MIDWEST VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Summer 2003 Newsletter

Editor Anne M. Windholz

Executive Committee Members: Officers-Micael Clarke, President; James Sack, Vice-President; Julie Melnyk, Treasurer; Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Executive Secretary; Anne M. Windholz, Past-Executive Secretary; Members at Large-John Reed, William McKelvy, Thomas Prasch, Patrick Leary, Florence Boos

The Twenty-seventh Annual MVSA Meeting was held at the Seneca Hotel, Chicago, on April 11-12, 2003. This year's theme was Victorian Transformations. In addition to a variety of excellent papers, the conference featured transformations within MVSA itself: the installation of new members on the Executive Committee. Taking a place (or a new position) on the board for 2003-04 are Micael Clarke (Loyola University) as President, James Sack (Univ. of Illinois-Chicago) as Vice-President and President-Elect, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre (Indiana University East) as Executive Secretary, and At-Large members John Reed (Wayne State University) and Patrick Leary (moderator of VICTORIA and the Victoria Research Web).

MVSA presented two awards for outstanding work by graduate students. Walter Arnstein presented Deb Gettelman of Harvard University with the 2003 Arnstein Award in support of her dissertation, "Reading and Revery: The Art of Daydreaming in Victorian Psychology and Fiction." Keith Welsh and Anne Windholz presented the 2003 Burgan Prize for the best conference presentation by a graduate student (one exhibiting the qualities of outstanding teaching as well as superior scholarship) to Marty Gould of the University of Iowa for his presentation, "Rational, National Show: The Theatrical Career of the Great Exhibition" (see abstract, pages 13-14).

In keeping with the theme of Transformation, MVSA members present at the conference participated in a roundtable on the future of MVSA: its conference format, its role in the newly inaugurated NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association), its conference sites and speakers. Everyone agreed on the importance of retaining MVSA's current format of plenary sessions and most expressed the opinion that Chicago should remain the primary site for future meetings, perhaps alternating with other compelling but less-expensive locations. Several people mentioned the possibility of creating an e-mail list of members (not to be confused with a discussion listserv) for soliciting executive committee nominations and disseminating calls for papers and other membership news. The possibility of publishing conference papers on the WEB was also broached. A number of members called for a slightly longer conference that would allow for more paper presentations and more discussion time. Ideas to help fund the conference included creating an endowment to pay for guest speakers and allowing academic institutions to sponsor certain portions of the conference without being actual hosts. Support was also voiced for a keynote panel on the conference theme to close each conference.

The 2003 conference was dedicated to the memory of two longtime members and friends of MVSA, Jane Stedman of Roosevelt University and Barbara Quinn Schmidt of Southern Illinois University.

IN MEMORIAM

Barbara Quinn Schmidt

Longtime MVSA member Barbara Quinn Schmidt passed away on July 18, 2002. A dedicated teacher, Barbara was on the faculty of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for 37 years, even continuing to teach part-time after her retirement in 2000. She was Director of the Women's Studies Program from 1993 to 1994 and Chair of the English Department from 1992 to 1994. She also hosted a regular radio program, "Writers of America," on St. Louis station WFIE from 1975-1986.

Barbara was a Member at Large of the MVSA Executive Committee from 1990 to 1994 and, with Richard Davis, co-hosted the 1994 conference in St. Louis. She was also a very active member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, serving as President and Vice-President. She was the editor of the society's journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, from 1985 to 1992, encouraging many younger scholars to submit their work. In addition, she edited two special issues of VPR devoted to the Cornhill Magazine, the subject of her dissertation, that were published in 1999 and 2000.

Barbara is survived by her husband, David, and her children, Karl and Roell. In her honor, RSVP has established the Barbara Quinn Schmidt Travel Fund to assist graduate student presenters to travel to the RSVP conference.

Barbara's warmth and generosity will be remembered by those who knew her. She radiated good cheer, and her unabashed enthusiasm for the Victorian period was heartwarming. She will be greatly missed.

--Susan Thach Dean                    


Jane Stedman

Jane W. Stedman was, and remains, a highly accomplished scholar, an inspiring teacher, an accomplished presenter of her scholarship at professional meetings, and a sly, witty colleague. Dr. Stedman was born on 8 June 1920 in Detroit. She died in the spring of 2003 in Chicago. She took her first degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, studied Scottish history at the University of Edinburgh, and completed a PhD at the University of Chicago. In nearly fifty years as a teacher she held appointments at Wayne State, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and Roosevelt University in Chicago, where she worked from 1955 to 1989. She held Guggenheim, Fulbright, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships. During the 1973-74 academic year Dr. Stedman was in residence at the Royal Holloway College at the University of London. She served on the editorial board of the journal Victorian Studies and regularly contributed papers and reviews to The Gilbert and Sullivan Journal and Opera News.

Her accomplishments in the field of Victorian theatre are immense. I hesitate to call W. S. Gilbert her "life's work," but her most significant scholarship focused on this complex, late-Victorian genius. Indeed, he and his writings and milieu are the subject of her books. Gilbert before Sullivan (U of Chicago P, 1967) was followed by an edited collection titled, W. S. Gilbert's Theatrical Criticism, which proved to be Dr. Stedman's last book. It was published in 2000 by The Society for Theatre Research in London. Perhaps her "crowning" achievement is her biography W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian and His Theatre (Oxford UP, 1996). The latter work was extensively reviewed world wide. Reviewer Andrew Crowther noted the "huge leap forward in Gilbert research" the book represented and added, "Even those who, like myself, thought they knew most of what there is to know about the man, find themselves having to reconsider and reconstruct, almost from the bottom." He also suggested the book was too factual and not speculative enough, a comment that would have amused Dr. Stedman greatly.

But a list of articles and appointments does not do justice to any figure who has so shaped the scholarship of her field over so long a period of time. Her precision was one of her great strengths as a scholar and teacher. Incapable of tolerating intellectual sloppiness, whether in a student composi- tion, a Masters thesis, or her own articles and books, she forced all who knew and respected her to hone arguments and augment their knowledge. Those students and colleagues who came in contact with her and respected her methods and values emerged better persons.

Jane Stedman's behavior as a scholar was a model for many. When one looks at the ranks of conference attendees and speakers, there is too often nowadays a concentration of junior faculty or equally junior graduate students speaking to an audience of graduate students and junior faculty; we see too little of mid- and later-career faculty actively participating in these same conferences by sharing their presumably more mature research and reflections with younger colleagues. MVSA works hard to be an "equal opportunity" organization on many fronts, yet even there graduate students and junior professors often shame their elders with their rich, abundant scholarship. In Jane Stedman we have the example of a model scholar throughout her career. She published an excellent article on breach of promise in Victorian Scandals: Representations of Gender and Class (Ohio UP, 1992), a collection of MVSA essays edited by Kristine Garrigan. She most recently delivered a paper to MVSA in 2001, while in her eighty-first year. Her talk, on children's deaths as portrayed on the Victorian stage, was well received and prompted a colleague to note admiringly that "Jane very positively modeled for us all how active scholarship can be a lifetime vocation."

I remember one other incident exemplifying Dr. Stedman's good academic citizenship. She was scheduled to chair a session on humor periodicals at a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals conference, held at the Newberry Library about ten years ago. By the start of the conference one presenter out of the standard three had backed out; we later learned a second presenter was ill and could not attend. As Dr. Stedman summarized these gory details for the audience the next day, many of us must have inwardly groaned over the prospect of a ninety-minute session with one speaker. But she surprised us. Surveying the wreckage (with an apologetic nod and wry smile to the remaining presenter, who acquitted himself admirably), she determined she would "step into the breach." She had herself written a much more than creditable paper the previous evening, and she delivered it to rapturous, sustained applause. Dr. Stedman was forced to take a "curtain call"; had we been attending the opera-a great love of Jane and her husband George McElroy-bravos would have flooded the auditorium and bouquets the stage. This tribute was as much to the content of her paper as it was to her pluck and generosity.

Perhaps it is best to leave Dr. Stedman-- Jane-on stage, with all our thanks, taking this final bow.

--D. J. Trela                         

CALL FOR PAPERS!

2004 MVSA CONFERENCE

De Paul University, Chicago


Structures of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Thanks in part to the work of James Murphy, the 2004 conference will be held at De Paul University in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland on April 18 and 19th. MVSA invites 400-word proposals on the conference theme Structures of Belief in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: in British and Irish Perspective. The histories of nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland are often thought of as asymmetrical, with religious faith as a key marker of difference between the two cultures. How did religion and other systems of belief operate in the relationship between the islands? Did religion increase in importance in Ireland as it diminished in Britain?

This conference invites papers that explore belief systems in nineteenth-century Ireland. It especially welcomes contributions that probe the relationship of such systems to British action, perception, and articulation. The impact of Catholic emancipation on Britain, the presence of the Catholic masses in British cities, the ideology of evangelical activity, the relationship between religion, gender, and subjectivity in literature, and the interaction of religion and material culture are among the many topics that might be explored. All systems of belief are of interest to the conference.

Please direct inquiries and abstracts, along with one-page CVs, to Professor James H. Murphy, Department of English, De Paul University, McGaw Hall, 802 W. Beldon Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614-3214, U.S.A. Deadline for receipt of submissions: Nov. 1, 2003.


ARNSTEIN PRIZE: Application materials for the 13th Annual Arnstein Prize Competition are available from the prize committee chair:

James Sack
Professor of History
University of Illinois - Chicago
601 South Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60607-7049
jsack@uic.edu



FROM TREASURER JULIE MELNYK:

Right now we have $729.92 in our interest-bearing checking account, and $2,204.73 in a higher-yield investment account that we opened this year. The Arnstein Fund has grown to $24,627.57, and our interest income for the Fund for calendar year 2002 was $920.48. Our Arnstein funds have been invested in longer-term CDs paying slightly higher rates, but partly because of low interest rates, we are still short of our goal of fully endowing the Arnstein Fellowship, which has increased in value to $1,500.00. This year's Arnstein contributions currently total $1,380.00. Thanks to all who contributed-and keep those tax-deductible contributions coming!


ABSTRACTS

VICTORIAN TRANSFORMATIONS

April 11-12, 2003

Seneca Hotel, Chicago

Session I

Transforming Ideas on Progress and History

Chair: David Wayne Thomas, Univ. of Michigan


"On History, Chaos, and Carlyle"--Jonathan Taylor, Loughborough Univ., UK

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Thomas Carlyle theorizes history and historical processes in terms of flux, chaos, disjunction, and disconnection, as opposed to the (supposedly) dominant Victorian view of history as progress, continuity, and linearity.

For many historiographers of the nineteenth century, the role of historian combines the apparently contradictory roles of prophet and scientist. These historiographers often appeal to the Newtonian ideal of a deterministic, mechanical universe, in which, by knowing "all the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it," it is possible that, for the historian, "the future just like the past would be present before [his or her] . . . eyes," as the Marquis de Laplace famously claims. Certainly, many of the most prominent historians and social critics of the nineteenth century sought to encompass in their work such Laplacian omniscience and to extrapolate universal laws and prophecies from the masses of "data" they presented. In this sense, I argue, Laplace and many contemporary thinkers looked forward to the age of the computer.

As the history of modern science has demonstrated, however, the age of the computer has not brought with it Laplacian omniscience, but has actually brought into question the very possibility of such omniscience. Though modern computers command vast amounts of data, they have actually demonstrated that absolute knowledge, and, by extension, prophecy are near impossibilities. This is most obviously the case as regards weather forecasting, which chaoticians like Edward Lorenz have shown to be almost doomed to failure.

Though he too sees himself as a kind of prophet, I argue that, whilst many contemporary historians appeal to a Newtonian view of the universe, Carlyle seems to anticipate modern science in his emphasis on complexity, chaos, and the intertwining of determinism and randomness. There are many points of contact between modern chaos theory, for instance, and Carlyle's views of history as a "Chaos of Being"; indeed, Carlyle often describes history in terms of fractal geometry, one hundred and thirty years before fractals were named as such.

Carlyle was not writing, though, one hundred and thirty years before phenomena such as fractals and complex systems were theorized and analyzed; it is just that particular terms like "fractals" had not been coined. One of the points of my paper is to show how some distinctly un-Newtonian strands of nineteenth-century science also relate to Carlyle's view of history and provide a historical context in which it can be placed and understood.


"From Status to Contract: Revising Maine's Definition of Progress after the Reform Bill of 1867"--Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Univ. of Notre Dame

This paper focuses on two different kinds of Victorian transformation. On the one hand, I'll be describing Victorian stories about transformation and progress: the Victorian versions of the classic liberal narrative of the shift from primitive to civilized, from tyranny to self-regulation, from involuntary to voluntary association. On the other hand, I'll be arguing that writers of the 1870s transform this classic liberal narrative to meet the demands of a post-Reform Bill liberalism, and that in so doing, they biologize what has hitherto been an essentially political-economic story, in order to replace a model of transition as radical discontinuity with one of a transition that balances continuity and discontinuity with a traditional past.

Henry Maine's Ancient Law (1861) is the story of how some societies progress from what he calls "status" to what he calls "contract." In the beginning, people lived in patriarchal family groups, governed by the father's law, and holding all property as a group. The unit of early society is the family, not the individual, and early social groups are seen as constituted by consanguinity (even if they aren't really), rather than by contiguity. For Maine, the society of status is static, unmoving, a place where exchange does not take place: in some places, however, this society is disrupted and a different kind of society, a civilized one, comes to take its place, characterized by mobility and gender neutrality. Only some groups manage to progress to societies of individuals whose relations are constituted by contract, and between whom there exists free exchange. There is a radical disjuncture between the two kinds of society: insofar as remnants of the social relations of status still exist in civilized countries-slavery in the US, Married Women's Property Law in England-those societies are not truly civilized. Modern social ties are thus contractual relations amongst contiguous peoples, rather than status relations amongst members of the same family or corporation. Group identity itself is thus primitive: the individual is the unit of civilized society.

Both Walter Bagehot (in Physics and Politics, 1872) and Herbert Spencer (in Principles of Sociology, Vol. I, 1876), draw upon Maine's account to produce to their own stories of social transformation. Bagehot transforms Maine's categories of status and contract into "custom" and "discussion," tempering his vision of radical discontinuity (he talks about breaking the cake of custom) with an evolutionary perspective that makes his second stage dependent on the continued internalized existence of his first. Rather than leaving custom/status behind entirely, Bagehot's civilized men carry them within, engraved upon their nervous systems as a biological inheritance. Spencer describes the shift as one from militarism to industrialism-he both insists on the necessity of the transition from the one to other for progress to occur, but uses his won brand of evolution to suggest that this transition cannot be completed until a man more perfectly adapted to social life evolves. Principles of Sociology also seems to need more than one narrative of transformation-the classic liberal one described above, and another about increasing complexity of structure that seems to have its roots in biological classification. These changes to Maine's narrative stem from an increasing need in the 70s for narratives that value continuity and collectivity over rupture and individualism, a need that stems from a renewed investment in nationalism.


Session II

Revamping Personalities and Periods

Chair: Joanna S. Mink, Minnesota State Univ.


"Imaginative Transformations: Charlotte Brontë and Discourses of Evangelical Methodism"--Lee Allen Talley, Rowan Univ.

Although Anglican, the Brontës owned a complete run of the Methodist Magazine, spanning from 1798 to 1812. Its pages contained not only a remarkable array of Methodist sermons and conversion accounts, but also sensational and wide-ranging discussions of dreams, premonitory visions, shipwrecks, missionary reports, and philosophical disquisitions. It published natural history columns, reports on recent scientific advances, hymns, and poetry. As children and adults, the Brontë sisters repeatedly mined the magazine's rich source material: they satirized its strident polemicism; transformed the imaginative tales of the supernatural to fit their collaborative fictional worlds; and retained many of its rhetorical strategies. While each sister refashioned these religious materials for their novels, Charlotte's work in particular bears the most obvious traces of this eccentric religious periodical. Charlotte's fiction-from her juvenilia to Villette-shows how she adapted this religious source material to advance her own secular and vehemently anti-evangelical ends. From characters and ideas in Jane Eyre, to the political unrest (incited by Methodist sympathizers) recounted in Shirley, to Villette's exploration of how religious passions could affect the brain, the materials in this publication provided Charlotte Brontë with ways of challenging Victorian society.

As one of the very few reminders of her mother, the magazine provided Charlotte with a personal connection to her maternal inheritance and a sanctioned spiritual connection to the discursive modes of folklore and the supernatural. The magazine offers us, in turn, an extraordinary record of a religious movement known for its oral history. Evangelical preaching, conversions, and revivals were important events not just to the Methodists, but to the other inhabitants in the North and West of England as well. Methodism's concern with conversion both at home and abroad necessitated a sometimes uncomfortable syncretic relationship with local folklore. This movement, and this magazine in particular, thus become tremendously important resources for scholars of the nineteenth century, since the magazine inadvertently kept alive beliefs in ghosts and the possibility of hauntings. I suggest that while the Methodist Magazine's overarching message of salvation was articulated through a multitude of rigid binary oppositions (save/damned, spirit/flesh, etc.), the magazine's discourses were often more flexible than its orthodox editors may have intended. And it is here that Charlotte and her sisters plundered its store to refashion materials for their own ends.

My paper traces how the Brontës came to own this magazine and Charlotte's profound yet previously unexamined debt to this publication. While not the "key" to Brontë's fiction, this magazine was of central importance to Charlotte's work and reveals the wealth of information we can gain by closely examining the religious movements of the nineteenth century. Victorianists today have much to learn from reading materials that Brontë's narrator in Shirley describes as "mad Methodist magazines full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism" (376). Brontë's fiction is full of traces of this peculiar magazine; her transformation of the older and more eccentric ways of reading the world for meaning sheds light on her artistic adaptations of these strange materials and the ways in which science, religion, politics, and literature were ineluctably linked in the nineteenth century.


"Cotton, Industry, and Empire: Refashioning Victorian Literary Studies"--Kathleen Blake, Univ. of Washington

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus presents a "Philosophy of Clothes." A jeu d'esprit while also a serious social commentary, this work features a symbolism of cloth that insists on its own materiality. But the material realities of material should be better known than they are in studies of Victorian literature and culture. We should refashion Victorian Studies to take in more of Carlyle's meaning in declaring that "Society is founded upon Cloth. In no age would this carry more powerful literal as well as symbolic import than in this one, when cotton textiles became the lead industry of the industrial revolution through imitation, technical innovations, and an epochal reversal of the balance of trade in Indian-style calicos.

My paper is drawn from a book project on Victorian literature and political economy. Beginning with references to textiles in Adam Smith, David Ricard, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx, I then offer an account of textiles as Britain's industrial leader. This is, above all, a story of cotton, and it very much involves Britain's trade and imperial relations with India. A reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford demonstrates the transformation of interpretation that follows from attention to fabric in the fabrication of Victorian society.

Gaskell's novel presents a small, old-fashioned, genteel, feminine world of unmarried village ladies devoted to their household linens and dress fashions but straitened in means and reliant on many "elegant economies." They would like to preserve their exclusive, self-sufficient world. They are proud to do without men and want no dealings with the nearby "vulgar" cotton mill town of Drumble (a fictional Manchester). But the novel shows that these ladies' small, traditional world is enmeshed by cloth in a much wider modern, masculine, and imperial world. Most critics miss this meshing, and they lay stress in their interpretations on themes of nostalgic resistance to modern change or regret over the change that comes. By contrast, I see a meshing that entails re-integration with men-new men of a new economy-and re-integration with industrial/com- mercial Drumble and far places all the way to India. And, with this, I see themes of advance for Cranford. Certainly there is much that may be deplored in industrial/commercial/imperial cotton, and the story for India as compared to England is different and darker. Still, cotton embellished and enriched the nineteenth-century British society "founded upon cloth" that we see in Cranford and served the advancement of women and the leveling of social hierarchy. Following a cue from Carlyle that prompts study across disciplines, I refashion interpretation of Gaskell's novel to point towards possibilities for refashioned understanding of the age in Victorian Studies.


"Dr. Arnold, the Transformation of Education, and the Transformation of Dr. Arnold"--George Mariz, Western Washington Univ.

Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) was renowned in his own day as an educational reformer and religious controversialist, though his son, the poet Matthew Arnold, now far outstrips him in esteem. Though Arnold had a corps of worshipful apostles and still has his defenders, prevailing contemporary estimates of him are generally less enthusiastic, deriving ultimately from Lytton Strachey's brilliant if unflattering portrait in Eminent Victorians (1918). The view of Arnold as a sexually repressed, overzealous, tyrannical headmaster, e.g. Sue Zemka's 1995 article in Victorian Studies, continues to our own day. This paper situates Arnold in a dialog on education that goes back to ancient times and examines his reforms at Rugby in light of the tradition he inherited as it had been transformed over more than a millennium, a tradition which itself was both complex and paradoxical. It argues that while Arnold's supporters attributed too much to him, his detractors credited him with too little. His reputation as a school reformer merits some rehabilitation, and he deserves serious attention as a pivotal figure in the transformation of Public School education in the nineteenth century. He was responsible for a number of innovations in Public School practices, notably modifications and restrictions of the fagging system, curricular changes, and increased emphasis on the ethic of service. Likewise, though Arnold favored closer ties between Britain and the colonies, he did not promote an ethic of imperial growth or a complex of ideas and social practices that, in themselves, led to the sorts of rampant expansion and racism that characterized the New Imperialism of the later nineteenth century. Strachey's portrait of Arnold in Eminent Victorians transformed him from a Victorian hero to a post-Victorian caricature, but that picture was itself the result of a unique mixture of distance from Arnold, a genuine and scarcely veiled distaste for him, and misperceptions of Rugby as a typical public school of the late nineteenth century. Arnold transformed the image of the public schools, and new public schools, those founded in the nineteenth century and based on the model and precedents of the ancient schools, in the hands of later administrators and in a new set of circumstances, could and did become something different than Rugby, Eton, Harrow. Interpretations that see Arnold as the lineal forbear of developments of the late nineteenth century render the true Arnold almost unrecognizable.


Session III

Shape Shifting: Science, Fantasy, and Myth

Chair: LeeAnne M. Richardson, Georgia State Univ.

"Dreamwork: Myth-Making, Anamorphosis, and Transformation in the Work of Aubrey Beardsley"--Leslie Atzmon, Eastern Michigan Univ.

Much of the work that discusses Victorian fantasy illustrator Aubrey Beardsley's fetus, dwarf, mask, and monkey/ape imagery turns to Beardsley's personal experience-specifically, it examines his relationship with his parents, his sexuality, and the impact of his tuberculosis. This approach, which has merit, nevertheless neglects the impact of broader cultural influences on Beardsley's work. Beardsley's sister Mabel, with whom he had a close relationship, suggests a less self-centered motivation: "He hated people who denied the existence of evil, and so being young he filled his pictures with evil" (quoted by Miriam Berkovitz, 1981). Beardsley absorbed various perceptions and opinions and synthesized them in his unique imagery. Commonly held Victorian beliefs about Darwinian evolution, phrenology, and precepts of pre-Freudian psychology coalesce with myth and fairy legend in Beardsley's work. Victorian science had a significant impact on late nineteenth-century culture. Phrenology, which proposed that personality is determined by so-called organs in the brain, was widely popular in the Victorian era. The unconscious was already "fashionable talk" by the 1870s. Darwin scholar Gillian Beer asserts that Darwin's work was accessible to most people. This science called into question accepted beliefs, and replaced those beliefs with what seemed like fantasy. Beer suggests that new scientific theories seem to intertwine reality with the surreal, concocting an odd picture of the world.

Evolution and fairy tales have imaginative elements in common. They both stress "magical" transformation and growth, and both offer strange juxtapositions expressed in narrative. The aboriginal and the advanced coalesced into fantastic fiction in the Victorian mind. Beardsley intuited these connections. His grotesque work is lush with in-betweens, strange admixtures of plants, animals, humans, mythological and fairytale creatures, and decorative elements. He is an alchemist of sorts, stirring into the cauldron part written text, part disgust and fascination squeezed from Victorian science, and part fairy tale. Darwin's work fore- grounded sexuality, growth, transformation, and mutation, which were also integral to fairy lore. Beardsley's illustrations pose these same themes in suggestive and provocative ways. Beardsley's dream-like work environment, dark and mysterious, stimulated his imaginative expression of these liminal cultural themes. At the same time, Beardsley's visual depictions of transformation and mutation, irrational dream-like narratives, and the emergence of the beast within the unconscious mind led themselves to anamorphic expression. They also lend themselves to anamorphic interpretation. The shifting perspectives and multiple narratives in Beardsley's imagery demand a mode of complex interpretation that goes beyond mere superficial analysis of the illustrator's psychology, narrowly construed. Examining cultural influences can offer novel interpretations of imagery and produce interesting insights into the creation process. The productive relationship between visual and cultural material is not so much a denial of personal psychology of the illustrator as it is a fulfillment of one of the central tenets of psychology-how does one make sense of a self in the world.


"Unspeakable Delight and Indescribable Fright: The Discursive Problematics of Narrating a Transformed Body and Transforming a Body of Narratives in Late-Victorian Sexology"--Sharon Kayfetz, Univ. of Notre Dame

. . . I could not force myself to speak. All at once I saw myself a woman from my toes to my breast; I felt . . . that the genitals had shrunken, the pelvis broadened, the breasts swollen out; a feeling of unspeakable delight came over me. I closed my eyes, so that at least I did not see the face changes. . . . And yet I was strong enough to briefly record my will in my note-book . . . But who could describe my fright when, on the next morning, I awoke and found myself feeling as if completely changed into a woman; and when, on standing and walking, I felt vulva and mammae! . . . I felt that a complete transformation had taken place in me. . . . [T]he imperative female feeling remained, and became so strong that I wear only the mask of a man, and in everything else feel like a woman . . . "Case 99," Psychopathia Sexualis (207-208)

Beginning the excerpted portion of (t)his description of his spectacular and cataclysmic transformation from man to woman with the failure of spoken language in the first sentence, Case 99 moves in almost dizzying succession within the length of just the second sentence to the visual, on to bodily sensation, and finally, to affective response. To prolong, or perhaps to limit (the meaning of "so that at least I did not see the face changes" is ambiguous) his extra-linguistic pleasure ("unspeakable delight"), Case 99 shuts off his access to the visual. But affect (changed from pleasure to fright) that eludes full articulation and bodily sensation remain, underscored by the almost onanistic repetition of "feeling," "felt," "felt," "feeling," and "feel," a use of the same root word in different gerund and nominative forms that blurs bodily sensation and a more general psychic or gendered affect. Confronted with such affective intensity in both body and psyche, the writer's "natural" biological sex and its socially prescribed contingent gender appear at one remove and are allocated to the (in this case) denigrated category of the visual, becoming a "mask" that fails to match up with or match in intensity the feelings Case 99 experiences at the time of the crisis and continues to experience to the writing present. Locating himself within the realm of both bodily and psychic feelings, the anonymous physician bridges the then and the now, the written about subject and the subject writing in the present. Side by side with the affective bridge his narrative builds, writing itself functions to align the different temporalities and subjectivities this passage depicts. For during his crisis, even though unable to speak and unwilling to look at himself, he oddly finds the "strength" to write his "will," a word that encompasses the legal document a man fearing death (another bodily transformation) might compose as well as the desire to act in a particular way, an aspect of the mind involved in choosing, and the power of controlling one's actions. He may have lost control of his biological sex and gender through a metamorphosis that he suggests sunders him in fundamental lifelong ways, but his body and the writing it can perform both at the time as well as in his retrospective rendering of that transformation allow him access to (at least discursive fictions of) cognitive control and continuity.

Performing a close reading of the representational strategies employed in the lengthy first-person case study that, penned around 1887, appeared in the first (1893) and subsequent widely read and wildly popular English editions of Krafft-Ebing's sexological treatise, then positioning that narrative within a brief genealogy of the sexological case history in its proto-modern form, my paper suggests that the difficulties one patient confronted when attempting to narrative his (extra-)corporeal transformation were representative of the problematics that besieged late Victorian sexologists themselves when they began to study sex and gender "pathologies" that failed to register their symptoms "legibly" on the bodies of patients. In other words, self-sundering (psychic) transformations like that of Case 99 that simultaneously resisted external scrutiny and description and yet thereby necessitated (subjective, autobiographical) representation paralleled and sparked the transformation of the body (of writings) the sexologists studied. Morphing from the physician-authored brief, third-person, and often tabular physiological symptomologies of bodies prevalent earlier in the century into lengthy, authobiographical, and quite literary narratives of patients' emotions and experiences in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the new form of first-person case history positioned the narrative itself rather than the body generating it as the object of study, and in so doing, predicted and led to what we recognize today as the Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic case narrative.


Session IV

Refashioning Victorian Life and Lives

Chair: Melissa Gregory, Univ. of Toledo


"Tea: The Transformation and Subversion of Domestic Space"--Judith L. Fisher, Trinity Univ.

The social tea-table is like the fireside of our country, a national delight; and, if it be the scene of domestic converse and agreeable relaxation, it should likewise bid us remember that every thing connected with the growth and preparation of this favorite herb should awaken a higher feeling-that of admiration, love, and gratitude to Him "who saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was very good. - George G. Sigmond, 1839

George Sigmond praised the "tea-table" as a site of domestic felicity four years after the East India Company lost its monopoly on the china tea trade. His specific occasion was the discovery of a native tea plant in Assam, India, which Sigmond took as a divine justification of the English habit; tea was now an even more British beverage because "the hand of Nature has planted the shrub within the wide dominion of Great Britain" (3). The true domestication of tea, however, was not its cultivation within the borders of the Empire, but its absorption into the essential feminine. "Nature meant very gently by women when she made that tea-plant," observed Thackeray in 1850. Not only was tea a female comfort, it was the "allay [sic] of woman in the work of refinement," claimed Leitch Ritchie in 1848. While the tea-table had always been a site of female power, in the 1840s and '50s it became identified with middle-class female "influence." Women serving tea displayed the beauty of their arms and hands as well as the elegance of their equipage while inviting sympathetic confidences from men to women. Lacking the animality of the dinner table, the tea-table encouraged a man to feel "a kindliness, amounting to warmth of regard, for all around him" (Ritchie 67). Tea as the emblem of female sympathy figured most prominently in Annie Swan's column "Over the Teacups," an advice column "where women could exchange confidences as equals and friends" in Women at Home in the 1890s (Margaret Beetham, 166). On the surface, tea and tea-drinking, a sign of safety in class and gender, fixed an essential feminine.

However, the very prominence of this sign as an emblem of an essentialist quality invited the subversion of the sign and thus the deconstruction of the essentialist reading. Four examples, from 1860 to 1895, use the domestic "tea ceremony" to reveal the custom as a performance not a reality, and thus undermine its civilizing function. Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1860) transformed the tea-table into a siren's fascination of her victim, emphasizing the commodification that underlay this domestic ceremony. Also in the 1860s, the short-lived satiric periodical the Anti-Teapot Review aimed itself at the moralism implicit in the praise of tea by social critics such as Ritchie and Sigmond. The tacit (and not-so tacit) cultural understanding that by drinking tea, men would avoid inebriation was ironized in 1886 by Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. In fact, in the 1880s, the Dean of Bangor argued that "tea-drinking" was "acting as a dangerous revolutionary force," disrupting domestic felicity (Arthur Reade 124). Ultimately, Algernon Moncrieff usurps the female tea-table in 1894 in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The space is now effeminate, not feminine and is controlled by a glutton (however refined may be the cucumber sandwiches, Algy's consumption is not). Because tea-drinking is so common in British literature, it is both a visible and invisible ideological sign: visible because authors often consciously call upon tea's extra-literary associations for metaphoric comment, invisible because the various significances of these comments are assumed. Thus, the subversion of the domestic tea-table suggests its function as a site of ideological tension.


"Men's Shops and Shopping Men: The Emergence of the Male Consumer and the Commodification of the Male Body, 1860-1910"-Brent Shannon, Univ. of Kentucky

While the important work of Frank Mort, Sean Nixon, and Tim Edwards has located an unprecedented commodification of male bodies and masculine desires in the 1980s and 90s, I argue that the foundations of this process actually began a full century earlier. My paper strives to bring the Victorian male consumer into clearer view by arguing that in fact men were pleasurably engaged in the world of goods to the same extent as female consumers and that middle-class men's interest in fashion and consumption increased substantially during the half-century between 1860 and 1910. I contend that men's fashionable consumption in the decades surrounding the turn of the century became more public and socially acceptable, heavily assisted by the new apparatuses of the emerging mass consumer culture-namely, the department store, advertising, and the popular press. Department stores and other merchants and advertisers actively sought to transform men into consumers by reappropriating and normalizing formerly "effeminate" or "deviant" male consumption and public display through clothing and accessories into permissible, even admirable masculine behavior. I examine how late-Victorian department stores wooed the middle-class male consumers through the creation of overtly male-coded "Men's Shops"-often with their own private entrances. I also analyze advertisements that masculinized seemingly gender-neutral products such as Cadbury's Cocoa, as well as those that cultivated the sex appeal of men's bodies to attract and emulative male audience. While Erika D. Rappaport and others have recently revealed how department stores transformed urban centers into feminized spheres and legitimized shopping as a pleasurable pursuit, I examine the previously overlooked increase in public acknowledgment of middle-class Englishmen's interest in fashion and self-display. The growing acceptance of male consumption and display created cracks in gender taboos and norms and changed definitions of late-Victorian normative manhood in fundamental ways. Not only were men allowed access into formally exclusively female spaces and activities, but they were also permitted to have a visual, physical, erotic self to be appraised by the public.


"The Provocations of a London Landlady"--Daniel Siegel, Univ. of Alabama

My paper examines Octavia Hill's efforts to transform the London slums, arguing that Hill's methods, unlike those of other philanthropists, explicitly aimed to make the interventions of the social worker both conspicuous and provoking. Hill believed that she could best address the material and moral conditions of slum life by establishing a system of competitive, and often contentious, exchanges between the working tenant and the middle-class landlady.

In the 1850s and 60s, public schemes to reform working-class housing typically involved the construction of sanitary "model dwellings" with affordable rents. These model homes (like the Council flats of later years) had long waiting lists, and for the poor families who were lucky enough to move in, there were strict rules and procedures to ensure that occupants wouldn't lapse into the bad habits of their prior days. Looking like well-ordered barracks, the model buildings bore little resemblance to the crowded courts and cottages from which they drew their tenants. Octavia Hill's first contributions to slum improvement came when her own attempts to build model dwellings failed; as the expenses accumulated, Hill realized that she couldn't afford to build new houses, and decided that she would take over the management of existing buildings instead. There would be no waiting lists and no sanitary barracks; the existing tenants would stay put, and, through the force of her various coercive schemes, Hill would improve the buildings gradually. In this way, Hill's work flew in the face of the standard reformist practices. Rather than demolish and rebuild, she would purchase and transform; rather than select tenants who would follow her rules, Hill would enter the slum communities as she found them, and try to enforce her will from the inside.

Hill's accounts of the landlady's vocation pay particular attention to the process of trans- formation itself, a process which is equally attuned to what has been and what ought to be. Her exchanges with tenants often involve the negotiation of past and present; in this way, Hill's management relies on the invocation of the transformational moment. She casts her tenants' complicity in the language of persuasion and even conversion, savoring their initial resistance and thrilling in her own ultimate triumph. Likewise, Hill makes her own interests visible; rather than a disembodied legislator, the landlady is a tangible force with whom tenants contend, bargain, and empathize. In all her writings Hill's imperiousness is evident: she attacks the problems of the poor with as much assurance-or, in the parlance of social historians, as much arrogance-as any of her contemporaries. And yet, by the way she foregrounds her own agency, her own interests, and the tenuousness of her interventions, Hill emphasizes the transformative effects of social work on tenant and reformer alike. Few programs drew so complete an identification between the volunteer worker and the working poor.

Session V

Metamorphoses in England and the English

Chair: Patrick Leary, VICTORIA discussion list

"'Rational, national show!': The Theatrical Career of the Great Exhibition"--Marty Gould, Univ. of Iowa

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was, scholars tell us, all about transformation: Hyde Park was transformed from a socially restricted area to a place where rich and poor, aristocrat and laborer, foreigner and native could mingle freely; the exhibition was designed to help transform British industry through education and competition; and according to Tony Bennett, the exhibition helped transform undisciplined individuals into a self-regulating national collectivity while also reminding Britons of their place in the larger world.

The exhibition's transformative power was of central concern in the numerous plays that took up the subject of the Crystal Palace before and after the exhibition opened in the summer of 1850. These plays demonstrate quite clearly the Victorians' struggle to understand the social effects of the exhibition. Together, these plays reveal a picture of the exhibition's evolving thematic associations, as initial enthusiasm for Prince Albert's project gradually gave way to anxiety about its more immediate implications for British society. The immediacy of its engagement with current events makes the Victorian theatre both a social barometer which registered changes in public reception of the exhibition as well as an institution of cultural production, producing public sentiment by com- menting on the exhibition.

Tom Taylor's Novelty Fair, produced one year before the opening of the Crystal Palace, locates the incredible transformative power of the Great Exhibition in its all-inclusive heterogeneity. The play emphasizes the way in which peace and prosperity are achieved through the bringing together of the widest possible variety of people and objects. Collection and display, of both people and objects, breaks down existing obstacles to progress by creating a spectacle in which the solutions to all social problems are made manifest.

This enthusiasm for the exhibition's transformative promises continued, as the pantomimes of the 1850 Christmas season appropriated the Crystal Palace, with its gravity-defying iron columns and glimmering glass walls, as a backdrop for their fantastic plots of triumph and transformation. The pantomime's generic conventions created associations between the coming exhibition and themes of domestic harmony and miraculous transformation. In these plays, the Crystal Palace is more mystical than material; it is the abode of fairies and benevolent spirits, a place where fantastic possibilities are realized and human misery is transformed into human industry and happiness.

However, as time passed and a pile of iron girders was literally transformed into a palace of glass, bringing to fruition the illuminated image so often invoked by the pantomimes, fantasies of radical metamorphosis gave way to dramas of social anxiety. Plays such as William Brough's Apartments focused not on the exhibition itself but on the domestic disruptions that occurred when London invites the world into its domestic spaces. The result, according to these plays, is anarchy and domestic discord, as foreigners appropriate the English home. The social chaos occasioned by the intrusion of so many different kinds of people reveals a growing anxiety about the domestic displacements caused by the exhibition's promises of radical social transformation.


"Cultural Conversion in George Du Maurier's Trilby"--Sarah Felicia Gracombe, Columbia Univ.

My paper examines the two conversion attempts in Trilby, George Du Maurier's fin-de-siècle bestseller. The novel's previous critics have generally focused upon the way Svengali, the Jewish musician and mesmerist, attempts to convert Trilby into his lover, his slave, his surrogate voice. But there is also a second and opposing conversion effort at work in the novel: Little Billee's attempt to renovate Trilby into a model of Englishness. I argue that the tension between these two conversion efforts reveals constituent elements of Englishness and refashions a central Victorian question: can one become "English" through a sort of conversion-not a literal, religious conversion but rather a transformation of one's habits, one's patterns of consumption, one's appreciation for art: in short, a change in one's culture?

Throughout Trilby, Du Maurier implicitly proposes a definition of Englishness as primarily a cultural rather than a juridical, political, or geographic identity. Signified instead by books, food, aesthetic and moral sensibility, this is what I call cultural Englishness. In emphasizing it, I take my cue from Trilby itself, which depicts dual meanings of that slippery term, "culture." Throughout the novel, we get an analysis of both everyday culture (characters' daily activities and habits of consumption) and artistic culture (French bohemian life, English middle-class entertainment, Jewish creative power). This paper explores how these two types of culture function within Trilby's ambivalent appraisal of Englishness, one that simultaneously condemns England's insular, anti-artistic mindset and expresses anxiety about what-or who-might be able to cure it.

Trilby's attitude toward Englishness can be seen in the battle waged between Little Billee and Svengali over Trilby herself. Little Billee, in love with Trilby but uneasy about her unconventionality, tries to "convert" her into a proper English girl. Like many conversionists, he begins with books, using the novels of Dickens and Thackeray the way novels about religious conversion use the New Testament. Trilby's "English training" also includes reforming her dress, her eating habits, her language, even her body. That reading English literature could inculcate Englishness was an idea explicitly discussed at the time, as well as one covered in recent post-colonial scholarship examining how the British often relied on literature to transmit a sense of national identity to colonial subjects.

Trilby draws a distinct link between English ideas and English food-we hear a lot about the patriotic value of "British beef and beer"-between what one consumes and what one is. That a novel should find elements of everyday culture more vital to national identity than legislative definitions or political affiliation is not surprising. Indeed, the Victorian novel is famously about the ordinary world, the realm of habit. Here, what one wears, eats, reads, listens to and looks like signifies. The detailed culinary descriptions go beyond Barthes' "reality effect." These things become not just markers of Englishness but its enacters: Little Billee's method of converting Trilby suggests that one can become English by consuming England's cultural products. Despite the fact that it occurs in Paris, Trilby nostalgically celebrates aspects of England's everyday culture.

However, Trilby doesn't endorse all of English culture. In fact, much of the novel focuses upon the failures of Englishness. Trilby reflects a sense of disappointment with England's artistic culture. For something of higher quality, Du Maurier implies, one must import foreign artists. And this is where Jewishness factors in Little Billee's efforts to convert Trilby into a paragon of Englishness gain in importance because they are opposed to Svengali's more memorable hypnotic "conversion" of Trilby. Svengali's methods differ markedly: instead of the domesticating power of books and food, he uses simply his own eyes. What makes Svengali's conversion efforts so threatening is their reliance not on tangible cultural habits but rather on the kind of intangible mental powers about which the late-nineteenth century was so ambivalent.


"From Ploughman to Englishman: Political Transformation in Late-Victorian England"-- Patricia O'Hara, Franklin and Marshall College

I'm a real Englishman to-day my boys, I was never anything before,
I could plough and sow, I could reap and mow,
I was good for nothing more.

CHORUS:

Then we'll lay down the shovel and the hoe, Well leave the old harrow and the plough
And we'll put in one for the "Grand Old Man,"
We've got to go and vote you know. "Labourers' Song-'Polling Day'" Eastern Weekly Press, 1885

On July 21 1884, the city of London was witness to a massive demonstration of supporters of the enfranchisement of male agricultural labourers, supporters who marched for three hours from Westminster Bridge to the Reformers' Tree in Hyde Park, where speakers including Jessie Collings, Joseph Arch, and Henry Broadhurst addressed the assembled masses of "men enfranchised and unenfranchised" (Pall Mall Gazette, 21 July 1884: 3). Never had the nation been presented with so grand a public display of popular support for the County Franchise, which was a portion of the Third Reform Bill. The passing of that Bill during the 1884/1885 session of Parliament added two million voters to the electorate and transformed ploughman, threshers, and all the English rural labourers into "real" Englishmen.

This paper addresses that social transformation by exploring the unprecedented amount of commentary published about farm labourers for Victorian readers anxious to know the political mind of the New Voters and part of "John Bull's family party." I examine specifically a series of pamphlets published just after the passing of the bill. These pamphlets are aimed at persuading the new voters of the benefits of either the Liberal or the Conservative Party, and frequently adopt the discursive strategy of "speaking" in the dialect voice of the rural natives themselves. These often unintentionally comic "self-representations" as well as the body of rural writings of which they are a part testify to political and discursive transformation wrought by the Third Reform Bill in late-Victorian England.


You can expect to receive your next MVSA MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY in the summer of 2004. If you have corrections to your current listing (new title, affiliation, addresses, contact info, research interests), please send them to our new MVSA Executive Secretary: Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Department of English, Indiana University East, Richmond IN 47374, phone 765-973-8531, e-mail: aclappit@indiana.edu

NOW'S THE TIME to renew your MVSA membership for the 2003-2004 academic year. Dues for regular members remain only $20.00. Graduate-student members are dues-free for the first three years, after which their annual dues become $10.00. Please fill in, cut out, and mail the membership form at right for renewal.


WEBSITE: Remember that you can keep up to date on the activities of MVSA and its members by checking our website: www2.ic.edu/MVSA. Many thanks to Bob Koepp for his excellent work as creator and webmaster for the past several years. Bob is, however, ready to pass this job on, so we are looking for a new webmaster!!! Anyone with internet savvy willing to take on the website and its maintenance can contact Bob at: rkoepp@hilltop.ic.edu

A FINAL NOTE: This will be my last official correspondence with you as Executive Secretary, and I want to thank all MVSA members, and especially out-going president Susan Thach Dean, in-coming president Micael Clarke, treasurer Julie Melnyk, and my predecessor Bob Koepp for making my years as secretary so gratifying. Best wishes to you all.

--Anne Windholz