With so many great
Victorian novels out there, many of them now largely neglected, what exactly is
the point of neo-Victorian fiction?
Put another way – what is drawing twenty-first century writers to the
nineteenth century, when there is so much drama in contemporary life?
I’ve heard multiple explanations
– from a sort of collective nostalgia, to a response to social inequality
post-financial collapse. Yet a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to
unpacking neo-Victorianism, and something I am keen to explore further in my
Neo-Victorian Voices series, is the interest these writers so often show in
giving narrative privileges – a forum for self-expression – to those
characters, and those sections of society, which area so often barred from
‘speaking’ or even existing in writing which actually dates from this period.
What this creates is a fertile
landscape for creative exploration. Characters in neo-Victorian writing can push the boundaries when it comes to
examining the period’s social strictures – their sexualities can be more
directly explored and delineated, they can give us a new appreciation of the
workings of race and class relations, and they can exist outside the realm of
conventional morality without, necessarily, being punished for it.
John Harding joins a rich
tradition of giving voice to the other side in later reworkings of Victorian
novels in his 2010 Florence and Giles.
But rather than giving a voice to the madwoman in the attic, or retelling a
classic tale from the perspective of a servant, the particular voice he gives
narrative space to is the voice of a child
– a child named Florence modelled on Flora in Henry James’s 1898 The Turn of the Screw.
This Gothic tale is self-conscious
revisiting of James’s classic ghost story and for a full, critical look at its
intertextuality, I recommend Sandra Dinter’s 2012 essay (available here). What
I want to consider here, however, is how Harding draws attention to the
radicalness of what he is doing – and what neo-Victorianism often does
generally – in ‘giving voice’ to a previously excluded individual.
Florence is not only a child. She
is a female child and, as such, she
has been denied an education and been forbidden to read by her uncle. Flouting
these restrictions, however, Florence not only educates herself, but narrates
the entire novel. And Harding has her do so in her own unique idiolect, never
letting his readers forget Florence’s identity as a literary outcast.
This idiolect is categorised by
non-standard usage of English, particularly the use of words as alternative
parts of speech from those as which they usually appear. Florence tells us she
lives in Blithe, ‘a house uncomfortabled and shabbied by prudence’, her brother
Giles it at one point ‘suspicioned’ by their governess (where we might expect
‘suspected’), and at one point the narrator tells us she ‘smugged’ herself, to
express her satisfaction.
This takes some getting used to
as a reader. It is jarring at first, before you come to accept Florence as a
speaker. But Harding is clear from the outset that Florence’s peculiar voice is
an asset – not a weakness. This is how the novel opens:
‘It is a curious story to tell,
one not easily absorbed and understood, so it is fortunate I have the words for
the task. If I say so myself, who probably shouldn’t, for a girl my age I am
very well worded. Exceeding well worded, to speak plain. But because of the
strict views of my uncle regarding the education of females, I have hidden my
eloquence, under-a-bushelled it, and kept any but the simplest forms of
expression bridewelled within my brain.’
There is a tension here, between
Florence’s description of herself as excelling in expression, and our reactions
to her unusual English - a tension which forces us to confront our own
inherited assumptions around who has the right to write a literary text. Yet,
in these first few lines, Florence also demonstrates her skill for conveying a
lot of information, with extreme brevity. In four sentences what do we learn?
1. Florence is telling us her story
2. Florence is confident in
regarding herself as a good communicator, despite the non-standard qualities of
her writing
3. Florence has been told girls
should be modest
4. Florence’s life is under the
control of her uncle
5. Florence has been told girls
should not be educated
6. Florence’s behaviour is
duplicitous as regards her level of comprehension
7. Florence is capable of extreme
repression and self-control
|
John Harding (1951-) |
This is how, at the novel’s best,
Harding uses Florence-isms – as a sort of shorthand. Thus, when she believes
she is being watched by ghostly apparitions of her governess in the mansion’s
mirrors, Florence describes herself as being ‘unmirrored’ whenever she is in a
room without a looking glass. The brevity helps avoid repeated explanations and
helps the reader feel like Florence’s co-conspirator.
Their use is less successful,
however, when Harding uses them for repetition and emphasis, or piles them on
top of each other, as if doubting their efficacy. For instance Florence
describes herself as ‘fairytaled’ in one of the mansion’s towers, but
supplements this by also describing herself as ‘Rapunzelled’. And occasionally
there are sentences like this, where the unusual usage is all-pervasive and
irritating, without aiding pace or adding anything: ‘It didn’t matter if it
blizzarded, or galed or howled like the end of the world outside, he Blithed it
every afternoon for the next couple of weeks’.
Florence does not offer us any
concluding statements at the end of the story. It is enough for her that she
and Giles are together, without the self-conscious nod to the novel’s
literariness with which it starts. As from The
Turning of the Screw, we come away unsettled and unsure about what we have
heard, but here two, highly connected, things are certainly not in doubt. First
Florence, despite her sex, youth, and dependence, is a powerful force, who has
her own agency, and second, she can channel this power through writing. And the
fact that she can do so, demonstrates the ‘point’ (or one point) of
neo-Victorian writing.
Did you miss the first post in my Neo-Victorian
Voices series on Michael Cox’s The
Meaning of Night? You can check it out here. And which contemporary writer
or artist with an interest in the nineteenth century should I consider next?
Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!