Joyce and the Victorians (review)

Abstract

Schwarze, Tracey Teets. 2002. Joyce and the Victorians. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $55.00 hc. XII + 246pp.Given its title, one might expect Tracey Schwarze's Joyce and the Victorians to delve into anxiety of influence or examine his novels with those of Dickens, the Brontes, or Hardy. Schwarze addresses this, saying that it would be a contrarian absurdity (2002, 4) to examine Joyce the last (4). Her approach, instead, follows a cultural studies or cultural history perspective, examining not so much Joyce the experimental stylist and modernist as Joyce the user and collector of artifacts from Victorian and Edwardian Ireland and Britain.Like Joyceans such as Vincent Cheng, Cheryl Herr, and R.B. Kershner, Schwarze contextualizes works through the forces or nets affecting and constraining characters. Specifically, she attempts to acknowledge and excavate the heretofore largely unexplored late-Victorian and Edwardian ethos that undergirds fiction (2002, 4). Schwarze examines the effect that this ethos-the combined and separate forces of colonial politics, religion, and gender-obtains on individual subjectivity. In contrast to the view of modernism in which the individual mind is believed to transcend the traditional Victorian authorities (4), she writes, Joyce's characters never fully manage to supplant these powerful arbiters of conscious and subconscious thought (4).Schwarze divides her book into three sections: Not a Strong Swimmer: Submersions of Dedalus; Caught in the Currents: Victorian Manliness, Public Morality, and Leopold Bloom; and Fracturing the Discursive Feminine: Joyce and the Woman Question. The ideologies of nation (and colonial politics) and religion make up the first section, while the second and third sections both engage gender (masculinity and femininity, respectively). Schwarze connects the three sections and the three institutions or dominant ideologies through their common pervasiveness and essentializing power. Further, although Joyce exposes the social discourse or mechanisms of control, his characters, Schwarze argues, never completely break free from them-if at all (2002, 194-95). On the one hand, for example, despite their performative masculinities, both Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan remain shackle[d] . . . to the gender constructs of their age (92). On the other, notwithstanding Stephen's declarations of escape in A Portrait or Stephen Hero, he too remains a servant to two masters (68).In the first section, Schwarze discusses Stephen's encounters with and the effects of those two masters, the State and the Church. Of the first, she writes that Joyce relentlessly depicts a country whose shifting internal allegiances continually betray its leaders, artists, and aspirations-and doom its political romance with colonial independence (2002, 18). Emphasizing Ireland's impossible, and in view undesirable task of 'purifying' . . . Irish culture (19), and the attempts to construct a unified national character (as seen in the Irish Revival) (22), Schwarze works through Stephen's struggle with the ideology of colonialism and his own Irishness in Stephen Hero, Portrait, and Ulysses.Schwarze continues discussing Stephen in the second chapter of this section, most notably demarcating the convergence of the ideological indoctrination of the Church, Stephen s own religious belief (and expressed disbelief), and his artistic freedom. As such, Joyce's novels critique ever more clearly Stephen's investment in a romantic ethos as he attempts to liberate himself from the Church's discursive orthodoxy (2002, 44). …