fin-de-siècle criticism.

· Eliza Bizzotto teaches at the University of Venice - Ca' Foscari. Her article ‘The Imaginary Portrait: Pater's Contribution to a Literary Genre’ appeared in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, Carolyn Williams (edd.): Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. ELT Press 2002.

Wilde and his work

Alexandra Warwick: Oscar Wilde. Series ‘Writers and their Work’ (general editor Isobel Armstrong), Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House 2007. ISBN 978-0-7463-1134-9 hard cover; 978-0-7463-1139-4 paperback.

Review by D.C. Rose

Those with long memories may recall the pamphlet series Writers and their Work, published for the British Council by Longmans. A great number of these were produced, including one on Oscar Wilde by James Laver (1954, revised editions in 1956, 1963 and 1968). Laver was an art and fashion historian, a Keeper at the V&A: like Wilde he had won the Newdigate at Oxford. His work on Wilde has vanished, and Longmans have relinquished the series to Northcote House, publishers in the town of Tavistock in the English county of Devon, still in association with the British Council and now under the general – one might say the formidable – editorship of Isobel Armstrong. The pamphlet is now a slender volume, some hundred pages long; and James Laver’s successor is Alexandra Warwick, Head of the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Westminster, which Laver would have known as the Regent Street Poly.

So many chances, so many changes, not least in the approach to the subject: one cannot imagine James Laver writing a chapter called ‘Sexuality and the Self’. Indeed, the Self is Alexandra Warwick’s approach to Wilde: the other two chapters are called ‘Making the Self’, and ‘Self and Society’. There are also a general prologue, biographical outline, notes and a Select Bibliography, into which Laver has not found a place. For ‘comprehensive’ bibliographies, Warwick recommends Ian Small’s volumes of 1993 and 2003, which, if they were barely comprehensive then, certainly cannot be called that now; and no internet sources of any shape or form are recommended, which must now be a cause for astonishment. The book is intended for Anglophone readers – no works or editions in other languages are cited, which gives an unbalanced view of Wilde studies, but the biographies and critical works listed do come with a couple of lines of explanation, however, and the book succeeds in its modest aim of being a good and up-to-date introduction to Wilde.

Warwick is not content, fortunately, with merely surveying the field, and, and although not hitherto known as a Wilde scholar, she has her own decided views on Wilde and how he should be treated:

Many of [Wilde’s] phrases are now part of the common stock, there is a sense of familiarity about him, even of personal acquaintance [...] Even otherwise sober academic critics fall into the unscholarly temptation to refer to him familiarly as ‘Oscar’, and this sense of personal investment makes it quite difficult to write about him; it is as though he is already thoroughly known and welcomed as a friend and contemporary. In this book I shall try and show a less familiar Wilde and suggest that he is not always the modern figure he has been seen as. [p.6]

A whiff of revisionism then, and a welcome one. Warwick’s attempt to understand and interpret Wilde is tautly written and well-grounded. This is an account not so much of Wilde’s life as of his mind. Sometimes prejudices show through. That, for example, Pater’s paragraph which contains the phrase about burning with a hard, gem-like flame, should be dubbed ‘infamous’, seems to be a censoriousness beyond the necessity of the case. Similarly she regards as infamous Wilde’s statement that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book: contestable, certainly, wrongheaded, even, but infamous? This is remarkable adoption of the language of Edward Carson. She is on more certain ground when describing the influence of Hegel and the Oxford Hegelians. The chief revisionist thrust, however, is in her cool gaze at those who have sought to ‘homosexualise’ Wilde’s text by their insistence that because Wilde was gay, all the heterosexual relationships are codified homosexual ones. Warwick will have nothing to do with this reductionism.

Of her contemporary citations, perhaps the most important is that from The Speaker in 1895 that ‘the new criticism, the new poetry, even the new woman, are all, more or less the creatures of Mr Oscar Wilde’s fancy’ (p.49). It is typical of Warwick’s level headedness that she does not use this affirmation of Wilde’s centrality to the cultural innovations of the period to glorify Wilde, but to rein back on overblown claims for Oscar. Her clear views and lucid prose, refreshingly free from the arcana of literary theory, make Alexandra Warwick a welcome addition to those who are synthesising our 21st century view of Wilde. I think James Laver would have approved.

· D.C. Rose is the founder editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Imaginary Portraits

Elisa Bizzotto: La mano e l’anima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siècle.

Milano: Cisalpino - Istituto Editoriale Universitario – Monduzzi Editore, 2001, pp. XIX, 192.

Review by Liberato Santoro-Brienza

The poetic, aesthetic, and critical ideas produced by the aesthetic movement which flourished in the second half of the 19^th century in England – with echoes and resonances in other European countries – do not seem, to date, to have received the attention they deserve. Aesthetic investigations, in particular, about this chapter in the history of art, criticism, and literature, are far from numerous and comprehensive. In fact, the general ideal of absorbing and metamorphosing life into art, and the idea of “art for art’s sake” – to mention just two aspirations of the movement – have been widely reputed to express a decadent inclination and sensibility: to be ignored, rejected, or – at the least – criticized. Thus academic histories of aesthetic ideas seem, overall, to have decried. Furthermore, the vision of a communion of the arts and their cross-fertilisation (and in particular the rejoining of poetry and painting) which inspired and sustained the literary production of the movement – especially in its original, exemplary, and privileged genre of the imaginary portrait – has not received approval, nor adequate consideration, in the past century.

Of course, literary criticism – unlike aesthetics and the history of ideas - has done its work in highlighting the literary significance and merit of the movement, also paying attention to the careful, elegant, lyrical style and diction of the writings which best expressed the new sensibility. However, it would seem that literary criticism has not paid much attention – and so claimed Bizzotto – to the specific study of the imaginary portrait.

Bizzotto’s study aims at filling the silent lacunae, both in aesthetic and literary studies, and eminently succeeds in its intent. Although her book is mainly concerned with the literary side of the story, she alerts us to the fact that the 19^th century fin the siècle artistic experiment and experience, with their poetic germs, came to further maturity in the work of Wilde and Joyce, to single out two veritable giants in the Anglophone tradition. The “fin” constituted an aesthetic and poetic era of transition, and a bridge between the Victorian glorious neo-classical era and modernism. The end was actually a beginning. But – sadly – it remains, to a large extent, a relatively ignored end, and a much underrated beginning.

As its subtitle indicates, the book is about the imaginary portrait – in its origin, its evolution, its influence on 20^th century literature – as a new genre and expression of a novel sensibility. The main title: The Hand and the Soul, ostensibly quotes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s only novella “Hand and Soul”, published in 1850, thus indicating the seminal significance of Rossetti’s contribution to the birth and formation of the imaginary portrait. At once, the reference to Rossetti points to the roots of the new genre – that heralded and gave voice to the spirit of fin de siècle literary, artistic, aesthetic sensibility – in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Bizzotto indicates the year 1850 as the date of birth of the new narrative form, for that is the year of birth of Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul”: the novella that bears all the salient features of the new genre for which Pater will later coin the name of, precisely, imaginary portrait. And Bizzotto is quick to remind us that “According to the well known thesis advanced by Roland Barthes in his Le degré zéro de l’écriture, it is in the year 1850 that one should place the Copernican revolution of European literature.” The thesis suggests that, while the literary expressions of the first half of the century were characterized by an a-problematic trust in our power of communication and represented the world as coherent and intelligible, after 1850 writers progressively abandoned the idea of being witnesses of some universal value or order, and chose to search for the form of the world – and, therefore, for the form of language and of narrative. From the loss of a presumed coherent universality originated the modern fragmentation of writing/writings.

Elaborating Barthes’s suggestive thesis, Bizzotto highlights the fact that the social and psychological crisis, symptomatically expressed by the 1848 revolution in France and with reverberations across Europe, engendered a new disposition of the artist towards the world, society, the arts themselves.

There is born the task of fashioning new works, in a new language, as a response attuned to the new historical and social context. For writers, the new explorations and experimentations implied also a discussion of the relationship between literature and the other arts. As outcome of this discussion, and of the reflections which it produced, we find the elaboration of hybrid artistic works – original and revolutionary – such as Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspired by literary themes, Wagner’s musical drama and Gesamtkunstwerk, the symphonic poems of Debussy and Strauss, the musically crafted poetry of the Symbolists in which the word aspires to the condition of pure music.

The question concerning the nature and the role of the various arts, and of their interactions, was much debated in the 19^th century. Especially in Germany, in the post-romantic and neo-classical era, philosophers, critics, and poets – such as Herder, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Wieland, Novalis, Tieck – had reflected on the tendency of each form of art to overcome its own limitations by aspiring to dialogue with and be influenced by other forms. As exponents of a contrary point of view, we find Hanslick – contra Wagner, and champion of Brahms, formalism, and purism – and, of course, Lessing who distinguished and separated painting, understood as a purely spatial art, from poetry as a temporal art focused on action.

Clearly, the writers presented and discussed by the book under review, felt no great affinity with Lessing’s Laokoon, and rather sided with the ancient Simonides of Cos who is reputed to have maintained that painting is silent poetry, and poetry talking painting; and with Horace who held that poetry is like painting: ut pictura poësis.

Bizzotto also reminds us that in his article “The School of Giorgione”, of 1877, published in the Fortnighly Review, Walter Pater coined the lapidary aphorism according to which “All art aspires towards the condition of music.”

Following the Wagnerian precept of the fusion of the arts in a new form that may embrace and transcend them all, the Pre-Raphaelites pursued the ideal of a fusion and osmosis of literature and painting. Almost all the members of the Brotherhood were painters, in the first place, but indulged in literary exercises, sought inspiration in literary subjects and characters, commissioned poems that would describe, and resonate with, their own paintings. Rossetti’s figure looms large on the new poetic landscape. He was convinced that “if a man has poetry in him he should paint” – as he put it to William Morris. Through Rossetti’s pictorial-literary production is reborn “the old idea […] of ut pictura poësis, the theory that poetry and painting are sister arts, and consequently that a text can illustrate a picture as much as a picture a text. The ramifications of this tradition have been widely felt in English culture, but with a bias, as is natural in a verbally sophisticated but visually under-educated nation, towards the illustration of a literary text – the painter’s art thus becoming a mere adjunct to something which is self-explanatory in the first place. Rossetti’s contribution to the tradition […] was to have a decisive effect in reversing this tendency, and was to be an influential component of the doctrine of aestheticism.” (T. Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites, New York & Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 50-51.)

Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul” stands as the exemplar and fore-runner of the aesthetic fiction: the genre which Pater chose to call imaginary portraits. It is the story of an imaginary medieval Tuscan painter who feels compelled to choose between religious belief and faith in beauty. His absorbing devotion to painting leads him to choose aesthetic beauty as his supreme value. The underlying theme of the story is that of the unavoidable vocation of a true artist: to invert the traditional roles of art and life. Life is transformed into art. Life is portrayed as a weak and blurred reflection of art.

Structurally, the story is a narrative that combines the strategies of the short story, (auto)biographical narrative, and the critical essay. It is also, stylistically, an attempt to fuse the dictions of prose and poetry, and to create a language to be treated “with the same respect and technical knowledge as sculptors treated marble and painters paint.” It initiated a type of refined and rarefied writing marked by intense musicality.

Acknowledging the central role played by Walter Pater in the shaping of the imaginary portrait as a literary form, and in the formulation of the critical, poetic, and aesthetic theories adopted by the entire aesthetic movement and pervasive of the fin de siècle sensibility, Bizzotto analyses in detail the writings of Rossetti, Morris and Solomon, to begin. The fourth chapter of the book is entirely dedicated to Pater, presented as writer, theorist, and cornerstone of the new literary and aesthetic tradition. The three last chapters deal with Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde, as Pater’s direct disciples; then Dowson and Yeats, with Symons and Synge, of the Tragic Generation.

Bizzotto identifies the distinguishing characters of the imaginary portrait – with reference to the traditional short story – in the following: 1) the tendency towards the hybridization of the arts and of the genres; 2) the autobiographical undertone revelatory of intimate aspects of the personality of the writer; 3) the function of fiction in controlling the autobiographical stream of consciousness. With these elements, Bizzotto singles out some of the favourite themes of the portraits: reflections on the relation between art and life; the threat of death and of illness – whether physical or mental – as metaphors of existential unease and life-weariness; the vision of childhood as a privileged existential condition; unrequited love; artistic failure. Finally, the portraits are articulated not according to a traditional plot, but rather in the absence of a clearly planned plot. The structure of the narrative is predominantly episodic, and the emphasis is not so much on the action as on the sensations and ideas of the protagonists.

To conclude, I would do great injustice to Bizzotto’s book, if I failed to mention that I found very enlightening the author’s analyses of, and comments on, the idea of aesthetic contemplation and artistic inspiration as “epiphany”. The connections with A Portrait… become increasingly intriguing.

The book is elegantly written. Its structure and presentation are clear and comprehensive. Its analyses are sensitive and well informed. It reads like a complex and rich tapestry, all finely embroidered.

· Liberato Santoro-Brienza is the co-author (with Hugh Bredin) of Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Edinburgh University Press 2000.

Women from Earth

Andrew Mangham: Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007, 247 pages. ISBN 978-0-230-54521-2

Review by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Andrew Mangham’s Violent Women and Sensation Fiction is a new and invaluable addition to the scholarly work on the Victorian sensation novel. The book looks at sensation fiction in context and examines the most famous sensation novels alongside some less known narratives by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood and Wilkie Collins, and is interested in the ways in which Victorian fiction was influenced by contemporaneous medical and legal issues. In so doing, Mangham’s study moves away from analyses which regard sensation fiction as either challenging or endorsing dominant ideology. The importance, Mangham contends, is to envisage how popular fiction was shaped by history. Not only were Braddon, Wood and Collins related to important scientific figures, physicians or psychiatrists, but they were also known to own medical textbooks. Similarly, sensational plots were more often than not inspired by real murder trials, and sensation novelists read about criminal cases in the Newgate Calendar or the French equivalent, Maurice Méjan’s Recueil des causes célèbres. In addition, sensation novels were serialized in family magazines alongside non-fictional articles written by scientists or lawyers. Hence the undeniable ‘links, exchanges and slippages’ (3–4) between the novels and non-fictional material that Mangham traces in his study.

The first two chapters pivot around Victorian criminal trials and medical theories dealing with female pathology. In the first chapter, Mangham focuses on medical constructions of violent women. The idea that the female body was influenced by women’s biological changes from the onset of menstruation to the cessation of the menses in old age prevailed in medical science. Mangham studies adolescents, mothers and old maids in three different sections. Recalling the Manning case (the murderers’ victim was buried beneath the kitchen floor), Mangham shows that criminal cases increasingly constructed the home no longer as a haven but as a place likely to harbour uncontrolled violence. Innocent-looking young girls should not be trusted, and the period was much concerned with women’s irrational behaviour and potentially dormant mental diseases. The case of Madeleine Smith, for instance, which involved a young woman, aligned the rise of female sexual desire with violence. For mothers, criminal cases dealing with child murders seemed to confirm the professionals’ belief that the biological phases of motherhood engendered the possibility of violence in all women. Mothering and murdering seemed to march hand-in-hand, as if ‘mothers were as capable of extinguishing life as they were of creating it’ [28]. As Mangham explains, criminal cases made explicit that the biological phases of motherhood were frequently found in cases of insane violence, whether the women were pregnant, suckling or in the puerperal state. Climacteric women could also be violent women, their crimes being once more connected with their biological state. Revealingly, if the defence of hereditary insanity was commonly used as evidence of the criminal’s irresponsibility in the criminal courtroom, Mangham underlines as well that insanity pleas may have resulted from the practitioners’ attempts to legitimise their own theories concerning the female physiology.

Chapter Two links further real cases and sensation fiction by focusing on The Road Murder which was appropriated by Braddon, Wood and Collins. The case conflated homicide and the “ordinary duties” of women. Such a conflation of home management and violence was another stab at the heart of the domestic sanctuary, revealing the latent dangers that the home harboured. Indeed, the Road Murder revolved around a bloodstained garment which was lost. Highlighting the links between the murder and women’s menses through the bloodstained nightgown, Mangham shows how the case related the crime to a young woman experiencing puberty, ‘a time when such unhealthy taints manifested themselves’ [61]. The second part of the chapter considers fictional representations of the Road Murder. In Aurora Floyd, Braddon capitalizes on the association between women’s bodies and violence the better to deflate ‘preconceived expectations of female guilt’ [71]. Mangham also shows how the changes that Wood made to St. Martin’s Eve (which was a lengthened and revised version of a short story published in New Monthly Magazine in 1853) intimated the influence of the Road Murder. Likewise, in Collins’s The Moonstone, the diamond, associated with bloodshed from the beginning of the novel and linked to periodicity through the lunar cycles, encapsulates ‘the somatic nature of women’ (82). However, Mangham points out, the investigation reveals less the alleged ‘missing link’ between women and crime which the detectives are looking for than the hero’s ‘link of his own forging’ [86]. Thus the three authors’ appropriation of the Road Murder suggests that the connections between female sexuality and crime are not only fabricated by the male characters, but that that fabrication is ‘a symbol of masculine psychopathology’ [86], as typified by Franklin Blake’s hysterical symptoms in The Moonstone, for instance.

In many sensation novels, as Mangham highlights in the following three chapters, crimes are tightly connected to the biological phases of woman’s life, and the novels heavily resort to contemporaneous medical essays and criminal laws. Chapter 3, dealing with the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon examines young women, mothers and post-menopausal women separately. Mangham looks at Braddon’s male investigators and offers detailed analyses of images symbolically related to female sexuality in Lady Audley’s Secret, ‘Under the Sycamore’, The Trail of the Serpent (Three Times Dead) and John Marchmont’s Legacy. Braddon’s sexual imagery brings to the fore contemporaneous medical readings of female violence. Mangham’s study of the role played by the absence or excess of maternal care in Braddon’s novels follows. Aurora Floyd, Lady Lisle and ‘Lost and Found’ all suggest that maternity is a threat; the novels figure motherless children who disregard propriety, male characters emasculated by their mothers’ lack of moderation or bring to light the dangers of wet-nursing. Braddon’s post-climacteric women, on the other hand, if they do not play a central part, feature in The Trail of the Serpent, Eleanor’s Victory, The Captain of the Vulture and Aurora Floyd.

Ellen Wood also played upon the relationship between women’s uncontrolled violence and the maternal role, as Mangham demonstrates in Chapter 4. Most, if not all, of Wood’s novels illuminate the threat that women’s latent violence represent for the family. Wood’s East Lynne, Danesbury House and Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles bring into play the dangers of mothers’ unchecked emotions with regard to the upbringing of children. Lady Adelaide’s Oath illustrates the importance of reading through deceptive appearances to choose good wives so as to ensure the offspring’s health. In The Shadow of Ashlydyat women’s emotional lives are contrasted with men’s professional lives.

Finally, Chapter 5, which examines Collins’s novels furthers Mangham’s exploration of the ways in which sensation fiction investigated ‘the allegation that all women harboured insanely violent possibilities’ [172]. Mangham highlights how in The Woman in White, the tracking of Anne Catherick functions as an allegorical representation of the period’s concern with the tracing of mental disorders. Ironically, because ‘detecting obscure mental disorders was itself a psychopathological obsession’ [174], the detective, who wonders whether he does not suffer from monomania, bears a resemblance to nineteenth-century psychiatrists, and Mangham shows once more how Collins turned male exploration of female hidden secrets into an investigation of the male psyche. In a similar way, in No Name the masculine Miss Garth’s conjecturings regarding Norah and Magdalen’s personalities uncovers more Miss Garth’s own wickedness. Excitedly, Mangham then shows how the emphasis on observation when Miss Garth lifts Magdalen’s skirts and cuts off a piece of material, which typified scientific investigation, equates Miss Garth’s behaviour with gynaecological examination of even surgery. Magdalen’s investigation, on the other hand, as she ‘penetrates’ Admiral Bartram’s house and is paralleled with Bartram’s sleepwalking, functions as another representation of the male psyche. In his study of Armadale, Mangham stresses the role that the villainess plays in the hero’s sense of fatalism—his monomanical obsession with his father’s crime. Hence, if Collins associates his villainess with stereotypical motifs representing women’s violence (his association of Lydia Gwilt with poisons or infection), Gwilt is, in fact, ‘a shadow cast by the psychopathic male himself’ [203], and Allan Armadale’s dream only comes true because Midwinter’s exemplifies how fate is self-fulfilling.

Mangham’s exploration of the relationship between women and violence in the sensation novels of the 1860s makes explicit how threatening and dangerous women were not simply the sensuous femme fatales of the fin de siècle, as generally assumed. They were part and parcel of Mid-Victorian representations of women’s violence. Mangham’s highly documented study is a fascinating exploration of Victorian popular fiction which offers new and sometimes unexpected analyses of sensation novels. His close readings of the novels from a historical perspective through contemporaneous medical essays and criminal laws are one of the many strengths of this very accessible study which will undoubtedly be of interest to many Victorianists.

· Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (France). She is the author of Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (Ashgate, 2007) and is currently working on a book-length study of Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic, to be published with the University of Wales Press. She has also edited Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (1884) (Valancourt Books, forthcoming).

Women in Fairyland

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas: Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. 188 pages.

Review by Susan Cahill

An analysis of fairy tales and sensation fiction in the Victorian period proves a fruitful combination for Laurence Talairach-Vielmas’s discussion of the tensions underpinning representations of the ideal female body in the second half of the nineteenth century. The link between these literary genres is not a new one; Philip Davis’s 2004 volume of The Oxford English Literary History on The Victorians, 1830-1880 includes a chapter entitled “Alternative Fictions”, the subsections of which are “The Sensation Novel” and “Fairy Tales and Fantasies”. Talairach-Vielmas uses this alliance between these genres as foils to the literary mainstream in Moulding the Female Body, in which she explores the ways in which such texts map contemporaneous assumptions about femininity and cultural constructions of the female body. Talairach-Vielmas skilfully weaves a compelling argument which focuses on fairy tales and sensation fiction published in the second half of the nineteenth century; the texts that she chooses range from 1853 to 1875, and include both male and female authors, and literature for children as well as novels aimed at an adult audience. She explores a wide variety of texts including prominent male fantasists such as Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, several novels by the master of the sensation genre, Wilkie Collins, and arguably the first sensation novel, Dickens’s Bleak House. She also foregrounds fairy tales by Christina Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, and Juliana Horatia Ewing and sensation novels by the lesser known writers, Rhoda Broughton and M.E. Braddon. The book is structured in its choice of texts in such a way as to move from childhood through burgeoning sexuality to unruly sexual desire through the shift from fairy tales and fantasies to sensation fiction, a move which displays the inculcation of the nineteenth-century woman from childhood to adulthood.

Talairach-Vielmas emphasises the intertextual connections between fairy tales and sensation fiction in her introduction, particularly in relation to the similarities with which these texts tackled contemporaneous issues relating to the cultural and social positioning of women. Furthermore, the texts that she chooses share in focus and theme the figure of the unruly heroine and articulate both moralising and subversive attitudes towards this particular construction of femininity. The texts often chart the punishments necessary to regulate the misbehaving girl or woman, laying bare the ideologies at work behind the creation of the feminine ideal. Thus, the texts illustrate the various pressures exerted on actual and textual configurations of the female body by this period of Victorian culture. Both genres are arguably concerned with the bodily, from the unrestrained sexuality and violence that are at play in sensation novels to the prevalence of food and metamorphoses that characterise many Victorian fairy tales and fantasy texts, particularly those authored by women.

Talairach-Vielmas locates each text firmly within the culture from which it was produced, drawing far-reaching but extremely pertinent connections to the world of advertising, discourses surrounding the Crystal Palace, late-nineteenth-century anxiety concerning the rise of the female consumer, the cultural disciplining of female food consumption, the idealisation of the sickly consumptive, Victorian medical discourses, and women’s writing and the issue of female representation. Throughout the book she foregrounds the growing phenomenon of Victorian consumer culture as a significant factor in the changes that conceptions of femininity were undergoing at this juncture. She outlines the complex intertwinings between consumer culture, the configuration of the female body, and the texts that she analyses, pointing out that these tales and novels are firmly imbricated in the economic structures of the late Victorian age, which impacted profoundly on ideas surrounding femininity.

As Talairach-Vielmas convincingly argues, notions of femininity were closely connected to discourses of the marketplace, particularly those of the fashion and beauty industries. Talairach-Vielmas uses the metaphors of spinning and weaving to reference storytelling and the marketplace, both of which often serve to entangle women in the dominant paradigms. Rapid changes in the Victorian economy highlighted the contradictory impulses that motivated late nineteenth-century depictions of womanhood. The texts featured share in varying degrees an anxiety concerning the relationship between the figure of the female consumer and the woman herself as consumable object. Woman, newly positioned as consumer by the growing economic culture, becomes the focus of fears surrounding her uncontrollable desire and the fairy tales and fantasies explored here revolve around the management of food consumption and the regulation of female appetites. They express the ideological constraints that idealise femininity as “light” and pure yet also signal the double bind by which women are also defined by their biology and fleshy appetites. Thus, several of these texts make explicit the medical and disciplining procedures enacted upon women both metaphorically and literally in order to conform to the ideal feminine figure.

The sensation novels focused on in Moulding the Female Body, while also registering the contradictory discourses surrounding the notion of ideal femininity in Victorian culture, tend to locate this anxiety firmly in the world of consumer culture and in the tropes of commodity, display, and disguise. Sensation novels themselves were seen from their inception as belonging to the commercial sphere as marketable commodities aimed primarily at the female consumer. Talairach-Vielmas explores the connections between the serialised publication of these novels and the advertisements that appeared alongside the instalments. She argues that these novels formulate heroines who are adept at both commodifying themselves and using the available merchandise to their own advantage. The texts articulate the constructed and artificial nature of Victorian femininity while at the same time confronting the contemporaneous fear that womanhood was necessarily false and duplicitous. In such a way these novels enter into complex and, at times, subversive, conversations with the cultural stereotypes surrounding the female body in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels is a far-reaching but tightly argued treatise on the ways in which these experimental tales and sensationalist fictions register the impact that the growth of consumer culture had on configurations of the female body and expose the conflicting impulses that shaped patriarchal ideologies of femininity. The texts variously echo the dominant discourses as well as articulate and undermine the inconsistencies of contemporaneous constructions of femininity and Talairach-Vielmas remains sensitive to their ambiguities throughout. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels offers extremely productive arguments useful to anyone interested in both these literary genres and this period of the nineteenth century.

· Susan Cahill is Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin.

An Age of Nerves

Anne Stiles (ed.): Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007, 229 pages. ISBN: 978–0–230–52094–3

Review by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Anne Stiles’s edited collection, Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, is a challenging and successful attempt at analysing the relationship between literature and science from the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. As the volume makes clear, neurology and literature had ‘common philosophical concerns and rhetorical strategies’ [1]. The latest neurological advances inflected contemporary fiction and even neurologists themselves turned to fiction writing. Hence the exchanges between neurology and literature were not simply reflective: the dialogue between literature and neurology was fruitful and dialogic. The collection falls into four parts entitled ‘Catalysts’, ‘Diagnostic Categories’, ‘Sex and the Brain’ and ‘The Traumatized Brain’ though echoes between the various articles—especially related to the concept of mental shock—collapse the different sections, suggesting the scope of neurological science in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the first part, Laura Otis’s chapter on Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells and David Ferrier examines how Collins and Wells were influenced by the struggle between anti-vivisectionists, physiologists and neurologists, especially after the physiologist Ferrier’s 1881 trial for his animal experimentations. As Otis recalls, the explorations of the substance of the brain and the mapping of the cortex resulted in a rise of the applications for licences and certificates to perform vivisection, especially between 1876 (which was marked by the founding of the Physiological Society by London and Cambridge physiologists as well as the Cruelty to Animals Act) and 1881. Otis then contrasts Collins and Wells in their attitude towards vivisection: Collins was a fervent opponent of vivisection; Wells supported it. Otis underlines the close relationship between Collins and the social activist Frances Power Cobbe, who founded the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection in 1875 as well as Collins’s use of Ferrier’s writing within his own fiction. Otis focuses on Heart and Science (1883) in which Collins not only denounced experimentations on animals but attacked as well certain scientists. On the other hand, Wells’s later fiction was published at a time when British scientists gained power, as typified for instance by the forming of the Association for the Advancement of Medicine by Research in 1882, while antivivisectionists continued to fight through pamphlets (such as Professor Ferrier’s Experiments on Monkeys’ Brains [1885] or Ferrieristic Brain Surgery: A Candid Condemnation [1887]). In fact, Otis highlights, if Wells’s Dr. Moreau in The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) illustrates the dangers of scientific experimentation, Wells does not condemn scientific research. Don LaCoss’s following article explores the connections between neurology, literature and modernism through a dancer, ‘Madeleine G.’, who danced while unconscious. ‘Madeleine G.’ was a magnetic subject put into a trance by her personal mesmerist. The latter was the neo-mesmerist Professor Emile Magnin of the Paris Ecole de magnétisme whom she had initially consulted for persistent headaches which, she believed, were of neurasthenic origin. Revealingly, ‘Madeleine G.’s’ responses to music were viewed as artistic movements: her somnambulist dance shared features with conventions and aesthetics particularly visible in the Decadent arts movement. As LaCoss underlines, Decadent artists’ interest in the subconscious mind and its power to produce artistic inspiration explains why ‘Madeleine G.’s’ subconscious powers evoked Decadent sensibility. Her shows were branded by Decadent and Symbolist influence and naturally highly criticized by physicians, psychologists, neurologists and medico-legal experts. LaCoss then examines how the unconscious dancer was represented by modern artists, such as Hugo von Habermann or Albert von Keller, fascinated by entranced models, and turns to the use of Wagner’s music in ‘Madeleine G.’s’ programme, which was deemed to trigger nervous excitability.

The second part opens on Andrew Mangham’s article, which traces the first steps of ‘dysmorphophobia’ at the end of the nineteenth century, in response to cultural anxieties to look good. As he argues, obsession with one’s appearance could be found as early as in the 1830s works of psychologists like the French alienist Jean Esquirol; but the term ‘dysmorphophobia’—meaning, literally, the fear of being ugly—was not coined before 1891, by the Italian psychologist Enrico Morselli. Mangham underlines the importance of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and its followers (such as Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), which highlighted an obsession with human breeding and a fear regarding the potential degeneration of the human race). The urge to look good, as an indication of moral beauty, was related to fears of unhealthy breeding and, hence, degeneration. Mangham then turns towards literary representations of such anxieties related to pressures to look good, and analyses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), pointing out how the heroines’ fears of physical deformity reveal deeper anxieties, particularly related to marriage and fears of spinsterhood. Mangham next traces forms of obsession and forms of dysmorphophobic minds in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–61), Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–revised 1891), H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1896) and Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1911), underlining how ugliness is a mental construction resulting from cultural pressures. Kristine Swenson’s following chapter deals with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s fiction. In her 1882 novel, Doctor Jay, the author of the bestseller The Gates Ajar (1868) advocates for women physicians and a homeopathic treatment of neurological illnesses. Swenson recalls how Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was a friend of the famous neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell; she frequently corresponded with him and discussed their mutual interest in medical fiction. Phelps’s Doctor Jay records the story of a female homeopath who cures a male neurasthenic. Through her homeopathic treatment of a mental illness, Zay breaks with mainstream neurology, questioning as well gender-based treatments such as Weir Mitchell’s ‘rest cure’ for women and more virile treatments for men, such as change of scenery and adventure. Like Sarah Grand, Phelps defined the New Woman and the New Man through medical tropes. Thus, through her study of Doctor Jay, Swenson makes explicit how women doctor novels, which were very fashionable in Britain and America in the 1880s and 1890s, offered a means to examine the question of the modern woman’s education, independence and sexuality.

In the third part, Randall Knoper’s article on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s A Mortal Antipathy (1885) takes us into psychological trauma and the relationships betwen neurology and sexology. A Moral Antipathy is based on a case of ‘sexual inversion’—a term used for homosexuality. As Knoper explains, homosexuality was pathologized and defined through neurological inversion or reversed nerve force. Knoper relates the developments of trauma theories, starting with ‘railway spine’ defined as a physical injury in 1866 by British surgeon John Eric Erichsen and contradicted by British railway surgeon Herbert Page, who contended that psychological shock could cause physical maladies. Page’s argument was developed further in 1883 and 1884 by the Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist James Jackson Putnam and George L. Walton, who were influenced by Jean-Martin Charcot and viewed the symptoms as hysterical. Knoper then analyses various conceptions of shock, highlighting the links between trauma and sexual inversion and demonstrating the extent to which Holmes’s insightful use of neurology and psychology was ahead of its time. James Kennaway’s study of the links between music and sexuality in fin-de-siècle literature furthers the relationship between neurology and sexuality. The article underlines how the debate on nervous music was liked to broader cultural anxieties about sexuality, and heightens the relevance of music from late-nineteenth-century fiction, such as Huysmans’ A Rebours (1884), George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897), Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1898), George Moore’s Evelyn Innes (1898) to early twentieth-century works, such as Thomas Mann’s ‘Tristan’ (1903) and Gertrude Atherton’s Tower of Ivory (1910).

In the last section, Jill Matus resumes the discourse on trauma tackled by Knoper to engage with nineteenth-century definitions of consciousness: interestingly, she argues, as the nerves were essentially electrical, mid-Victorian physiologists defined consciousness as a form of shock. Matus looks at the psychic effects of the development of industrialization and focuses on how Victorian novelists and mental physiologists understood mind shock. She analyses war narratives and finds in 1870s British medical reports on the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War more overt discussion of psychological injury than in British sources on the Crimean War (1854–56) or the Sepoy Rebellion (1857). Moreover, Matus returns to the work of Herbert Page which she compares with French responses to war. Finally, Mark S. Micale prolongs the discussion on the relationship between trauma and modernity, focusing more particularly on the American Civil War of 1861–65. Micale underlines how military-medical manuals recorded somatic illnesses ranging from lameness, loss of voice or sight, paralysis of the limps, convulsive fits, to headaches and chronic diarrhœa. Micale then turns towards the work of American military physicians, such as William Hammond, who founded a new hospital in Philadelphia in 1862 and appointed the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, the surgeon William Williams Keen, the general practitioner George Read Morehouse and the cardiologist Jacob Mendez Da Costa and who published pioneering documents in the history of American neurology and cardiology. Interestingly, as Micale explains, before being the eminent ‘nerve doctor’ famous for his ‘rest cure’, Silas Weir Mitchell was an army doctor dealing with soldiers. Additionally, he also wrote non medical writings, among which fifteen novels. The latter, however, though featuring soldiers, hardly revealed the depths of the soldier’s psyche. Through his study of fictional and non-fictional material, Micale underlines the limits of American Civil War medicine, lacking key theoretical concepts at a period in which the prominence of epidemic physical diseases may have rendered psychological aches of secondary importance.

Anne Stiles’s Neurology and Literature is an insightful and well-documented collection of articles which shows how the developments of neurology in the second half of the nineteenth century informed the literature of the period. As the collected articles highlight, psychic shocks, monomaniacal obsessions or trances in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century must be read through the prism of medical research, as if literature and neurology constantly fuelled each other. Stiles’s edited collection demonstrates once more the necessity to look at fiction in context and will prove an invaluable guide to scholars and students interested in late-Victorian and early twentieth-century literature.

· Laurence Talairach-Vielmas is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (France). She is the author of Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Fiction (Ashgate, 2007) and is currently working on a book-length study of Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic, to be published with the University of Wales Press. She has also edited Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (1884) (Valancourt Books, forthcoming).

A PLAYBOY OF THE DUBLIN WORLD

Madeleine Humphreys: The Life and Time of Edward Martyn: an Aristocratic Bohemian. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007, xviii+ 286 pp., $55.00

Review by Michael Patrick Gillespie

I take no pleasure in beginning this review by saying that Madeleine Humphreys’ biography of Edward Martyn is not a very good book. I make this statement without rancor and indeed with a great deal of regret. Writing on any topic is a laborious, even painful, endeavor, and I cannot believe that Ms. Humphreys undertook her project with any but the intention of doing full justice to her subject. However, a number of flaws prevent the successful achievement of this goal. In the following paragraphs I will enumerate them.

Although I realize as an academic my own tendency toward pedantry may shape my assumptions, I do not feel it unreasonable to expect that a book entitled The Life and Time of Edward Martyn offer a modicum of scholarly information. Sadly, this is not the case for Humphrey’s book. Instead, it presents an uneven account of the events shaping the lives of Martyn and his associates without showing a clear interest in assessing the significance of what has transpired.

Although it may at first glance seem a minor point, the structure of Humphreys’ citations alerts one to analytic deficiencies that punctuate the volume. While evidence of her research can be found by going through the footnotes, the absence of a works cited page which would collate references to her scholarly efforts is more than a minor irritant. For the reader seeking to understand her approach through an overview of the works that Humphreys consulted when assembling her material, the difficulty in discerning specific evidence of extended familiarity with the field hampers understanding.

In fairness, I must mention that Humphreys does include a selected bibliography of Martyn’s writing, and does cite seven books ‘about, and partly about, Edward Martyn.’ However, in choosing to reference so few titles as evidence of her research, only one of which was published after 1984, she leaves one to wonder if she thought other material, including Adrian Frazier’s magisterial biography of George Moore, which she cites in her footnotes, not worth inclusion in the bibliography. This is more than an academic quibble. Humphreys needs to establish for the reader a sense of her intellectual familiarity with the period, its central figures, and its leading issues, and the paucity of research material undermines confidence in this regard.

Striking shortcuts in her approach to research augment one’s concern. In compiling her life of Martyn, Humphreys has given little attention to primary sources, but rather has summarized material contained in a handful of previously published studies. This in itself should not disqualify her book from consideration as a serious study of Martyn’s life. However, a number of fundamental flaws undermine the credibility of The Life and Time of Edward Martyn even as an adequate summary of received opinions of the man’s life.

The book shows an absence of the fundamental features one would expect in a clear rhetorical presentation. Rather than documentation of fact, Humphreys too often substitutes speculation. A sentence on the opening page of her “Introduction” warns readers of what to expect. Here Humphreys conjectures about the loss of Martyn’s personal archive and the responsibility for that held by Cyril Ryan to whose safekeeping they had been entrusted:

It is possible that Ryan destroyed the papers, given that they may well have revealed the complexity of Edward’s sexual nature or even his latent paganism, but if he did, it is unlikely that he [one presumes she refers to Ryan here] had the co-operation of Denis Gwynn (p. 1).

A great many things, indeed, are possible in life, but if one wishes serious consideration as a biographer it behooves one to avoid sentences with quadruple suppositions, and stick to verifiable statements.

Humphreys also seems challenged to understand the difference between fact and fiction. To convey the mood of Dublin theatergoers responding to W.B. Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen Humphreys discusses James Joyce’s reactions at the opening night performance (p. 113). According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, Joyce was in attendance that night. However, the response that Humphreys chronicles comes not from Ellmann’s biography or from any other recollection of Joyce’s attitudes. Rather, it is a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, offering a fictional account of Stephen’s reactions to the event. While Joyce may well have drawn upon his own recollections of the evening, Humphreys’ using this fictional account of them as if it represented a biographical fact is akin to a historian turning to War and Peace to teach students about the Battle of Borodino. The gesture simply elides too much.

When Humphreys does turn to reliable sources, she presents her information in an undifferentiated and often undigested form. The description of Martyn’s death, which occupies the last few pages of the book, comes solely from Lady Gregory’s journals, and these lines deal more with Lady Gregory’s impressions than with factual events (pp. 257-258). As with so many other instances of this approach in the biography, this account gave me no clear sense of what Humphreys endeavored to do or convey.

I realize that I am presenting a harsh view of Humphreys’ work, but I find it difficult to comment on the book without raising serious questions relating to methodology. Time and again, one finds examples of Humphreys’ inattention or simple lack of concern. For example, early in chapter eight she discusses the reaction that critics made to the published version of Martyn’s play, The Heather Field, which Gerard Duckworth brought out in January of 1899. However, to illustrate her point she reprints a facsimile of a review that clearly refers to the stage production which did not take place until May of that year (pp. 100-101). The mistake itself is minor, but it raises questions about the level of engagement that Humphreys brings to her subject.

Finally, anyone not familiar with the period and with the lives of individuals like Lady Gregory, George Moore, W.B. Yeats, and others associated with the Irish Literary Revival will find the order of events confusing. Humphreys has a tendency to jump back and forth in time, and, for me at least, she assumed a greater knowledge than I had of these times. Consequently, I found myself moving back and forth between chapters trying to reconstruct a series of events that the author presumed I already knew.

In fairness to Humphreys, I must admit to bouts of impatience as I read her work, and these instances may well have informed some of my judgments. I began reading this book shortly after finishing my grading for the fall term, and I had already a surfeit of poor writing. The carelessness of her prose however, particularly given the general quality of books from the Irish Academic Press, truly surprised me. The most consistent and for me the most irritating problem lay in pronoun usage. Speaking about preparations for Martyn’s play Privilege of Place, Humphreys describes a visit by friends to Martyn’s Galway home: ‘During the summer the MacDonagh brothers, Thomas and John, had been to Tillyra, helping Martyn to tidy it up’ (p. 231). After a few sentences, I realized that it was the play and not the castle stairs that the brothers were polishing. However, I did not do so without feeling resentment for the time wasted in puzzling out Humphreys meaning. Unfortunately, this, like that of encountering Humphreys’ affinity for slang expressions, was an experience that recurred a dozen times per chapter.

As I noted at the opening, it is not my intention to infuse my response to this work with rancor. However, I cannot deny feeling strongly that this is a book that should not have been published. I came to it with a very limited knowledge of Edward Martyn and of his role in literary events in Ireland. Because of my mistrust of what I have read in this book, I am now less sure what I know about the man.

· Michael Patrick Gillespie is Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University and a Past President of the American Conference on Irish Studies.

· For a response to this by Madeleine Humphreys, click

VISUAL ARTS

Flake White

Georges-Paul Collet: Jacques-Emile Blanche, Le peintre-écrivain, biographie, Éditions Bartillat, 2006, 567 pages, 10 illustrations in black and white, 33 illustrations in colour.

Review by Chantal Beauvalot. Translated from the French by D.C. Rose. The original can be found in Rue des beaux Arts no. 7. The translation has been approved by Madame Beauvalot.

For some decades now, Georges-Paul Collet has followed public interest in the corpus of paintings and the diverse writings of Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), who has handed down to us memoirs, novels and an impressive correspondence with the great names of the world of art.

This has led Georges-Paul Collet to study the relations of the painter/correspondent with George Moore, Virginia Woolf, Cocteau, Gide, Max Jacob, the Halévy family, François Mauriac, Proust, Paul Valéry and Maurice Denis. Now, having perfected his knowledge of the man to whom he gives the appropriate name ‘painter-writer’, he has published with Éditions Bartillat 92006), a strongly documented biography which will serve as the foundation for future studies of this artist.

In the efflorescence of this work, which leans on both published and unpublished sources concerning the painter, we realise the importance of this son of the famous Parisian psychiatrist, from the comfortably off bourgeoisie, very much with the entrée in Society, polished, cultured, anglophile, came to have, notably for all interested in the cultural exchanges between France and Great Britain. The great talent is made plain of this portrait painter whose sitters included people as well-known to-day as Bergson, Cocteau, Colette, Crevel, Gide, Henry James, James Joyce, Mauriac, Anna de Noailles. Proust, Raymond Radiguet, Rodin, Stravinsky…to list only a few taken at random.

One finds here also a man with a complex character, tortured and feeble, as much with those at a distance as in the bosom of his own family, when, after his marriage (we are twice told that this was unconsummated) he oddly supported the presence and the mischief-making of his two sisters-in-law], jealous of his wife Rose. Along with this was the lack of self-confidence in this creative man who never stopped working, open to the innovations and paradoxes of his era, as passionate about writing as about painting, who might also have been a musicologist. In short, here was a many-sided individual.

For those who are looking for more details concerning Blanche and Oscar Wilde, the references are only sketchy. Completely ignored, for example, is the portrait Sir Coleridge Kennard assis sur un sofa fleuri which Blanche executed in 1904, and which, through discretion and by reason of its resemblance to the hero of Wilde, was retitled Portrait de Dorian Gray by the editor of the catalogue of the exhibition of the artist’s work as the Galerie Charpentier, in Paris in 1924. On the other hand, M. Collet mentions that in his quasi-autobiographical novel Aymeris, the ‘painter-writer’ says that he was introduced to Whistler at the time of a reception in honour of his lecture on Wilde. He mentions the text of Propos by the painter, devoted to the Irish writer, the visit of John Rothenstein to Dieppe (where Blanche showed the critic the café where Beardsley, Conder, Sickert and Wilde used to congregate), the jealousy of Gide in connection with his colleague from across the Channel, the insolence of Blanche comparable with that of Wilde himself. He invokes equally the very recherché style of the letters sent by the latter to Blanche. The meeting of the two protagonists in 1899 is made the occasion for the biographer to transcribe an extract from Dates where Blanche recognises the excellence of the story-teller, the power of his mind at odds with his dandy’s physique. It is without question this quotation that rests the most pertinent for our understanding of the relations between the writer and the portrait painter.

That said, it must be admitted that the procession of quotations that the author does not hold back from running systematically in front of us, leaves the reader confused, hardly able make out with precision the unfolding of a particularly rich life and the context of an entire epoch. This repeated process hinders the biographer from any deep analysis of the personality and work of a man whose secrets one would like to penetrate further, of whom one would wish to appraise truly the qualities and defects; and of whom one wants to learn more about his friendships, sympathies and antipathies. Above all, one ought to be able to grasp with more clarity the evolution of the style of an artist who, between his encounters and the influences to which he was subjected (that of Manet not the least), altered the vision of his art and his technique.

If it is evident that one cannot pass over the abundant writings of this ‘painter-writer’ to touch upon this last, it remains necessary to retain a critical distance from them, for, in spite of the sharpness of a number of his judgments, Blanche was not always objective, and his memories, from time to time inaccurate, would have merited some correcting.

But are we right to reproach an author, whose concern is documentation, who, carried along by the extent of his knowledge, has wished to place in the limelight an important figure in the history of the arts, to-day too much overlooked?

· Chantal Beauvalot is Professeur de philosophie honoraire and Docteur en histoire de l'art, currently working on the portrait painter Albert Besnard.

Aubrey Beardsley in Dulwich

Beardsley and his Followers

Review by Linda Zatlin

The recent exhibition at the Dulwich Gallery, London, England, sounded like a perfect antidote to winter. Titled The Age of Enchantment, Beardsley, Dulac and their Followers 1870-1930, the exhibition, which ran from 28 November 2007 through 17 February 2008, parades some of the most beautiful British book illustrations of the forty-year period. Although all too few works by all too few women—Jessie M. King, Annie French, Dorothy Makeig-Jones, and Clarice Cliff—received all too brief recognition, the male artists were an impressive group: in addition to Beardsley and the French-born Dulac, there were illustrations by Laurence Housman, Charles Ricketts, Sidney Sime, Harry Clarke, Arthur Rackham, the Detmold brothers, Alastair, Hungarian-born Willie Pogany, and Danish-born Kay Neilson, as well as designs for the Ballets Russes by Leon Bakst. Drawings and line-block reproductions abound, and the exhibition also included examples of Wedgewood Fairyland Lustre pottery by Dorothy Makeig-Jones, an art furniture cabinet, a wood screen, Beardsley’s work table, and two textiles, one with that recurring late-Victorian image of male bravado, the peacock, which struts across a branch on a swathe of silk, spreading its tail to attract the attention of a peahen standing on the ground. (The inclusion of these objects makes one wonder what principle underlay the omission of panels, furniture, and drawings by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and her sister Frances Macdonald McNair, who spoke of Beardsley’s influence as early as autumn 1893.) The main focus, however, was works on paper. From the intricately balanced and carefully designed pen-and-ink drawings by Beardsley, Housman, Ricketts, and Clarke, to the burst of color in the Detmold brothers’ exquisite color etchings and watercolors of animals, birds, and fish, to the sinister trees and strange small figures in Rackham’s in muted watercolors, to the seductive blue-green coloring in Dulac’s watercolors, they beguiled the eye like fine jewels catching the light.

The visitor expects the catalogue by Rodney Engen, the guest curator, to guide her/him through the enchantment of these illustrations and wonders how he will bring together the diverse artists that span the forty years. In time the exhibition extended through several epochs from the dismantling of the Victorian era through the Edwardian period and encompassing as well the years of World War I and its aftermath—reflected in part by the loosening of some sexual restraints, in Alastair's erotic depiction of Manon Lescaut's lover easing her dress below the curve of her buttocks while he hungrily buries his face in her breasts (1928, cat. 131) and Ricketts's lean, naked male bodies in ‘Head of Oedipus’ (1929, cat. 35)—up to the years just before Hitler assumed the position of German Chancellor. Indeed, an exploration of the ways these artists were molded by the available printing techniques, the manner in which they influenced each other, and the reflection of social issues in their work would have fulfilled the promise of enchantment even as it intellectually stimulated the reader.

Sad to say, the catalogue goes in another, intellectually flaccid direction. Its essence appears in the wall texts at the beginning of each room. The premise of the exhibition seems to be (more on the premise below) that after Beardsley’s death in 1898, ‘decadence,’ code word for ‘deviance’ and ‘depravity,’ disappears from English illustration and the illustrated book becomes a world of enchantment (pp. 9-15). Having set up Beardsley as a scapegoat, to support his point Engen discusses his work in broad terms and asserts as fact misleading or downright incorrect ideas. For example, he perceives Beardsley’s ‘delicate, provocative pen drawings’ as the reason Ricketts, Housman, Clarke, and Sime ‘initially embraced Beardsley’s credo of decadence, sensuality and the fantastical’ (p. 10). Not only do most artists grow beyond their early influences, but Housman and Ricketts were already publishing when Beardsley came to prominence; Jane Barlow’s The End of Elfintown with Housman’s illustrations appeared in 1894, Ricketts’s Daphnis and Chloe in 1893. In the case of Ricketts, who also published a magazine, the Dial, long before Beardsley helped to found and became art editor of the Yellow Book, Engen further errs about who influenced whom (p. 10). Omitting dates, after mentioning Beardsley’s editorship of the Yellow Book and his debut in the Studio (in that incorrect order), Engen says ‘Charles Ricketts started his own illustrated magazine,’ implying that Ricketts, incorrectly termed here ‘Beardsley’s rival’ (p. 10), imitated the younger artist. Furthermore, Engen asserts that ‘Beardsley pursued just one aspect [of the book illustration field]—pen and ink draughtsmanship—Ricketts insisted upon book design as an integral part of an illustrator’s role’ (p. 19). This statement distorts the facts. Beardsley, as we know from four biographies and three editions of his letters, had no funds, as did Ricketts, to publish his own magazine; he was therefore dependant upon publishers for the duration of his six-year professional career, tragically cut short when he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five and one-half years. That he believed in the artist’s control over book production containing his work is shown in a gleeful letter, written between 1893 and 1895, to E. J. Marshall, Headmaster of Brighton Grammar School, enthusing in part over a contract he had just signed for a new book ‘entirely my own…. I shall at last be able to do myself complete justice’ (Philips, London, 12 March 1981, lot 119) and a later, brooding letter to Smithers, his publisher from 1896, about a planned book, ‘Size of page and sort of paper and such questions are beginning to worry me dreadfully…. Some definite scheme should be settled on first’ (Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, 1970, p. 209).

Contradictions abounded; two examples will suffice, the first concerning the focus of the exhibition, the second the sexual content of later English drawings. On the first page of the catalogue Engen states what seems to be the premise of his show: ‘upon the Queen’s death, a new and more adventurous spirit slowly emerged in the arts and crafts of Britain.’ Or is the focus his comment on page 9: ‘Tempered by the horrors of World War One…. The nation yearned for escapist fantasy.’ Or is it that Beardsley’s ‘drawings came to represent the height of English decadence’ (a term used without definition or reference to its meaning in art) and ‘his career held such [a] powerful sway over his contemporaries’ (p. 10). Which is the focus? Gauging from the introduction, Engen seems to base the exhibition on each statement at different points in the essay. Secondly, that there was no death of deviance after Beardsley’s death is laid bare in the sexually provocative and revealing work by Alastair and Housman, eye-catching examples of which are included in the exhibition. As the nascent field of sexual psychology examined human sexuality at the turn of the century, art, sometimes nudging the perimeter of pornography, kept pace.

Errors in fact about Beardsley abound. A number are too important to be ignored. The Aubrey Beardsley-Oscar Wilde relationship, as I discuss in an article recently reproduced in THE OSCHOLARS Library, was both too vexed and the details too little known for it to be dismissed with the unfounded comment that Beardsley ‘later found Wilde repellant’ (p. 12). In addition to the letter in the 1970 edition of Beardsley’s letters, in which he tells Wilde’s devoted friend Ada Leverson that he is writing to Wilde and refers to him as ‘poor dear old thing’ (Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, p. 82), I have recently found an unpublished letter in which Beardsley describes himself as ‘more affected [by Wilde’s imprisonment] than I know.’

As we learned ten years ago from Matthew Sturgis’s biography, Beardsley was not ‘wholly self-taught’ (p. 12); he attended the Westminster Art School under the tutelage of Fred Brown for one and one-half years (Aubrey Beardsley, 1998, pp. 82-6). About Beardsley’s technique, Engen refers to his black blot method ‘in which he would drop an inkblot onto the paper and move it about, then develop a plausible composition incorporating the element of chance’ (p. 13). This statement raises several issues. First of all, anyone who has looked at his drawings knows how little the element of chance occurs in his work. Meticulous planning can be seen in the penciled under- drawing, the placement on the page, the perfect balance. Secondly, although attributing the comment to Robert Ross’s 1909 book on Beardsley’s art, Engen repeats W. B. Yeats’s 1926 canard on Beardsley’s ‘black blot’ technique to the effect that the artist ‘would drop an inkblot onto the paper and move it about’ (p. 13). Writing over thirty years after the fact, Yeats got it wrong. Engen could have quoted Beardsley in full from the letter to A. W. King in which he writes of his ‘entirely new method of drawing: Fantastic impressions treated in the finest possible outline with patches of “black blot”’ (Letters of Aubrey Beardsley 1970, p. 37). It is clear from this comment, as it is from looking at the drawings, that the outline came first and the black was infill. Moreover, he erroneously divides Beardsley’s ‘experiment[s] with large areas of black ink’ and the black blot method into two separate techniques. Assuredly, many well known works by Beardsley use ‘large areas of black ink,’ which may be the origin of his ‘black blot’ comment; however, as six of his drawings in the exhibition reveal, he frequently made pure line drawings. Having studied his work for over two decades, I can attest to the presence in many of them, even those with massed blacks, of penciled under-drawing, often ignored, sometimes changed or partially erased, but evident. Engen seems to assume that the ‘black blot’ comment seriously reflects the manner in which Beardsley worked; it is, however, merely an example of self-mocking humor.

About the subjects of his work are at least three glaring inaccuracies: Beardsley did not ‘transpose’ into his drawings the ‘bizarre, which he found in the period’s grotesquely illustrated diagrams in contemporary medical textbooks’ (p. 13). Nineteenth-century medical textbooks were no more ‘grotesquely illustrated’ than those that are contemporary with us. An illustration of a fetus in a medical text in his surgeon-general grandfather’s library may have sparked Beardsley’s fœtus figure, or it may have been influenced by his sister Mabel’s abortion. Moreover, ‘Enter Herodias’ was not ‘dropped’ from Salome (p. 13). Forced to make a change by the frightened Lane, who was ever worried about public opinion, Beardsley altered the drawing by scraping off the genitals of one figure and replacing them with a noticeable fig leaf; in this state, it was published in the 1894 edition. And the verse he penned about the incident appears on a proof (now at Princeton University) not the original (now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Another major error relates to his treatment of subject matter. Through sly adjectival innuendo, the essay that opens this catalogue allies itself with 1890s slander by suggesting that his work is prurient. For example, Beardsley’s work includes no ‘courting couples drawn in compromising positions’ (p. 13). Indeed, in his almost 1,100 drawings only one figure touches another—and not in a compromising manner.

The last group of spurious allegations relate to Beardsley’s career. Engen avers that after Wilde’s sentencing ‘Beardsley was removed from the Yellow Book because of his unsavoury associations’ (p. 14). We not told who these associations were—Wilde perhaps, but who else? The fact is that the publisher John Lane acted out of 1. fear that he would be named at Wilde’s trial as having introduced Wilde to Edward Shelley, a young man Wilde had met at Lane’s office and who would be a witness against Wilde at his trial (Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, 2000, pp. 520, 590), and 2. being urged by a few prudish, and probably jealous, contributors. While Lane was in New York opening an office of the Bodley Head, he allowed Beardsley to be fired by his manager, Frederic Chapman, whom Lane had left in charge (Zatlin, ‘Aubrey Beardsley, John Lane, The Yellow Book, and Archival Material’ in The Death of Pierrot; A Beardsley Miscellany, 1998, pp. 59-70). That the Savoy survived ‘a mere eight issues until it was banned by the ever-vigilant guardian of morals, W. H. Smith’ (p. 14) is similarly untrue; W. H. Smith may have harmed initial sales by refusing to carry the magazine, but Smithers’s lack of cash flow combined with Beardsley’s burgeoning tuberculosis and consequent inability to work consistently ultimately killed the magazine. About his drawings for Lysistrata Engen says ‘That same year [1896] his shocking masterpiece of classical eroticism appeared … with its drawings of inflated phalluses and overt sexuality’ (p. 14). Any student of the 1890s, however, knows that Smithers did not publish his edition of the play for the general public. He offered it by private subscription, purchased in advance by individuals who would doubtless not have been shocked. Indeed, the treatment of the subject matter—all but one drawing relates to specific scenes in the play—is bawdy, inspiring laughter, not prurient gasps. The erroneous contentions make Beardsley appear on the one hand to be only superficially important in the art world and on the other hand to be a satanic power. Of course he was neither. He was, however, a great artist, a fact the essay refuses to grant.

There is a disjunction in the catalogue between the essays in the first part and the exhibitions sections in the second, markedly in the lack of cohesion about the premise of the exhibition and Beardsley’s influence. Some of his own influences are apparent in ‘The Lure of the Far East’ and ‘The Aesthetic Peacock.’ He is the focus in ‘The Age of Decadence,’ containing eleven works by him, seven of which are not originals despite the presence of many in London, all easily available. While all are striking examples of the stylistic range and complexity of his work, neither originals nor reproductions exhibit the ‘deviance’ implied by the term decadent; the section title and the drawings in that section do not correspond. In the following and fourth section ‘Exquisite and Precious Tales,’ as in the succeeding eight sections, one reads in vain to find a discussion of Beardsley’s influence. ‘In the Gothic Shadow of Beardsley’ shows examples of his allusions to the Gothic taken to the extreme, as in Harry Clarke’s simpering puppet-like figures in illustrations for The Rape of the Lock and the truly frightening drawings for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which Engen hyperbolically describes as ‘transform[ing] Beardsley’s high Gothic line into new depths of depravity’ (p. 82). ‘Fairyland, Fantasy’ and ‘The Glasgow School Artists’ exhibit the continuation of the Victorian cult of the medieval. These drawings reveal the profuse influence of Beardsley’s techniques and style, including dots, swags of flowers, attenuated ladies, swirling lines—all of which make one long for a proper discussion of the way Beardsley influenced his supposed disciples, although from this point references to the artist that the twentieth-century German artist Marcus Behmer called ‘holy Beardsley’ largely disappear. In the section ‘Fairyland Fantasy ‘ one expects to see a discussion of color printing but it is mentioned only in passing although arresting examples of this striking new technique comprise the following five sections, ‘The Glasgow School Artists,’ ‘The Age of Enchantment,’ ‘The Enchantment of Nature,’ ‘International Enchantment,’ ‘The Fantastic Ballets Russes.’ In the last named, Engen ignores Léon Bakst’s adoration of Beardsley, visible in his pen and ink drawings as well as his designs for sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. In fact, he draws no parallels between Beardsley and the applied arts in the final two sections, ‘Enchantment at Home’ and ‘The Lure of Exotic Empire,’ as if acknowledging that these sections are tacked on—as much as the early, faulty Beardsley section is tacked on. In truth this exhibition is a smaller version—albeit containing a bit more variety and the exaggerated thesis about Beardsley—of Engen’s 1997-98 exhibition in Japan, Beautiful Decadence. Perhaps if Engen were not living in Saba, Netherlands Antilles, he would have been able to check facts lying behind arguments that seem cobbled together, although he refused to correct a number of errors caught by the critic who read the catalogue for a preview piece and then notified the Dulwich Gallery.

The exhibition was hung well, but some wall texts did not correlate with the Handlist and did not refer to the actual works (for example, nos. 44-48), bewildering the viewer. Furthermore, the wall texts were placed too low for an adult to see easily; one spent half of one’s viewing time crouching to read texts that might be mounted next to the works for the viewer’s ease. In addition, the Handlist is divided into nine sections, the catalogue into thirteen, confusing at least this viewer-reader. Nonetheless, even if the text of the catalogue erred too frequently and steers the viewer-reader towards untruths, the works themselves were sumptuous and should have lead the viewer to explore additional examples in other books illustrated by the artists in the show.

· Linda Gertner Zatlin is Professor in the Department of English, Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia.

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[1] Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 180; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.

[2] Lyn Di Iorio Sandín, ‘The Latino Scapegoat: Knowledge through Death in Short Stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz,’ in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism, ed. Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–19 and 26–33; hereafter cited in parentheses in the text.

[3] See Franz Fanon, Peau noire, masque blancs. English: Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).

[4] Nelly Richard, ‘Cultural Peripheries: Latin America and Postmodernist De-centering,’ in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley, José Oviedo, and Michael Aronna (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 217–22.