Abstract
Even by as late as the 1890s, France – and especially Paris – represented what was other for Victorian society. This paper claims that Parisian pictures, as drawn by George Moore (notably in Celibates and Esther Waters) and Kate Chopin (in “Lilacs”), constitute gentle challenges to simplistic judgment and fundamentalist prejudice. Their portrayals are word pictures without the expected accompaniment of an obvious edifying lesson; they are neither overt nor threatening while, with dispassionate balance, they advance an insidiously persuasive case for reinterpretation of Victorian moral certainties. This essay further suggests that the Irishness of both writers may be a key factor in their artistic and modernist approaches.
Highlights
Defined sociologically, otherness is the distancing from a cultural norm of what is peripheral, marginal and incidental; it is the distancing of illicit danger from safe legitimacy; otherness is something dangerous and threatening
There were many reasons for such stances but a recent defence journal analysis of the military position in the nineteenth century provides a pithy summing up that is applicable to the world of literature at the time: its verdict was that Britain needed its neighbour in order to define itself
That meant that the politico-military establishment could persuade itself three times in the course of the nineteenth century that France would invade, an attitude that defied objective logic, and so in the wake of the 1870 French defeat by Prussia
Summary
Otherness is the distancing from a cultural norm of what is peripheral, marginal and incidental; it is the distancing of illicit danger from safe legitimacy; otherness is something dangerous and threatening. This essay will focus on some of the literary routes taken by George Moore (1852-1933) and Katherine O’Flaherty, better known as Kate Chopin (1851-1904), as they undermined the facile assumptions of Paris as dangerous other, and so broadened fiction’s horizons.
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