The Late-Victorian Romance Revival: A Generic Excursus

Abstract

The Late-Victorian Romance Revival:A Generic Excursus Anna Vaninskaya Attempting to define romance is like attempting to define genre itself: an immensely revelatory but ultimately futile exercise.1 At the very least it is doomed to circularity and tautology, for it starts out already knowing what the definition is—enough, at least, to specify or to extend it. Taxonomies build on and link up with previously existing taxonomies, along a chain that disappears into the remote past of Western literary history. To abstract a set of romance characteristics from a group of texts one has to use some criteria to identify that group in the first place, and any such criteria will be a version of the very romance characteristics one is looking for. But though they may be methodologically problematic, there is no shortage of ideal formal definitions which attempt to conscript everything from medieval tales of aristocratic love and supernatural adventure to modern-day "genre fiction," and Northrop Frye's mythos of summer is only the most famous. These models can hardly do justice to the complex cultural background of an individual work, let alone a period phenomenon like the "romance revival" of the 1880s and 90s. Derek Brewer's canonical characterisation will serve to illustrate the difficulty. Like Northrop Frye and Gillian Beer,2 Brewer is interested in romance as a "mode" in continuous metamorphosis from Greek antiquity, through the medieval and early modern cycles, to Morris, MacDonald, Wells, and finally Tolkien. The romance is "a fantasy story about an individual's personal love and adventure, in which quest and conflict culminate in a happy ending. The story is told in a natural sequence with rhetorical art, local realism, and humour. The subject-matter is secular, but there are symbolic implications. Romance may be said to be the antithesis of tragedy.…" It is a late-cultural form, sophisticated and aesthetically self-aware, told "by well-educated men to upper-class audiences."3 But it also shares many of the formal characteristics of folktale narratives and makes extensive use of convention and repetition, [End Page 57] of the marvellous, supernatural, and improbable. Unlike the epic, the romance is concerned with the individual, though public and private are usually reconciled in the happy ending and social responsibility is restored. Although Brewer's representative sample is mainly medieval, his definition is meant to be general enough to apply to a variety of contexts: "Romance is a mode … and examples are found from Classical Antiquity to the present day."4 Indeed, in the critical debates of the fin de siècle many of its elements—idealism, optimism, improbability, adventure—were commonplace. But just as many were conspicuous by their absence, or were altered beyond recognition. The target audience was assumed to be significantly lower on the social scale; the relative prominence of individual or society was fiercely contested; fantasy and humour were by no means always welcome guests. The romance itself appeared younger: the earliest (and most juvenile) of literary modes. For its detractors it was, if anything, the very opposite of its aristocratic predecessor, a mass commercial genre produced by hacks for the edification of lower-class boys. Those more charitably disposed talked of Scott and Stevenson and the literature of the youth of mankind. None of this undermines Brewer's definition in its entirety, for there is no doubt that it holds well for certain times, places, and individual texts. But neither it nor any other summation can be expected to distil the essence of more than a thousand years of literary development. A genre is not an abstract entity, but one which manifests itself in concrete works and at specific historical moments: it is, in the end, what contemporaries (and future generations) make of it, and what they make of it alters over time. When one recalls that even during a given period different interpretative communities approach the same object with very different agendas, the possibility of a unifying definition dissipates like the mirage it is. So what made the late-Victorian romance revival a new and period-specific departure? After all, romance had been defining itself against realism ever since the rise of the novel, and...