My Victorian Novel

Critical Essays in the Personal Voice

Annette R. Federico, Annette R. Federico, ANNETTE R. FEDERICO

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780826222077
• eBook ISBN: 9780826274434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The previously unpublished essays collected here are by literary scholars who have dedicated their lives to reading and studying nineteenth-century British fiction and the Victorian world. Each writes about a novel that has acquired personal relevance to them––a work that has become entwined with their own story, or that remains elusive or compelling for reasons hard to explain.
 
These are essays in the original sense of the word, attempts: individual and experiential approaches to literary works that have subjective meanings beyond social facts. By reflecting on their own histories with novels taught, studied, researched, and re-experienced in different contexts over many years, the contributors reveal how an aesthetic object comes to inhabit our critical, pedagogical, and personal lives.
 
By inviting scholars to share their experiences with a favorite novel without the pressure of an analytical agenda, the sociable essays in My Victorian Novel seek to restore some vitality to the act of literary criticism, and encourage other scholars to talk about the importance of reading in their lives and the stories that have enchanted and transformed them.

The novels in this collection include:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
The Duke's Children  by Anthony Trollope
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray
Middlemarch  by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

CHAPTER ONE

Identifying as a Reader

Andrea Kaston Tange

On Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

At the age of eight or nine, I discovered what I immediately dubbed “the good shelves” in the school library. I did not know much about how books are shelved. But I did know that on the good shelves stood one perfect, engaging book after another, in long rows. When I was in graduate school, and particularly fascinated with Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, I finally figured out that the books on the good shelves were all written by E. Nesbit. It was not that authorship was meaningless to me as a child: everyone knew the “Little House” books were all written by the grown-up Laura, or that Roald Dahl had created both Charlie in his chocolate factory and James in his peach. Noel Streatfeild’s “Shoes” books were obviously all by the same person, as both the titles and plots suggested, even though the little girl protagonists changed. But the family in The Story of the Treasure Seekers was not the same family I found in Five Children and It, and the titles did not imply an immediate connection.¹ It made just as much sense to me as any other system to think that the smiling librarians who checked out books to me several times per week had conveniently decided to group together all the books worth reading.

At some point, I obviously branched out beyond the good shelves, but their precedent made me gravitate toward other books that shared their most salient qualities. In considering the stories I loved most as a child, the ones that I would have shelved in the good section, if you will, I recently looked up their dates of publication and realized with a start that I have apparently been a Victorianist since I could read a chapter book. I have fond memories of Black Beauty (1877), A Little Princess (1905), The Railway Children (initially published serially, 1905), Beautiful Joe (1893), A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), Freckles (1904), The Little Lame Prince (1875), Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus (1881), and all the fairy tales of George MacDonald (1867–1882). My elementary school library was rich in the romance of the orphan. I know I read scores of more contemporary books too—detective stories, fantastical ones, and the first book that ever made me sob and sob, Where the Red Fern Grows (1961).² But the older books drew me in most alluringly to worlds that felt both foreign and familiar, recognizably old-fashioned compared to my own but with problems of siblings and of imagination that felt at once identifiable and transporting.

Without question, so much in those books prepared me for what has become the clearest arc of my reading life: my repeat encounters with Jane Eyre (1847). Their manor houses and manners, their self-sufficient children and absent parents, their clothes without zippers, bread-and-milk suppers, carriages, button-boots, and coal fires. Their metaphors. Their prose demanded things of me as a reader—offering language pitched to children without talking down to them, but vocabulary and syntax nearly a century old that felt different from other books, though I could not have explained how at the time.

Yet while it may have given me the tools to read Charlotte Brontë’s novel at an early age, no collection of books could have poised me to anticipate the meaning that comes from rereading a single book time and again. The good shelves helped me to define myself as a reader, to find the prose styles and tones and narrators that appealed to me, and to begin to understand a period in history. But Jane Eyre has stuck with me because it made an intense early impression, one that produced enthralled identification, and then it challenged me, as I grew into a more informed reader, to recognize that even my earliest delight was predicated on systems in which Jane and I were similarly privileged. It would have been impossible for me to think of her as privileged when I first met her—forlorn, ill-treated, derided for being a reader. It was not until I continued to meet her, over time and in new contexts, that I could begin to see beyond her exhilarating heroism to the fact that the limitations of her world are not merely those imposed upon her but also those placed on others, which she by necessity exploits to reach her own version of success. The discomfort I feel now in her happy ending is the discomfort of realizing that our childhood heroes were never perfect. It is the necessary discomfort of appreciating that feminism is far more complicated than glorious rebellion, and of acknowledging that the triumph of any one woman may come at the silent cost of many marginalized others.

But before I could come to all of that understanding, I needed to fall in love with Jane.

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”³

There literally was not: I was stuck with my younger sisters in our powder-blue Datsun hatchback, somewhere on the highway between Georgia and Michigan. The novel’s opening sentence had me hooked.

It was a slow-going road trip, punctuated by bathroom breaks and our mother’s naps. She had limited driving stamina and a proclivity for rousing narrative songs on which we could all chime in. “There was a desperado from the wild and wooly west . . .” and “Oh, the grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor . . .” We liked “Down by the sea, where the watermelons grow . . .” because we could make up endless verses of our own, in between rounds of the alphabet game and the state-license-plate-collecting game and the invisible ink puzzle books we all had. And in between all of those, I read. Unlike my middle sister, I did not get carsick. And unlike the youngest, I was reading big, fat books that could last me a good long while. I had commandeered the tiny station wagon’s “way-back,” leaving the back seat to my sisters. The sun warmed my legs through the sloped window, and I reveled in a space I did not have to share, small though it was and situated between suitcases. I could not have been more primed to offer sympathy to Jane (ten, just like me!) as she pored over her Bewick’s History of British Birds—both of us taking happy refuge from the world in a book.

Everything about Jane Eyre, the girl and the book, entranced me from the first page. My copy of her story was old and hardbound, and I have a vague recollection that it had belonged to a grown relative when she was a child, which I liked. I do not think I had ever encountered a book this big with a heroine this small and so like myself. I wore glasses, which, as far as I could figure, she did not. But I understood what it was to be impatient with senseless chattering when all a person wanted to do was read. And I could feel deep down the intense satisfaction that must surely come from shutting oneself up in a window seat behind red moreen curtains on a dreary winter day.

Red moreen curtains! Had any ten-year-old ever had a place more magnificent-sounding in which to hide and read? How I longed for a cushioned window seat of my own! And if it had had curtains to shut me away from the rest of the world? What bliss that would have been. Who knew what moreen was? Not me. But it was certainly something thick and warm, possibly glamorous, and obviously affording secrecy.

And so, I lay on my stomach and dove into Jane’s story, forgetting the time and the miles and my sisters and the awkward lumps of metal, molded around the spare tire, that lay just under the thin carpet of the way-back. I was outraged at John Reed’s imperiousness. (I surely did not know that word, but the visceral memory I carry of that reading tells me that I felt that is what he was, although I could not have named it as such.) I was horrified by the dual abuse of books and Jane as he threw the heavy Bewick’s volume at her head—and drew blood. I cowered with her in the red bedroom, longed for Bessie to be kinder to her more often. And I was in absolute awe of the child who dared to stand up to injustice practiced by a grown-up. Jane’s verbal defeat of the terrifying Aunt Reed, who slanderously told Brocklehurst that Jane was a liar, was the most glorious thing I had ever read—so much bolder than I could ever be, exactly as bold and eloquent as I would have longed to be if I were the heroine of my own story.

Jane was me and not-me all at once. She seemed like the kind of girl who could sit quietly, staring out a window and imagining for hours. The way she was misunderstood in the Reed house felt familiar, like my own quietness at school writ larger. She was awkward and ungainly. Brainy and dreaming. Her sufferings were, thankfully, nothing like my lot—but that only made me love her more. I felt I understood her mind and her desires, while at the same time her difficulties activated so much of my imagination. And her way out of them was simply extraordinary.

Jane and her story were like nothing I had ever met in a book before. Now I might posit that this is because prior to then, I had never read a book that was not explicitly written for child readers. Surely, one of the things that lent exuberance to the pens of all the Victorian and Edwardian authors whose books I had loved was that there was a clear place for complicated, imaginative writing in the newly defined children’s market. But while I would not have put it in these terms on that seemingly endless summer drive, nothing on the good shelves was as morally complex as Jane Eyre. The Bastable children were clever, and their adventures were fascinating and magical. But, like the siblings in the “Boxcar Children” books, they were shepherded by an older sister more motherly than childlike. Jo March was a marvel, and was going to be a writer, as I was sure I would be, but she had Marmee. Laura was bold and questioning, but Ma Ingalls was the orderly center of her world and kept her in check. And Mary Lennox? Well, she was not a child you could like, even as an orphan, until she was softened by gardening and the baked potatoes provided by Dickon’s comfortable mother.⁴

The good shelves and their ilk had impressed upon me that in the world of books, someone was always caretaking, following rules, ensuring people ate and washed up and grew up. Even children who were left to their own devices ultimately needed benevolent uncles to resolve the bigger problems in their worlds. And those uncles always showed up. In Jane Eyre, breathtakingly, the adults in charge were bad at being in charge. They were cruel and capricious and snobby and ineffective and petty. They let children go hungry out of something called “false economy,” and they defied the cardinal rule of all poverty-stricken-family books I had ever read: namely, that when you had nothing, kindness was somehow going to get you out of the worst of situations. They were never kind.

Obviously, the uncle, or at least his fortune, eventually appears like a fairy godmother’s aid in Jane Eyre too, but my fascination with Jane on that first reading was far more focused on the fact that the vivid adults in her childhood world were the enemies of her well-being. The one exception, Miss Temple, was both a welcome relief and a character who seemed ephemeral, made mostly of seed cake and Jane’s memories of her quiet compassion. Furthermore, for a very long time before she had Miss Temple, Jane had no one to rely on but herself. Compounding that, she fit none of the criteria of good-little-girlhood that my reading experience suggested were necessary to her success. Although she was impressively good at tidying and dusting, she found it neither rewarding nor her proper duty. She, one presumed, would not cheerfully forage for spoons in the local dump and scrub them with sand at the creek, and pretend to be camping in a found boxcar while eating the berries she picked; she would think scathingly about how unfair it was that she should have nothing to eat when her relatives had plenty, and finally she would get hungry enough to tell them so to their faces. This would be deeply satisfying, emotionally. But nothing in the books I had read suggested it would actually solve her subsistence problems, because girls who won in the end were domestic nurturers, not outspoken proponents of justice.

Jane appealed to me, in short, because she resisted being a good little girl in ways that felt astonishing and liberating to a good little girl who had carefully internalized all the imperatives of goodness, littleness, and girlness. Jane may have been punished repeatedly for speaking up, but nowhere in the story was it implied that the adults were right to punish her or that she was supposed to regret what she had done in standing up for herself. Therein lay the marvel. That even while every precedent suggested Bessie and Abbot were correct to lament that Jane was not prettier and more guileless, because all of that proper femininity would enable her to go far in life, the novel sided with Jane in pooh-poohing those standards and thereby defying Aunt Reed. Even Jane’s own remorse as she stood on the hearthrug was driven only by the sense that children could not defy their elders and get away with it, rather than that she had actually done anything objectively wrong. Jane showed me, in terms a child could understand, the power of claiming one’s own voice as a girl.

Through giving voice to her frustrations, Jane helped me find my own feminism before I had the language to name it as such. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the chapters focused on Jane’s early life made the deepest impression on me during that days-long car ride. When I witnessed bookish child-Jane staking a claim not to be mocked or misrepresented, I concluded that internal exhilaration and freedom were the logical result of speaking up. She continued to appeal to me as a studious teenager—when the popular girls with their expert makeup and layered, logo-adorned shirts were Georgianas to my Jane—because her vision transcended the limits of her own small sphere. Thus, when I read Jane Eyre in high school, I began to see her in terms that, although still more intuited than theorized, moved beyond herself. I began to perceive that anger at systems, rather than only at individuals, was sometimes warranted.

The bit of the novel I remember with the most clarity from my high school reading of Jane Eyre is the point where, aged eighteen, Jane positions herself on the parapet of Thornfield, looking out over the countryside, and proclaims,

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further . . . that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. . . . It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people the earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. In the Personal Voice
• Chapter One. Identifying as a Reader: On Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Chapter Two. Mourning Glencora: On The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
• Chapter Three. A Skeptical Education: On The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Chapter Four. Victorian Fable-Lands: On The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Chapter Five. “What do I think of glory?”: On Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Chapter Six. Unhinged: On Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
• Chapter Seven. Words Like Violence: On The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
• Chapter Eight. Stock Exchanges: On Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• Chapter Nine. An Ethics of Place: On North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
• Chapter Ten. What Esther Thinks about Sex: On Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Chapter Eleven. Liking David Copperfield: On David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Chapter Twelve. Endless Circling, Perpetual Beginning: On New Grub Street by George Gissing
• Chapter Thirteen. Let to a Single Gentleman: On The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
• Chapter Fourteen. Bedtime Reading: On Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Chapter Fifteen. The Hand of Fate: On Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Notes on Contributors
• Index