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The Victorians’ View of France
Abstract
This article makes the case for a critical consideration of the Victorians’ attitude towards France which goes beyond studies of literary influence and focuses on their response to French culture in a broader sense. Using Dickens’s writings on France as an example, it suggests that recent developments in cultural studies and research into the cross-Channel exchange of ideas can enhance our understanding of the Victorians’ relationship with France and their concept of their own national culture.
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Book synopsis: This book re-examines cultural, social, geographical and philosophical representations of Victorian London by looking at the transformations in urban life produced by the rise and development of urban mass-transport. It also radically re-addresses the questions of epistemology and gender in the Victorian metropolis by mapping the epistemology of the passenger. Vadillo focuses on the lyric urban writings of Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) and 'Michael Field' (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Shortlisted for the ESSE Book Prize
Acknowledgements Introduction Copying and Reporting Life (1830-33) Chronicling and Sketching Life (1834-36) 'Boz' as 'Editor' (1837-41) Travelling, Skirmishing, and Sharp-shooting (1841-44) Launching The Daily News (1845-46) Reviewing The Examiner (1848-49) Editing Life: Household Words (1850-59) Publishing and Recalling Life: All the Year Round (1859-70) Dickens the Journalist: Models, Modes and Media Special Correspondence: Reading Dickens's Journalism Endnotes Bibliography and Abbreviations Index
This essay seeks to mediate between two apparently conflicting elements in Dickens’s writing: on the one hand, the more than physical sense of trauma and dislocation which Dickens associates with crossing the English Channel (as we British presumptuously call it), and, on the other, the feelings of comfort, normality and balance which tend to supervene as soon as he begins to write about actually being in France.
‘October 4, 185-. No. 9. A male child; newly born; weakly and very small; ticket round the neck with the name of Gustave; coarse linen; red stain on the left shoulder; no other mark.’ This is how Dudley Costello, at the end of his impressive Household Words article ‘Blank Babies in Paris’ (HW, VIII, 379–82; 17 December 1853), translates the registry entry for a new arrival at the Foundling Hospital in Paris in the Rue d’Enfer. Costello, responding to Dickens’s editorial policy of ‘dwelling on the romantic side of familiar things’, is able to wring metaphor and symbol from his subject. He starts by interrogating the etymology of that street name: it comes from Via Inferior, but ‘a poetical imagination soon made the corruption’ that ensures that infant orphans in Paris are brought up in the street of hell. The building on that street may be strikingly plain and anonymous (‘it lay before us, grey, blank, and dreary, with nothing to relieve the monotony of its general aspect…’), but the writer is able to imagine its very absence of significant features as pregnant with significance, for it is a place ‘where no witness might see the trembling mother deposit her new-born child.’
John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty (1859). In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. To understand how Mill came to this conclusion requires one to investigate his notion of the stages from barbarism to civilisation, and also his belief in imperialism as part of the civilising process. This study encompasses discourses on the blessings, curses and dangers of modernisation from approximately the time of the American and French revolutions to that of the so-called mid-Victorian calm in which On Liberty was written. Current political issues concerning the West and Islamic countries have heightened interest in just the kind of question that this book discusses: that of how the West relates to, and assesses, the rest of the world.
Ann Heilmann is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea, UK. The author of New Woman Fiction (Macmillan, 2000) and the editor of The Late-Victorian Marriage Question (Routledge Thoemmes, 1998) and (with Stephanie Forward) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, she has guest-edited a special New Woman issue for Nineteenth-Century Feminisms (2001). A collection on Feminist Forerunners (Rivers Oram/Pandora) and a special suffrage issue for Women's History Review are forthcoming, and she is now completing a study of Sarah Grand Olive Schreiner and Mona Caird (for Manchester University Press) and working on a collection on New Woman Hybridities (for Routledge). She is the general editor of Routledge's Major Works 'History of Feminism' series of anthology sets.
1. See Gaye Tuchman for the "troubled" responses by male Victorian writers, literary critics and publishers to the "prevalence of women novelists," and the processes which led to the gradual "edging out" of women from the literary marketplace (204).
2. For conservative concerns about the "modern" woman in her doubly threatening configuration as reader and writer see the Punch cartoon "Donna Quixote," 26 April 1894, as discussed in Heilmann 2-3. For the medical pathologization of the female reader see Plate 211 in Gilman, which reproduces a female patient from Bethlem Hospital (c. 1858) sitting in a chair and, with her loose hair falling over her shoulders, bending over an open book; though facing the presumably male observer (doctor/photographer), she does not look at him, her self-absorption an evident symptom of her "religious mania."
3. See Sparks for a discussion of the generic traditions with which Braddon engages in her novel.
4. In a letter to Bulwer Lytton from Summer 1864, Braddon dismissed Flaubert's "hideous immorality." (Qtd in Carnell 216, emphasis in original.)
5. The scene in Madame Bovary reads as follows: "The situation became crystal-clear to her. It was as though she were standing upon the brink of a deep gulf. Her panting breath tore at her lungs. In an ecstasy of heroism ... she ran down the hill, crossed the cattle-bridge, continued along the path and into the lane, until finally she reached me market-hall and came to a halt outside the chemist's shop. — It was empty ... The key turned in the lock, and she went straight to the third shelf, so truly did her memory serve her. She lifted down the blue jar, pulled out the stopper, rummaged inside with her hand, and withdrew it filled with a white powder. This she began to eat on the spot." (382-84)
6. See Frazier 16, 113-16 for the influence of Madame Bovary and The Doctor's Wife on Moore.
7. "Priscilla and Emily Lofft" has been cited as the foremost example of the "melodic line" that Moore promoted in his "Advertisement" to Celibate Lives (v-ix), the revised version of In Single Stictness (see Owens).
It is no secret that Coleridge developed a deep-seated aversion to France, though so far criticism has been either too embarrassed by the prejudice, or too sympathetic to it, to consider the problem and its implications properly. In the context of new research on xenophobia and propaganda during the period, this essay first traces the key moments in the development of Coleridge's francophobia (support for peace in 1798-1802, fear of Napoleon in 1803-04, and life in Malta and Italy in 1804-06) and then suggests how Coleridge uses the rhetoric of horror and ridicule to exaggerate the foreignness of the French. Finally, this essay contends that francophobia informs Coleridge's political theory, driving in particular his notion of organicism.
In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres. Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flaneur and the omniscient realist narrator--the portiere who supervised the apartment building.
This book is a major study of European tourism during the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. The author demonstrates the ways in which the distinction between tourist and traveller has developed and how the circulation of the two terms influenced how nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers on Europe viewed themselves and presented themselves in writing. Drawing upon a wide range of texts from literature, travel writing, guidebooks, periodicals, and business histories, the book shows how a democratizing and institutionalizing tourism gave rise to new formulations about what constitutes 'authentic' cultural experience. Authentic culture was represented as being in the secret precincts of the 'beaten track' where it could be discovered only by the sensitive true traveller and not the vulgar tourist. Major writers such as Byron, Wordsworth, Frances Trollope, Dickens, Henry James, and Forster are examined in the light of the influential Murray and Baedeker guide books. This elegantly written book draws links with debates in cultural studies concerning the ideology of leisure and concludes that in this period tourism became an exemplary cultural practice appearing to be both popularly accessible and exclusive.
Victorian Studies 47.4 (2005) 623-624
At a dicey moment just after the Boer War, Edward VII thawed a hostile Parisian crowd when he exclaimed to the actress Jeanne Granier: "Mademoiselle, I remember applauding you in London where you represented all the grace and spirit of France." John Stokes doesn't retell that anecdote. He doesn't even mention Jeanne Granier. But he does make dazzlingly clear what Good Old Teddy had in mind. Well, perhaps not exactly, or at least entirely, in mind. To English audiences, for almost all of the preceding century, the French actress had made available a repertoire otherwise unstageable in England, or in English: a repertoire centered on boldly exploring "the emotional and sexual needs of mature women" (178–79). No wonder Victoria's eldest was pleased.
Stokes is a leading member of that remarkable group of British theatre historians—others include Gail Marshall and Richard Schoch—that, on the foundations of Michael Booth's pioneering work, has made theatre and performance indispensable to all serious Victorian study. We can now see theatre-going as a far more widespread and shaping practice in the nineteenth century than, say, novel reading. (A claim that virtually all the Victorian novelists themselves endorse.) After all, you didn't have to be literate to go to the play. But you certainly had to be literate, in French no less, to attend the annual seasons of French theatre that Stokes's account chronicles. One could wish, then, for a more even scrutiny paid to the two sides of his title. What kind of numbers, what kinds of backgrounds, supplied those English audiences? One doesn't really learn that here. Nevertheless, this is a book that many different sorts of reader will be glad to have read: theatre historians and performance theorists, of course, and feminists of every focus, but also anyone concerned with accurately assessing the limits of what the Victorians thought they could legitimately see and respectably consume.
We encounter eight actresses, seven from the nineteenth century and one, Edwige Feuillére, their twentieth-century and final (Stokes insists) avatar. At least one of them, Sarah Bernhardt, remains close to a household name. Others, much less recognizable in themselves, may still ring a bell for readers of Stendhal: Mademoiselle Mars (1820s); George Eliot: Rachel Félix (1840s–50s); Henry James: Madame Arnould Plessy (1840s–70s), and Marcel Proust: Gabrielle Réjane (1890s). But at least two are unknown and astonishing discoveries for English readers, at any rate, even for English readers interested in theatre history: Virginie Déjazet (1840s–70) and Aimée Desclée (1850s–70s). Their chapter-by-chapter catalogue could easily have deflated into something like an MGM calendar number, where, one after another, frozen beauties revolve in perfect period quaintness. But Stokes is too expert and much too alive to the dynamic of performance, and its incessant reformation under the pressure of circumstance, to permit that. Through rich quotation of contemporary accounts he brings vividly alive each actress as a bold and distinctive stylist. I was particularly struck by two. Déjazet, the toast of the Second Empire, performed only in trousers roles, usually as a charming rake of the ancien régime. Every rule was defied. Tight-fitting breeches and waistcoats revealed her every contour, while she not only smoked pipes but, scandal of scandals, exhaled through her nose. For her successor we'd have to wait for I Am My Own Wife (2003). Réjane, by contrast, was Aubrey Beardsley's ideal, at once unabashed clown and haughty dominatrix, staring out through the performance at one or another friend in the audience, often stopping to underline a mot or a movement by glancing at a favorite. Verfremdungseffekt, we might say, avant la lettre.
At the start Stokes suggests his chapters will trace a progress from the grande coquette to the charming bourgeoise to the hysteric. Happily, his practice is nothing like so schematic. Instead, with considerable nuance he unpacks the varieties of experimental realism that ramified...
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