English II A: English Literature 1800-1900

British Border Crossing: Romantic and Victorian (Inter)Textuality and the Destabilization of Boundaries

Panel # 1: Aesthetic and Generic Boundaries (and Spaces)

Cynthia Van Sickle

McHenry County Coll.

cvansick@mchenry.edu

Presenter # 1: Sarah Massey-Warren, University of Colorado

Title: Misbehaving Prose

Abstract: In comparison with other forms of literature – poetry, fiction, or drama – remarkably few theorists and literary critics have addressed themselves to the essay generally and the Romantic essay in particular. This ambivalence is not too surprising, given the essay’s slippery positioning between fiction and “fact,” between art and article, and between autonomous creative project and published material byproduct. Theodor Adorno notes that the essay is regarded as a “hybrid” in Germany. I propose to address another area of crossover unique to the essays of the second-generation Romantic essayists – that slippage that destabilizes the lines between public authority, public realm, and the private realm delineated by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than illustrating the divisions Habermas describes as typifying the writing of this time period, essayists including Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt scrambled those boundaries. Richard Sennet writes that “To speak of the legacy of the 19^th Century’s crisis of public life is to speak of broad forces of capitalism and secularism on the one hand and of these four psychological conditions on the other: involuntary disclosure of character, superimposition of public and private imagery, defense through withdrawal, and silence.” Although I would argue that “withdrawal” and “silence” were more typical of the Victorians than of the later Romantics, I find the ideas of “involuntary disclosure of character” and “superimposition of public and private imagery” quite relevant to the essayists. What made them even more dangerous within a public such as the one that Sennet describes that insisted on the acting out of codified social roles in public and only a private revelation of self is that the essayists conflated the two, giving rise to the idea of the published “personal” essay that communicated directly with a reader while questioning the government and social mores.

Presenter # 2: Bradley Ricca, Case-Western Reserve University

Title: “Vivid as Spectres”: The Shattered Window of Wuthering Heights

Abstract: In Wuthering Heights, the discovery of Catherine’s book, filled with its strange marginalia, sets up the single quasi-supernatural scene of Emily Bronte’s text: the appearance of Catherine as ghost. To understand this difficult, ambiguous scene, I posit that what mediates the supernatural experience of both Lockwood and the reader is not (just) the Gothic setting so expertly posed by Brontë, but the presence of the spectral text, which not only provides a comment on Gothic conventions, but re-imagines them within the realm of Victorian facts. Through step-by-step analysis of the scene, I will conclude that the ghost itself is made real by Brontë’s careful instructions to us on how to read and interpret various texts. When we are finally confronted with the ghost, it is neither an expected Gothic convention or a half-baked deus ex machina being lowered from the rafters, it is a carefully-mediated encounter of terrible physical (and believable) violence. Bronte, drawing on traditions of magic, the Bible, and the Gothic, gives us a new text that, though still imaginative and speculative, grounds itself fully in reality, thus creating a supernatural experience that refuses to sacrifice its own physicality in light of genre assumptions.

Presenter # 3: Meghan A. Freeman, Cornell University

Title: Cordons of Protection: The Boundaries of Viewership in Middlemarch and Villette

Abstract: Although the novels of George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë are not as consistently preoccupied with aesthetic issues as those of some of their masculine contemporaries, both authors utilize the symbolically-charged space of the museum to great narrative advantage, in the process bringing to the fore the gendered nature of the aesthetic relation. The typical figuration of the subject-object relationship in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory was that of the masculine artist or viewer to the feminized art object or landscape; the “feminine” was also often invoked as the manifestation or embodiment of androcentric ideas or principles, such as the female body standing in for the male spirit or soul. Given the prevalence of these formulations, the museum—a public space created for private acts of contemplation and valuation—was a particularly good site for the staging of both aesthetic and social encounters and for the juxtaposition and complication of these homologous relations. For this paper, rather than focusing on a single text, I analyze similar scenes from two texts: Brontë’s Villette and Eliot’s Middlemarch. In each case, what I am interested in is the representation of museum or gallery space and the way in which these female authors utilize its aestheticizing function (aestheticizing insofar as it is a space that is constructed for acts of perception and judgment) in order to illuminate and destabilize the gendered dynamics of viewership.

Presenter # 4: Margaret Rennix, University of Virginia

Title: Revolutionary Aesthetics: Perception in Alice Meynell’s “The Woman in Grey” and Walter Pater’s “Diaphaneitè”  

Abstract: My presentation will explore how the possession of an aesthetic sensibility manages to destabilize gender boundaries within Alice Meynell’s “The Woman in Grey” by viewing the essay through the lens of Walter Pater’s “Diaphaneitè”. In noting how the woman in Meynell’s essay uses her bicycle to achieve a synaesthetic engagement with the exterior world, my paper draws a parallel between this representation of an aesthetic consciousness and Pater’s figuring of the “revolutionary” within his own work. Meynell’s essay, in this sense, chronicles not only a woman’s physical experience as she rides a bike through the metropolis, but also takes account of the mental metamorphosis that the woman goes through as a result of the shift in perceptions she experiences as she maneuvers through the crowd. The bicycle’s ability to inspire a synaesthetic response in the woman in grey transforms it into a “vehicle” for change that becomes increasingly apparent as one notes similarity between the language Meynell uses in the essay, and Pater’s diction in “Diaphaneitè”. In Pater’s estimation, one of the impulses that drives the individual toward revolution is “a sympathetic perception of the dominant undercurrent of the progress of things,” a sensitivity that culminates in an individual who can rise above the “collective life, [that] press[es] equally on every one of us”. If the individual fails to overcome the pressure of this “collective life,” then he is reduced to “the level of a colourless uninteresting existence” where he is immobilized by his “equipoise among” many gifts.

English II B: English Literature 1800-1900

British Border Crossing: Romantic and Victorian (Inter)Textuality and the Destabilization of Boundaries

Panel # 2: Boundaries of Empire and Nation

Cynthia Van Sickle

McHenry County Coll.

cvansick@mchenry.edu

Presenter # 1: Zubair S. Amir, University of Miami

Title: “Drawn Almost into Frightful Neighborhood”: England, France, and the Problem of National Identity in Wordsworth’s Sonnets

Abstract: In many ways, Wordsworth’s political sonnets of 1802-3 are a (quite literal) study in contrasts. Many of these poems, later collected under the group title of “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty” (Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807), revolve around a distinct logic of opposition, comparison, and definition in which the poet constructs the identity of one term through an examination of its opposition to another. In particular, sonnets such as “Great men have been among us,” deploy the most obvious oppositions available in the time of Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars—the contrast between England and France—as a way of understanding what is and is not English. These oppositions enable Wordsworth to create what Alan Keen has termed “identity-in-difference,” a means by which England’s nationhood could be defined “differentially across geographic or temporal divides.” In this paper, I will explore how Wordsworth’s sonnets also anxiously envision a world where such distinctions—particularly (but not exclusively) those created by geographical and national boundaries—can begin to blur or even fall apart, destabilizing seemingly reliable, even natural, ways of conceptualizing national identity.

Presenter # 2: Kristin Mahlis, Califonia State University - Chico

Title: The Hour and the Man: Harriet Martineau’s Historical Romance and the Domestication of Toussaint L’Ouverture

Abstract: Best-known for her journalism and her highly successful 34-volume series, Illustrations of Political Economy, Harriet Martineau crossed the borders of her English home to write of Toussaint L’Ouverture in her 1841 novel, The Hour and the Man. Lionized by William Wordsworth in his sonnet of 1801, “To Toussaint L’Ouverture,” this African slave led the only successful slave revolt in the European colonies and became known as the hero of the Haitian revolution. Martineau’s novel, written at a time when England had abolished slavery in its colonies but the United States remained embroiled in a bitter dispute over slavery that would culminate in the Civil War of the 1860’s, stirred controversy for its laudatory portrait of a black man. Martineau’s activities as abolitionist as well earned her controversy, especially when she visited the United States, and her fame as the popularizer of the “dismal science” of political economy failed to overcome the institutionalized racism of the southern United States. Knowing that her audience in Europe and in the United States would read her works through this racist lens, Martineau embraced this challenge by making a former slave of African descent the hero of her historical romance. I argue that Martineau deemed it historically and novelistically apt to cast her “negro statesman” in a domestic role as husband and father, when his greatest achievements were those of a general and military strategist, precisely because the ideological power of the domestic provided the strongest counter to the fear and irrationality inherent in racism.

Presenter # 3: Lauren deBeer, Centre College

Title: “The Empire, The Orient, and the American West: Transatlantic Anxieties in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘ A Study in Scarlet’”

Abstract: This paper is part of a larger project, in which I argue that the popular perception of the US as an ascendant superpower constitutes a key element of the imperial angst that pervades the works of Doyle, Haggard, Kipling, Buchan and Margaret Harkness. The focal point of Britain’s transatlantic anxiety is the “American frontier,” an imaginative space that serves as the cultural signifier of the United States’ unlimited natural resources; ruthless, entrepreneurial spirit; and cultural backwardness. In political, scholarly and popular discourses of the period, the US is invoked as a sign of Britain’s imminent demise as well as the possibility of its resurrection. Would the United States overwhelm and extinguish the Queen’s struggling empire or would it take up the flag and propagate her institutions across the rest of the globe? In the fictions of fin-de-siecle politics and the politics of fin-de-siecle fiction, the US became central to Britain’s national self-fashioning. The future of Victoria’s realm appeared inextricably intertwined with the state of Anglo-American relations. This paper explores the intertwined imperial and transatlantic anxieties structuring Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet.” Doyle uses the cowboy-entrepreneur to deflect the imperial anxiety of reverse emigration and the Mormon to deflect the transatlantic anxiety of rising US economic power.

Presenter # 4: Veda Khulpateea, Binghamton University

Title: Race to the Altar: Philip Meadows Taylor’s Guarded Optimism

Abstract: In the Preface to Philip Meadows Taylor’s memoir, Story of My Life (1878), journalist Henry Reeve explains that, “Meadows Taylor gave to the people of India not only his head, but his heart. As we can see from his tone throughout the memoir, Meadows Taylor was no mere imperial soldier. He was well-versed in native traditions and seemed genuinely to believe that for the British, native culture had some essential value and was worth learning about. His autobiography also makes clear that he fully endorsed inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriage, even writing in favor of rescinding the East India Company’s policy of not allowing mixed-race soldiers on the grounds that “half-castes” would be biased by their affiliation to this discriminatory system (SML 355). Though married to a woman of native descent, he leaves the exploration of the social difficulties posed by such unions, to the fictional situations in his novels. In this way, Meadows Taylor is dramatically different from other nineteenth century writers who discuss interracial marriage, and for that reason, he will be the sole focus of my talk. In examining Meadows Taylor’s novels Seeta (1872) and Ralph Darnell (1865), I will show how the author addresses the complicated social situation created when an inter-racial marriage destabilizes the categories of ruler and subject. While presenting ethnic inter-marriage as an ideal state to be entered into by idealized individuals, post-nuptial life in each text suggests that these unions are incapable of existing in a world that defines selfhood by otherness.

English II-C: English Literature 1800-1900

British Border Crossing: Romantic and Victorian (Inter)Textuality and the Destabilization of Boundaries

Panel # 3: Boundaries of Gender

Cynthia Van Sickle

McHenry County Coll.

cvansick@mchenry.edu

Presenter # 1: Jessica Notgrass, St. Louis Univesity

Title: Man’s Brain and Woman’s Heart: Ambiguity and Androgyny in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract: Bram Stoker’s Dracula obviously contributes to the Gothic tradition with its vampire lore, bloodthirsty lunatics, and nighttime attacks on innocent victims. But Dracula also plays with Gothic tropes through gender ambiguities and transformations which undercut traditional Victorian notions of gender. Victorians considered men as more rational and women as more emotional, and Stoker uses the vampire gaze to crisscross these traditional lines of gender. The new insecurity in widely-held Victorian absolutes of gender allows for a deeper sense of fear than the often-considered colonial invasion of outsiders. By twisting the Victorian conventions, Stoker invokes instability in the absolutes that readers would have considered immutable, thus instilling a cultural fear deeper than that of the undead. Throughout the work, the men in the vampire hunting party decrease in masculinity as the fear of Dracula grows; the women conversely increase in masculine tendencies by becoming more sexualized and intellectually capable. By manipulating the stability of traditional notions of gender, Stoker contributes to the Gothic’s tendencies toward insecurity, chaos, and xenophobia, especially as these elements relate to sexuality and reproduction.

Presenter # 2: Diane Sager, University of Missouri - Kansas City

Title: “The Catastrophe of a Female Philosopher” Gender and Genre Transgressions of Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract: The fascination with Wollstonecraft as a purveyor of transgression stems from both the influence of her work on later feminists and the often-frustrating difficulty of resolving the apparent inconsistencies in her oeuvre. Poovey has claimed that Wollstonecraft’s self-conflicting message can be attributed to her own unresolved anxieties about emotion, sexuality, and her place in a patriarchal society, suggesting that what she really wanted was an altered place of dependence rather than a liberation. Anne K. Mellor reconfigured Wollstonecraft as a writer whose message was sometimes couched in useful or convenient devices that, despite the criticisms of modern feminist scholars, were empowering rather than crippling in that they ensured she would be heard. Virginia Sapiro has attempted to give Wollstonecraft a place among political science luminaries such as Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, arguing that she was an innovator rather than a responder to political theory. Wendy Gunther-Canada countered that placing Wollstonecraft among a canon whose patriarchal ideology she opposed is a disservice to her goals and a misunderstanding of her distinct place as a feminist pioneer. I will argue that Wollstonecraft’s written work reflects and shapes a historical trend in revolutionary Europe, a permeability of intellectual categorical boundaries whose study enables us to better understand not only Wollstonecraft, but her era and the one that followed.

Presenter # 3: Danielle Nielsen, Case Western Reserve University

Title: Sarah Grand’s Politics: Working toward a Single Moral Standard

Abstract:   While the Contagious Disease acts gained widespread support from members of the military, the medical profession, and the government, many were outraged by the offense to civil liberties of the prostitutes. More importantly however, the social purity movement, which was gaining influence in the 1860s, was concerned with the sexual double standard set for men and women. Harriet Martineau, a leader in the movement, that the Bill “promise[d] to secure soldiers and sailors from the consequences of illicit pleasures.” Furthermore, the Women’s Manifesto published in the January 1, 1870 Daily News argued that “by such a system [the Contagious Diseases Acts], the path of evil is made more easy to our sons, and to the whole of the youth of England; inasmuch as a moral restraint is withdrawn the moment the state recognizes and provides convenience for, [sic] the practice of a vice which is thereby declares to be necessary and venial.” Social purists such as Martineau, Josephine Butler, and later, author Sarah Grand believed that the upper and middle-class society of England should not support a double standard where men were rewarded for the sexual licentiousness and women were considered “fallen” and never again proper candidates for marriage. This paper situates Sarah Grand’s fiction and journalism in the discourse of the social purity movement, and explores the ways in which Grand advocated against the sexual double standard.

Presenter # 4: Jessica Walsh, Harper College

Title: Border Patrol: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Amy Levy's "Run to Death"

Abstract: My paper will explore the poem "Run to Death" by Amy Levy (1861-1889). While most of Levy's work is powerful, "Run to Death" is particularly confrontational and unflinching in its examination of oppressive Victorian social taxonomies—the same classifications that pushed Levy to the margins as a lesbian, Jewish woman prone to debilitating depression. Indeed, I contend that the thematic heart of "Run to Death" is the very concept of those borders that delineate the hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and sex. “Run to Death” tells the tale of a gypsy woman carrying an infant who becomes prey to a group of gentlemen hunters bored with their typical pursuits. By chance the hunters spot her, a “Swarthy woman, with the ‘gipsy’ written clear upon her face,” and immediately shift their focus from animal to human victims. The poetic speaker condemns the dehumanizing gaze of the wealthy male elites who see the woman as “a ‘something’ which is crawling with slow step, from tree to tree.” Her life is “paltry” to the men, worth no more than that of a fox or a deer. To the hunters, she and her baby are alien, clearly and unmistakably separated from them by class, sex, and ethnicity. To the reader, however, the effect of this transgression is the desire to see beyond those very boundaries.

English II-D: English Literature 1800-1900

British Border Crossing: Romantic and Victorian (Inter)Textuality and the Destabilization of Boundaries

Panel # 4: Urban and Social Boundaries

Cynthia Van Sickle

McHenry County Coll.

cvansick@mchenry.edu

Presenter # 1: Peggy D. Otto, University of Louisville

Title: “City in the Jungle: London as Doppelganger in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau”

Abstract: One of the most disturbing aspects of Wells’s Doctor Moreau stems from the narrator’s repeated futile attempts to frame the absurdities he witnesses on the “infernal island” within a rational perspective. As Prendick, a London gentleman, encounters a defamiliarized landscape shot through with flickers of the familiar, Wells’s narrative forces readers to struggle with disorientation as well. The narrator’s conflation of vision and memory through counter-contextualized images of landscape and cityscape reveal a pattern of shifting perspectives in which anxieties about degradation are encapsulated in remembered images of a city in crisis. Prendick’s—and the reader’s—disorientation comes from the influence of this unnamed character that walks Moreau’s island, haunting the narrator’s imagination and masking his perceptions of the places and faces that he encounters. Faces of vivisected animals morph into faces of the London poor. Flights into dark and cramped spaces read like descriptions of the London Underground. London, this shadow character, is responsible for the “uncanny” aspect of the narrator’s experiences on the island, where he senses the places he has left behind tinting his apprehensions of the landscape he is encountering. In short, London functions as the doppelganger on Moreau’s island.

Presenter # 2: Nicholas Parker, Boston College

Title: Hunting for Boundaries in London Labour and the London Poor

Abstract: Of Victorian notions of bordering, structures of class are all-pervasive. Even some of those figures who have been lauded for their attempts to supersede this state of affairs, and to blur the various borders in one direction or another, have ultimately been brought down by these profoundly ensnaring cultural divisions. This paper deals with a personal narrative of attempted cross-class engagement - both its failure and even, it becomes apparent, the hollowness of its pretense. William Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor is a text which functions philanthropically both towards its purported object, the urban poor in London, and at the same moment towards the Victorian middle classes. Support for the first of these objects is overt and constantly restated – Mayhew devotes much of his text to outlining the hardships, mistreatment and of course previously disregarded lifestyles of numerous London ‘types.’ Many critical commentaries on the text have praised its status as an early and vocal statement of the need for social reform. Such readings are in many ways valid, yet they fail to allow for an essential and absolute limit to the text’s will to reform, which in my opinion becomes one of its principal functions.

Presenter # 3: Laura Vorachek, University of Alabama

Title: Destabilizing Class Boundaries: Mesmerism, Middle-Class Mores, and Eugenics in Trilby

Abstract:  While critics have noted that Trilby is saturated with the issues of the 1880s and 90s, despite being set in the late 1850s, George Du Maurier’s concern with Social Darwinism and eugenics has so far been overlooked. Crossing disciplinary borders, Du Maurier draws on science (Darwin’s writings), pseudoscience (mesmerism and contemporary discourses of degeneration), music, and art in his critique of eugenic attempts to control the social body through selective breeding, especially those voiced by Francis Galton. His resistance to eugenics is initially seen through the character of Trilby who, despite her city environment and her labor, defies prevailing notions about urban, working-class degeneration. Indeed, with her capacity for adaptation and her perfect feet, she is presented as the pinnacle of evolution and the means of regenerating the stagnating English middle class through marriage, thereby challenging the boundaries between the classes. Du Maurier combats Social Darwinists’ reworking of Darwin’s theories in Trilby, rejecting both urban, working-class degeneration and eugenics. Instead, he appears to follow Darwin’s views in The Descent of Man that “our natural rate of increase, though leading to many and obvious evils, must not be greatly diminished by any means” because it is through both unfettered reproduction and the struggle for existence that the human race has advanced. Du Maurier exposes the dangers of interfering with that maxim.