Moving Away from the Marriage Plot: The Urban Gothic in Frances Burney’s Cecilia

Reviewed by: The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices Roger Cooter (bio) Tabitha Sparks , The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, 186 pp. $99.95 cloth. This book should not be judged by its title, though its publishers might. Tabitha Sparks, after all, is not a retired doctor with pretensions to literacy and history, but a sophisticated scholar with something to say and good reason to say it. Far from an empty exercise in doctor hunting, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel is a lucid analysis of how the medical profession functioned within and for the Victorian novel's prevailing marriage plot. Without any of the smoke and mirrors of "close reading," Sparks shows how the unifying logic of matrimony in the Victorian novel was tempered and tested over time through the persona of the medical man, and later (fatally for the marriage plot), the medical woman. The appearance of the doctor-character in Victorian fiction, she contends, "reflects not only the rise of science in culture . . ., but also the revised and revising fortunes of domesticity and marriage" (p. 25). It is the intertwined tension between them that she charts—a tension emblemized by, on the one hand, the "Physician" in Dickens's Little Dorrit (the benign professional steeped in empirical truth), and, on the other, Dr. Woodcourt in Bleak House (the personification of domestic morality and keeper of intimate secrets). The outcome is a tidy and revealing study of how the doctor-character maps a dynamic interface in Victorian culture between public and private spheres. As such, "Doctoring the Marriage Plot"—the title, in fact, of her first chapter—might better have served for the book as a whole. In a deceptively predictable move, Sparks begins her mapping with Dr. Lydgate in Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-72). But it is only to indicate how the historical pitch has been queered by Lydgate's canonical status as the doctor who failed to assuage the social ills of the 1820s and '30s with medical science. Sparks compares him with Dr. Hope in Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook (1838-39) to reveal, in contrast to Lydgate, how Hope fits a domestic plot that "reflects pre-scientific medicine's essentially civic and social identification" (p. 24). Dr. Hope dutifully lives into his name to serve as a worthy guide for companionate marriage ("cooperation over romance") of the sort approved of by Martineau, the popularizer of Benthamite political economy. Deerbrook thereby forges new literary ground in terms both of doctor-plotting and moving away from Austen-esque romantic sensibility and domesticity. But Spark's point in making the comparison is to indicate that Lydgate's scientific ambitions (and Eliot's later Victorian knowledge of [End Page 329] modern science and medicine) shaped a marriage relationship "negatively informed by an emotional-empirical divide" that was "not yet visible to Martineau in the 1830s" (p. 24). Nor was it to be obvious to many of the other doctor-deploying novelists she discusses; only partially and in oblique ways did it become manifest before the fin de siècle when, in the novels of scientists and vivisecting surgeons, entwined with the specter of the New Woman, the marriage plot went into steep decline. With the message in mind that even by the time of Middlemarch, the wand of science could still be seen as wielded by the human hand (and, as with Lydgate, could bring a doctor-character down), Sparks traces "the trajectory of love in an increasingly scientific age" (p. 45). More than a dozen novels and short stories are marshaled to do so, some of them, such as Edward Berdoe's Romances of a Medical Student (1887), being even less known than Deerbrook. Consistently, as in her discussion of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, where scientific realism is reconciled with the love story (p. 73), or Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866) and Heart and Science (1882), where resistance to empiricism is treated as "antithetical to the values and lessons of fiction" (p. 89), or the "women doctor novels" that demand "either a reassessment of the marriage plot as female destiny, or of medicine's later-century distance from...

Reviewed by: Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain Tamara S. Wagner Heath, Kay . Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain. New York: State University of New York, 2009. 247 pp. $75.00 cloth. The marriage plot, generally considered a determining paradigm of nineteenth-century popular fiction, achieves a very different significance and reveals surprising new twists when we read the often remarked age differences not along easily typecast assumptions on gendered double standards but instead through the lens of age anxiety. Kay Heath's probing exploration of the literary and larger cultural representations of aging exposes this concern as a Victorian invention. Victorian culture transformed middle age, changing it from the "prime of life" into a period of decline, for men as well as for women. Previously considered "the apotheosis of adulthood" (6), it became an age of anxiety, of worries about status in society and in the work force, about marriageability, and about waning masculinity. Signs of aging were no longer an indicator of maturity, experience, wisdom, and hence increased status, but were instead anxiously watched as physical symptoms of decay in health, strength, beauty, or virility. While Heath acknowledges the expected double standard—which is significantly still with us—that "a gendered paradigm of midlife onset heralds the end of youth and marriageability at a much earlier point for females than males" (149), she also shows the effects this new invention had on men. An important number of heroes in Victorian novels suffer from the new anxiety, just as women worry about attractiveness (and fertility) or widows capitalize on the allure of experience. Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit (1857) springs to mind as one of the most self-conscious middle-aged men, as does, of course, the seemingly ageless Dorian Gray in the eponymous novel at the end of the century. But Heath discloses a range of otherwise very different male and female protagonists, minor and major, who struggle or come to terms with the changing perception of their age. As a result, this cultural history of midlife's invention also offers a new approach to nineteenth-century fiction: a literary history of aging heroes and heroines. [End Page 486] The spectrum of novels—both canonical and non-canonical—that Heath covers is impressive, inviting us to go back to and reread them, to search them out, or also to apply the paradigm (the tracing of age anxiety as an interpretative tool itself) to other novels of the time. A self-reflexive proviso in the introduction alerts us to the sheer pervasiveness of aging as a theme and the consequent development of what Heath calls "midlife plots" (13). At conferences at which she has been presenting and discussing her research, Heath stresses, "one of the most frequent comments has been the suggestion of yet another novel to include" (17). Clearly, "midlife is a Victorian issue so ubiquitous it would not be feasible to cover even a fraction of eligible texts" (17), while it also invites further study. Heath's method of selecting texts is as impressive as her coverage of the "fraction" she has sought out. In fact, what makes her study a delightful read as well as informative are the connections she establishes between outwardly very different texts, comparing and contrasting them across genres. While she supplements her perceptive close readings with equally insightful analyses of medical literature, demographic data, and advertisements, treating them as constructed texts as well, she importantly states from the beginning that she is going to "center [her] attention most extensively on Victorian novels" (3). Stressing that fiction "indicates a much more complicated scenario" (9) and shows finer distinctions, especially in such a culturally loaded and constructed discourse as the invention of a new and continuously shifting life stage, she thereby also illustrates how novels form such a revealing and often particularly intriguing insight precisely because they are "problematic bearers of cultural freight" (18). It is indeed a major strength of the study that it draws on a wide range of works, analyzes representative texts in detail, and thereby presents a different key to tracing literary history along the marriage plots of novelists including...

Reviewed by: Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture Matthew Bolton (bio) Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, by Martha Stoddard Holmes; pp. xiv + 228. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004, $65.00. Returning home from her disastrous foreign marriage "a cripple and a mother," Madame Madeline Neroni of Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857) is determined to captivate the men of Barsetshire (66). At a reception hosted by the bishop and his wife, she arranges for a couch to be placed at the top of the grand staircase, to which she is carried by four attendants. Once settled on her couch—a symbol of both her physical disability and her sexual availability—Neroni becomes the fixed point around which the party swirls: "Dressed as she was and looking as she did, so beautiful and yet so motionless . . . it was impossible that either man or woman should do other than look at her" (81). Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction investigates the cultural assumptions, values, and anxieties encoded in Madame Neroni's couch, Tiny Tim's crutch, Rochester's blindness, and other Victorian representations of disability. For Stoddard Holmes, the Victorian discourse of disability is bound up with the conventions of melodrama, and her book studies both disabled characters in melodramatic fiction and melodramatic discourse in "factual" narratives of disabled Victorians. Along with the figure of the disabled fallen woman must be considered that of the disabled heroine, such as Wilkie Collins's Lucy Finch, and the disabled helper, such as Charles Dickens's Jenny Wren. At first blush, then, the presence in Victorian novels of [End Page 483] both disabled female villains and disabled heroines seems to point to a general awareness that disability is not correlative with any one moral character or disposition. Yet Stoddard Holmes proposes that villainy and heroism are weighed on the same scale, measured against the disabled woman's willingness to control her emotions and, by extension, her sexuality. This fear of the disabled woman's unrestrained sexual desire circles around issues of eugenics, heredity, and the transmission of disability. Neroni is dangerous precisely because she continues to exert a sexual hold over men, and she must leave Barchester for its normal social life to resume. That her disability is acquired rather than congenital seems to be of little consequence. The disabled heroine, on the other hand, is marked by an ability to restrain her emotions. While a "good" disabled woman may assist in bringing to fruition an able-bodied protagonist's marriage plot, and may even marry herself, she is almost never shown bearing children. In fact, Stoddard Holmes claims that there are only two Victorian fictions that feature disabled women giving birth: Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) and Dickens's "Doctor Marigold" (1865) (88). The scarcity of disabled mothers suggests that the emotional restraint Victorian fiction seems to value in disabled women encodes a similarly valued sexual restraint, a tacit understanding that a disabled woman ought to forgo bearing children for fear of handing down her disability to a new generation. Victorian writers therefore tend to use disability, and the great emotional abandon or restraint that they see as concomitant with it, as a stand-in for femininity. Stoddard Holmes traces the deployment of this trope across a range of novels and genres. When Rochester is blinded toward the end of Jane Eyre (1847), for example, he becomes dependent on Jane—effectively, if temporarily, losing some of his masculinity. If disability is associated with the feminine and with dependency on others, then able-ness is associated with masculinity and with the independence that men establish through their ability to work. The disabled workman, therefore, is a figure of great anxiety to the Victorian public; he represents, Stoddard Holmes argues, the anxious middle ground excluded by the typological dichotomy of the virtuous, crippled boy and the shiftless, able-bodied beggar. Victorian society as a whole was comfortable with its obligation to protect the Tiny Tims of the world and to punish the grifters, but was less sure of its obligation toward the honest man whose work had disabled him. Melodrama, dealing as it does in extreme types...

Looking at the underside of the city, Sabo explores the material filth, refuse and decaying matter that every city produces. He traces the dynamics of street rubbish in millennial Gothic fictions to suggest that we ignore trash and residue in the Anthropocene at our peril. Placing the texts in a larger context of impending ecological disaster, Sabo examines the Gothic irruptive potential of trash to deconstruct uncanny horrors and the urgent materiality of waste as expressions of one-way anxieties of filth in contemporary cityscapes. In particular, he looks to the dynamics of street rubbish in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and the transcendence of discarded material objects in David Mitchell’s Slade House (2015) to map the wasteways between Gothic worlds and tropes. Sabo argues that the pressing threat of ecological disaster related to the accumulation of waste limits the new urban Gothic’s ability—or even willingness—to craft ontological oppositions that are easily extricable from the materiality of contemporary ecology.

Though the marriage plot is the most familiar vehicle in the Victorian novel for reconfiguring the family, the adoption plot is a prominent alternative version. This essay explores the intersection of comic adoption plots with the motif that Alistair Duck-worth has dubbed the "improvement of the estate." In the Victorian novel the variety of arrangements according to which children are transferred to households other than the one to which they are born reflects the fact that institutionalized adoption did not exist in Victorian England. An investment in traditonal patterns of property succession was one of the factors that delayed its advent. In the adoption plots of Dinah Craik's King Arthur: Not a Love Story and Trollope's Doctor Thorne, however, this concern is countered by a representation of adoption as the key to safeguarding or revitalizing the estate. Craik's novel makes a case for institutionalizing adoption by showing that it is the hero's adoption into a middle-class family that equips him to be the worthy steward of an ancestral estate. In Trollope's novel the salvation of the Greshamsbury estate hinges on the rescue of the illegitimate child, Mary, by the uncle who adopts her. Doctor Thorne suggests that adoption is the key to a social mobility that serves not just the individual but society at large.

This article aims to examine Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889), not merely as an extension of her argument of the essay “Marriage”(1888) on Westminster Review which ignited a firestorm of controversy on ‘modern’ marriage, but also as an experiment on various devices of the contemporary fiction-Bildungsroman, domestic novel with a marriage plot, and the murderess of the late-Victorian Sensation Fiction.BR Viola Sedley finds herself trapped in oppressive relationships among her family and harassed by Sir Philip Dendraith and his son (whose name is also Philip). Her growth as a human being is seriously distorted and stunted, which characterizes Viola’s adolescence as ‘anti-Bildung’. Her family members force her to marry Philip to avert their financial ruin. Viola soon discovers that her married life is a “living-hell”, because of Philip’s gaslighting and stone-cold abuses including marital rapes, rarely portrayed in fiction during the Victorian era. While dreaming of escape with Harry Lancaster, she stabs Philip to death, to avoid the immediate rape. However, Caird does describe Viola neither as an adulteress-murderess of a Sensation Fiction, nor as a tragic heroine like Thomas Hardy’s Tess.BR As an early ‘New Woman’ novelist, Caird not only covers various topics surrounding the debate over the Victorian marriage, but also appropriates several novelistic devices and conventions to dramatize the typically thwarted progress of a Victorian woman’s life.

:<i>Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders</i>

Review

Anne Hidalgo’s twenty-first-century mayoral plans for turning Paris into the “fifteen-minute city” remind us of the spatiotemporal effects that public transportation can have on our urban experience—and of the contingency of today’s vehicular forms, from bicycles and cars to buses and trains. We are well aware of the key date of 1900 for the development of the Paris métropolitain system and because the Métro continues to provide rapid transit, it tends to overshadow previous models for communal urban transportation in the public imaginary. It is tempting to take the teleological view of transportation as a progressive development from oxcarts and galleys to airplanes and supersonic jets. Within that history, the horse-drawn omnibus that ferried small groups of passengers across the streets of Paris from 1828 to 1913 would seem merely a transitional mode, a hiccup before the propulsive advent of engines. Indeed, if we look backward to the nineteenth century through the critical prism of what David Harvey calls the “time-space compression” of postmodernity—or through the historical lens of what Mathieu Flonneau identifies as the democratization of the city under the “automobile revolution” of the Trente glorieuses, the omnibus might appear as a pale preface to modern, efficient modes of transport—akin, perhaps, to the kinetoscope as a quaint proto-version of cinematic technology.Such thinking would sell the omnibus short—something I would have been likely to do before reading Masha Belenky’s lively and well-researched book Engine of Modernity. In Belenky’s account, the omnibus emerges not just as an eclipsed precursor to the eventual acceleration of modernity but as itself already embodying that acceleration. In fact—and this is a nuanced, intriguing point that Belenky’s book develops convincingly—it is precisely because the omnibus was becoming swiftly obsolete that it registered in the popular cultural imaginary as the perfect symbol of the (Baudelairean) éphémère, of everyday life’s “provisional, transitory and fragmented nature,” and of sped-up anxieties about gender and class mixing in the capital city even before the changes wrought by Haussmannization (3). The etymological meaning of omnibus, “for everybody,” set up a horizon of democratization evoking responses of both hope and despair, with low-cost lines transgressing topographical boundaries and creating interior spaces where different classes, genders, and races rubbed elbows in new ways. Belenky harnesses a wealth of archival documents to support her analysis of the new mode’s sociological dynamics; one of the book’s pleasures lies in its black-and-white and color illustrations of omnibus-related caricatures, paintings, postcards, press clippings, advertisements, vaudeville songs, fashion, and even a board game.Engine of Modernity is more, however, than a cultural history of a mode of transport. Belenky’s book proposes the thesis that the omnibus not only fundamentally changed the material conditions of urban life as a “motor” of new sociabilities but also inspired innovations in literary form. As both vehicle and storytelling device with “powerful figurative and self-reflexive potential” the omnibus became a “super-topos” marked by heterogeneity (5, 165). In physiologies, story collections, popular vaudevilles, and more canonical works like Zola’s La Curée, the logic of chance encounters defines both the content and the mode of writing. Belenky deftly crosses the lines between intra- and extra-diegesis to trace a repertoire of recurring features in middlebrow tales of transit, including first-person narration by an “omnibus flâneur,” urban description, marriage plots, and themes of estrangement or connection in the enclosed space of the omnibus car. Bourgeois anxieties about a society in flux get staged through everything from an overturned omnibus turned revolutionary barricade in Hugo’s Les Misérables to the alienating sensory experience of working-class passengers emitting pungent smells in the cramped space of the omnibus in Maupassant’s short story “La Dot.” And in other literary texts, the bodily realities of sloppy wet nurses and bulky crinoline skirts crystallize wider discourses about transgressive female behavior and women’s bodies in public space, which Belenky usefully situates within critical work by scholars like Griselda Pollock, Catherine Nesci, Sharon Marcus, Marni Kessler, Temma Balducci, and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Engine of Modernity ends cleverly with a “final stop” addressing fin de siècle ambivalence about the omnibus as an emblem of urban modernity and mobility: Fortuné du Bosgovey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus and Zola’s Au bonheur des dames call attention to its violent dangers, while Octave Uzanne’s article “Omnibus de Paris” provides a nostalgic elegy for this mode of transport as it nears definitive obsolescence. Belenky’s book is a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in the rich, intertwined histories of literary mobility and transportation technology of the nineteenth century—a subject that continues to flourish, as evidenced by Kari Weil’s newly published Precarious Partners: Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France and Seth Whidden and Corry Cropper’s forthcoming Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France.

Describing Gothic literature as a ‘writing of excess’ (1996, 1), Fred Botting argues that the genre has historically been replete with ‘gloomy and mysterious’ atmospheres, stock supernatural features and desolate and alienating landscapes, signifying ‘an overabundance of imaginative frenzy, untamed by reason and unrestrained by conventional eighteenth-century demands for simplicity, realism or probability’ (3). It is through excess that the emotional affect of the Gothic takes hold. Kristin Thompson argues that excess within the cinema emerges when there is a ‘conflict between materiality of a film and the unifying structures within it’, namely narrative and character motivation (1986, 132). She suggests that ‘the minute a viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward and must affect narrative meaning’ (132). This is particularly significant with regard to horror cinema, wherein the emotional affect often generated by the aesthetic excess is, in fact, the central purpose of the film, with story and style working together to incite an emotional response. It is precisely at the point where style spills out over the requirements of narrative that affect is generated, whether that be fear, terror, disgust or laughter.

Reviewed by: Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf Tess O'Toole (bio) Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf by Mary Jean Corbett; pp. 264 Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008. $26.05. As familiar and well-mined a topic as the Victorian marriage plot is, Mary Jean Corbett's fascinating study allows us to view it afresh by attending to the "cultural meanings" (175) attached to incest in nineteenth-century Britain. Our critical tradition, Corbett suggests, has overemphasized both the cultural injunction to exogamy in the period and the generic plot of "romance between strangers" (vii). But in an era when the distinction between consanguinity and affinity (relationships created by marriage) was contested, affective bonds between siblings and cousins informed conjugal bonds in powerful and complex ways. In compelling readings of narratives depicting what she terms "marriage within the family" (34) in such forms as marriage with a cousin, a deceased wife's sister, or an adoptive sibling, Corbett encourages us to rethink not only Victorian novels but also our own normative models of family life. Corbett approaches incest as an "historically variable concept" (68) that in the Victorian context, connoted "a different set of perceived transgressions [End Page 244] than we associate with the term today" (7). She charts its changing valences and the practical forms it assumed throughout the nineteenth century, tracking in particular the way its definition gradually disentangled biological and affinal forms of relationship defining incest as well as the complicated and counterintuitive overlaps between concerns about incest and about the practice that would appear to be its exogamous opposite, miscegenation (a relationship she makes especially visible in a reading of Wuthering Heights). Central to Corbett's reconstruction of this history is the debate over the law that prohibited a widower from marrying his sister-in-law. Repeal of the prohibition with the passage of the Deceased Wife's Marriage Act in 1907 was a watershed: decriminalizing affinal incest, it "effectively enabled the institution of legal penalties for consanguineal incest" a year later and paved the way for our own cultural understanding of the term (4). But for the ban's Victorian proponents and opponents alike, Corbett argues, the affective charge of the wife's unmarried sister reveals an "ambiguity in the boundaries of the family" (59) that is central to what she defines as "nineteenth-century middle-class incests" (19). In that ambiguity, Corbett finds openness and possibility. In a surprising and persuasive reading of Mansfield Park, for instance, she invites us to imagine "the force and scope the now-anomalous alternative plot of marriage within the family had for Austen's original audience" (55) and argues that Austen's characters "have opportunities to maintain and extend kinship ties ... through the creation of second families not exclusively centered on the heterosexual couple and its offspring" (56). She locates a similar flexibility in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, where the blended family formed by Dr. Gibson's remarriage and the figurative adoption of Molly Gibson by the Hamleys mediate the courtship plot in a way that suggests family relations are "not ... fixed or given ... [but rather] malleable, situational, and fungible ... [depending on] action more than essence" (148). Thus, while the literary trope of incest has generally been associated with contraction and enclosure, Corbett's approach identifies it with expansiveness and extension; this is perhaps the most revisionary aspect of her study. Like the work of Sharon Marcus, whose Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England Corbett references several times, Family Likeness productively reframes the critical conversation around domestic fiction. Particularly impressive is Corbett's deft integration of the personal narrative—the affective dimension of the negotiation between first-family and conjugal bonds, the potential of "marriage within the family" to foster a woman's agency—with the cultural narrative whereby the "middle-class incests" depicted in the marriage plots she addresses were poised against and increasingly distinguished from working-class pathologies of family life (13). She considers fictional texts alongside legal, political, and scientific treatises that work through related problems: Henry Maine's anthropological account of adoption, for instance, frames Corbett's account of...

Victorians Journal 5 Gratings from thg editors As Adam Gopnik has recently told us in The New Yorker (May 4), “Trollope is Trending.” For that high-profile attention in an iconic cultural and literary magazine, we who have been reading Trollope and writing about his work for decades are grateful—but not surprised. The argument for Trollope’s art as sophisticated and modern as well as deeply engaging is one Trollope scholars have been making for quite some time now. Trollopians such as Robert Polhemus {The Changing World of Anthony Trollope), Juliet McMaster {Trollope’s Palliser Novels), and Robert Tracy {Trollope’s Later Novels) have long pointed out his characters’ psychological complexity, the “depth ofportraiture” that David Skilton—one of Trollope’s great editors—focuses on in a recent essay. The intricacies of Trollope’s deceptively “transparent” prose have been remarked upon at least since Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor claimed that Trollope’s narrator likes “to lead his reader very gently up the garden path of his own conventions and prejudices and then to point out that the reader is wrong. This is not very like the behavior of a typical mid-Victorian gentleman” (168). It is now generally accepted among Trollope scholars that his fiction engages the intricacies not only of the individual psyche—in layered, complicated prose—but that Trollope also immerses himself in the most complex issues of the Victorian society in which he wrote his books. His work addresses the discourses of gender and nationhood in particular, but also responds to social class tensions and racial history, issues that still intensely occupy us today (see Morse, Reforming Trollope). These essays on Trollope build on past scholarship to read his novels in fascinating new ways. In the long wake of germinal scholarship by James Kincaid {The Novels ofAnthony Trollope) and Christopher Herbert {Trollope and Comic Pleasure), a group of essays focus on the marriage plot, discovering in Trollope’s fiction adaptations and critiques of that narrative convention. In “Why You Can’t Forgive Her: Vocational Women and the Suppressive Hypothesis,” Talia Schaffer examines the economic background of the Langham Place movement, which from the mid-1850s onwards sought to expand the 6 Victorians Journal opportunities for work for women, when activists like Emily Faithful, Bessie Raynor Parkes, and Barbara Leigh Smith pragmatically realized that creating access to work would lead to more equality more quickly than fighting for legislative reform. The first half of the essay, which focuses on their work and their achievements, is scrupulously delineatedbefore Schafferproceeds to examine Can You Forgive Her?, the first novel of the Palliser series, in this light. Schaffer proposes that this marriage novel is a critique of the convention oferotic marriage, and one that advances the concept ofthe vocational marriage, where a woman’s choice of spouse is predicated on a life with a career for her too, alongside her husband. This reading leads to some telling ironies, many of them uncomfortable. In a subtle re-working of Sharon Marcus’s thesis in Between Women, she sees the happiest “marriage” as being between Plantagenet Palliser and John Grey, as Palliser convinces Grey of the fulfilment of a life in politics. John Grey and Alice each achieve the other’s ideal ending, as Grey gets the exciting career and Alice ends up with the peaceful estate in Cambridge. Lauren Cameron also creates a new perspective on Can You Forgive Her? when she examines Darwin’s influence on Trollope’s novel. Cameron too links her analysis to the story of Alice Vavasor, rather than focusing on sparkling Glencora McCluskie—Palliser’s courtship, unhappy early marriage, and flirtation with her rakish former suitor Burgo Fitzgerald—as many Trollope scholars have done: Alice’s plotline is the heart of the book, which begins with her past and closes with her future. Trollope views Alice as a worthwhile subject of study and one of the reasons—I argue in this article—is that her experience provides a test case for Darwinian narratives that were gripping public attention and intellectual imaginations in the years following the publication of On the Origin of Species. . . . Alice’s plot shows us that Darwinian evolutionary principles function...

One of the most distinctive features of Victorian dialogue is the speakers’ tendency to take up and develop one another’s metaphors. This practice, which appears as frequently in actual recorded conversations as in fictional ones, is common in all sorts of situations, but it takes on a particular significance when the interlocutors are potential marriage partners. According to a widespread understanding, enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer, marriage itself is a metaphor. Literary theorists, meanwhile, particularly in the early nineteenth century, frequently describe metaphor as a type of marriage — a joining together of diverse but complementary concepts. Hence it is worth attending when an unmarried man and woman share in the creation of a single metaphor. Focusing on two representative Victorian novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Meredith’s The Egoist , this essay suggests two major ways in which the trope is significant. First, it reflects an important shift in the conception of matrimony in England over the course of the Victorian period, from an ideal of marriage as total merging towards an increasing recognition of distinction-within-union. Second, the practice of sharing metaphor can serve in a novel, not just as a marker, but as a microcosm of conjugal compatibility; even in novels that end as soon as the lovers marry, these dialogues permit the reader to witness, in essence, a marital relationship.

Going Underground

Drawing on George Haggerty’s Queer Gothic, Lee Edelman’s No Future, and Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, this paper positions The Wanderer as both a female gothic and a queer gothic text through its representations of sapphism and its critique of the marriage narrative and reproductive futurity. In The Wanderer, Burney locates Juliet’s (who also goes by the Incognita, L.S. and Ellis) source of gothic horror in the marriage plot and the obligation of women to embrace reproductive futurity. However, Juliet’s escape from her coerced marriage represents only a part of the novel’s larger refusal of linear life paths and sexual developmental narratives. For both Mr. Ireton and Sir Jaspar Harrington, reproductive futurity unravels itself. It generates the gothic specter of male disempowerment—figured equally through marriage and its avoidance—that prevents both men from achieving it, and this resistance to reproductive futurity compounds the novel’s queer gothic narrative bent. The article ends by tracing Elinor’s trajectory from Wollstonecraftian radical to someone obsessed with gender normativity and marriage. When marriage becomes foreclosed, Elinor becomes a wanderer who enacts her own unique, queer path.