Abstract
Ideas of insanity and hysteria have recurred as subtexts in the novels discussed so far in this book. My final chapter will focus more specifically on two neo-Victorian writers who contest nineteenth-century ideas of madness and medicine by way of epistolary strategies. Focussing on Mick Jackson’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Underground Man (1997) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), I will consider how the pathologised and silenced ‘others’ of nineteenth-century literature are voiced as neo-Victorian diarists who challenge an authoritative clinical gaze. The Underground Man draws on historical details of the life and eccentricities of the fifth Duke of Portland, William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott and develops recorded accounts of a reclusive loner of uncertain temper who created a grandiose subterranean world beneath Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.2 By contrast, The Crimson Petal and the White is wholly a parody of Victorian fiction and society. Faber’s novel comprehensively satirises nineteenth-century domestic and gendered ideology with a diarist, Agnes Rackham, who parodically distorts Coventry Patmore’s ‘angel in the house’: a staple of the Victorian novel. Both diarists record their incompatibility with Victorian society’s restraints on personal liberty. Presented as victims of nervous energies, they depict twinned states of hysteria and hypochondria exacerbated by Gothic imaginations that raise spectres of impending madness.
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’ (1852)1
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Notes
Matthew Arnold, ‘The Buried Life’, in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Era (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2009), pp. 285–7 (286).
See Tom Freeman-Keel and Andrew Croft, The Disappearing Duke (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003).
Bernard Duyfhuizen, Narratives of Transmission (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), p. 91.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Forgotten Books: www.forgottenbooks.org, 2008 [1859]), p.81 <http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ScTePJKjiTMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=john+stuart+mill+%2B+on+liberty#PPA6,M1> [accessed 28 February 2009].
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 123, original emphasis.
Mick Jackson, ‘Author’s Note’, The Underground Man (London: Faber & Faber, 2007 [1997]), p. 265.
Further examples include Mixail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Ivan Goncharov’s idle, daydreaming noble in Oblomov (1859).
English Actional diarists that conform to the type include George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1888)
and George Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). Henry Ryecroft, a man of morbid moods and preoccupations with nature, his diet, and health particularly resonates with Jackson’s Duke.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From The Underground (New York: Dover Publications, 1992 [1864]), p. 1. Jackson states that he was influenced by one particular Russian nineteenth-century diary text, Nikolai Gogol’s short story, ‘The Diary of a Madman’ (1835). Another sick and superfluous man, Gogol’s diarist, Poprischin, is obsessed with power and glory as he writes his diary with a fastidious focus on paper and quills.
Nikolai Gogol, The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. by Priscilla Meyer and Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Signet, 2005 [1835]).
Mick Jackson, The Underground Man (London: Faber & Faber, 2007 [1997]), p. 121. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (London: Pan Books, 1985), p. xvii.
Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 8.
M. M. Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. by Vern McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), p. 126, original emphasis.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 205.
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 53.
Jacob L. Mey, When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999), p. 38, original emphasis.
Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 51.
Ian Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2000), p. 7.
For example, one of Wilkie Collins’s many ‘morsels of paper’ is discovered by Rosamond Treverton in The Dead Secret (1857). An illuminating letter is found hidden in an inauspicious writing-table after a brusque and impatient search of the long-neglected Myrtle Room. Wilkie Collins, The Dead Secret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [1857]), p. 273.
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1903]), p. 117. Ryecroft ruminates: ‘if I am right in concluding that mind and soul are merely subtle functions of body. If I chance to become deranged in certain parts of my physical mechanism, I shall straightway be deranged in my wits’. Gissing, pp. 117–18.
Maria Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 70.
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Tour Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 259–422 (304).
Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 68–9.
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, 2nd edition (London: Prentice Hall, 1995), pp. 99–109 (103).
H. Porter Abbott, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 36.
Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003), p. 3. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.
Paul Dawson, ‘The Return of Omniscience in Contemporary Fiction’, Narrative, 17 (2009), 143–61 (150). Dawson suggests that ‘narrative voices employed by contemporary omniscience […] seek to assert the cultural authority of novelists as public intellectuals in the new millennium’ (150).
Paul Goetsch, ‘Reader Figures in Narrative’, Style, 38 (2004), 188–202 (192).
Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. by Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, trans. by Kathy Durnin (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), p. 93.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, in The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse, ed. by i (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 134–9 (136).
Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutions: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 63. This continues a tradition identified by Joe Bray as the ‘ubiquitous’ presence of the female reader in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel whose essential property is to ‘bring […] out the meaning and form of the work’.
Joe Bray, The Female Reader in the English Novel: From Burney to Austen (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 8.
Lucien Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 8.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 99.
Sugar’s attack on popular fiction continues in Faber’s sequel: ‘In every story she reads, the women are limp and spineless and insufferably virtuous. They harbour no hatred, they think only of marriage, they don’t exist below the neck, they eat but never shit. Where are the authentic, flesh-and-blood women in modern English fiction? There aren’t any!’ Michel Faber, The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), p. 95.
Georges Letissier, ‘The Crimson Petal and the White: A Neo-Victorian Classic’, in Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities (Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 113–25 (p. 115).
Michel de Certeau argues for reading as ‘poaching’: ‘the use made of the book by privileged readers constitutes it as a secret of which they are the ‘true’ interpreters. It interposes a frontier between the text and its readers that can be crossed only if one has a passport delivered by these official interpreters, who transform their own reading (which is also a legitimate one) into an orthodox ‘literality’ that makes other (equally legitimate) readings either heretical (not ‘in conformity’ with the meaning of the text) or insignificant (to be forgotten)’. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 171.
Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1996), p. 15.
Lejeune, p. 207. The diary has traditionally been understood by some as a feminine form of life writing. Rebecca Hogan explores this by asking the question, ‘Is the diary feminine?’, citing autobiography critics who position the diary as feminine and the autobiography as ‘somehow masculine’. She pointedly conflates the letter with the diary to borrow Jane Gallop’s distinction: “‘Women write letters” — personal, intimate, in relation; men write books — universal, public, in general circulation’; Hogan develops this to state: ‘substitute diaries for letters and autobiographies for books and [Gallop] has captured perfectly the relative places and valuations of the two types of life-writing in contemporary criticism’. Rebecca Hogan, ‘Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a Feminine Form’, in Autobiography and Questions of Gender, ed. by Shirley Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991) pp. 95–107 (95).
Woolf writes of the Angel in the House: ‘whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her’. Virginia Woolf, ‘Selected Professions for Women’, in Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, ed. by David Bradford (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008), p. 142.
Catherine Delafield, Women’s Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 160.
Deborah Martinson, In the Presence of Audience: Self and Diaries in Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 4.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 78.
Valerie Raoul, The French Fictional Journal: Fictional Narcissism/Narcissistic Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 32.
Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era’, in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 47–68 (56). Gaining an impression of nineteenth-century perceptions of the female body from a representative guide, John Forbes’s 1833 Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine, Shuttleworth notes that ‘near-hysterical male anxiety focused on the flow of female secretions, and in particular those of menstruation — a hysteria whose impact on the female psyche must inevitably have been to create the sense of existing in an almost permanent state of pathology’, p. 61.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1985), Prelude, no page number.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002 [1967]), p. xii.
Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 33.
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© 2013 Kym Brindle
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Brindle, K. (2013). Dissident Diarists: Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. In: Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007162_7
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