British Modernism and Censorship by Celia Marshik

Abstract

202 Reviews and forhis thorough, well-informed, and insightful commentaries and contextual izations. His treatment of JohnAddington Symonds seems especially prescient as there are signs thatSymonds ison theverge of amajor critical re-evaluation, and it is extremely helpful toencounter such a serious and detailed treatmentof his poetry. In his Chapter 4, 'From Sexuality to Sexualities', Holmes's contention thatRossetti's 'Inclusiveness' allows his poetry tobe read as a 'queer poetry' isextremely interesting, as are his furtherspeculations about sexual identityand its manifestations during the nineteenth century.Though one may disagree with some of his formulations, this is an argument which should rightly rouse much critical interest among Victorianists working on representations of sexuality. Iwould have liked to seemore treatmentofEugene Lee-Hamilton, a finesonneteer and strong admirer ofRossetti, who, apart fromhis sonnet on DGR, isnot discussed. Neither his extremely original Imaginary Sonnets (i888), a series of sonnet mono logues spoken by characters from legend and history, nor his Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (i 894), a sequence predominantly lamenting his chronic invalidism, aremen tioned. The issue ofRossetti's own influences isnot really addressed either, although I suspect his 'Inclusiveness' may inpart derive fromSwinburne (usually thought of as his disciple), whose short sonnet sequence 'Hermaphroditus', published inPoems and Ballads (i866), anticipates many of the characteristics Holmes describes. How ever,Holmes's book is an excellent contribution to the critical literature on Rossetti and on lateVictorian sonnet sequences, and deserves tobe widely read. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON CATHERINE MAXWELL British Modernism and Censorship. By CELIA MARSHIK. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress. 2oo6. xii+257pp. 348. ISBN 978-o-52i-85966-o. Celia Marshik's study argues that 'in the context of British modernism, censorship was repressive and also had productive effects' (p. 4). These included many ofmo dernism's 'trademark aesthetic qualities-such as self-reflexivity,fragmentation, and indirection' (p. 6). There are case-study chapters on Dante Gabriel Rossetti (included because he and his artistic circle 'areemerging as privileged sites ofmodernist genesis' (p. I4)), George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and JeanRhys. Each of these chapters discusses theauthor's careermore generally while focusing detailed analytical attention onto a single text. Such an approach allows for a range of concern and a subtlety of comment. At the same time the examples are, given the period covered (i 870-1934), spread rather thinover a time characterized by extensive change. Marshik's overwhelming concern iswith the actual or threatened censorship of sexual topics, and she exposes the fuzzy line between the unofficial power of various pressure groups and the power granted to the courts by Acts of Parliament. Her comments on the censorship of literature forblasphemous or seditious content are, incomparison, relatively restricted.The period of theFirstWorld War isof course a special case (onewhich a chapter on Lawrence would have illuminated), but publisher Grant Richards wrote in retrospect of the manuscript ofRobert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists-which he read before theoutbreak of thewar-that itwas 'damnably subversive'. Richards published the book, but in a heavily abridged (and arguably censored) form. Marshik concentrates especially on representations of prostitution and the 'white slave trade', but she also has some useful discussion of the embargo on the depiction of homosexuality. Virginia Woolf's revisions toA Room ofOne's Own involved the deletion of an archly ironic passage implying that 'Chloe and Olivia' shared a bed. MLR, I03.1, 2oo8 203 Would a comparable comment have survived inBetween the Acts had Woolf lived to revise this text too, or had times changed? Marshik assumes thatOrlando was vul nerable to prosecution because of its representation of prostitution, butWoolf was probably skating farnearer the edge with her gender-shifting hero(ine), whose very creation may owe something to the threatof censorship. (The device effectivelyallows Woolf to depict sex between two characters both born asmen without risking legal action.) Marshik's detailed discussion ofWoolf's excisions to the textof The Voyage Out isvery illuminating, as isher point thatLeonard and Virginia Woolf became far more vulnerable to the threatof legal action as publishers thanVirginia was as author. Discussing Jean Rhys's Voyage in theDark, Marshik argues, 'The first landlady that the reader encounters refuses to rent toAnna and a friend because she...