Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the VictorianFin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue Ross G. Forman (bio) Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue, by Christine Ferguson; pp. x + 180. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006, $89.95, £55.00. In his “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), Thomas Babington Macaulay infamously urged Parliament to create a class of English-speaking Indians to “act as interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” (par. 34). Naturally, Macaulay did not consider that learning the English language would give this new set of speakers any sense of ownership over it. They were to translate from English into the vernacular but in no way to reshape the “mother tongue” of the mother country. As the nineteenth century progressed and English increasingly became the language of the elite in India and elsewhere within the Empire, this view came to vie with other conceptions of English’s global role. Many such conceptions were grounded in the Darwinian frame that Christine Ferguson takes as the jumping-off point for her lucid and compelling investigation of the relationship between language theory and [End Page 489] Victorian literature, and many were grounded in an Orientalist study of “Eastern” texts that no longer endorsed Macaulay’s view that a single shelf of a “good European library” was worth “the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (par. 10). Ferguson’s work fits into a long line of scholarship that stretches from Marxist criticism’s exploration of what Gareth Stedman-Jones has termed “languages of class” to Gauri Viswanathan’s demonstration, in Masks of Conquest (1989), that the institutionalization of English Studies was a crucial ideological tool of imperialism. Ferguson is also clearly familiar with the arguments made by many postcolonial writers and theorists that the language gifted by imperialism can be (and has been) reappropriated and rearticulated and served to contest the very hegemonies it was intended to bolster. The Brutal Tongue shares with these works an investment in the Foucauldian notion that language and power are inextricably intertwined and in deconstructive techniques that see texts as potentially self-deconstructing and promote a destabilizing of language’s normalizing potential. Ferguson’s reading of Dracula (1897), for instance—a revised version of her superb article in ELH—envisages Bram Stoker’s novel as a celebration of “an English without a centre” that “rejects both late-century language purism . . . and the reactionary concern with social homogeneity that critics often find in horror fiction” (10). She therefore sees the linguistic sterility of the vampire—his inability to modify language or to mimic the multifarious englishes which appear in Stoker’s narrative—as the key to his destruction. The Brutal Tongue also strikes out into new territory by participating in a recent twist in postcolonial studies: the focus on language theory. Like Rachel Gilmour’s Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa (2006), Ferguson’s work foregrounds Victorian linguistic discourses as a means to understand the colonial encounter and its narrativization. Moreover, Ferguson’s turn to Victorian popular culture—and her call to revise the image of popular literature as homogenizing and regressive—provides a salutary check on previous scholarship that has seen the representation of dialect and other forms of non-standard English mainly in relation to canonical literature and often in terms of such texts’ marginalization of the voices of the working classes, women, and denizens of the “Celtic fringe.” Ferguson also resurrects nineteenth-century linguistic thinkers such as Max Müller. Although their theories of the origin of language and its defining role in separating the brute from the human may be discredited or overlooked today, she demonstrates how influential their ideas were to the Victorians and how they filtered into the popular consciousness through the types of literature that she studies. In her first chapter, “What Does Brutal Language Mean?”, Ferguson focuses on Victorian science’s engagement with the principle that language distinguishes men from beasts. She notes that verbal dearth, not profusion, marked “moral turpitude” (17) and that decline, “in savage societies at least, is evidenced through a silencing of words, through an absence where...