Friendship's Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England by Richard Dellamora (review)

Abstract

YES, 36.2, 2006 273 presentation of the writer, particularly in relation to the mysterious gaps in her life. Alan Rawes examines Benita Eisler's treatment of a similar mystery in Byron's life, demonstrating how her emphasis on the poet's incestuous relationship with his half sister (of which there is no decisive proof) is influenced by Byron's own fictions and by the Romantic model of poetry as self-expression. Similarly, Gerard Carruthers highlights the Romantic elements in Lockhart's biographies of Burns and Scott, revealing, for example, that 'Lockhart's Scott-unforgivably in a biography-is very much a version of Scott's Scott' (p. io6). Of the remaining essays, two address issues of gender. Drawing on the work of Anne Mellor, Julian North considers the gendering of biography, particularly in terms of the shifting attitudes of biographers to the myth of the heroic masculine genius, while Jennifer Wallace compellingly shows how the contemporary focus on Keats's body feminized and etherealized him. Finally, Arthur Bradley examines the structure and methodology of biography more generally, using the work of Jacques Derrida to show how the dialectic presentation of the relationship between Byron and Shelley has excluded other ways of thinking about their creative friendship, finding in the winged laughter of 'Julian and Maddalo' a figure for an alternative mode of biography that resists dialecticism. Like many contributions to this excellent volume, Bradley's stimulating essay not only offers a powerful critique of the structures and methods of Romantic biography as it has existed for the last two centuries but, in its proposals for its future direction, reveals the continuing value and importance of the form. LANCASTER UNIVERSITY SIMONBAINBRIDGE Friendship's Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England. By RICHARD DELLAMORA. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. ii+ 264 PP. $47.50. ISBN 0-8I22-3813-3. This is a challenging and complex book, which begins with the question: 'What is the connection between citizenship and friendship inVictorian fiction?' (p. i). It focuses especially on the theme of anxiety around the corruptibility of male friendships, jux taposing concerns about the influence of Jews and homosexuals in British political and literary life from Dickens to Oscar Wilde, with Marx, Disraeli, and Gladstone as the key political polemicists. Discussion of canonical texts, such as Oliver Twist and Daniel Deronda, alternates with close readings of the less familiar, such as Dis raeli's novels Tancred and Alroy. The result is an intellectually demanding argument to which it is difficult to do full justice in a short review, but which uncovers the intimate undercurrents of homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric underlying political and literary friendship networks when Victorian democracy was cautiously unfolding. The crucial starting-point, for Richard Dellamora, is the story of Lot, told in Genesis, which links together three core preoccupations of the Victorian establish ment. These are the concept of a chosen people; then that group of 'others' against whom the chosen group is defined; and finally, what Dellamora terms Lot's 'unseemly cosmopolitanism' (p. 4) in choosing to settle in Sodom, a place associated with 'unna tural' desires. Dellamora, however, develops aportmanteau interpretation of the term 'Sodomite', which encompasses not just homosexual practices, but a construction of the national subject dependent on 'a shadowy, abjected Other, namely the S/sodo mite'. As he goes on to demonstrate, with itswide-ranging implications, 'Sodomitic rhetoric has been a general feature ofWestern religio-political discourse' (p. i8). Perhaps the best way to give a flavour of the discussion is to focus on two stages of its development, from themore familiar texts. The chapter on Oliver Twist focuses on 274 Reviews the articulation of desire between men and boys, and the parody ofmentorship, which Dellamora connects with the values of citizenship. His discussion here includes ana lysis of George Cruikshank's famous illustration of 'Oliver Asking forMore', which, he argues-through Bumble's 'splayed stance' and Oliver's outsize spoon-hints at sexual impurities implicit in the text: a theme continued in the Fagin episodes, which begin with Oliver longing for relief from his bodily self. By the time we come toDaniel Deronda, Dellamora's argument has incorporated farmore of the...