Child Sacrifice and the Crisis of Gender in Mary Cholmondeley's Major Fiction Carolyn W. De La L. Oulton By the mid-nineteenth century popular narratives of childhood such as Jane Eyre (1847) and David Copperfield (1850) had opened up numerous possibilities for the child protagonist, as both judge and uncomprehending victim of the adult world. In Brontë's text it is the adult Jane who narrates, "'I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered: now … I see it clearly.'"1 When the young David first encounters Mr. Murdstone, the adult recalling narrator retreats from the scene, allowing him to give no reason for his instinctive dislike. Between them they nonetheless convey a more reasoned dread to the reader in the comment: "'He patted me on the head, but somehow I didn't like him or his deep voice, and I was jealous that his hand should touch my mother's in touching me.'"2 Similarly naive, Pip in Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) believes himself to have been chosen by the wealthy Miss Havisham as a future husband for her beautiful ward, rather than as a tool for her personal vengeance on the male sex. In all three cases, the first-person narrators directly influence the reader through their control of the texts, regardless of their initial failures of comprehension. Cholmondeley of course knew the work of both Dickens and the Brontës, but by contrast, her writing of the 1890s allows her child characters surprisingly little comment on events, and they are rarely presented as central to the narrative. Nonetheless the figure of the child is used in her major novels, Diana Tempest and Red Pottage, as a filter through which the reader is encouraged to scrutinise traditional adult gender roles. In both novels a child's hero-worship of an adult educator will be problematised, and taken together, the two novels offer a powerfully counterpoised critique of the attribution of gendered qualities, leading to crisis and potentially tragedy. [End Page 204] In Diana Tempest (1893) the reader is first introduced to the schoolmaster Mr. Goodwin through a newspaper article, detailing his daring rescue of his young pupil John Tempest, successor to a wealthy family estate, from a supposed accident at a railway station. The boy is in fact the object of a number of murder attempts after his uncle (who knows that John is illegitimate and so has no moral right to the estate) makes a drunken bet that he himself will not succeed. Goodwin is first presented as a publicly accessible myth, the romantic hero: "Narrow escape of Mr. Goodwin and Mr. Tempest on the Metropolitan Railway.… Tremendous crowd on the platform. Struggle for the train as it came in. Mr. Tempest pushed down between the still moving train and the platform. Heroic devotion of Mr. Goodwin. Rescue of Mr. Tempest uninjured. Serious injuries of Mr. Goodwin."3 The idea of a "narrow escape" won by "heroic devotion" is a familiar feature of late-Victorian boys' adventure stories, as well as newspaper headlines, but Goodwin's status is further intensified by the narrator's implied précis of this already titillating account, the excision of all unnecessary phrases, as in a telegram stressing the urgency of the situation. In a clever use of flashback, the tutor's characterisation is initially filtered through this act of heroism. During the lifetime of the older Mr. Tempest, Goodwin has met John at the station (an augur of his later act of courage) on his first day at school, and the two are drawn to each other by an understated exchange of emotion. Gesa Stedman has shown that the "central paradigm that orders the discourses on emotions in the 19th century is the relation between expression and control,"4 and this encounter between the two serves as a moral test through which the boy and his tutor are enabled to assess each other's worth without contravening the laws of social decorum. John, whose neglected childhood has increased his natural reserve and self-sufficiency, refuses to cry despite his distress at leaving home, and Goodwin respects his silence. In a substitution for the tears that he...

The Graphic Novel and the Age of TransitionA Survey and Analysis Stephen E. Tabachnick Owing to a large Number of excellent adaptations, it is now possible to read and to teach a good deal of the Transition period literature with the aid of graphic, or comic book, novels. The graphic novel is an extended comic book, written by adults for adults, which treats important content in a serious artistic way and makes use of high-quality paper and production techniques not available to the creators of the Sunday comics and traditional comic books. This flourishing new genre can be traced to Belgian artist Frans Masereel's wordless woodcut novel, Passionate Journey (1919), but the form really took off in the 1960s and 1970s when creators in a number of countries began to employ both words and pictures. Despite the fictional implication of graphic "novel," the genre does not limit itself to fiction and includes numerous works of autobiography, biography, travel, history, reportage and even poetry, including a brilliant parody of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land by Martin Rowson (New York: Harper and Row, 1990) which perfectly captures the spirit of the original. However, most of the adaptations of 1880–1920 British literature that have been published to date (and of which I am aware) have been limited to fiction, and because of space considerations, only some of them can be examined here. In addition to works now in print, I will include a few out-of-print graphic novel adaptations of 1880–1920 literature because they are particularly interesting and hopefully may return to print one day, since graphic novels, like traditional comics, go in and out of print with alarming frequency. Outside of these adaptations, there are completely original graphic novels that utilize literary and historical characters and events from the period. Again, I do not have the space to treat them here. Two of the most famous are Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), in which Sherlock Holmes, Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo, among [End Page 3] other Victorian heroes, appear together, and From Hell (1991), a heavily footnoted but still fictional treatment of the Jack the Ripper case. Those who may be interested should read Christine Ferguson's “Steam Punk and the Visualization of the Victorian: Teaching Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell” in my edited collection, Teaching the Graphic Novel (New York: MLA, 2009). One basic difference between graphic novels and films, another visual medium into which literary works are often adapted, is that graphic novels offer a reading experience in which, as in traditional reading, the reader controls the speed of perception and can linger or look backward at will. And a basic difference between graphic novels and drama, another visual experience, is that the graphic novel can accommodate reasonably long passages of narration, while drama usually includes only dialogue. Another basic difference between graphic novels and film and drama adaptations is that the graphic novel illustrator can draw characters as he or she desires them to look, while film and drama directors are limited to the appearances of living actors available for the necessary roles. Moreover, unlike film or drama, the graphic novel can be seen as the attempt of the physical book to survive in an electronic age by combining the advantages of the traditional reading experience with those of the computer screen, which often provides visual objects alongside text. This opens up the possibility of discussions (in the scholarship and in the classroom) about the different visual media and the history of the physical book, including William Morris's emphasis on “the book beautiful” as a physical object, as well as about the very nature of reading. And improved text readers have moved the conversation about book history and the nature of reading to yet another dimension, since graphic novels no less than prose novels can be read on electronic readers, such as Amazon's Kindle 2. Regardless of the format in which it is read, what makes a good adaptation from pure text to graphic novel format? I think that two qualities are essential: first, a good adaptation should be faithful to...