Welcome back to my Neo-Victorian Voices series, focused on books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first. Today, I’m blogging about Louis Bayard’s 2024 novel, The Wildes, which delves into celebrated Victorian writer Oscar Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency” for his romantic relationship with a man, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the impact of the scandal on his wife and children.
The novel is structured in five acts of uneven length. The first, longest, and, for me, the most compelling act charts the breakdown of the Wildes’ marriage as Oscar’s wife, Constance, becomes aware of the nature of his relationship with Lord Alfred during a family trip to the Norfolk countryside. In the second act, Constance and her young sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, are in Italy, escaping the press attention surrounding Oscar’s trial and subsequent imprisonment. By the third act (which is very different in tone from the rest of the book), Cyril is fighting in World War One. In the fourth, Vyvyan, now grown, encounters Lord Alfred in London. And in the fifth, Vyvyan imagines an alternate reality where his parents’ marriage survived Oscar’s infidelity and Constance accepts her husband’s relationship with Lord Alfred.
Looking at the novel’s reviews, the fifth act has been the most divisive, but for me it worked well as the fantasy of a child still impacted by the breakup of his parents’ relationship, even after he is grown. The whole novel seemed like an examination of how a specific event/moment can become a shared family trauma. In the world of the Wildes, as presented in this novel, “Norfolk” becomes almost a code word for everything that followed, and exact details of the trip, which would have otherwise seemed inconsequential, are seared into their collective memories.
This isn’t the book I’d recommend if you are looking to learn about the Wilde scandal for the first time, but if you know the history and are interested in diving deeper, there’s a lot to enjoy. Just be warned: if your own family has dealt with divorce, incarceration, or another episode of extreme upheaval, this one may hit close to home.
I’ve previously reviewed Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, A Sentimental Education, for this blog, but this month I’m back with a post about a lesser-known work—his collection of Three Tales, published eight years later in 1877.
In the first story, ‘A Simple Heart,’ a servant woman, Felicité, suffers through a difficult existence, despite the love she has to give. She ends her days unable to distinguish between her stuffed and moldy parrot, the one creature that ever showed her any affection, and the Holy Ghost.
Meanwhile in the second story, ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier,’ a much-loved son with a sadistic passion for hunting finds himself subject to a terrible curse. Destined to kill his own parents, Julian abandons his former life to save theirs, but fate soon catches up with him with terrible consequences.
Finally, in his third story, ‘Hérodias,’ Flaubert expands on the biblical tale of the beheading of John the Baptist.
All three tales, which I read in Roger Whitehouse’s translation, have a modern feel, especially when contrasted with Flaubert’s full-length novels. ‘A Simple Heart’ and ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitalier’ are both incredibly readable, while ‘Hérodias’ is denser, packed as it is with proper nouns and theological references.
I found ‘A Simple Heart’ emotionally arresting, even as the old woman’s veneration of a taxidermied parrot borders on the absurd, and the descriptions of Julian’s blood lust as he hunts will stay with me. ‘Hérodias’ left me a little cold, but that could be due to familiarity with later works, such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893), which Flaubert’s story is said to have inspired.
Overall, Flaubert’s Three Tales succeed in feeling fabulistic, while remaining unexpected. They’re peopled by characters with depth—these men and women aren’t just archetypes—that show off Flaubert’s range and far-reaching empathy. If you’re looking for a shorter work of nineteenth-century literature to read next, check the collection out, or dive into my full “Victorians in Brief” list here.
What book would you like me to review next on the Secret Victorianist? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
My debut novel, Bronte’s Mistress (2020), is about Lydia Robinson, the married woman who had an affair with Branwell Bronte, the Bronte sisters’ brother. So I was intrigued to read a (non-fiction) book about another real Mrs Robinson—Isabella Robinson—whose divorce scandalised the nineteenth-century press.
Kate Summerscale’s 2012 book, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, is less of a biography of Isabella, and more of a social history about the advent of divorce in Victorian Britain, which takes the Robinson vs. Robinson & Lane case as its centrepiece.
Like my Mrs Robinson, Isabella was in her forties when she began an affair with a younger man. However, in this case, the object of her passions was also married and her social equal—a doctor and proponent of hydropathy, whose business would be significantly damaged if courts found he had committed adultery.
But, wait, you might be thinking—wasn’t divorce illegal in England? It was during the 1840s when Branwell and Lydia engaged in their ill-fated affair but, in 1858, when Henry Robinson read his wife’s private diaries and exposed her infidelities, the legal system had just provided a provision for a total separation, albeit with caveats.
Divorce still couldn’t be procured due to incompatibility or unhappiness. But a man could now divorce his wife for adultery. For wives things were harder. They had to demonstrate that their husband had been guilty of an additional crime (e.g. abandonment or cruelty)—breaking the marital vow was not enough.
In practice then, divorce was complicated and expensive, so it was largely the upper middle classes who flocked to the court. The Robinsons were wealthy and well connected. Henry was fixated on revenge. The story was one designed to capture the public imagination.
A curiosity of the case was Mrs Robinson’s written confession—her diary, a document she’d assumed her husband would never read. Isabella’s legal counsel ultimately “defended” her from the charge of adultery by arguing that she was insane. She was, they claimed, a nymphomaniac who had blurred the lines between fact and fiction in her journal, an adulteress in her heart, but not in reality.
This Victorian refusal to accept the simplest explanation for women’s actions, especially when this involved acknowledging their sexual appetites, is one I’ve written about previously on this blog, for instance in my 2013 Women in the Witness Box series. This pattern played out in both literature and life, from the notorious murder trial of Madeleine Smith to Isabella’s divorce hearing.
The testimony about the diary also reveals public uneasiness about the influence of novels on their (largely female) readership. Women were considered prone to hysteria, exaggeration and dangerous excitement. And Isabella Robinson was seen as having novelised her own life, whether by acting out her fantasies or just indulging in them privately. As Gwendolen Fairfax notes in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
Overall, Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace is a good read if you’re interested in the history of divorce and/or women’s rights in the nineteenth century. There are also great passages on Victorian medicine and pre-Freudian psychology, as Summerscale discusses how the Robinsons and their circle engaged with phrenology and sought “cures” for masturbation (spoiler: prostitutes). But don’t pick this up expecting titillation. Isabella and the men she desired don’t leap of the page. This is a scholarly, if accessible, work; Summerscale leaves sensation to the novelists.
What book would you like me to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. If you’d like to read a novel about Lydia Robinson, whose disgrace preceded Isabella Robinson’s, make sure to check out Bronte’s Mistress in hardcover, audiobook and e-book. And, for updates on my writing and blog, subscribe to my monthly email newsletter below.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde (first published in French in 1887).
I’ve read books by other writers who were part of the late nineteenth-century Decadent Movement. I’ve blogged, for instance, about Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which is often held up as representative of the excesses of the artistic and literary movement. I’ve read Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, some of the most famous Decadent writers in English. And I’ve enjoyed the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, probably the most famous British visual artist in this group.
However, I had no idea until recently that there was a woman writer amongst the leading French Decadent authors—Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, who published under the pen name Rachilde.
The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)
The novel of Rachilde’s I picked up was The Marquise de Sade (1887), though her 1884 Monsieur Venus is perhaps slightly better known. Flicking through its front pages, I discovered that it had taken more than a hundred years (!!) for The Marquise de Sade to be published in English, with this translation, by Liz Heron, appearing in 1994.
An intriguing writer, a racy title, and a recent translation? I was in, and flew through the novel within days. Now I’m blogging to tell you all about it. Warning: spoilers ahead, as this one’s a little off the beaten track…
CN: Sexual Violence, Animal Cruelty, Transphobia, Homophobia
First up, the title is pretty misleading. The novel has nothing directly to do with the nobleman, philosopher, and sexual libertine who put the “S” in “BDSM.” Rather, the feminisation of the title (this is the Marquise de Sade, rather than the masculine Marquis) is a reference to the novel’s central theme. Rachilde’s book is a bildungsroman about how a girl grows into a woman with a perverse taste for cruelty.
Second, if you’re expecting sex on every page, you’re going to be disappointed. Mary Barbe, our protagonist, is seven years old in the opening chapter and the book mainly deals with her childhood. This, of course, includes references to her nascent sexuality, but it’s only in the last quarter of the novel, when Mary is an adult, that the content becomes overtly and consistently sexual.
What I was least prepared for was how (deliberately!) funny the book was in parts. Mary is the daughter of a colonel and Rachilde’s satirical depiction of the social life of officers in the French army is incredibly entertaining.
As a writer, I was also impressed by Rachilde’s convincing use of a child’s point of view, while the narrative still winks at what’s really going on between the grown-up characters. Even as the book plays with the excessive and the absurd (e.g. a brawl between the officers’ children over live lambs, which have been given out as gifts at a kids’ party), I felt like the writer really knew and could empathise with children—something that’s pretty rare in nineteenth-century novels.
I’m no psychiatrist, but Rachilde’s psychological portrait of Mary reads as proto-Freudian and progressive. Mary is initially a sensitive and caring child. But neglected by her family, who would prefer her to be a boy, she is starved of affection and has several early experiences that lead to her associating love and pain. Her first (pretty innocent) fumblings with a boy in her tweenage years are also linked to power play, as she convinces him to steal a prized rose from his employer for her in return for a kiss.
As the novel progresses, her development becomes less believable. She ends the novel fantasising about murder, having tasted every other excess. And, in a strange twist I didn’t see coming, it is a “transvestite man” that she considers killing. She talks of men who sleep with other men as “fallen” and “ill-equipped to defend [themselves] against women.” And says, “her conscience would be clear if the chosen victim were among that kind!”
While the ending is a clear escalation in violence, there are also plenty of other moments readers will find problematic, distasteful and shocking throughout the book.
There are various instances of animal cruelty. The opening scene sees Mary faint as she watches an ox being butchered and its blood drained as a cure for her consumptive mother. As a small child, Mary’s beloved companion is a cat (even though it scratches her). I won’t go into details, but, predictably, the cat and her kittens meet unpleasant ends, further cementing Mary’s misandry and misogyny.
Mary’s own “cruelty” as an adult at first revolves around exercising her newfound power to deny men. She pretends she loves them, but refuses to have sex with them, or goads them into making sexual advances, but then blackmails them about what they have done. Eventually, one of the young men she’s been playing with rapes her, cuckolding his father in the process. The narrative suggests that he is the victim.
But it’s not only men who Mary can captivate and torture. In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Mary has a woman who wishes to sleep with her strip naked before her, and then, without warning, brands her with a red-hot poker. Reader, I gasped.
I’ve written before about the misconceptions people can have about the nineteenth century. This was certainly not a period when everyone was swooning at the sight of an ankle or an uncovered table leg. French Decadent literature may be more out there than the novels of British novelists in the time period, but you can be sure that many of our literary greats were reading books like this one. Overall, I’d recommend The Marquise de Sade to enthusiasts for the period with a strong constitution, and to adventurous readers with a taste for more than Fifty Shades of Grey…
Compared to The Marquise de Sade, my own novel, Bronte’s Mistress, seems almost wholesome, but, if you love the nineteenth century, please consider buying a copy for yourself or as Holiday gift this Christmas season! Want to get in touch? You can always message me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (no creepy DMs please), and you can also sign up for my monthly email below.
Wilde complained to me one day that
someone in a well-known novel had stolen an idea of his. I pleaded in defence
of the culprit that Wilde himself was a fearless literary thief. "My dear
fellow," he said, with his usual drawling emphasis, "when I see a
monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else's garden, I am
impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no
reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals." THAT WAS
OSCAR WILDE.
Robert Ross
Patricia Racette in the Met's 2016 production
Last week, the Secret
Victorianist visited the Metropolitan Opera in New York to see Patricia Racette
as the eponymous character in Strauss’s 1905 Salome.
The opera, which is performed in
German, is based on Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play of the same name — a play written
in French, banned by the censors and famously illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in the first English
version (1894).
Beardsley's illustrations
Originally deemed
shocking for its overt sexuality and liberal depiction of Biblical characters,
it was from accusations of plagiarism that Robert Ross defended the play in his
Note on the text in 1912. For Ross, Wilde’s freedoms with his sources, such as
conflating the Biblical Herods, are necessary for artistic innovation and
literary thievery is acceptable as long as improves the sources it plunders. I
couldn’t help but wonder then what Wilde might have made of Strauss’s opera and
the Met’s current production.
For an opera, Salome is incredibly true to the play it
is based on — from the lyrics that the performers sing, to the reactions it
invokes. Beheadings still fascinate and appall, erotic dances titillate. Even
today the opera still has the ability to shock — not just through the fleeting
full frontal nudity, but also in the sense of danger that pervades, in the
story, yes, but also in the staging and the music.
Beardsley's illustrations
What has changed
perhaps is our response to Jochanaan. When once audiences and readers baulked
at the combination of eroticism with their own religion, today, sitting
watching in Manhattan, it’s hard not to find John the Baptist’s prophecies as
alien and unsettling as the play’s more pagan symbolism. It’s easy to imagine that for early audiences
Jochanann and Salome were two great oppositional forces, carrying almost equal
sway, but today’s Salome is
undoubtedly dominated by its titular character.
At only one act, this
is one of the shorter operas I’ve seen, but one that draws you in to a
discordant and unsettling world. I only wished the Met’s production could have staged
the moon that dominates Wilde’s imagining of Herod’s court, Beardsley’s
illustrations and the singers’ words:
Look at the moon! How strange the moon
seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb.
She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead
things.
Do you know of any
NYC productions you think the Secret Victorianist should watch? Let me know —
here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?
Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?—come, children, let us
shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
So ends Thackeray’s 1847-8 Vanity Fair, a novel that defies our
desire for happy endings and near resolutions. When we think about novels we
may divide them into two categories, those with tear-jerking endings and those
with endings that satisfy in their neatness in a way that is rarely replicable
in real life. Or we may reject unhappy endings entirely and agree with Oscar
Wilde’s joke: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad
unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’
The final illustration in Vanity Fair
Yet, after nearly 900 pages,
Thackeray’s ending doesn’t subscribe to either of these models. As in many
Victorian novels, we are presented
with a picture of domestic serenity after preceding drama—the Dobbins and
Crawleys live side by side with hope of further marriage ties between the
younger generations. But the complete happiness we have longed for with
readerly naivety is not forthcoming. Rebecca will not be punished, Amelia will
remain insipid, even when freed from the tyranny of her dead husband’s memory,
and the fair will play on, with its falsehoods and frivolities, even if we
abandon the particular characters we have toyed with.
Nowhere is this dissatisfaction
more obvious than when in comes to Dobbin. Vanity
Fair is ‘a novel without a hero’ but the Major has all the qualities we
might associate with such a character. He is a military man of outstanding
morals, a loyal lover and a just friend. He protects Amelia for years without
hope of her reciprocating his feelings and the culmination of their
relationship in a marriage (and child) is the ending we are encouraged to look
forward to.
The ending is there, the marriage
comes to pass and the child is forthcoming so why isn’t this resolution as
happy as we had hoped? Dobbin’s kindness, constancy and frequent romantic
gestures do not win his bride. Instead he can only woo Amelia when he
recognises the folly of wanting her at all:
“Have I not learned in that time to read
all your feelings and look into your thoughts? I know what your heart is
capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a fancy, but
it can't feel such an attachment as mine deserves to mate with, and such as I
would have won from a woman more generous than you. No, you are not worthy of
the love which I have devoted to you. I knew all along that the prize I had set
my life on was not worth the winning; that I was a fool, with fond fancies,
too, bartering away my all of truth and ardour against your little feeble
remnant of love.”
Our desire for a
happy ending is shown to be as delusional as Dobbin’s unrequited love. Instead
of the passionate climax we have hoped for we are given a marriage based on the
submission of one party and the tolerance of the other. Dobbin loves the child
(little Janey) now more than anyone (presumably Amelia included) and, even
then, she is only slightly more important to him than a history book.
Ending such a
sweeping novel is hard, and, with masterful skill, Thackeray chooses to draw
attention to the device’s artificiality while wrapping up all loose ends. If
you’re writing an ending it might be worth thinking outside the binary of
happy/sad and interrogating the possibilities of the unsatisfactory ending.
After all, it’s always good to leave your readers wanting more…
What would you like
to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
I first saw David Hare’s 1998 The Judas Kiss in 2012 at Hampstead
Theatre in London. Four years on, the production, directed by Neil Armfield,
has come to Brooklyn, with four of the seven-person cast unchanged, including
Rupert Everett as a charismatic, but ultimately broken, Oscar Wilde.
The play is in two acts. The
first is set in 1895, just before Wilde’s arrest and imprisonment. Robert Ross
(Cal MacAninch) begs Wilde to flee the country while Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred
Douglas, known as Bosie, (Charlie Rowe), pins his hopes on a last minute
reprieve from the Home Office.
Everett and Rowe as Wilde and Bosie
The second act skips forward in
time to after Wilde’s imprisonment, as he and Bosie live their last few months
together in poverty and obscurity near Naples. Hare has more room for
imaginative speculation here than in the first act, where much of the evening’s
drama is a matter of historical record. His Bosie has moments of redemption,
despite his general unreasonableness and it is left to him—not Wilde—to give a
vocal defence of homosexuality, despite Wilde’s eloquence on the subject in the
here elided trial.
In Act One, light relief comes
from Wilde’s quips (delivered with panache by Everett) and the antics of the
hotel staff (two of them begin the production in flagrante, setting the tone
for a production that doesn’t shy away from repeated full frontal nudity). In
Act Two, an Italian fisherman, Galileo (Tom Colley), plays a similar role, but,
while the audience still titters, his tryst with Bosie has a darker edge,
reflecting as it does on the now muted, and static, Wilde.
Jessie Hills, Elliot Balchin and Alister Cameron as the hotel staff
Watching the production again,
four years on and in a very different theatre, many of my reactions were
similar. Most notably, on both occasions, I found there was a predictability in
Wilde’s character, and his witticisms, which makes the play feel familiar even
to a first time viewer. Everett’s characterisation is spot on, but you can’t
help but wonder about the play—what is
this adding to our understanding of Wilde, his arrest and Victorian attitudes
to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’? The first time I watched the
play though, the tragedy of Ross’s character hit me much harder—watching in
Brooklyn it definitely seemed this was the story of Wilde’s tragedy, and Rupert
Everett’s play.
The Judas Kiss will be
performed at BAM until June 12. You can purchase tickets here.
Do you know of any plays in NYC you think the Secret Victorianist should
review? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting
@SVictorianist.
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is one
of the most famous comedic plays in English and one that has enjoyed popularity
since its first performance in 1895.
The play is admired for its
quotable quips, farcical plot twists and exaggerated characters, but this week
I’ll be looking at what Wilde does in his opening scene to engage and entertain
his audience right from the start.
The cast of the 2002 film adaptation
Anyone who has ever acted in a
comedy, done stand up or been part of an improv group will know that getting the first laugh is
all-important. It settles the audience, establishes the mood and allows those
watching and the performers to relax. But how to set up a joke so quickly when the
characters and situation are new to your audience? Here’s how Wilde does it:
Morning-room in Algernon’s flat in
Half-Moon Street. The room is luxuriously and artistically
furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room.
[Lane is arranging afternoon
tea on the table, and after the music has ceased, Algernon enters.]
Algernon.
Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
Lane. I didn’t think
it polite to listen, sir.
Two lines of dialogue are all it
takes for Wilde to make us laugh, but why do we?
First up, he opens with a comedic
type—the sarcastic servant. Lane’s position is established immediately by what
he is doing (‘arranging afternoon tea’) and how Algernon addresses him. His
response to his master (‘I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir’) is sardonic
but shrouded in politeness, bringing us instantly into the dynamic between
these characters.
Second, Wilde ensures that we
side with Lane from the outset, by placing us in an analogous position to
him.When the curtain rises, an audience
hushes and is much more attentive than it will be in the middle of the play,
when a lot may be going on. Those watching must assess what they can see and
hear to be sure they are following. Because of this they will have been
listening (like Lane) to Algernon’s piano playing quite intently and the idea
of someone wilfully not listening will appear all the more ridiculous.
Once you’ve won your first laugh
there is still work to be done to bring an audience on the journey with you. Introducing important character names
early, without being overwhelming, is important in this. Over the next
stretches of dialogue we are given the names Lane, Lady Bracknell, Ernest,
Algy, Gwendolen and Cecily, gifting us with a run down of the cast and
establishing the characters’ relationships to each other.
As well as setting up the cast,
Wilde also hints at the laws of his
universe. This is a world where masters are intrigued rather than angry
about servants taking their champagne:
Algernon.
Oh! . . . by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when
Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne
are entered as having been consumed.
Lane. Yes, sir;
eight bottles and a pint.
Algernon.
Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the
champagne? I ask merely for information.
Lane. I attribute it
to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in
married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.
And where characters are
unabashed at their hypocritical behaviour:
Algernon. Please
don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches. They are ordered specially for Aunt
Augusta. [Takes one and eats it.]
Jack. Well, you have
been eating them all the time.
Algernon.
That is quite a different matter. She is my aunt.
Another way in which Wilde pulls
his audience in, using a technique that is the hallmark of his comedy, is by reversing the familiar, especially
through altering common phrases and proverbial maxims. Here are a couple of
examples from the first scene:
Algernon. Really,
if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of
them? [Wilde
applies to the ‘lower orders’ a role usually designated to the ‘higher
orders’.]
Algernon. Divorces
are made in Heaven [Wilde
applies the language of marriage to divorce.]
Once you’ve set up your first
laugh, introduced your most important characters, established rules for your
world and pulled your audience in by building on, or reversing, information
that is familiar to them, there’s one more thing that most comedies do—they set up a running joke, a comedic
through line, which will keep the audience laughing even as further
complications are added. In The
Importance of Being Earnest, the cucumber sandwiches fulfil this role and
it is these, rather than early gags about the piano or the institution of
marriage, which the audience is most likely to remember.
What else do you think Wilde does
in the early scenes of the play to pull his audience in? Why is it that Earnest
remains so popular today? I’d love to hear your opinions so comment here, on
Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!
Post-November it feels
appropriate to write about one of the greatest successes to come out of
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in recent years – Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, which enjoyed
widespread critical attention and seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller
List.
The Night Circus straddles
fantasy and romance, in a late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century setting,
as Celia and Marco – orphans reared to develop their magical powers – compete
in the environs of the mysterious travelling spectacle in a battle designed to
leave only one victor.
There is much to admire in the
novel. It’s opening (‘The circus arrives
without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown
posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is
simply there, when yesterday it was not.’) will probably – and rightly – be
used as an example of a great ‘hook’ in creative writing classes across the English-speaking
world.
Morgenstern has a highly sensory
imagination. The world of the circus is a rich one, with an apparently endless
number of tents designed to blur the line between reality and illusion, the
possible and the magical. This for instance is the Cloud Maze:
‘The tower itself is a series of platforms swooping in odd,
diaphanous shapes, quite similar to clouds. They are layered, like a cake. From
what Bailey can see, the space between the layers varies from room enough to
walk straight through to barely enough to crawl. Here and there parts of it
almost float away from the central tower, drifting off into space.’
A hallmark of Morgenstern’s
descriptions, which helps create the dreamlike atmosphere of the Le Cirque des
Reves, is her imprecision. This is the Cloud Maze but the platforms it contains
are only ‘quite similar to clouds’. We
are reminded that this is only ‘what Bailey can see’ – there may be even more
to this tent than we imagine. And what does the final sentence actually mean?
Do parts of this construction float and drift or not?
This imprecision, which can work
so well, occasionally becomes irritating on close reading. What colour are the
kittens in the following?
‘A kaleidoscope of colour, blazing with carmine and coral and
canary, so much so that the entire room often appears to be on fire, dotted
with fluffy kittens dark as soot and bright as sparks.’
Erin Morgenstern (1978-)
But where Morgenstern’s vagueness
is most detrimental to the novel isn’t in her descriptive passages but in her
plotting and characterisation – to which this non-committal approach
unfortunately also applies.
Billed as an epic love story and
a fierce battle, The Night Circus
reads like neither. It’s hard to feel for characters who you only understand on
a superficial level, as more ink is spilled on describing their gowns, their
apartments and their bowler hats than on exploring their interiority.
The tension that should come from
the deadly tournament never materialises, as you are sure there must be some
escape in this world where the rules are constantly changing. Halfway through
the novel, Marco and Celia admit to each other that neither wants to win. I was
hopeful for a twist or a betrayal, but this is a Romeo and Juliet where everything goes to plan for the star-crossed
lovers.
Intrigued by the opening and
pulled in by the world building, I kept waiting for clever storytelling to hit
me hard, but the novel is the epitome of style over substance.
The same is true of the
historical setting. The characters don’t read as nineteenth-century at all,
except in the visual cues Morgenstern borrows from the period, which is a shame
as it would have worked well to have some sense of the real world the
characters were escaping from.
I was excited by the introduction
of the ‘reveurs’ – visitors to the circus so enamoured by the experience that
they create a subculture around following it around the world – thinking to
find some clever interplay with late Victorian aestheticism, but this
comparison went no further.
The novel is what The Great Gatsby would be were it only a
catalogue of Gatsby’s parties, it’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray if Wilde’s story didn’t move beyond the environs of
Basil Haywood’s studio on a summer’s day.
That said, it’s worth reading. This
too is one neo-Victorian novel that seems like a prime target for beautiful adaptation
on film. But, while you may fall in the love with the night circus itself, it
will be with the world - not the story.
After 25 letters in my Victorian Alphabet, I’m
cheating a little bit here, as Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story wasn’t actually published
until 1911. But, having recently finished reading Rupert Hart-Davis’s Letters Of Max Beerbohm, 1892-1956, and seen
how Zuleika, as a character and a novel, is such a strong presence in Max’s
life long before the text’s publication (he began writing it in 1898), I feel
justified in using her to round off this very Victorian series.
Zuleika Dobson is a satirical novel about a girl so attractive
she makes the students at Oxford University commit suicide en masse, destroying
the city and its institutions. An untalented magician, Zuleika’s appeal is
partially due to her beauty and partially to the contradictions of her
character which make her unable to love anyone:
“I could no more marry a man about whom I
could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of
himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster”.
While the
novel moves away from Zuleika at times – whether to the history of Oxford’s
most elite drinking society, to the birds which are harbingers of death for
holders of a particular dukedom, or to the muse of history Clio – she dominates
the novel, and also seems to have dominated its creation.
In his
letters, Max even uses the word ‘Zuleika-ing’ to denote the act of writing and,
in 1904, not only does he seem to have a very clear idea of the eventual plot, but
he’s also personifying his work, talking about his inability to write a
‘skeleton’ of the rest of the novel, without it becoming a ‘full-fleshed
figure’.
At the
novel’s appearance, Max writes the following note to Robert Ross (who had been
a close friend of Oscar Wilde):
‘My dear Bobbie, Poor old Zuleika! She is
at length to be dragged out, blinking and staggering, into the light of day.
And Heinemann [his publisher] will be sending her to the Reform Club, to wait
for you there. Be kind, be courteous, to the hag. Incline your ear to her
mumblings. Pretend not to hear the horrid creakings of her joints. Tell her she
does not look a day older than when you saw her or at any rate her head and
shoulders all those years ago. Don’t hint to her that she makes a goblin of the
sun. Yours affectionately, Max’.
Here we
see Beerbohm referencing the long gestation period his novel has been through.
And we also see him using an identification between Zuleika the woman and Zuleika the novel to reference the
faults in his writing (mere ‘mumblings’ with ‘creaking…joints’), while
simultaneously pleading for kind critical judgement on them (without seeming to
plead for himself).
With the
reference to Zuleika’s head and shoulders as having appeared first, Max also
seems to be alluding to one of the most famous stories of male birth, the
emergence of Artemis from the head of her father Zeus. Writing a novel as a
sort of pregnancy is an idea he returns to again in a letter to Arnold Bennett:
‘You mustn’t expect from me a
‘diabolically ingenious defence’ of Zuleika,
any more than you would expect a woman who has just borne a child to be
diabolically ingenious of defence of that child… “Madam, this baby is in many
respects a very fine baby. I observe many inimitable touches of you in it. But,
Madam, I am bound to say that its screams are more penetrating than a baby’s
screams ought to be. I notice in its complexion a mottled quality which jars my
colour-sense. And I cannot help wishing it were” etc. etc.… Will the young
mother floor you in well-chosen words?’
Max’s
easy and familiar references to ‘Zuleika’ in his letters demonstrate
beautifully the strong connection between artist and work (even an artist as
humorous and, at times, flippant as Beerbohm). They also show the fascination
‘she’ as a character and as a project held over Max across several decades.
Zuleika’s appeal may have decimated Oxford, but it has cemented Beerbohm’s
place in literary history.
This is
the last in my Victorian Alphabet series, so let me know if you have any new
series ideas – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.
And, if you want to find out more about Beerbohm’s Oxford, then click here for
my top tourist tips for Victorianists who find themselves in England’s best
city!
Last February, I shared some inspiration for
literary lines to use whatever your romantic situation on Valentine’s Day. And
this year, I’m bringing you even more potential card-fillers (thank me later!).
Can you name the novel for each line?
The Engagement Kiss
1. For the long-term partner you love to hate,
and wouldn’t even contemplate leaving:
“My love for you resembles the eternal rocks beneath; a source of
little visible delight, but necessary.”
2. From a lover who aspires to a great and
(in)famous passion:
“I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world
to hear our laughter, and grow sad.”
3. For the love who has already rejected you at
least once:
“My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you
will silence me on this subject for ever”.
4. For the love you have an up and down
relationship with:
“Remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been
loved.”
5. From the lover who is realistic about a
relationship’s future:
“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.”
6. From a sugar daddy to his lover:
“I dare say I am a romantic old fool; but if you do not dislike
me, and if you do not love any one else, I see no reason why we should not make
a very happy couple”.
7. For the love who has reformed you, after
years of sowing your wild oats:
“I have found for the first time what I can truly love – I have
found you. You are my sympathy – my better self – my good angel.”
8. From a lover who is about to sacrifice
himself for the greater good:
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
9. For the cruel object of your affection:
“What have you to do with hearts except for dissection?”
10. From the spurned and creepy lover:
“You look as if you thought it tainted you to be loved by me. You
cannot avoid it.”
Do you have any other Victorian Valentine's Day suggestions? Let me know - here, on Facebookor by tweeting @SVictorianist!
1. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte; 2. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde; 3. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen; 4. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James; 5. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy; 6. Lady Audley’s Secret,
Mary Elizabeth Braddon; 7. Jane Eyre,
Charlotte Bronte; 8. A Tale of Two Cities,
Charles Dickens; 9. Good Lady Ducayne,
Mary Elizabeth Braddon; 10. North and
South, Elizabeth Gaskell.
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the
English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an
account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to
an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous
disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria,
separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad,
convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.
Even this
straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of
content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the
first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other
students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?
The choice
isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about
the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:
The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a
smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is
a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.
Two
important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the
colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage
of time.
Earlier in
the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the
colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This
is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in
the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage
of time, in Great Expectations
(1860-1):
I saw that everything within my view which
ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was
faded and yellow.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is at pains
to highlight that the paper is a yellow of these very associations of festering
age, rather than say a sunny yellow:
It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper!
It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like
buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.
Jane even links
the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:
The only thing I can think of that it is like
is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.
In doing so,
she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’,
isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s!
For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle,
yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with
degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding,
boredom or excess.
There was a
practical link too. In the nineteenth-century, scandalous French novels were
bound in yellow paper to warn browsers of their racy contents. It is one of these
books which helps to corrupt the impressionable Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published
the year before Gilman’s story.
Lord Henry
gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow
paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of
dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:
It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches
all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great
place on the other side of the room low down.
Later, in
Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this
book:
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I
should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book
to any one. It does harm."
This
suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one
which Wilde rejects firmly:
There is no such
thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
badly written. That is all.
But it is
interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular
model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is ÀRebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate
(French) life.
Here’s the
effect the novel has on Dorian:
It was the strangest book that he had ever
read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of
flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that
he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had
never dreamed were gradually revealed.
Dorian’s
feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly
with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel
and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what
could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life –
but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.
When it came
to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in
no doubt what to name it – The Yellow
Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died
out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey
Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of
this period.
It is within
this context too then that The Yellow
Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’.
It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the
Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender,
motherhood and madness?’
We’re nearly
there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me
your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting
@SVictorianist!
, 
