Like other artistic expressions conceived, elaborated and produced in the present and set in a near or distant past, neo-Victorianism may be described as a peculiar form of cultural time travel. Indeed, one of the novels that sits alongside Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by Gaslight (1944), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) as a forerunner of neo-Victorianism relies on the experiences of a woman who travels through time. Written by Marghanita Laski and originally published in 1953, The Victorian Chaise-Longue tells the story of Melanie Langdon, an assertive invalid married to a successful lawyer named Guy. Melanie suffers from tuberculosis and has just given birth. Following her doctor’s advice, she moves from her bedroom to a more airy part of her house, where she falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue, recently purchased in Marylebone High Street, London:
It was ugly and clumsy and extraordinary, nearly seven feet long and proportionately wide. The head and foot ends of the seat curled round a little as though to meet each other, raising, above the elaborately carved legs and frame, a superstructure of wine-red crimson felt. At the right-hand end a curved padded support rolled backwards on curlicues of carving and a carved framework supported padding to halfway down the back. (Laski 2014, pp. 12–13)
After her sleep, Melanie wakes up and finds that she has gone back in time to the 22nd of April 1864, and is now in the body of Milly Baines, who suffers from the same illness. Milly is looked after by her stern sister Adelaide, and is similarly confined to her chaise-longue. 1 In The Victorian Chaise-Longue Melanie is afraid of leaving her seat—the object that has presumably transported her back in time—for fear of being forever trapped in Milly’s past. This chaise-longue thus becomes the emblem of her corporeal and cultural paralysis. Laski’s novel, which has been variously classified as a Gothic tale, a science-fiction story or a fantasy, is based upon a confrontation between the condition of women in the past (sexually, intellectually and physically ‘paralysed’) and in the present, proving that the twentieth century and the nineteenth century are not necessarily different in this regard. The novelty of The Victorian Chaise-Longue resides not only in its Victorian setting, but in the opportunity it offers readers to reflect on the role of women then, and now, through the perspective offered by Melanie’s Victorian alter ego Milly. Melanie’s gradual awareness of Milly’s past, and of her secrets, allows her to look at the future from a different angle. Moreover Melanie uses her basic medical knowledge to suggest the proper cures and treatments for Milly, who will be otherwise condemned to die of tuberculosis. By doing so, Melanie tries to alter the past of her Victorian counterpart and, indirectly, the future of contemporary women. As a consequence, in Laski’s novel the temporal return to the nineteenth century is based upon a prolonged comparison with the present, and with the repercussions of its paradoxes in a rewritten and refigured past.
Contrary to other literary works set in distant centuries (from Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth to Sharon Key Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour and Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss), neo-Victorian texts replicate the questions that The Victorian Chaise-Longue raises in an explicit engagement with current issues. Dealing with the ‘imaginative capability’ of history (a specific framework that is fundamental in the reconstruction of a bygone age), Peter Mandler compares it to a form of voyage back in time. In the following excerpt from Mandler’s History and National Life one may replace terms such as ‘historical’ and ‘history’ with ‘cultural’ and ‘culture’ so as to identify one of the central features of neo-Victorian poetics as a cultural time travel:
One of the purposes of [cultural] time travel is to transport our modern selves into alien situations which allow us to highlight by contrast our own values and assumptions […]. In this aspect [culture] asks us not to lose ourselves in the past but to view the past from our own standpoint. (Mandler 2002, p. 147) 2
Neo-Victorian texts such as Laski’s novel basically ‘view the past from our own standpoint’ by approaching the Victorians not simply as our ancestors, but also as our sometimes uncomfortable (and unforeseen) mirror-image. The nineteenth century is therefore not just nostalgically evoked through the presence of cultural and historical references to the Victorian age—to its dresses, habits, places, literary works, etc. It becomes a living cultural entity that resurfaces, confronts and often challenges our assumptions. In this respect, there are various strategies and modalities to reproduce the (Victorian) past under an artistic guise: either by replicating its stereotypes, in what Christian Gutleben labels retro-Victorian novels, whose tribute to ‘heritage culture’ is an exclusively vacuous formal trait (cf. Gutleben 2001) or—as in the case of neo-Victorianism—by focusing on its provocative, and unexpectedly contemporary, traits. The Victorian age thereby turns into our cultural unheimlich, a familiar and yet disquieting presence.
For this reason, the reconstruction of Victorian collective memory and history by neo-Victorian authors and artists can be a stimulating analytical strategy through which it is possible to study the nineteenth century from a ‘deviant’ viewpoint and to rediscover the Victorians through a new perspective. Given the impossibility of reliving the past, the nineteenth-century frame of mind has necessarily to be reinvented in the present, and for the present. Provocatively, David Lowenthal contends that artists seem to be better equipped than historians to offer a coherent and comprehensive view of history: ‘novelists commonly outdo historians in making readers aware of the past. And the fictional past has another advantage: because it is contrived, it must make sense. Contrariwise, history must in part baffle’ (Lowenthal 2015, p. 367). 3 This slippage between historical documentation and artistic reproduction is one of the most recurrent features of neo-Victorianism. At the same time, many scholars and critics have reflected on the risk of a (postmodern) propensity to nostalgia, which disrupts historical fidelity and documentary reconstruction for the sake of pure playfulness. 4 Since neo-Victorian works, in order to be recognised as such, must use cultural memory according to certain recognisable traits—in particular by recovering forgotten or deliberately censored (hi)stories—it is necessary to underline that neo-Victorianism is not just an evocative remembrance of the past. In this sense, it would be critically profitable to meditate on the very notion of ‘Victorianism’ or rather on multiple and shifting notions of this expression, given that Queen Victoria herself, as the perfect epitome of a whole nation and historical period, cannot be reduced to a single and static definition. Reflecting on the association between (often) conflicting depictions of the same monarch, Margaret Homans and Adrianne Munich argue that there were ‘many Victorias’, because she was, at the same time, ‘alone and surrounded; autocratic and abject; charitable to the poor, egocentric and abrupt to others; immensely hardworking and immensely self-indulgent’ (Homans and Munich 1997, pp. 2, 3). In much the same way, neo-Victorianism succeeds in showing that, alongside a canonical view of the Victorian age (and of Queen Victoria) as characterised by the presence of well-defined and stable political, cultural and ideological values, there were ‘deviant’ idiosyncrasies and impulses that coexisted with those same values.
The aim of Lytton Strachey’s redefinition of the Victorian age in Eminent Victorians (1918) is antithetical to the neo-Victorian revival of the nineteenth century: Strachey wanted to define the differences between the Victorians and the moderns, whereas neo-Victorianists are often interested in finding analogies between past and present. Yet both approaches tend to privilege the interest in ‘deviances’, rather than in stereotypical depictions of the age. As Strachey writes in his ‘Preface’ to the volume, ‘[it] is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack its subject in unexpected places’, shooting ‘a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined’ (Strachey 2003, p. 5, added emphasis). 5 Furthermore, Strachey’s creative and idiosyncratic use of historical and biographical research, which privileged psychological investigation over detailed listing of events, appears unexpectedly similar to the one employed by neo-Victorian artists. Since Strachey believes that ‘[we] know too much about’ the Victorian age, he recommends the revaluation of ‘ignorance’ as ‘the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art’ (Strachey 2003, p. 5). The historian, scholar and artist prefigured by Strachey (just like his or her neo-Victorian equivalent) must partially forget or obliterate mere data in order to perform a selective act of remembering, putting to the test a canonised view of the nineteenth century. But neo-Victorianism is far from being only a matter of literary debate and high-brow intellectual quibbling. Indeed, the neo-Victorian creative reusage of the past has also proven, in some cases, economically rewarding and editorially productive, as in the success of the novels by Antonia Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber, and of the countless movies and TV series set in the nineteenth century. In Louisa Hadley’s words, ‘[despite] the over-saturation of the market, the popularity of ...