“A GREAT PART TO PLAY”: GENDER, GENRE, AND LITERARY FAME IN GEORGE MOORE’S A MUMMER’S WIFE

Abstract

An actor is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another.— George Moore, “Mummer-Worship” (1891)THE COMPLEXITIES OF GEORGE MOORE’S CHARACTER, his reactions to Victorian life, and his experimentation with literary styles and genres make him a persistently marginal, albeit intriguing, character in literary studies. “[H]is best work,” Lloyd Fernando has observed, “rests to this day in an artistic as well as social limbo which resists complete definition” (10). A Mummer’s Wife (1885), his second novel, has been studied for Moore’s debt to French novelists, in particular Flaubert, or for the author’s reaction to the British circulating libraries’ power.1 In response to controversy over A Mummer’s Wife’s perceived crudeness, Moore claimed “I have a great part to play — I am fighting that Englishman [sic] may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed, that of writing freely and sanely” (qtd. in Hone 114), even appointing himself “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre.”2 Without exception then, author and scholars regard A Mummer’s Wife as a transitional work, the book that brought naturalism into the British tradition. The novel, however, suspended in that artistic and social limbo, has not come under scrutiny for additional and alternative readings.3