Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel by Carolyn Lesjak

Abstract

524 Reviews cross-generic strains itsarguments on Victoriana and their force for today's audience. Example and critique prove suggestive and definitive in equal measure. UNIVERSITY OF READING NICOLA BRADBURY WorkingFictions: A Genealogy of theVictorian Novel. By CAROLYN LESJAK.Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007. x+270 pp. TI4.99. ISBN 978-o-8223 3888-8. WorkingFictions explores the relationship between 'labour' and 'pleasure' ina number of Victorian novelsand whatCarolyn Lesjak seesas its centrality tothosetexts. Lesjak begins her study by asking the fundamental question 'Why do we unthinkingly take our pleasure separately fromour work and what might thishave to do with theVic torian novel?' (p. I). Her attempt to respond to thisquestion is informed by twomain aims. The firstis tochallenge theconventional argument as advanced by critics such as Catherine Gallagher (The Industrial Reformation ofEnglish Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, I832-I867 (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, I985)), that literary representations of labour vanish from theVictorian novel after thedecline of the industrial novel in the I86os. The second is to dispute the claim that notions of labour and pleasure are unrelated. In place of these assertions Lesjak attempts topre sent a new 'genealogy', as she terms it, which maps a lineage of literary thinkingabout labour and pleasure throughout theVictorian period and beyond. Her genealogy can be traced from the early industrial novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, which seemingly represents labour and pleasure as separate spheres, to the utopian fictionsofWilliam Morris and Oscar Wilde, who envision a societywhere labour and pleasure are united: where labour ispleasure. Crucially, Lesjak suggests not only that such a rereading of theVictorian novel can give us new insight into theworkings of nineteenth-century Britain, but thatwe can 'read-forward' these insights inorder to understand our contemporary attitudes towards labour and pleasure in today's society. The study comprises close readings of a collection of seminal Victorian texts, with chapters on Gaskell's Mary Barton, George Eliot's Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, Morris's News fromNowhere, and a chapter which discusses a number of Wilde's works, including The Picture ofDorian Gray and De profundis.The study is separated into threeparts, each ofwhich has a brief but ef fective introductionwhich provides historical and cultural contexts to the subsequent section. The three parts chart Lesjak's genealogy chronologically and conceptually from Victorian Realism to theBildungsroman and finallythrough to lateVictorian and fin de siecle utopian fiction.Although, on thewhole, these chapters are engaging and often begin to read these very familiar texts in some interestingnew ways, a discussion of such a limitednumber of textsand authors perhaps undermines the study's claim to be a new genealogy: one might expect a broader and more inclusive network of texts. Lesjak does, however, pre-empt thiscriticism and argues inher introduction that: 'To some readers, theword "genealogy" may evoke a broad survey ofVictorian Literature, an expectation that thisclose analysis of six novels cannot hope tomeet. Iuse the term to highlight the "descent" between texts thathistorically have been treated as dis connected fromone another' (p. 7). If anticipating a book which engages with a large number ofVictorian novels, then one is likely to be disappointed. However, although the 'genealogy' claims of the study are perhaps a littlemisleading, it nevertheless represents a valuable re-evaluation of the importance of the 'labour novel' and makes some genuinely convincing and interestingnew connections between traditional texts. LOUGHBOROUGHUNIVERSITY GEMMA GASKELL ...