Fictions of Dissent

Reclaiming Authority in Transatlantic Women's Writing of the Late Nineteenth Century

Sigrid Anderson Cordell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848930230
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317324065
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Fin-de-siècle fiction by British female aesthetes and American women regionalists stages moments of rebellion when female characters rise up and insist on the right to maintain control of their creations. Cordell asserts that these revolutionary acts constitute a transatlantic conversation about aesthetic practice and creative ownership.

1 ‘A BEAUTIFUL TRANSLATION FROM A VERY IMPERFECT ORIGINAL’: MABEL WOTTON, AESTHETICISM AND THE DILEMMA OF LITERARY BORROWING

In a pivotal moment in Mabel Wotton’s short story ‘The Fifth Edition’ (1896), Janet Suttaby, a struggling writer unable to find a publisher for her novel, offers the rising literary star, Franklyn Leyden, her manuscript, telling him, ‘If you really think there is any good in it … it must either go back to the drawer until I have time to polish it, or … you must take it’.¹ Miss Suttaby offers almost no explanation for her act, nor does she outline what she expects Leyden to do with the manuscript, so when Leyden accepts, rewrites and then publishes it under his own name, he has not done anything that she has explicitly forbidden. Nevertheless, his appropriation of her work is clearly marked in the text as ethically compromised, especially when Miss Suttaby’s subsequent death from starvation underscores her desperate need for the money that the sale of a novel would have brought. At the same time, the text offers a much more nuanced critique of Leyden’s actions that reaches beyond the ethics of plagiarism and into the realm of literary invention itself; as Leyden revises the manuscript, his creative act is bound up with a parasitical translation of Miss Suttaby herself into text, and he is thus implicated as a fraud on the grounds of both literal and figurative appropriation. In this way, the appropriated manuscript becomes a metaphor for the uneasy relationship between art and life, a concern that is central to fin-de-siècle literary culture.

As I will argue, the emphasis in this story, and elsewhere in Wotton’s fiction, on what Susan Sontag has termed in another context the ‘shady commerce between art and truth’ makes visible concerns about the connection between inspiration and invention that emerge in the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Henry James, as well as in debates over plagiarism and New Woman fiction.² In other words, Leyden’s act of literary appropriation echoes and critiques contemporaneous arguments for plagiarism that suggested that improving on someone else’s work – with or without permission – was in itself a laudable act of artistic invention. In this chapter, I will suggest that apologies for plagiarism both authorize these acts and, as Wotton’s story dramatically demonstrates, reveal a parasitic angle to the aesthetic artist’s claims to improve upon (i.e., make beautiful) the raw material of everyday life.

Although there remains much work to be done in excavating the personal and professional details surrounding the life of ‘forgotten female aesthete’ (to use Talia Schaffer’s term) Mabel Wotton (1863–1927), Meri-Jane Rochelson’s recent discovery of Wotton’s letters to the novelist and playwright Israel Zangwill, letters that were filed away under the wrong name in the Central Zionist Archives, has shed considerable light on Wotton as artist and critic.³ Wotton, who remained an obscure writer even after the publication of Day-Books in John Lane’s infamous Keynotes series, was born and lived in London for most of her adult life. Although most of her work is currently out of print, she published numerous novels, short stories and children’s books throughout her lifetime. As her letters to Zangwill reveal, far from a reclusive, starving artist, Wotton was deeply involved in the cultural and social life of turn-of-the-century London. In her letters, she comments on her negotiations with leading publishers of the day, offers advice and criticism of Zangwill’s work, and reveals her connections to prominent theatrical and literary figures, including George Egerton and Dion Boucicault. She was also a close acquaintance of the poet and essayist Alice Meynell, to whom she dedicated Day-Books as a token ‘of gratitude for tenderness’. Although she consults Zangwill on financial and literary matters, she also trusts her own judgement and, at times, rejects his advice about her work.

Beyond adding to our biographical and bibliographical knowledge of Wotton, this new evidence of her ties to the literary world, as well as of her insistence on professional independence, invites us to rethink the wider context of her work and to acknowledge the ways in which it was deeply embedded in and critical of contemporary aesthetic debates over the relationship between art and life, literary invention and literary property. Her fiction, like that of Vernon Lee, evinces a deep suspicion of literary realists such as George Moore and Henry James, authors who drew on and dissected women’s lives, transforming real subjects into fictional subjects, thus translating (someone else’s) ‘real’ experience into art.⁴ Wotton calls into question the ethics of this kind of artistic representation in stories such as ‘The Fifth Edition’ by leaving on the stage the shattered figure of the subject who is left behind. Unlike Oscar Wilde, who complains in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that realism erases the art from fiction, according to Wotton, realism takes the soul out of those who provide its raw material.

In Wotton’s story about a male artist appropriating a woman’s manuscript, improving it by interweaving his stylistic ability with his observations of her, and then publishing the manuscript under his name without giving her financial or literary credit, Wotton critiques a host of late nineteenth-century discourses on artistic invention. Through Leyden’s gratified sense that he has improved Miss Suttaby’s manuscript, Wotton invokes and revises contemporary arguments in favour of plagiarism, in which it is seen not as an intellectual crime, but, in fact, as an intellectual responsibility when it ‘improved’ (i.e., rendered more marketable) an original manuscript. At the same time, Leyden’s act of using Miss Suttaby’s manuscript as a piece of raw material that he then transforms and commodifies by applying his particular form of artistic genius echoes the late nineteenth-century aesthetic theories of Pater, Wilde and James that I laid out in the introduction to this volume. In these theories, the aesthetic artist creates a work of art in the act of responding to and translating elements of the material world into another medium. The artist’s response to and transformation of what he or she sees is in and of itself a work of art. The direct incorporation of Miss Suttaby herself into the manuscript reflects a realist practice that drew on ‘real life’ as raw material and purported to offer a more transparent view of that life. That Leyden is able to appropriate both Miss Suttaby’s novel and Miss Suttaby herself, to ‘improve’ the original manuscript, and to profit by it is also a condemnation of the late nineteenth-century literary marketplace in which aesthetic figures like Leyden held cultural authority, and thus were gatekeepers to publishing outlets that were effectively unavailable to an obscure, unconnected woman writer like Miss Suttaby.

Locating Wotton’s work amid a constellation of fin-de-siècle debates over the relationship between art, life and the literary marketplace not only reveals her embeddedness in late nineteenth-century literary culture, but also helps establish a place for her in recent critical conversations about the period. Although Margaret Stetz reintroduced Wotton in 1986 by reprinting ‘The Fifth Edition’ in the journal Turn-of-the-Century Women, Wotton has remained on the outskirts of literary history. Despite appearing in influential anthologies of fin-de-siècle women’s writing, such as Elaine Showalter’s Daughters of Decadence (1993) and Carolyn Christensen Nelson’s A New Woman Reader (2001), as well as in critical overviews, such as Schaffer’s The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000) and Ann Heilmann’s New Woman Fiction (2000), Wotton’s work has received little sustained critical engagement. That her work has hovered on the margins of the critical conversation about women’s writing in the period is due, I would argue, to the fact that we have not known where to place her in that conversation – is she a New Woman, an aesthete, a conservative idealist, an experimentalist? In other words, should we identify her with the seemingly victimized Janet Suttaby or with the arch narrative voice that in telling Suttaby’s story mocks and exposes the parasite Leyden’s charade?

One way to begin locating Wotton is to examine ‘The Fifth Edition’ in terms of the larger context of her work and working life and to recognize the nuanced point that story makes about artistic invention and the potentially parasitic rela tionship between art and life. While Heilmann has pointed to the ways in which ‘The Fifth Edition’ can be read as a New Woman story,⁵ Schaffer problematizes the usefulness of the term in identifying writers from the period by pointing to the still unresolved question of defining the New Woman. Schaffer describes a split in the criticism between inclusivists, who class any writer interested in women as a New Woman, and those who would restrict the label to ‘feminist ideologues’. Schaffer asserts that the pressure ‘to prove [writers] acceptably feminist’ can both lead to over-reductive readings and a tendency to overlook writers who do not pass the litmus test of feminism.⁶ While Wotton’s work is not overtly political, and thus might not seem to line up with Heilmann’s assertion that New Woman fiction ‘constituted, and conceived itself as, an agent of social and political transformation’,⁷ Wotton is nevertheless concerned with the (often gendered) social and professional inequities between those who have access and opportunity, and who take ruthless advantage of those opportunities, and those on the margin. At the same time, while Wotton’s work is concerned with women’s lives, it does not neatly line up along feminist lines, and the exploiters in her stories are just as likely to be female as male. Thus, while she is linked to New Woman writing through her vivid portrayals of the powerless and exploited and her critique of the largely male-dominated professional system, I propose moving beyond the question of whether or not she is a New Woman by focusing on the ways that her work targets the inequities brought about by professional, social and financial hierarchies. More specifically, I will argue that Wotton’s fiction illuminates how fin-de-siècle aesthetic theories created vexed dichotomies between inspiration and execution, creation and appreciation, dichotomies that excluded those who did not have equal access to the marketplace. In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Leyden rationalizes his act of plagiarism in such a way that it sounds very much like what I have described as a revisionist strain in aestheticism. Through this connection between plagiarism, revision and aesthetics, Wotton rereads aestheticism, and its emphasis on models of female beauty, as essentially parasitic.

Wotton’s work threads together a series of contemporaneous debates related to aestheticism and originality that run through the writings of Pater, Wilde and James, as well as through debates over plagiarism and New Woman critiques of male artists. My analysis of Wotton’s short fiction, in particular ‘The Fifth Edition’ and her neglected story, Amongst Her Following’ (1893), demonstrates how she complicates and challenges her contemporaries’ assumptions about the often vexed relationship between the artist and his or her material. Both ‘The Fifth Edition’ and ‘Amongst Her Following’ question the ethics of invention and inspiration by depicting characters who destroy the subjects on which they base their fictions. At the same time, Wotton defends the autonomy of the artist, even if that artist’s work is simply one’s self. Both stories depict two different types of artists – one a parasitic stylist who translates what he or she sees and one, to whom our sympathies are directed, whose art is an expression of the self. Rather than relying on pure invention, the parasitic artists create art by transcribing the experiences of others, claiming that what gives their work value is the effect of critical appreciation and translation. While ‘The Fifth Edition’ satirically targets the male literary aesthete in general, and, as Angela Kingston argues, Wilde in particular,⁸ that story’s critique does not neatly line up along gender lines (i.e., men exploiting women) because the male dandy figure borrows the life stories of both male and female characters; ‘Amongst Her Following’ further muddies our readings of Wotton’s gender politics by inverting the male and female roles, this time presenting a female artist who destroys her devoted male admirer by acting out his suffering in an improvised recitation. Reading ‘The Fifth Edition’ and ‘Amongst Her Following’ alongside one another reveals Wotton’s awareness of the opportunism underpinning artistic invention, an equal opportunity opportunism practised by both genders in late nineteenth-century literary culture. Wotton’s formulation of artistic invention echoes and revises a host of deeply interconnected ideas and anxieties about literary borrowing.

In ‘The Fifth Edition’, Franklyn Leyden’s most obvious ethical transgression is publishing Miss Suttaby’s manuscript – albeit in a drastically revised form – as his own. This act, however, is part of a pattern in Leyden’s working life; his first successful work, Wrecked, was little more than the faithful transcription of a dying man’s life story that ‘he had “tipped” … into manuscript’, faithfully reproducing ‘the weary voice, and the inert hands, lying open on the coverlet’.⁹ Before publishing Wrecked, Leyden strategically waited until his source was dead, hoping that no one would recognize the parallels in the story. In creating this scenario, Wotton’s story engages with a debate on plagiarism that emerged in the late nineteenth century. In his rewriting of Miss Suttaby’s work and his elaborate self-justifications, Leyden embodies the theories of a disparate group of late nineteenth-century apologists for plagiarism mapped out by Paul K. Saint-Amour in The Copywrights (2003). Although, as Saint-Amour points out, this was not a coherent group of theorists, but rather ‘scattered purveyors of an emerging critique of original genius and literary property’,¹⁰ they shared a sense that raw material – in whatever form – is there to be ‘picked up’ and used by whoever is in a position to capitalize on it, regardless of whose idea it may have been originally. According to the pro-plagiarists, it is almost an ethical imperative to take advantage of, and perhaps even build on, material that comes to hand rather than leave it to be forgotten.

One aspect of the plagiarism debate emerged in 1887 when the Pall Mall Gazette accused Rider Haggard of plagiarizing portions of both She (1887) and Jess (1887). While there is no direct evidence that Wotton was thinking of the Haggard case when she wrote ‘The Fifth Edition’, she may well have been aware of the controversy, which was featured prominently in the journal’s pages. The Pall Mall Gazette, Haggard’s most energetic critic, accused him of heavily borrowing the plot for She from Thomas Moore’s The Epicurean (1827). Perhaps more embarrassingly for Haggard, and closest to the plot of Wotton’s story, the editors also discovered that Haggard had included in Jess some verses by R. C. V. Myers that had appeared fifteen years earlier in the Christian Union.¹¹ In his defence, Haggard asserted that he had been sent the verses by a friend who he believed had written them. As he explained in a letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, after the friend’s death, ‘I put the lines, or rather some of them, into the mouth of Jess, because I knew that my dead friend would have been pleased at my doing so’.¹² Since the friend was dead, we have no evidence other than Haggard’s word that this indeed would have been the case. If Haggard’s assumption that the verses were the work of his dead friend had been correct, his appropriation of the verses would have gone undetected. By failing to attribute the lines, Haggard implied that he had written them himself, a charge which he vehemently denied: ‘I have, however, never claimed the authorship of them, and I should have acknowledged it in the book, only to do so would have been to spoil the vraisemblance of the scene’.¹³ The Pall Mall Gazette was clearly dissatisfied with Haggard’s casuistic argument and countered that ‘Mr. Haggard’s explanation does not strike us as satisfactory. His incorporation of some one else’s verses in his novel without any acknowledgment … seems to us a clear case of literary dishonesty.’ The editor continues by linking Haggard’s defence to broader questions of professional ethics: ‘The adoption of this code – implying as it does that an author is at liberty to beg, borrow, or steal so long as he does not expressly deny that the property is stolen – would … completely revolutionize literary ethics’.¹⁴ This debate points to two divergent conceptions of originality: one in which art is created anew by interweaving and building upon existing work and one that values the myth of original genius. The two sides are diametrically opposed – the interweaving camp accusing those who argue for original genius of hopeless naiveté and the original genius camp accusing the interweavers of advocating theft. Robert Macfarlane has noted this dichotomy between ‘originality’ that emerges from rearranging ‘pre-existing materials i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Muse’s Revenge
• 1 ‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original’: Mabel Wotton, Aestheticism and the Dilemma of Literary Borrowing
• 2 Vernon Lee and the Aesthetic Subject
• 3 Edith Wharton and the Artist as Connoisseur
• 4 The Aesthetics of Ownership in Women’s Stories
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index