Victorian Poets

A Critical Reader

Valentine Cunningham

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780631199144, 9780631199137
• eBook ISBN: 9781118610794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader features a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of Victorian-era poetry from the 1830s to the 1890s.

• Presents key criticism on Victorian poetry
• Features contributions from a variety of scholars in the field
• Illustrates the full range of critical approaches to the Victorian poets, including attention to texts, words, forms, modes, and sub-genres
• Offers fresh reinterpretations, many driven by contemporary ideological interests, including gender questions, selfhood, and body issues

1

The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry

Gerhard Joseph

In recent French theory, the term en abîme describes any fragment of a text that reproduces in small the structure of the text as a whole. Introduced by André Gide in a passage of his Journal in 1893, the phrase, which he intended as a characterization of his own reduplicative techniques, had as its origin an ancient visual device – that of the miniature heraldic shield enclosed within another shield whose shape and inner divisions it repeats exactly. There had, to be sure, been earlier examples of internal mirror effects in painting and literature – Gide cites the literary instances of Hamlet, Wilhelm Meister, and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”¹ But in order to distinguish his own strategies from those of simple doubling, he felt the need to fashion a new critical term – “en abîme” – to indicate the idea of multiple replication. From Gide’s coinage in the Notebooks and exemplary practice in Narcisse, La Tentative, and Les Faux- Monnayeurs, it is but a short step to the mise en abîme of post-Saussurean, post-structuralist theory, where we are invited to follow, in Jacques Derrida’s words, “a book in the book, an origin in the origin, a center in the center”² beyond the inmost bound of human thought. In short, the mise en abîme generated by Derrida’s elaboration of bottomless differance uncovers a frame within a frame in endless replication – what one thinks of in more homely terms as the Dutch-Cleanser, Quaker-Oats or Morton-Salt effects of commercial packaging.

It is no accident that the concept was given its initial literary definition in the nineteenth century. In his famous characterization of “the Piranesi effect,” for instance, Thomas De Quincey recalls the play within a play in Hamlet and compares this to a room on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room, on whose wall is a picture of that room . . ., and concludes that “we might imagine this descent into a life below a life going on ad infinitum” into “abysses that swallow . . . up abysses.”³ And Alfred Tennyson conveys to perfection what Gide meant by en abîme in the very context of Gide’s heraldic etymology: Lancelot’s shield in “The Lady of Shalott” with its image of a knight forever kneeling to his lady gives us in microcosm the larger structure of desire in the poem. That is, whatever its history in French theory and literature, the device, or something very much like it, also accentuated itself in English Victorian poetry in the auditory guise of the echo and the visual one of the mirror, sometimes in tandem. It demonstrated thereby the nineteenth-century English sources – Arnold’s tortured and unending “dialogue of the mind with itself” – of modernist reflexiveness.

The formal expression of man’s cognitive self-enclosure for the period is the dramatic monologue, with its limited aperture of the single personality’s straitened vista upon the world.⁴ The very narrowness of the “single window” in the monologue, however, makes for a compensatorily rich depth; the outer frame can compose a wildly proliferative inner cosmos, the receding strata of voices, for instance, within Robert Browning’s poems. As John Hollander suggests in his exhaustive study of the figure of echo in English literature, dramatic form is an implicit echo chamber whenever a speaker is made to echo a prior voice,⁵ the typical situation in Browning’s monologues. In the simplest and most accessible of the monologues, the speaker’s outer voice merely brackets a single interlocutory one – the Duke’s voice, say, in “My Last Duchess” containing the implied answers of the Count’s envoy. But more often that framing impulse leads Browning to the more dazzling rhetorical acrobatics which attract his sophistical protagonists, those “wheel within a wheel” replications their perverse, complex natures require, as his Bishop Blougram insists.⁶ At his most convoluted (and increasingly in the later monologues), Browning approaches the frame within-a-frame recessiveness that Erving Goffman has anatomized in Frame Analysis, his breakdown of social intercourse at its labyrinthine extreme where only the most patient of listeners can follow.⁷

While others may have their own favorite Browning echo chamber, my candidate for his most recursive Chinese-box instance – or at any rate the one easiest to exfoliate in brief as a paradigm for auditory regressiveness – is “Dîs Aliter Visum; or Le Byron de Nos Jours.” In this maddening tour de force, Browning’s Last Year at Marienbad, a woman addresses a famous French poet who out of timidity and a passion for respectability had refused to seize the moment of love with her ten years earlier. Then, they had met by a cliff brow at the seaside; now, she reminisces to him at a windowseat in an enclosed room. As quotation marks envelop quotation marks, point of view becomes ever more recessively entangled until, at the echolalial center of the poem, the woman is imagining what her lover would have imagined himself saying in reply to the speech (sts. xv–xvii) which he had just imagined her making had they indeed decided, as they had not, to marry! And the challenge to the audience becomes even more forbidding in such late monologues as Balaustion’s Adventure, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country; or Turf and Towers, or Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. Perhaps we have not yet reached, even in the most impenetrable of such later mazes, the systematic vocal dislocations of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute or the deepset games of R. D. Laing’s Knots. Arguably we are not quite at the seventh remove from the outer voice (“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “in print) where John Barth locates the innermost voice of his “menelaiad,” one of the auditory experiments in Lost in the Funhouse. But Browning is surely moving in such directions, and the pleasurable strain we experience in disentangling the voices of his intricate echo chambers prepares us for the late games of modernist theory and practice, for an epistemological vertigo that stages itself rhetorically as auditory confusion.

The original sound that the Victorian poet’s voice projects into the world is not of course inevitably indecipherable, or so the situations in some of Tennyson’s poetry assure us. In a brief, early Shelleyan phase, unmediated sound fills the soul of the Tennysonian bard upon the height (as in, say, “Timbuctoo” or “Armageddon”), from which remove he is able to “shake the world” with prophecy. The sound of the Dying Swan, one of Tennyson’s recurring images of the poet’s prophetic voice,⁸ flows forth into the world with such a bracing force, flooding an otherwise desolate wasteland with “eddying song.” But very quickly Tennyson’s artist figures suffer an “Icarian fall”⁹ from a semidivine to a human condition. As a result, prophecy now floats down from the heights upon a melodic stream to be received by such fallen or “cursed” maidens as Claribel, Mariana, and the Lady of Shalott – artist figures immured within a garden of the mind who try in their turn to reach an audience or a single auditor with their voices. As song flows out of the aesthetic garden, the important question Tennyson considers is how or even whether the bard’s inspired flow will be received by listeners in the cities of man. Tennyson conceives of a variety of answers to that question in the course of his career from the perspective both of the artist and of the audience, but for the sake of brevity, I will abstract first the positive and then the negative force of his notion of sound, especially of reverberative sound – i.e., the echo.

One of the critical truisms about Tennyson is that he is the poet of the remote in time and space, a poet of the “far, far away” – to echo one of his favorite echoing phrases. “It is the distance,” he maintained to his friend James Knowles late in life, “that charms me in the landscape, the picture and the past, and not the immediate to-day in which I move.”¹⁰ If that recessional quality characterizes his visual sense, it informs his sense of sound as well. Sound like sight is most evocative when it is experienced at a “far, far” remove from the original source, and the appeal of echo over simple sound is that the former gives the impression of having traveled great distances, of having bounced off various surfaces on the way to the auditor and of having been rendered numinous in the process. Music, as it moves from the bugle in the lyric “The splendour falls on castle walls” (from The Princess), grows “thinner” and “clearer” the further it travels, the greater the number of wild echoes it achieves. That is, the artist’s sound may dissipate at its source – it is ever “dying, dying, dying.” But the very repetition of the word, like the repetition of “far” in “Far Far-Away” or “break” in “Break, break, break”¹¹ denies that death since it implies an endless life in an answering nature and in the ears of distant auditors:

O love, they [the echoes] die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.

(ll. 13–16 of “The splendour falls on castle walls”)

To the extent that the echo is nature’s correspondent instrument to the impulse of human speech and sound, theoretically unto infinity, it implies the emergence of sound’s life out of sound’s death – not merely life dying out but also life rolling from soul to soul forward to the starry track. Of the several other instances of a death-and-rebirth pattern one might educe to illustrate Tennyson’s treatment of the answering echo, perhaps the most haunting occurs at the conclusion of the Idylls of the King. There, the dying wail of the three queens as they escort Arthur toward the distant great deep is answered by a sound from that deep:

Then from the dawn it seemed there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

(“The Passing of Arthur,” ll. 457–461)

But the Tennysonian echo is not always so expressive of life rolling to and from the limit of the world, especially in works where the poet-figure does not have much of an impact upon or is misunderstood by his – or rather “her” – audience (since, as Lionel Stevenson demonstrated in a Jungian analysis of the matter, Tennyson in his early poetry habitually rendered himself as an “anima’’ figure in the guise of isolated maidens¹²). Perhaps the situation in “The Lady of Shalott” may illustrate the auditory gap as well as any of the early poems (“Anacaona,” “Claribel,” “The Kraken,” “Oenone” or “The Hesperides”) that one might have chosen. In the 1832 version of the poem, a reaper, arguably representing the audience of the Lady’s art, hears the song she sings in her tower:

Underneath the bearded barley,
The reaper, reaping late and early,
Hears her ever chanting cheerly,
Like an angel, singing clearly,
O’er the stream of Camelot.
(ll. 28–32)

By the time of Tennyson’s 1842 revision, the Lady’s “clear” song has been transformed into something more mysterious:

Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to towered Camelot.
(ll. 28–32)

While the single reaper of the first version hears the song directly, the several reapers of the second encounter it as a reverberation off the river, to which the epithet “clear” has now been shifted. It is tempting to read something thematic into this change partly for reasons of interpretive originality: to m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Echo and the Mirror en abîme in Victorian Poetry
• 2 The Mirror’s Secret
• 3 Browning’s Anxious Gaze
• 4 The Pragmatics of Silence, and the Figuration of the Reader in Browning’s Dramatic Monologues
• 5 Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric
• 6 Matthew Arnold’s Gipsies
• 7 A New Radical Aesthetic
• 8 Alienated Majesty
• 9 Fact and Tact
• 10 ‘A Thousand Times I’d be a Factory Girl’
• 11 ‘The fruitful feud of hers and his’
• 12 ‘Eat me, drink me, love me’
• 13 Browning’s Corpses
• 14 A E Housman and ‘the colour of his hair’
• 15 Tennyson’s ‘Little Hamlet’
• 16 The Disappointment of Christina G Rossetti
• 17 Stirring ‘a Dust of Figures’
• 18 ‘Love, let us be true to one another’
• 19 ‘Poets and lovers evermore’
• 20 Swinburne at Work
• 21 Naming and Not Naming
• Index