THE OSCHOLARS
___________
Vol. IV
No. 3
issue no 34: March 2007
And I? May I Say
Nothing
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In this issue we publish a response by Talia Schaffer to Grace Brockington’s review of her Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle ; and, by kind permission, the abstract of a paper on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Ellen Scheible, given at the 2007 American Conference for Irish Studies. We thank Maureen O’Connor for drawing this to our attention.
I. Talia Schaffer
Grace Brockington’s review of Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle is based on a view of the fin de siècle I wholeheartedly applaud: it was a big, interesting, messy period with no closely defined chronological boundaries, with an internationalist perspective, and with lots of movements that bear examination. Like her, I think that no printed book could do justice to this period; a web archive is a grand idea, and I too wish that Literature and Culture could have had many more readings (indeed, it originally did; it took years of painful cuts to reduce it to its current size). But I wish that her critique had emerged from an equally coherent and accurate paradigm. While Brockington’s view of the fin de siècle is admirably capacious, her view of what a reader should do is oddly blinkered, and occasionally contradictory.
First, she is quite right that there have been other anthologies covering aspects of fin de siècle thought. Ledger and Luckhurst’s The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880-1900 and Elleke Boehmer’s Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918 are exemplary collections. However, I wish that Brockington had read beyond the first line of the preface. In her irritation at my claim that it is ‘the first reader to make the fascinating texts of the period from 1880 to 1910 available for classroom use’ (xv), she seems to have missed the fact that four paragraphs later I recommend the anthologies she mentions plus many others she doesn’t, explaining that these texts ‘have taught me what a good anthology should look like’ (xxvi).
However, since Brockington focuses on that first line, let me explain what I meant by saying that Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle is ‘the first reader...for classroom use.’ Perhaps I should have specified that it is the first reader for undergraduate English classes. Ledger and Luckhurst’s book is, as the title points out, a cultural history. It contains no literature (as literature is traditionally defined), and hardly even any writing about literature. It therefore does not work for English classes, although it is invaluable for research purposes. Jay and Neve’s 1900 has what Brockington accurately calls a ‘scattergraph approach,’ and while ‘its very looseness’ may indeed ‘make allowance for historical inconsistencies,’ it is no way to run a course. In a bewilderingly wide range of chronologies and nationalities, Jay and Neve make some eccentric choices that bear no relation to what literary scholars work on. Wilde barely appears. There is no section on aestheticism. The New Woman section does not contain a single female author. Thus I respectfully beg to differ with Brockington. My book’s ‘thematic range’ is not ‘similar to that found in Jay and Neve (1999) and Ledger and Luckhurst (2000).’ Worthy as these books are, they do not cover aestheticism or New Women or canonical literature adequately, or in some cases, at all.
Literature and Culture really is the first book of which I am aware that combines literary texts and cultural information in a way that is accessible and appropriate for undergraduate English courses, and, believe me, as someone who has taught courses on turn-of-the-century literature and culture every semester for ten years, I have tried plenty of anthologies. I decided to compile Literature and Culture out of sheer frustration at the lack of viable teaching tools. Had something been out there, it would have saved me a lot of work. If she is really recommending these books instead of mine, I don’t think Brockington can have seriously thought about the difficulties of trying to teach Wilde, Wells, Hardy, Houseman, Grand, Caird, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Levy, and Yeats.
Brockington also seems to have a rather murky understanding of what an anthology should do in the first place. She critiques Literature and Culture’s ‘Mind and Body’ section as too ‘baggy.’ Yet that section is the same length as the others. If it is too baggy, one would presume it should be cut – yet instead, Brockington calls for the inclusion of more material over a wider stretch of time, and recommends two anthologies that have even more material on ‘Mind and Body’ than mine does.
Nor is Brockington quite clear on the audience of an anthology. While she points out that it is designed for ‘student readership’ she nonetheless suggests replacing it with a ‘web archive’ (which would be awfully hard to bring to class on Wednesdays). Perhaps the oddest objection is that this volume ought to accommodate the rising sense of internationalism before World War I. This is not a topic for which there is a lot of demand, from either students or teachers, which would have made it very hard to justify its inclusion. While I’m sympathetic to Brockington’s desire to see her own area of research represented, I’m afraid that is not the function of a course reader. (If it is any consolation, my own pet project, the author Lucas Malet, is not in the book either, and for the same reason; it would not serve the majority of the readers.) A course reader is a modest and pragmatic teaching tool; it aims to organize the selections in ways that might suggest interesting pedagogical juxtapositions while accommodating instructors’ needs for often-taught texts, and it should ideally place the users’ consensus views of the period above the editor’s possibly idiosyncratic personal beliefs. While a course reader should be informed by new directions in scholarship, it should not be the venue for presenting them.
The fact is that we who teach the 1890s, and our students who study it, deserve a book that makes a good-faith attempt to give a wide range of documents on multiple topics. Students should be able to read (and we should be able to teach) Oscar Wilde and Boer War reports and Galton’s eugenics and Alice Meynell, in one course, hopefully from one book. We have not previously had that chance. I am perhaps more aware than anyone else of how much is lacking and problematic about Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. But imperfect and rudimentary as it is, it is a first step. Brockington can legitimately critique many aspects of this book, but she cannot fairly say that the need that this reader satisfies could be fufilled elsewhere.
Talia Schaffer
Queens College and the Graduate Center CUNY
II. Ellen Schieble
The Gothic Sublime in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley recounts a dream-like vision she had that ultimately led to the construction of the novel. In her retelling of the vision, she intertwines discourses of science and art to describe the uncanny feeling evoked when the accepted limits of humanity’s creative powers are stretched beyond human control to a level more characteristic of the supernatural. In Shelley’s words, ‘the successive images that arose in [her] mind’ carried ‘a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie’ (Smith 24). Her memory of the ‘acute mental vision’ she used to conjure the story of Frankenstein emphasizes the fear and horror that ensue when any human creator, through the uncanniness of his or her creation, seemingly mirrors the omniscient powers of an almighty being. She describes the vision through which the novel was created as follows:
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. (Smith 24)
The fear that Shelley so provocatively illustrates in this passage is not only the fear of the reanimation of the dead that Freud attributes to the intellectual uncertainty of uncanny experiences, but also the fear that an artistic or scientific creation could confront the artist or scientist. The ‘speculative eyes’ of the corpse-like monster that stare at the recently awakened creator demand acknowledgment, explanation, and, ultimately, an admission of responsibility. Shelley is writing a half century before Walter Pater coins the phrase ‘art for it’s own sake’ and her story of Frankenstein—of the reanimation of humanity at the hands of the scientist turned artist—refuses to champion the process of art over the product of creation. Shelley suggests that what art produces maintains power in its ability to confront both the spectator and the artist, and the power of confrontation reveals a relentless subjectivity present in the monstrous creations of a British society that is driven by its belief in both scientific experimentation and imperial destiny.
It is my contention that in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde empowers through confrontation first Dorian, who becomes the aesthetic creation of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, then the painting of Dorian that exchanges places with him as a work of art, and, finally, the character of James Vane, whose accusations against and climactic encounter with Dorian lead to Dorian’s eventual demise. Each confrontation is a moment of gothic doubling that borders on destruction, when the individual self of either a character or the painting is opposed and finally threatened by the ‘other’ with which it comes face to face. I read this moment of gothic confrontation as sublime because of its uncanny conjuring of recognitions, both familiar and unfamiliar, that threaten to erase or absorb the original self—the self that is first the artist in the text, then the art itself, and finally the decadent, bourgeois culture of the London elite. Through an identification with an ‘other’ who has the power to consume the self, the characters of Wilde’s novel recognize both their own gothic tendencies and a subjectivity that exists outside of themselves.
For many characters, the recognition of the power of the other proves fatal. Dorian, the painting, and James Vane—along with other characters in the text, such as Sibyl Vane and the aristocratic, but ignorant, attendees of various salons—are all ‘creations’ or ‘products’ of a British sensibility that Wilde found both disturbing and dangerous. John Paul Riquelme acknowledges this aspect of Wilde’s critique, underscoring how Wilde’s Irishness played a part in his critical perspective: ‘In a typically modern transformation of gothic narrative, the threat in Wilde’s novel comes from within culture and within British society, not from foreigners who can be treated as savages. As an Irish writer, Wilde would have been particularly aware of the distinctions the British tended to draw between themselves and ostensibly less civilized racial and national groups who might in some way pose a crude threat, Calibanlike, to British aspirations and identity’ (499). The threat posed in Wilde’s novel takes the form of various gothic ‘creations’ or projections of otherness and each maintain a rigorous subjectivity in the face of their stereotypically British counterparts. The ‘others’ participate in what Maureen O’Connor terms Wilde’s ‘radical decentering of the self,’ where ‘the only identification possible is a necessarily impossible one with the lost and fragmented’ (456). In my reading, it is exactly this type of impossible identification that characterizes the threat of the sublime as that which carries the power to overwhelm, confuse, and ultimately resist the dominant discourses of creation within the narrative.
Ellen Scheible
Stonehill College
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