Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness, and Late-Victorian Culture

Jill R. Ehnenn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351871242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The first full-length study to focus exclusively on nineteenth-century British women while examining queer authorship and culture, Jill R. Ehnenn's book is a timely interrogation into the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships. For Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and 'Kit' Anstruther-Thomson; Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Martin); Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell; and Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the couple who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Michael Field', collaborative life and work functioned strategically, as sites of discursive resistance that critique Victorian culture in ways that would be characterized today as feminist, lesbian, and queer. Ehnenn's project shows that collaborative texts from such diverse genres as poetry, fiction, drama, the essay, and autobiography negotiate many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity, industrial capitalism and alienated labor, and heterosexism. In so doing, these jointly authored texts employ a transgressive aesthetic and invoke the potentials of female spectatorship, refusals of representation, and the rewriting of history. Ehnenn's book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature and culture, women's and gender studies, and collaborative writing.

Chapter 1
The “art and mystery of collaboration”: Authorial Economies, Queer Pleasures

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life; and it ought not to be.

—Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë

Fear… that we would write the unspeakable. For together our fears no longer hold us back.

—Angela Estes and Kathleen Lant.

Following the mid nineteenth-century collaboration of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, by the turn of the century there was a significant increase in collaborative writing by men, including the famous partnerships between Andrew Lang and H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne, and Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford. These writings prompted a cluster of periodical articles which sought to explain the “art and mystery of collaboration”¹ by firmly situating coauthorship within existing discourses of productivity, subjectivity, and authorship. The articles juxtapose, albeit problematically, the contradictory ideals of divided labor within modern industry; Cartesian notions of selfhood associated with the Enlightenment subject; and Romantic notions of the Poet as solitary genius. Strikingly, while these nineteenth-century periodical essays cite many lesser known male writers, they fail to mention any of the simultaneously increasing numbers of collaborative enterprises by women.

Of the female coauthors active in the late nineteenth century, Michael Field, Somerville and Ross, and Vernon Lee and Elizabeth Robins and their respective collaborators are exceptionally notable—talented, prolific, yet understudied. In temperament, the individual women could not have been more dissimilar; and the daily writing practices and interpersonal relationships among the writers also varied significantly from couple to couple. Yet as I will show, these literary partnerships and texts, when considered together, share some important characteristics: late-Victorian women’s collaborative lives and texts call attention to themselves as gendered and performative spaces that negotiate contemporary notions of selfhood, authorship, and heteropatriarchy.

This chapter will examine women’s literary partnerships in context of the late-Victorian cultural-economic matrix of issues that sustained the labor, production and circulation of creativity and created texts. In contrast to popular Romantic and Victorian narratives about the nature of “the Author,” labor, and authorial labor, I suggest here that, given the psychological needs and material conditions of late-Victorian women as disenfranchised author-subjects, women’s collaborative authorship provides a unique form of divided labor that empowers, by reducing alienation from both product and language. Personal and published texts of all the coauthors indicate that the unique circumstance of long-term collaborative writing with another woman functioned as a strategic and pleasurable literary mode of creative expression and social commentary. And in particular, my discussion will focus on how representations of women’s collaborative writing processes at this time problematize the ideologies of the writing industry under patriarchy by reconceptualizing authorial labor, economies of production, and literary audience/ marketplace.

Rethinking Authorial Labor though Collaboration

Monstrous Anthills and Solitary Nightingales

Terry Eagleton argues that writing is “an activity inseparable from wider social relations between writers and readers…and largely unintelligible outside of social purposes and conditions in which they are embedded” (206). Similarly, Jeffrey Masten “insists upon relating the material condition and cultural representation of sex/gender and of textual reproduction” (5). In this spirit, let us reconsider the common perception of authorship—the image of the author as solitary genius—as a simple economic equation. The act of writing then becomes an isolated worker (author) converting raw materials (his creative ideas) into a product (the text) which has artistic and monetary exchange value. Following Masten, much of this chapter will evaluate how the material conditions and cultural representation of sex/ gender fit into this equation and, subsequently, its relationship to late nineteenth-century women’s collaborative partnerships; but first, I would like to think about the implications, for collaboration, of the tensions between the cultural representation of authorship and the material conditions of textual reproduction.

The Romantic myth of the author as solitary genius is actually problematized by the history of the publishing industry, which, during the nineteenth century, saw a move from patronage and subscription to generalized commercialism.² If, as eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith observed, industrial economics is characterized by a division of labor that increases production, such division certainly can be seen in the way the printing press, increased specialization, and transportation/distribution of printed material all facilitated the rising book industry. In this light, in the age of industry, authorship could never be a wholly solitary activity.

In fact, it is common for Marxist analyses of nineteenth-century literary history to argue that the myth of solitary genius arose to counter the reality of industrialization. Such arguments suggest that isolationist postures such as those of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and later, Thomas Carlyle, developed as a response to the material experience of alienated labor in an industrial society, where the worker-writer is alienated from the product and from the activity of production; and where the outcome of labor does not belong to the laborer, but becomes the property of someone who is alien to the work itself. For example, for Wordsworth, a solitary and escapist stance against the industrial world is a precondition of the creative writing process. In The Prelude, Wordsworth recounts how the growth of the poetic mind is adversely shaped by city life in London: “thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain / Of a too-busy world” (1850 Prelude, 7.149–150). Even urban leisure offerings seem shallow and false to Wordsworth, compared to the real inspiration and peace he believes comes from solitary communication with nature. For instance, attending a city fair only reinforces the market-centered priorities of city life, with its hyperstimulating sights and sounds: “what a hell / for eyes and ears, what anarchy and din / barbarian and infernal—’tis a dream / Monstrous in colour, motion, shape and sound” (1805 Prelude 7.660–2). Instead, Wordsworth must turn to the memory of life in Nature in order to become a writer in the modern world, as he states in “Tintern Abbey”: “these beauteous forms … oft in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities … [pass] even into my purer mind / With tranquil restoration.” Only when the material distractions of “all this unintelligible world” are set aside, can he achieve a state of poetic inspiration where he can “see into the life of things” (lines 23–29, passim).

In his Sartor Resartus, written in the 1830s, Thomas Carlyle echoes Wordsworth’s Romantic sensibilities as he bemoans the effect of Victorian industry upon the soul: “To me the Universe … was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb;” “In the middle of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary” (936). Eventually, Carlyle’s protest brings him rebirth in the form of a psychological Fire-Baptism; Carlyle still stands alone in his “Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance,” but he no longer fears his chosen isolation and “began to be a Man” (937). Thus, for the Victorian Carlyle, as for Wordsworth writing several decades earlier, the fiction of the creative genius is useful because through it he can remove himself from the alienating environment of modern life.

As historian of copyright law Martha Woodmansee has suggested, given the practices of commercial literature, it is “not clear” that the notion of author as isolated individual ever “coincided closely with the practice of writing” (15). However, after the 1710 Act of Anne regulated procedures by which authors sold books to publishers³ and recognized the author (instead of the bookseller) as holder of the copyright, there grew an increased distinction between reader-consumer and writer-producer which highlighted issues of textual control, creating distinctions between authority and authorship that are important to understanding the ways alienation perpetuates the ideology of the individual author. By Victorian times, although through copyright, the author retained ownership of the text in its abstract sense, with exponentially increasing production and distribution, it was only through the continued stretch of the (Romantic) Imagination and the notion of solitary authorship that writers could combat the increased divide between their creative labor and ownership of the text in all its materiality.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the myth of solitary poetic genius effectively dissimulates not only the role of divided labor in the publication and distribution of texts, but also the role of inspiring, supportive, and/or collaborative forces. For example, although Wordsworth gratefully acknowledges both his sister Dorothy’s “sweet” (1850 Prelude 14.237) and Coleridge’s “kindred” influences (1850 Prelude 14.281), the process of becoming a poet is ultimately a solitary one:

Here must thou be, O Man!

Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;

Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:

No other can divide with thee this work

No secondary hand can intervene

To fashion this ability, ‘tis thine,

The prime and vital principle is thine

In the recesses of thy nature, far

From any reach of outward fellowship

Else is not thine at all. (14.209–219)

Here, the “work” of the poet fuses textual creation and self-creation, textual possession and self-possession. The spirit of Romantic individualism is linked to the creative power of the Poet’s mind, as we see in Wordsworth’s explicit and repetitive rhetoric of self-reflexive possession: the creative power “’tis thine / The prime and vital principle is thine / In the recesses of thy nature.” Furthermore, Wordsworth asserts that attaining “this freedom in himself” is “genuine liberty;” (1850 Prelude 14.131–2); and as it creates both self and world, the poet’s soul straddles the boundaries between man and God: “Such minds are truly from the Deity,” and “.the consciousness / Of Whom they are, habitually infused” raises the soul “From earth to heaven, from human to divine” (1850 Prelude 14.112–119, passim). Clearly, such a goal for the poetic mind, where spiritual and artistic consciousness attain a state where human and divine become one, necessitates a highly individualistic, Cartesian view of subjectivity and agency. Carlyle, too, says, “I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god” (937). Ultimately, then, within the Romantic model, true authorship is necessarily incompatible with a collaborative “Helper” or “second hand.” As Shelley states in A Defence of Poetry (1821), “A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds” (795).

The Art and Mystery of Collaboration

Late nineteenth-century periodical commentary on male literary collaboration employs a paradoxical rhetoric that highlights issues of embattled textual control; it attempts to preserve the aesthetic ideologies of Romantic individualism while simultaneously acknowledging (unlike the solitary myth) modern day professional writing as dividing and alienating labor. In 1890, an article printed in both Longman’s Magazine and the Living Age acknowledges the reality of divided authorial labor by asserting that the first question asked of a collaborative text is “what was the part of each partner in the writing of the book?” (Matthews 167); yet the article goes to great lengths to explain how two writers can (and must) achieve “unity of expression” (Matthews 168). Walter Besant’s discussion two years later in The New Review⁴ similarly privileges those characteristics of art and form associated with Wordsworthian individuality and imagination: “the essence of literary partnership is that the result must appear as if it had been the creation of a single mind and the work of a single pen” (202). These and other examples of late nineteenth-century discourse on literary collaboration can be seen to be firmly entrenched within the problematic space between the practice of divided industrial labor and the lingering ideologies of Romantic Individualism.

For example, discussions of the “best” procedure for (male) collaboration advocate that partner A do some work, which is then fleshed out by partner B; then A edits, then B (Matthews 173). This method clearly maintains the solitary position of each partner as an individual thinker and writer: the two authors exist as individually functioning parts of an authorial machine which shuttles the texts back and forth between loci to which only one writer has access at a time. Both articles, written by men who worked collaboratively themselves, agree that the goal of production is to imitate the style of a singularly authored text: “We must hear—or think we hear—one voice” (Besant 205). To this end, the writing process is inevitably characterized by the fact that: “one of the two must be in authority…. absolutely must have the final revision of the work or the writing of the work.” (Besant 204–5 passim). Therefore, whereas the partners are alternately divided from the text during its creation, in the end, one man must ultimately take possession of the joint work so that an individual and unified voice might prevail.

Furthermore, these articles caution that collaborative authorship, because of its inherent remove from the individual poetic mind, will only produce works of limited literary and philosophical merit:

To touch the deeper things one must be alone…. To treat of the graver things one must, alone, construct the machinery…. Collaboration is possible for satire, humour, fun, pathos … but neither in the study of the wanderings and development of the individual soul, nor in the development of character, nor in the work of pure and lofty imagination, is collaboration possible. (Besant 203–4)

Matthews similarly invokes Romantic literary ideals, masculine characteristics, and the language of progress, production and goal-oriented activity:

Collaboration fails to satisfy where there is need of profound meditation, of solemn self interrogation, or of lofty imagination … A task of this delicacy belongs of right to the lonely student in the silent watches of the night, or in solitary walks under the greenwood tree and far from the madding crowd.

Collaboration succeeds most abundantly where clearness is needed, where precision, skill and logic are looked for, where we expect simplicity of motive, sharpness of outline, ingenuity of construction and cleverness of effort. (169)

Here, a hierarchy of philosophy vs. utility pits Romantic and Victorian ideals against one another. In matters of aesthetics Matthews acknowledges the time and effort needed to nurture the (individual) writer’s imagination—to take inspiring and contemplative walks as Wordsworth did—for the poet to become Shelley’s solitary nightingale. Ironically, however, the lesser status Matthews accords to “simpler,” utilitarian, collaborative texts problematizes how singular authorship fits in with the Victorian valorization of industrial ideals and methods—that philosophy which Dickens so memorably satirizes in Hard Times: “what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest...