MIDWEST VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Bulletin

Summer 2002

Editor Anne M. Windholz, Executive Secretary

Executive Committee: Officers--Susan Thach Dean, President; Micael Clark, Vice-President; Julie Melnyk, Treasurer; Anne M. Windholz, Executive Secretary; Robert Koepp, Past Executive Secretary; Members at Large-Florence Boos, William McKelvy, Thomas Prasch, James Sack

The Twenty-sixth Annual MVSA Meeting was held at the University of Illinois-Chicago on April 19-20th 2002. Dedicated to the theme of Victorian Borders, the conference featured keynote speaker Peter Bailey of the University of Manitoba speaking on "Victorian Railway Erotics"; Walter Arnstein and Nicholas Temperley of the University of Illinois-Urbana sharing musical reflections on the friendship between Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and Felix Mendelssohn; and scholars from across both regional and national borders delivering a host of excellent papers. Professor Lawrence Poston deserves special thanks for the fine local arrangements.

At that meeting two graduate students received recognition for outstanding accomplishments. Narisara Murray, Ph.D. candidate in History and the Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, was awarded the 2002 Arnstein Prize in support of her dissertation research. Her dissertation is titled: "From Native Places to Displayed Cages: On Becoming an Exotic Natural History Specimen in the London Zoological Gardens, 1851-1897." Ms. Murray anticipates receiving her degree in May of 2003. Also of Indiana University, Sara L. Maurer, Ph.D. candidate in English, was awarded the Burgan Prize for the best graduate student paper delivered at this year's MVSA conference: "Redefining the Bounds of Property, Re-enforcing the Borders of Empire: Ulster Custom, Ancient Law, and the Land Act of 1870." (See the abstract of Maurer's paper on page 9.)

CALL FOR PAPERS

2003 MVSA CONFERENCE, CHICAGO

VICTORIAN TRANSFORMATIONS

We invite 500-word proposals (no more than one typed page, please, and no e-mail attachments) on the conference theme Victorian Transformations for presentation at the twenty-seventh annual meeting of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association to be held in Chicago on April 11 and 12 of 2003. (Venue pending.) In keeping with the spirit and nature of MVSA, interdisciplinary topics are encouraged, as are submissions from historians, art historians, musicologists, and all who do research in the field of Victorian Studies. Please direct inquiries and abstracts to: Dr. Anne M. Windholz, MVSA Executive Secretary, P.O. Box 571, DeKalb, IL, 60115; e-mail: amcwind@msn.com

ARNSTEIN PRIZE NEWS: The MVSA Executive Committee has voted to raise the amount of the Arnstein Dissertation Prize from $1000.00 to $1,500.00 beginning in 2003.

Application materials for the 12^th Annual Arnstein Prize Competition are available from the prize committee chair:

Micael M. Clarke

Associate Professor of English

Loyola University Chicago

6525 N. Sheridan Road

Chicago, IL 60626

mclarke@wpo.it.luc.edu

FROM THE TREASURER:

After covering the expenses of our highly successful conference, we still have $3,864.23 in our interest-bearing account, which will shortly be transferred to an investment account bearing yet higher interest. The Arnstein Fund has grown to $22,402.68, and our interest income for the Fund for calendar year 2001 was $992.52-welcome, but still short of our goal of fully endowing the Arnstein Fellowship, which will next year increase to $1,500.00. This year's Arnstein contributions currently total $1,335.00. Thanks to all who contributed-and keep those tax-deductible contributions coming!

ABSTRACTS

VICTORIAN BORDERS

April 19-20, 2002

University of Illinois-Chicago

Session I

Border Crossings: The Changing Nature of Art and Imperialism

"Indian Art under the Raj: Crossing Racial, National, and Geographic Borders"--Julie F. Codell, Arizona State University

The exhibition of Indian art that accompanied the coronation of Victoria as Empress of India in 1877 crossed historical, racial, and geographic borders. It consisted of works given to Edward, Prince of Wales, during his trip to India in 1875-76 to assess the level of popular support for Victoria and to offer the Indians royal presence as a sign that Britain wanted to repair damage done during the 1857 Mutiny/War of Independence and to create a new imperial relationship. But this same haphazard collection then became the Indian Art section of the 1878 Paris International Exhibition and later toured the UK in 1880-81. This exhibition was also a template for exhibitions that accompanied the Delhi coronations of Edward VII and George V and so its importance as a feature of the coronation and a venue for the promotion of imperial policies and power were revived again in 1903 and 1911 although with new themes and exhibition contents.

George Birdwood's catalogues for the 1877 collection and its various incarnations became a much loved text for the British arts and crafts movement as well. Birdwood's explanations of the "natural" strengths of Indian craft versus British high art and his Aryan theory of British and Indian racial ties served as a text for the British arts and crafts movement and for imperial authority, as it paved the way for later imperial exhibitions of Indian art.

"Orientalism and the Victorian Nostalgic Gaze"--Christine Roth, Univ. of Wisconsin-Oshkosh

On the cover of Edward Said's landmark book on the construction of Othered spaces, Orientalism, we see a detail from Jean-Lõon Gõrme's "The Snake Charmer" (1880). It is an image filled with the bodies of exotic, savage, distanced Orientals, individuals characterized by their other-worldliness, taboo, and romance. Yet, in this painting, we tend to overlook the body that was most exoticized, theorized, fetishized, and fantasized about in Victorian culture. In the center of the painting stands the figure of a naked child. Not only did a remote Eastern locale allow viewers to imagine a land of fantasy in which the repressed desires of English consciousness could find expression, it also provided a seemingly sequestered space that was ideally suited to stage and shelter nostalgic reveries of the nineteenth-century child figure.

Interestingly, the type for Orientalized child figures-the languid pose, the side glances, the draped and partial clothing-found in numerous portraits taken by Lewis Carroll, Oscar Rejlander, and Julie Margaret Cameron, is virtually identical to the one used in popular paintings coming into England from the colonies. The distant past is simply relocated to the distant present. By imagining both native Others and child Others as negations (bodies that lack a history), Occidental artists performed a kind of erasure, clearing a space for the expansion of a colonial/colonizing imagination and for the pursuit of adult English desires. As a result of this erasure, there is a direct parallel between child as remote Othered body and colonial native as remote Othered body; the distant past is relocated to the distant present. By staging visual fantasies of English children dressed as Turkish odalisques or Chinese servants, for example, Victorian photographers used physical signs to identify a specifically English nostalgic desire. Children's bodies, which had been temporally and geographically dislocated from adult "Englishness" became stimulating in the ways that they were revealed and in the ways in which they were revealing. Explicating Victorian conceptions of loss, longing, and Otherness clarifies how the bodies of middle-class English children (especially little girls) became the signs by which a new kind of Orientalized and nostalgically productive primitivism was constructed.

Session II

Drawing the Line:

The Boundaries of Art, Aesthetics, and Health

"Crossing the Line: John Ruskin, the 'Turner Gallery,' and the Art Journal in Mid-Victorian England"-Katherine Haskins, University of Chicago

In 1860, the London publishing firm of Virtue and Co. launched an ambitious, posthumous series of plate engravings after pictures by Joseph Mallord William Turner, widely acknowledged as the great British modern master. The Art Journal, the leading arts periodical of its day, and a subsidiary of the Virtue firm, was the principal vehicle for the distribution of the more than 70 individual Turner prints published between 1860 and 1865, which in spite of their pedigree were not an assured commercial success. In its publicity, the Art Journal boldly declared that "all difficulties vanish" when Turner's signature coloring, especially that associated with his later pictures, was rendered in black and white. As heretical as the Art Journal may seem to current sensibilities about Turner's transcendent painterly style, the journal presented a point of view that was, for its time, honest, earnest, and understandable. Turner's worth to the British public was only to be increased by the ubiquitous presence of fine art prints after his works. At almost the same time (1865-66) and in the pages of the same Art Journal, Turner's greatest contemporary champion, the art critic John Ruskin, authored a still-obscure 10-part essay passionately arguing for the critical role of drawing and line engraving in the diffusion and perpetuation of high art production and edification. Ruskin, who had earlier been excoriated in the Art Journal for his advocacy of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, now wittingly or unwittingly supported the editorial and commercial goals of the periodical in his "Cestus of Aglaia" ("The Girdle of the Graces"), for Ruskin devoted much of his essay to the proper liberal education for and execution of what he called "good lines." Not coincidentally, perhaps, in defending his position, Ruskin employed as examples prints published in the Art Journal, including one of the Turner Gallery series.

This paper examines the significance of these two events as indicative of the formative history of mid-Victorian art publishing and journalism in England. In particular, it focuses on the inextricable intertwining of fine and commercial art production in the contemporary journalistic milieu, the related issue of prints as translations of paintings, and the degree to which moving from one medium to another represented an act of transcription or transgression.

"Dado or Dust Trap? Aesthetic Borders and the Late-Victorian 'Healthy House'"--Eileen Cleere, Southwestern University, TX

This paper explores Victorian borders both spatially and philosophically, arguing that late nineteenth-century anxieties about the household "dust trap" are symptoms of broader cultural controversies over the disciplinary boundaries of sanitary science and fine art. I have elsewhere suggested that aesthetic philosophy was significantly transformed in the years immediately following the 1842 publication of Edwin Chadwick's Sanitary Report, when the Romantic celebration of picturesque decay and dilapidation seemed to contradict the new Victorian reverence for health. Yet even though John Ruskin's celebration of Modern Painters worked in tandem with the Pre-Raphaelite movement to institutionalize a "cleaner" style for fine art, an ideological opposition between aesthetic and sanitary standards lingered for most of the nineteenth century. After the development of germ theories in the 1870s, moreover, the link between environment and illness made the Victorian home a much-scrutinized site of disease production, and the decorative artist and architect joined the fine artist as the suspected enemies of health, cleanliness, and sanitation reform. Not only did the Gothic style of architecture (primarily and inadvertently resuscitated for use in home construction by Ruskin) revive an unsanitary interest in nooks, tunnels, dark rooms, and turrets, the most cherished examples of Aesthetic decoration-dados, decorative carvings, shelving, cornices, tapestries, curtains, carpets-were revealed to be at best "dust traps" and at worst "the forcing beds for disease germs" ("Domestic Health" 228). While nobody doubted that tapestries, for example, were valuable works of art, writers like Harriet Martineau insisted that they belonged to "the past century" where hiding spaces concealed both ancient dust and gothic terror: "we in our tight houses, whose walls have no chinks and no cracks, may better hang our apartments with clean and light and wholesome paper, which harbors no vermin, screens no thieves, and scares no fever patient with night visions of perplexity and horror" (Health, Husbandry and Handicraft, 463).

Martineau's concept of the impermeable "tight house" would eventually yield the "healthy house" described by architects and furniture designers like Robert Edis, Phillip Webb, Norman Shaw and E. W. Godwin at a series of joint Art and Health Exhibitions held in and around London in the 1880s. The healthy house eliminated decorative and architectural borders in order to promote both physical and psychological ease; Shaw and Godwin were especially instrumental in the creation of Bedford Park, an entire sanitary suburb designed without basements, carpets or curtains for the aesthetically-minded but hygienically-conscious middle class. Moreover, like Martineau, Godwin associated Gothic revival architecture with both filth and Medieval panic; such architecture made "our modern houses already look weird, as if with forebodings of ghosts and haunted chambers" (qtd. in Soros 106). In removing the decorative and architectural dust trap from the home, sanitary science was instrumental in exorcizing both Gothic ghosts and Victorian subjectivity from what would become Modernist aesthetics. Such aesthetic exorcism is apparent in novels like Benjamin Disraeli's Lothair, Florence Caddy's Lares and Penates, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View, and Rhoda Broughton's Second Thoughts, where the transition to a borderless Modernism in art and architecture is repeatedly described as some version of sanitation reform.

"The Good Samaritan"-Suzanne Nunn, University of Exeter

"The Good Samaritan" painted by William Small in 1898 is one of only a few nineteenth-century British genre paintings that take the medical practitioner as their subject. This moving painting, which depicts a doctor attending a child in a gypsy encampment, will be used to discuss the Victorian medical practitioner's capacity to transgress social, professional, and spatial borders.

Reading this painting interdisciplinarily, the image represents much more than the doctor/patient encounter, providing an important-and rare-visualization of Victorian socio-cultural ideas about the role of the medical practitioner in a modern society, and the "nature" of the profession of medicine.

The rise to prominence of the general practitioner at the end of the nineteenth century-precisely the type of caring professional gentleman depicted by Small-can be related to the parallel rise in bureaucracy and the centralization of government health policies. The increasingly disciplinary role assigned to medicine during the nineteenth-century necessitated the crossing of cultural boundaries, and government legislation which authorized medical activity indicates the cultural imperative of such transgressions. Since the Renaissance medicine had enjoyed a mutually supportive association with the church, the law, and the state, but as the nineteenth century progressed the nature of this relationship changed. Increased secularization and medical advances combined to institute the doctor-who signed the death certificate-into areas of life that had hitherto been the province of the church. In law too, with the advent of forensic medicine, the doctor again extended his sphere of professional influence.

The Victorian doctor operated on the border. On the border between life and death, he was the arbitrator. On a daily basis he dealt with the most significant and highly policed of cultural borders, that of the body itself. The medical gaze/glance with its diagnostic capacity redrew the borders of illness and, as a consequence, the role of the patient, giving the doctor a mandate to visit, inspect and report on the conditions encountered in every location. Small's painting, as part of Victorian medical/social visual culture presents a fascinating insight into the processes of negotiation, transgression, and maintenance of social, professional, and spatial borders.

Session III

On the Edge: Gender and Sexuality

"Transgressing Masculine Borders: Caucasian Men/Oriental Dress"-Joseph A. Kestner, University of Tulsa

In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman observes that "hegemonic colonialism works by inspiring in the colonized subject the desire to assume the identity of his or her colonizers." Provocatively, she then notes the intriguing "inverse desire . . . whereby a white man . . . comes to assume the psychic coloration of the Arabs he seeks to organize." However, this latter process, which Silverman sees embodied in the practice of T. E Lawrence, in fact began in the early nineteenth century and was conspicuous in Victorian male portraiture. Such male transgression of identity borders merits exploration. Key portraits confront the question of Caucasian males in Oriental dress. Prior to Victoria's accession, there is Thomas Phillip's "Byron in Arnaot Costume" of 1813, showing the poet in the dress of an Albanian tribesman, a canvas complementing his "Turkish tales" The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos. Andrew Geddes' "Charles Lenox Fumming-Bruce in 'Syriac' Costume of 1817" shows this adventurer seated before the ruins of Baalbeck in Syria.

Robert Lauder's "David Roberts in the Dress He Wore in Palestine" of 1840 shows Roberts as he appeared during his 1838-39 excursion through the Middle East, leading to his landmark publication The Holy Land (1842-49). James Sant's "Captain Colin Mackenzie" of 1842 portrays a man who was a hostage during the First Afghan War. William Holman Hunt completed his "Self Portrait" (1867-75) in a supposedly Syrian costume, challenging in light of Hunt's racist comments about Arabs in his letters and diaries. ("I thought the whole race of Arabs were a blot on the face of the earth.") Finally, Thomas Seddon's and Frederick Leighton's portraits of Richard Burton (one in Arabic costume, the other not) delineate the famous translator/adventurer who reportedly endured circumcision to travel to Mecca, a pilgrimage described in his Personal Narrative (1855).

These portraits (along with the Arabic dress episode from David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962) serve as indices to alternative, transgressive, Othered masculinities during the nineteenth century which modeled Lawrence's border-crossing demeanor in the twentieth, stages on the path of "going Native."

"The Man in the Melodrama: The Violent Borders of the Penitent Woman Tableau"-Melissa Valiska Gregory, Indiana University

This paper reads the familiar Victorian tableau of the fallen woman begging a man for forgiveness as a classic border scene, one that reveals the equivocal boundaries between physical and psychological violence in the mid-century bourgeois home. The penitent woman tableau, where a daughter, fiancée, or wife drops to the ground in remorse at the sight of the lover or husband she has betrayed, appeared prominently in mid-century domestic melodrama. In these on-stage scenes, the actors would temporarily freeze their physical positions, transforming he conflict into a fixed pictorial tableau that brought the play to a standstill at its most crucial moment: the instant when East Lynne's Elizabeth Vane penitently falls to the floor at her husband's feet, for instance, after she has betrayed him for another man. But the cultural significance of the penitent woman tableau can be gauged not only by its persistent presence in stage melodrama, but also by its prominence in art, novels, and poetry. By examining the penitent woman tableau as it is depicted not only in Victorian melodrama, but also in mid-century paintings such as Augustus Egg's Past and Present (1858), or poetry such as Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859-85), I argue that the husband's position in this widely popular scene captures the troublingly ambiguous role of physical violence as it existed in mid-Victorian marriage and masculinity.

Not surprisingly, recent scholarly interpretations of the penitent woman tableau have focused primarily on its implications for feminine agency. But I argue that the consequences of feminine transgression are not the only cultural issue at stake in this popular mid-century scene of feminine remorse and guilt. For the penitent woman tableau captures a moment where physical violence is threatened but never fully carried out. Although the woman grovels on the floor while the man stands over her, often menacingly clenching his fists in anger, he never, ever, beats her, or exerts any form of physical reprisal for her transgression. The penitent woman tableau thus displays a moment of masculine hesitation or irresolution, wherein the man contemplates the possibility of physical violence but does not act on it. The scene not only represents the instant in which the husband exhibits the ultimate self-restraint-he will not beat his wife despite the magnitude of her betrayal-but also, by suspending the action, suggests that he might at any moment fail to check his aggression.

This scene was enormously popular in mid- to late-Victorian culture: Coventry Patmore remarked that Tennyson's description of Queen Guinevere's penitence in Idylls of the King, for instance, was 'the highest [ . . . ] of the poet's efforts"-and, indeed, Guinevere's groveling surfaced repeatedly in mid-century painting and other decorative arts. I argue that the widespread appeal of the penitent wife tableau lies in its presentation of an idealized version of masculine power, one in which husbands need only to suggest discipline-rather than physically enact it-in order to confirm their authority. More than just a spectacle of female contrition, the penitent woman tableau serves as a display of extreme female vulnerability to the aggrieved man's possibly violent reaction, a moment when women are exposed to the intimidation of potential physical force. As a moment of arrested narrative development, the penitent woman tableau points back to the inherent physical power of masculinity and forward to a moment of male self-mastery, a mastery that is both terrifying for wives and potentially appealing to Victorian men searching for ways to confirm their domestic authority without resorting to crude displays of violence. In a mid-century world where masculine violence was increasingly scrutinized and rejected as a legitimate means of control, the view of masculine authority as a sublimation of violence rather than an overt display resonated profoundly within the mid-Victorian imagination. Ultimately, at stake is not only an enriched understanding of Victorian melodrama and the significance of the penitent woman tableau, but a further consideration of how equivocal "border violence" was a key concept in maintaining the Victorian domestic ideal, wherein the paterfamilias controls his family without relying on physical force.

"The Queer Politics of Pleasure-Seeking in Victoria Cross's Six Chapters of a Man's Life"-Christina Parish, Syracuse University

In the fiction of controversial New Woman author Victoria Cross, border crossings would seem to be the norm. In Six Chapters of a Man's Life (1903), and its earlier Yellow Book incarnation "Theodora: A Fragment" (1895), Cross's heroine, Theodora, proclaims that there can be "no pleasure without liberty," in which liberty refers to the female pleasurist's unrestricted mobility not only across national boundaries but those of gender, sexuality, and race as well. So while Six Chapters of a Man's Life ostensibly provides late-Victorian readers with a narrative of heterosexual romance, the union between New Woman heroine Theodora and her male lover, Cecil, is itself predicated upon same-sex desire. That is, Cecil, who also functions as the narrator, desires the mustachioed, orientalized heroine precisely because she is a "virile" woman. In the lovers' journey to the East, the borders between self and other prove even more permeable. Passing as Cecil's male companion, "Theodore," the New Woman heroine engages in erotic flirtation with other European women on their voyage, yet she is also aroused by he sight of native Egyptian men, who are, in turn, watching the homoerotic performance of an effeminate Arab dancing boy. Such practices are evidence of Theodora and Cecil's status as "sincere and ardent pleaure-seekers, unfettered by any prejudices" (SCML 202). While literary works produced by female New Woman authors are generally noted for their conscious explorations of the physical and geographical boundaries of female desire (as a means of challenging patriarchal norms and authority), these texts have tended to reproduce heterocentric models of femininity and to reinforce racialized subjectivities that help maintain British imperialism. Victorian Cross's fiction, however, invites us to consider the relationship between "queer" female subjectivity and empire at the fin-de-siècle. In Foucauldian terms, Cross's New Woman heroine engages in a seemingly endless and utopic exchange of bodies and pleasures. In her border crossings, across identities and desires, the queer New Woman appears to resist the norms of late-Victorian patriarchy and imperialism.

Session IV

Political Borders: Self and State

"Politics as Self-Reconception: Crossing the Border to Republic Citizenship"-Beth Browning Jacobs, University of Illinois-Chicago

The history of the British public's attempts to cross the border which separates the medieval subject from the citizen of the republic has been a remarkable one. Attempts made in the Cromwellian era failed because although both rabble rousers and learned men of a republican temperament-Milton comes immediately to mind-were capable of theorizing this border, the public at large were not yet capable of performing the crossing. When threatened, they subsided readily. In passing the 1701 act of succession, Parliament did cross a legally earthshaking border-it made the statement that law takes precedence over the previous divine right of inherited kingship. The public, for the most part, failed to perceive the significance of this turning point, and therefore the public performance in the 1715 and 1745 attempts to restore the Stuart pretenders was meager and easily crushed.

In the nineteenth century, however, the public finally developed a voice. This paper discusses that voice: where did it come from, and why then? When British women and children were being raped and murdered in India, the public had an opinion about what should be done. When Gordon was abandoned to be killed in Khartoum because of Gladstone's inaction, Gladstone lost his power. The fascinating back-and-forth exchanges of power between Disraeli and Gladstone during this period-which, themselves, consist mainly of performance-reflect the shifts in the public opinion of the time. Members of the general public have crossed a border of knowledge and self-perception: they see themselves as a force in directing affairs and their leaders as persons who may be held accountable.

Why are people able, during some eras, to muster the cultural will to become citizens of a republic, while in other eras they simply fail? Literary/cultural materials were present in seventeenth-century British-in abundance. The writings of Milton, Walwyn, Overton, Lilburne, and many others urged people forward. But the challenge was not taken up. It was taken up earlier in America, and attempted, with mixed success, in France. I argue that a special combination of factors involving urbanity, literacy, and economics must come together at a moment which allows a people to make the transition to actually performing the duties of the modern republican citizen. That crossover, for Britain, took place in the middle of the reign of Victoria.

"The Political is Personal: Literary Elections in Historical Context, 1840-1865"-Michael Markus, Washington University-St. Louis

This paper examines the representation of Parliamentary elections in a number of fictional works set during the period 1840-1875. Several important novelists, including Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, deal with such elections in their works. Although the approaches which they adopt can be quite disparate, ranging from the outright travesty presented in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, to the subtle analysis of the interplay between personal and political feelings in Trollope's Rachel Ray, one common thread passes through the work of each of these authors: A strong disinclination to regard political issues as the primary, or even a major, determinant of election outcomes.

All the works under consideration offer valuable insights to historians of Victorian elections. These works illuminate certain aspects of elections which contemporary newspaper accounts and private correspondences rarely address, particularly the role played by women in supporting candidates "behind the scenes," and the role of social relationships in shaping political allegiances. At the same time, though, the frequency with which these authors present venality and corruption as being the defining characteristics of elections may lead modern readers to adopt a somewhat jaundiced view of English electoral politics during this period. Research into electoral politics in Yorkshire's West Riding suggests that neither corruption nor political apathy were the norm. By thus traversing the borders between fictive and real electoral politics, I address the judgments made by these authors in their presentations of elections, and attempt to shed some light-for both literary scholars and historians-on how these presentations might be interpreted.

"Redefining the Bounds of Property, Re-enforcing the Borders of Empire: Ulster Custom, Ancient Law, and the Land Act of 1879"-Sara L. Maurer, Indiana University

In this paper I examine the colonial context of Victorian ideas on ownership, in order to argue that the enforcement of imperial boundaries required the re-engineering of the borders imagined to exist around private property. I look at the cultural and intellectual contexts of Gladstone's 1870 Land Act in Ireland. The Act formalized into law for all of Ireland the so-called Ulster Custom, a traditional set of tenant rights that approximated, but was not legally identical to outright ownership. Westminster's allotment to restive Irish tenants of one sort of dominance over the land, in order to stabilize English dominance over the whole colony signaled a new prominence for discourse on socially determined forms of ownership. The notion that property regulation took on local and highly specific forms departed significantly from the early-century Enlightenment assumption that ownership was a universal category, as inherent to human nature as life and liberty. Significantly, the English impulse toward respecting and restoring culturally different modes of Irish ownership arose just as Irish coalitions gained a more equitable parliamentary power. The turn of events, I argue, reveals a retrenchment of British colonial power through new lines of thought. From Sir Henry Maine's 1861 explorations of ancient laws, to John Stuart Mill's advocacy for Ulster Custom, to later Parliamentary endeavors such as 1884's "Reports on the Systems of tenure of Dwelling Houses in Foreign Countries," the notion of culturally relative ways of owning provided a new paradigm for British imperialism. Rather than attempting to reconcile an external policy of colonial rule by conquest with an internal policy of civil rule by consent, political theorists were now able to dismiss the legal impasse of the exclusivity of property that made the two incommensurable. Through the logic of culturally relative degrees of ownership, a territory could both be a British colony, and simultaneously be seen as belonging-in its own way-to its own people. England redefined its own identity through this notion of a spectrum of cultural ownerships, from a state strictly vigilant in protecting citizens' property rights, to a nation whose transcendent character boasted a highly evolved mode of ownership unlike any other-and thus, in its colonial endeavors, usurping no powers or privileges involved in other cultures' ways of holding property.

Session V

Britons and Americans: Looking across Borders

"Crossing the Border of Hell: Jack London and Charles Masterman Represent 'the Abyss'"-Dan Bivona, Arizona State University

In the 1880s and 90s, a mainly middle-class Victorian discourse on poverty reinterprets the horizontal geography of London within a vertical eschatological vision, as writers imagine the East End of London as "the abyss," a place of "demoralization" and degradation populated by a class of people labeled, in Charles Booth's memorably abstract phrase, "the residuum." While social activists such as William Booth, the Rev. Andrew Mearns, and Octavia Hill of the C. O. S., and settlement movement pioneers such as Samuel Barnett, argue for the ultimate redeemability of the denizens of the abyss, and while Charles Booth and George Gissing take great care to finely differentiate what one might call the various "circles" of this hell, many Britons seem to have preferred the undifferentiated vision of East End life metaphorically represented in H. G. Wells' depiction of the apelike Morlocks in his classic satire The Time Machine (1893): pre-human creatures living underground who threaten the prosperous denizens of the upper world by crawling out of their confines at night to prey upon them.

While the metaphorical vehicle is eschatological, the historical phenomenon being represented is really social class difference. Despite the evident prosperity of the West End and the evident industriousness of "the City" near the end of the Victorian age, the working class East Ender increasingly becomes, for many middle class Londoners, a figure of grave concern: even if living "respectably" amidst squalor, he is a figure who troubles middle class consciousness in a way that, by the 1880s and 90s at least, suggests that differences of social class had been invested with the kind of permanence one usually associates with differences of culture. Moreover, as Wells' novelistic treatment suggests, "cultural" differences are not a matter for purely anthropological debate, for in the writings of these middle class observers, the denizen of the East End is not safely confined in his hell but represents a continuing treat of infection to the prosperous.

Jack London and Charles Masterman, two turn-of-the-century writers who made the journey into the "abyss," returned to tell about it, the former in People of the Abyss and the latter in From the Abyss. While both reinforce the popular image of the East End through their repeated use of Dantesque clichés, they are committed to rather complicated, if bleakly tragic, views of the ultimate fate of London's "residuum." Jack London's unusual mix of darkly Malthusian satire, socialistic bonhomie, and Darwinist physicalist critique produces a compellingly ambivalent but also ghastly representation of the life of the London underclass. Masterman focuses less on the obviously repulsive aspects of life in the nether world, instead putting his criticism of middle class insensibility to the suffering poor in the service of a critique of an emerging mass culture: Masterman conjoins "mass man" and the urban working class in order to reinterpret the problem of poverty as a crisis in middle class cultural ideals. In that sense, one could say that Masterman reinterprets the problem of the "residuum" as a problem of the "majority culture," governed by impoverished ideals that are inadvertently caricatured when they are adopted by the respectable working class of East London.

"The American Civil War through British Eyes: Diplomatic Dispatches from the United States"-James J. and Patience P. Barnes, Wabash College

Dispatches written by one or more British diplomats resident in America during the Civil War describing what is going on to their superiors back in London reveal that the following issues were of special concern to the British: the Northern blockade of Southern ports; the difficulty of British ships in securing Southern cotton; the predicament of British subjects in the United States being caught up in either Confederate or Union military service; the North's implied threat to go to war with Britain if the latter recognized Southern independence; and British efforts to understand American politics in turmoil.

"Border as Highway: Martin Tupper and the Promotion of Anglo-North-American Identities, 1849-1877"-Denis Paz, University of North Texas

Martin Tupper probably was the best-selling poet on both sides of the Atlantic between 1840 and the 1880s. About a million pirated copies of his poetical Proverbial Philosophy circulated in the United States during that period (with about half a million circulating in Britain). Aware of his popularity in the United States, Tupper cultivated his American readership by maintaining a correspondence with American cultural luminaries including Longfellow and Bryant, entertaining visiting Americans at his country house, and addressing his readers directly by means of "loving ballads to Brother Jonathan." And he paid two visits to North America, in 1851 and again during the winter of 1876-77. Not neglectful of British North America, he took a side trip to the Province of Canada in 1851, and a few years later he addressed poetic calls to both British North America and the Australian colonies to firm up their allegiance to the British empire.

These were not easy times in which to promote such goals. Americans were still smarting in 1851 from Charles Dickens's scathing report of his visit to the United States in American Notes (1842), from the difficult negotiations of the borders of Québec and British Columbia with Maine and the Oregon Territory, and from the trouncing they had received at British hands when guerilla forces invaded Ontario. And in 1876, the bombastic centenary celebrations of United States Independence reminded Americans of the ill-feeling associated with the Mason and Slidell Affair, the Alabama claims, the Treaty of Washington (1871), and alleged British sympathy towards the Confederate side in the Civil War. Throughout the period, moreover, Americans resented their dependence on British cultural imports.

Nevertheless, Tupper managed to avoid these shoals, as the publication history of his books in the United States, the geographical distribution of his American readership (as indicated by inscriptions and owners' signatures), and his public reception during his tours of the United States and the Province of Canada suggest. Tupper grew more exclusively interested in the United States and less interested in Canada over time. Clearly borders can be simultaneously both barriers to and facilitators of communication and even of understanding. The borders that Tupper negotiated must challenge Americanists to question the concept of American exceptionalism .

Session VI

Traversing Borders in Victorian Fiction

"Margaret Oliphant's Pilgrims on the Borders of the Unseen"-John Reed, Wayne State University

Late in her career Margaret Oliphant wrote two interesting narratives dealing with the crossover between life and death. In "A Beleaguered City, Being a Narrative of Certain Recent Events in the City of Semur, in the Department of the Haute Bourgogne. A Story of the Seen and Unseen," a French town, where materialism has come to prevail, is suddenly occupied by the unseen spirits of the dead, who expel the occupants because they are morally unworthy to live in the town. A local visionary, interested in communication with the unseen because of the death of his beloved wife, is able to explain the presence of the unseen dead to his fellow citizens. He tells them that the dead have come out of love to teach the populace, but they feel they have failed. The saying of a mass clears the darkness from the town and the dead withdraw, but the consequence is that, with time the populace falls back into its petty and materialist ways.

In this story the dead cross the border between life and death in order to instruct their living counterparts in the importance of the "real" moral world that surrounds them. The truth about human existence is available to the dead, but not to the living. Only a visionary, motivated by love, can communicate across the border of life and death and deliver the redemptive message of the dead to the living. Although life and death appear to be antagonistic states, in fact, in Oliphant's story they are merely different regions in a larger spiritual domain, regions whose borders can occasionally be traversed.

In "A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen," the border crossing is in the other direction. The Little Pilgrim, a woman of a certain age, dies and finds herself in heaven. There she learns about the Father and the heavenly message of love and takes on the responsibility of waiting at the doorways to heaven to greet newcomers. While she is in heaven she learns that its residents can watch the people in other worlds, and also that here is a place of purification where the sorrows of living existence are reenacted. A visionary poet provides much of this information. He declares that, though earth is but a little speck, it is the center of all. Here again, Oliphant indicates that the dead are privileged in that they may see the world of the living and even visit it, whereas the living are blind to the direction. The living cross it only once-when they die.

But there is another border to be considered in this tale. For in heaven the Little Pilgrim meets her parents. "And thus she learned that though the new way may take the place of the old, and many things may blossom out of it like flowers, yet that the old is never done away." As in "The Beleaguered City," life and death are seen as two continuous realms within a larger territory, but now those realms are seen to be continuous in time as well. But "The Little Pilgrim" adds yet another dimension to this domain, because there is another border that separates another population from humanity. The story ends with the Little Pilgrim's voice of greeting to the newcomers in heaven echoing throughout the universe. It "cheered the anxious faces of some great lords and princes far more great than she, who were of a nobler race than man; for it was said among the stars that when such a little sound could reach so far, it was a token that the Lord had chosen aright, and that His method must be the best."

Investigators such as Edmund Gurney tried to explain communication with the dead and other supernatural events in Phantasms of the Living (1886), Frederic Meyers offered elaborate explanations about man's ability to communicate with the dead in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), and earlier Balfour Steward and P.G. Tait had published The Unseen Universe (1875), which was a serious attempt to reconcile science and religion, including an acknowledgment of a spirit world. These are only a few of the "serious" texts that provided a rich context for Oliphant's tales in which crossing the border between life and death constitutes the central event.

"Indexing Criminality before Criminology: Gender's Borderlands and the Mid-Victorian Novel"-Carrie Etter, University of California-Irvine

This paper argues that with the rise of criminology in the nineteenth century, in the mid-Victorian novel gender comes to dominate over class as the primary index of criminality. Numerous novels suggest that in the borderlands of gender, in regions of perceived lack and excess, the Victorians came to locate criminal character.

In England from the turn of the century into the eighteen-forties, professional and popular studies of crime almost universally linked criminality to class status. In his Treatise on Indigence (1806), Patrick Colquhoun regarded poverty as "exerting a structural pressure to crime" (Reiner 143); that is, the poor were not innately criminal, but were understandably, if not justifiably, motivated by circumstance. While this perceived relation never wholly disappears, in the wake of Chartism and revolutions on the Continent we increasingly find an important change in literature: an increasing focus on individual over group motivations for criminal behavior. As Michel Foucault contends in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, from the late eighteenth century "A whole corpus of individualizing knowledge was being organized that took as its field of reference not so much the crime committed (at least in isolation), but the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct" (126). As part of this trend, rising scientism in the study of crime involved both the increased use of statistics, partly spurred by the publication of Adolphe Quetelet's work in Britain, and increased biologism in the specific application to the individual criminal of phrenology, heredity, and physiology.

Such prominent biologism helps explain the rising incidence of a correlation between criminality and gender abnormality in mid-Victorian novels. The advocated correlation implies that one's inability or unwillingness to obey norms of gender extends to an inability or unwillingness to obey other societal norms, namely the law. To use Foucault's fore-cited words, "observed everyday conduct" in terms of gender performance, if aberrant, may be seen to indicate a hidden "potentiality of danger." Moreover, novels also present this correlation working in reverse: obedience to gender norms appears indicative of obedience to the law and hence criminal innocence. An analysis of Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm manifests a correlation between gender and criminality that 1) distances the criminal from class justifications for crime, 2) individualizes the criminal in such a way as to imply the uniqueness of her motives, and 3) indicates how the multiplicity of acts through which gender is constituted allows for censuring the most minor acts of deviance. In these and other mid-Victorian novels, it is not simply the case that one appears criminal because one transgresses perceived gender borders, but more specifically that the individualistic nature of criminality is marked by degrees; this is what makes the concept of gender borderlands, areas of lack and excess, useful for understanding Victorian ideals of criminality as well as the novel's unique participation in the nineteenth-century transition from classical to positivist theories of crime.

"George Eliot's Negotiation of Cultural Borders in Daniel Deronda-John McBratney, John Carroll University

George Eliot is often regarded as a novelist who wrote primarily about English provincial society. Middlemarch, with its closely observed depiction of life in a small English town, certainly fits this view. Yet even in this ostensibly regional novel, Eliot takes aim at the very preoccupation with the local that she is said to embrace, calling attention to the prejudice and small-mindedness of many of the town's inhabitants. Indeed, one of the more compelling characters in the novel is outsider Will Ladislaw, the son of a Polish father, a student of art on the Continent, and a man of broadly European culture-in short, a figure whose intellectual, artistic, and cultural orientation is more international than English. At the end, his effectiveness as an agent of political change in England is made possible by his ability to cross cultural borders, particularly that between England and the Continent, bringing to bear the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral attainments of the latter upon the former.

Eliot's interest in the wider definition of cultural and moral value made possible by the negotiation of cultural borders receives its most full and mature treatment in Daniel Deronda. Though Deronda is raised by an English Christian guardian, he is by birth a German Jew. By the time he comes to recognize his true paternity, he has fallen under the influence of the Jewish mystic, Mordecai, whose vision of a renovated Zion inspires Deronda and his wife, Mirah, to emigrate to Palestine to found a Jewish homeland. Throughout the novel, foreign conceptions of culture-whether embodied in the musician Klesmer's spacious understanding of art or Mordecai's messianic vision of national and spiritual regeneration-stand as both a corrective to a narrow English culture and an incentive to moral growth, especially for the self-centered Gwendolen Harleth.

Eliot's conception of cultural borders does not call for the breaching of cultural boundaries or the undoing of those opposed values that define differences across boundaries. In this sense, her work is unamenable to the kinds of analysis that contemporary poststructuralist theories of hybridity might call for. Instead, without ever relaxing the integrity of cultural borders, she wishes to make these borders porous so that a limited, controlled traffic across lines of demarcation may flourish. She encapsulates this idea in the slogan of "separateness with communication," a formulation that allows for divisions between cultural worlds-here, the Christian and Jewish-but also for exchange between them for their mutual understanding and benefit. Daniel Deronda may fail to succeed in realizing the lofty aims of its motto: Daniel's plan to revive a Jewish nation in Palestine weakens his ties to England and Gwendolen's confinement to her home at Offendene cuts her off from the outside world. However, in envisioning a cultural exchange at once attentive to the claims of different cultures and committed to a non-dominating dialogue between them, the novel hints at a cosmopolitanism that may aid us in negotiating cultural difference in today's fractious, globalized world. In its vision of separateness and communication, Daniel Deronda suggests a way of going beyond both the false universality of a traditional Western liberalism and the sterile cultural relativism of certain forms of contemporary theory.

ANNOUNCEMENTS OF INTEREST

CFP: The Victorian Press in India. Special edition of Victorian Periodicals Review (2004). Abstract and CV deadline 9/1/02. Final papers due 3/1/03. Will consider essays on Indian and Anglo-Indian periodicals published in India in the nineteenth century and in any subject or field. Send, fax, or e-mail 2-page abstracts and 2-page CVs to Prof. Julie F. Codell, School of Art, Box 871505, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-1505. Fax: 480-965-8338. E.-mail: julie.codell@asu.edu.

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