Poetry as Fiction: Meredith's Modern Love

Abstract

Modern Love is a curiosity of Victorian literature, an oddity among Victorian poems and even among Meredith's own. For despite the rich, dense imagery, the self-sufficiency of many of the individual stanzas (which stand well by themselves in anthologies), and the paucity and obliquity of narration (the latter a characteristic of Meredith's fiction too), it is in a very real sense novelistic. It treats a poetic theme which had fascinated Meredith among many others in the nineteenth century-the fatal woman, la belle dame sans merci-in terms of the psychological realism, the awareness of social context, and above all the temporal development of personal relationships that characterize the Victorian novel in general and Meredith's novels in particular. It tells its story in heightened poetic language, as a sequence of intense emotions, but its intensity is continually undercut by ironic self-awareness and its extreme subjectivity is always sharply responsive to the reality of others. The narrator at the beginning is nearly indistinguishable from the maddened husband, but at the end he is wise, aloof, omniscient. Modern Love is a point of intersection between Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel, and definitively marks Meredith's transition from poet to novelist. Meredith's first book was Poems, (1851). During the 1850's he wrote poetry, two odd works of prose fiction-The Shaving of Shagpat (1856) and Farina (1857), and then his first novels, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and Evan Harrington (1860). After Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, published in 1862 but containing much that had been written in the preceding decade, he wrote mostly novels. The shift was no doubt ultimately determined by his talents and influenced by his need for money, but it seems to have been precipitated by an experience that shed new and disagreeable light on two recurrent subjects of the poetry and fiction he had written so far: innocent nature and love, and fatal or fallen women. In 1849 he had married Mary Nicolls, the widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock; a son was born in 1853; in 1856 or '57 she went off with a Pre-Raphaelite painter, Henry Wallis, to whom she bore a child in 1858; she died in 1861,