Index
PREFACE ... III
1. INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS NEO-VICTORIANISM? ... 1
1.1 The meanings of “Victorian” ... 3
1.2 Defining Neo-Victorian fiction ... 9
1.3 Neo-Victorian fiction as historical fiction ... 15
2. HISTORY AND FICTION: THE TRIAL OF SEPARATION AND REUNION .... 17
2.1 History and Fiction in the nineteenth century ... 17
2.1.1 The historical novel before Scott: origins and early manifestations ... 17
2.1.2 Sir Walter Scott and the classical model of historical fiction ... 21
2.1.3 Scott: imitation and decline ... 25
2.1.4 The historians’ response to the historical novel ... 28
2.2 History and Fiction in the early twentieth century ... 33
2.2.1 Historians’ doubts about the intelligibility of history ... 33
2.2.2 Modernism and the historical novel ... 35
2.3 Postmodernism and History ... 38
2.3.1 The postmodern challenge to History ... 38
2.3.2 Postmodernism and the historical novel ... 42
2.4 Conclusion: the historical novel beyond the centuries ... 46
3. THE RISE OF NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION:J. FOWLES AND A. S. BYATT AS FORERUNNERS OF THE GENRE... 48
3.1 The French Lieutenant’s Woman ... 53
3.2 Possession: A Romance ... 70
3.3 Conclusion ... 84
4. SPIRITUALISM AND LESBIAN DESIRE INSARAH WATERS’S AFFINITY .... 86
4.2 Nineteenth-century spiritualism and neo-Victorian ghost stories ... 93
4.3 Affinity ... 97
4.3.1 The diary form ... 97
4.3.2 Spiritualism, lesbianism and sexual identity ... 106
4.3.3 Indoor and outdoor spaces ... 114
4.3.4 The novel’s ending ... 118
4.4 Conclusion ... 121
5. JULIAN BARNES AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN DETECTIVE NOVEL ... 124
5.1 Nineteenth-century detection ... 128
5.2 Julian Barnes: an introduction ... 137
5.3 Arthur & George ... 138
5.3.1 Narrative structure ... 138
5.3.2 The detective figure and the process of investigation ... 146
5.3.3 Spiritualist traces ... 152
5.3.4 Arthur and George as opposite characters ... 156
5.3.5 Arthur and George as “unofficial Englishmen” ... 161
5.4 Conclusion ... 164
CONCLUSION ... 167
Preface
The last years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first witnessed a remarkable increase of novels with a direct or indirect connection to the Victorian era. The proliferation of what has come to be known as ‘neo-Victorian fiction’ shows no sign of decline, as the consequent rise of scholarly research demonstrates.
The aim of this thesis is to offer an overview of neo-Victorianism and to analyze some of the novels that might be ascribed to this literary trend.
The first chapter provides a theoretical background for the neo-Victorian novel. Particular attention is paid to the connotative and denotative meanings attached to the term ‘Victorian’, as well as to the two different approaches towards the Victorian era which developed during the second half of the twentieth century. Given the plurality of interpretations and the abundance of terms coined, an attempt at definition of these contemporary rewritings is therefore offered.
Neo-Victorian novels reveal a profound engagement with history and the historical specificity of the Victorian era and, for this reason, may be considered historical novels in all respects. The second chapter therefore traces the evolution of the historical novel, from the late eighteenth century to the present, exploring how the relationship between history and fiction has been constructed, and how this has influenced the development of both the discipline of historiography and of the historical novel, and, consequently, the neo-Victorian novel.
The third chapter provides a brief excursus into the main features of neo-Victorian novels in order to show how these texts engage with Victorian canonical literary conventions. The chapter also acknowledges and examines the importance of two key twentieth-century novels – John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) – which suggest thematic areas of interest and
anticipate many of the literary devices that later neo-Victorian novels will adopt and adapt to their aims.
The fourth chapter discusses Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) and analyses how the author exploits the conventions of Gothic and sensation fiction to address contemporary issues that she personally feels strongly about, like the creation of a history of nineteenth-century female homosexuality. In particular, Waters uses the theme of spiritualism as a metaphor for lesbian sexuality and as a space to explore the relationship between the present and the past and between fact and fiction.
Finally, the fifth chapter turns to Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) which adopts the conventions of the nineteenth-century detective novel and evokes the figure of the most famous of all literary detectives, Sherlock Holmes. In examining the idea of ‘evidence’, crucial to both criminal detection and spiritualist investigation, the chapter analyses how Barnes’s novel explores issues surrounding historical narratives, issues to do with the possibility of accessing and knowing the past.
As the neo-Victorian domain is still so distinctly new, research and insights are regularly added to it. Theories about neo-Victorianism change rapidly and this sometimes complicates any attempt at analysis by the researchers. Given the breadth and complexity of the neo-Victorian phenomenon, this analysis does not have, nor can have, any claim of exhaustiveness. Aware of its inevitable partiality, the work aims nevertheless to provide a theoretical framework for reading a genre whose influence is likely to continue its growth over the following years.
1
Introduction
What is neo-Victorianism?
“The history of the Victorian age will never be written. We know too much about it”,1 these are the opening lines of Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians published
in 1918. Yet, since the death of Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago, the history of the Victorian era has been continuously rewritten. Indeed, Strachey’s book was itself part of a Modernist project of rewriting that reflected the desire to emphasize the distance between the Victorians and the Modernists. As J.B. Bullen affirms, in the early years of the twentieth century “no self-respecting literary or artistic modernist or political liberal would wish to think of himself or herself as the child of repression, realism, materialism and laissez-faire capitalism”.2 But, despite Strachey’s
marginalization of the Victorian past at the beginning of the twentieth century, both the frequency and the popularity of rewritings and re-imaginings of the Victorians have increased in the second half of the twentieth, and on into the twenty-first century. In a number of fields, ranging from film and television to fashion and trends in interior decoration, the Victorian era has been reinvented and reinterpreted – a practice indirectly inherited from the Victorians themselves:
The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything – and in just about every possible direction: the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux
vivants were consistently being adapted from one medium to another and then back again. We
postmoderns have clearly inherited this same habit, but we have even more new critical materials at our disposal – not only film, television, radio, and the various electronic media, but also theme parks, historical enactments, and virtual reality experiences.3
1 Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, Garden City Publishing Co. Inc., New York 1928, p. v. 2 Bullen, J. B., Writing and Victorianism, Routledge, London and New York 1997, pp. 1-2. 3 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, Routledge, London 2006, p. xi.
The contemporary fascination with the Victorians seems to be particularly marked within the realm of narrative, where it has given rise to the genre of Neo-Victorian fiction. The relative newness of this literary domain has caused some disagreement among scholars about the beginning of the Neo-Victorian phenomenon in contemporary fiction. Some, like Robin Gilmour, argue that the trend emerged in the 1940s, with Michael Sadler’s Fanny by Gaslight (1940) and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953) as precursors of the genre.4 Mark Llewellyn and Ann
Heilmann suggest that although the birth of the genre in its broadest definition “was itself almost simultaneous with the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1901” and that “chronologically speaking everything after that key date is in an essential manner post-Victorian”,5 not all narratives published after 1901 can be considered
‘Neo-Victorian’; indeed, many of them are conservative because they lack imaginative re-engagement with the period and instead deliver stereotypes about the Victorians and their culture. According to these critics, “it was only with the work of authors like Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) that a conscious articulation of the desire to re-write, re-vision and challenge the nineteenth-century’s assumptions and dominance came about”.6 The
importance of the late 1960s as a nodal point in the history of Victorian re-writings has been acknowledged by many scholars, yet it is still not generally accepted: Lin Petterson, for example, argues that only the publication of A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), and the subsequent surge in neo-Victorian narratives, definitively catapulted Neo-Victorian fiction into the mainstream.7
All these attempts to establish firm chronological boundaries have shown the difficulties linked to the necessity of defining this literary phenomenon. The variety of
4 Gilmour, Robin, “Using the Victorians: The Victorian age in Contemporary Fiction”, in Jenkins,
Alice and John, Juliet (eds), Rereading Victorian Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills-Basingstoke and New York 2000, p. 189.
5 Heilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century,
1999-2009, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills-Basingstoke and New York 2010, p. 8.
6 Idem.
7 Petterson, Lin, “’The Private Rooms and Public Haunts’: Theatricality and the City of London in
Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White”, in Adiseshiah, Sian and Hildyard, Rupert (eds),
Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills-Basingstoke and
terms used to describe fictional rewritings of the Victorian era also reflects the variation within neo-Victorianism itself, both as a critical approach and as a creative practice. As Marie-Louise Kohlke explains:
Neo-Victorian Studies is still in the process of crystallisation, or full materialisation so to speak; as yet its temporal and generic boundaries remain fluid and relatively open to experimentation by artists, writers, and theorists alike, a state of affairs that forms part of its strong attraction. What properly belongs in and to this emergent, popular, interdisciplinary field of study remains to be seen.8
But, before trying to provide a suitable definition for this group of texts and a possible explanation for the proliferation of so many terms, it is necessary to focus on the meanings attached to the term ‘Victorian’.
1.1 The meanings of “Victorian”
Referring to Queen Victoria as head of state, ‘Victorian’ holds a denotative meaning that marks the life span of that historical person; however, since it also specifies characteristics of an era, its chronological boundaries often get extended. Simon Joyce argues that the term ‘Victorian’ came into use almost immediately upon the Queen’s death in 1901, coined by journalists who desired to “summarize her reign, the century with which she seemed synonymous, or both”.9 Miles Taylor instead notes that the
term dates back to 1851 and suggests that “certainly by the Jubilee years of 1887 and 1897 it was being used to describe a distinct historical era, with its own poetry, literature and song, military heroes, drama, graphic art, dress and fashion”.10 This
suggests something of the elusiveness of the term, the difficulty of defining what is ‘Victorian’. Moreover, it is a term that has acquired numerous connotative meanings as well, which have undergone changes through the years. Immediately after the Queen’s death, it was first used to separate Edwardian attitudes from Victorian ones.
8 Kohlke, Maria-Louise, “Introduction: Speculations in and on the Victorian Encounter”,
Neo-Victorian Studies, 1, 1, 2008, p. 1.
9 Joyce, Simon, “The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror”, in Krueger, C.L. (ed.), Functions of
Victorian Culture at the Present Time, Athens University Press, Athens, Ohio 2002, p. 7.
10 Taylor, Miles and Wolff, Michael, The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions,
As J.B. Bullen explains: “for them [the Modernists], and for many of their contemporaries, ‘Victorian’ was a way of distinguishing their own attitudes from those of their parents, and within this generation the term ‘Victorian values’ took on an almost oedipal quality”.11 Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound all rejected the
influence of the Victorians in order to emphasize the distinctiveness of their own ‘modernist’ writing.12 In the same period, however, there were critics like G. M.
Young, who made some effort to reassess the Victorian period and to remove some of the negativity associated with it; this was in part due to the growing uneasiness about modernity and its achievements in the wake of war and economic depression. Yet, it was not until after the Second World War that a new fascination with the period achieved prevalence.
By the 1950s and 1960s critics noted a marked increase of interest in the period, with a return to the Victorians in publishing and book purchasing trends, and a renewed concern in Victorian decorative arts. During this period two different approaches towards the Victorian era and culture develop: the first approach preserves, in some way, the sense of ‘otherness’ which characterised the Modernists’ attitude toward their predecessors, and highlights “the distance between the Victorians and us – their strangeness and the discontinuities between the present and the past”, while the second underlines “their proximity to us – their familiarity and the continuities between the present and the past”.13
Accounts which refer to the strangeness of the Victorians as the source of contemporary interest suggest that the return to the Victorian era is prompted by an awareness of its difference from our period. These accounts are often motivated by a nostalgic impulse which positions the Victorian era as a ‘golden age’, contrasted to an inadequate present. This appeal to a past era of ‘greatness’ is particularly prone to political appropriation and, indeed, the Victorian era was used for such a purpose by
11 Bullen, J. B., op. cit., p. 2.
12 Mitchell, Kate, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages, Palgrave
Macmillan, Houndmills-Basingstoke and New York 2010, p. 42.
13 Hadley, Louisa, Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: the Victorians and Us, Palgrave
the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In the run up to the 1983 General Election, Thatcher invoked ‘Victorian values’ in order to support her campaign of family values which was intended to contrast what she saw as the permissiveness that had grown during and since the 1960s.14 Thatcher used the term ‘Victorian values’ as a
measure against which to identify the social ills of her milieu – a regulated economy, welfare dependency and the decline of the family – and to advocate a return to laissez faire economics, to a reliance upon individual charity and strong family discipline.15
She contrasted a corrupt present with a romanticised past, characterised by stability and strength. This positive view of the past is clearly overlaid with nostalgia, a Victorian idyll peopled with industrious, honest and morally virtuous citizens. The Victorian values she praised were those of thrift, charity, independence and hard work. In an interview with Peter Allen she praised the upbringing she was given by her Victorian grandmother as a moral standard against which all people should be measured:
14 Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 coincided with the publication in England of the first volume
of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Here Foucault attacks traditional narratives of Victorian sexual repression because they promulgate and perpetuate what he calls ‘the repressive hypothesis’, which holds that the Victorians’ attitude toward sex and sexuality had been primarily characterized by repression. According to Foucault’s account, instead, discourses about sex proliferated in the nineteenth century. Whereas talk about sex may have been erased from ‘the authorized vocabulary’ and a “whole rhetoric of allusion and metaphor was codified”, at another level, there was “a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward” (Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Random House, New York and Toronto 1990, p. 18). Not only did the restrictions mean that talk of sex was newly valorised because it was indecent, but new techniques for speaking about sex were produced within and by political, economic and religious institutions. In each instance, sex became a public issue between the individual and the state and “a whole set of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it” (ibidem, p. 26). According to Foucault, sex and sexual desires, far from being mute, “were transformed by Victorians into a different, indeed copious, discourse” (Mitchell, Kate, op. cit., p. 46). What Foucault wants to stress is that Victorian culture was less homogeneous and more diverse than it had previously seemed. His work helped to transform the popular images of Victorian culture and provide a fuller picture of it. Nevertheless, despite Foucault’s revision of the Victorian era, traditional images of nineteenth-century culture survived, and the idea of a hidden and repressed sexuality, made mute and invisible to history by social inhibitions and prohibitions, retained (and still retain) their force. As already said, this conventional image of Victorian culture and values was used by Thatcher to promote her politics of conservatism.
I was brought up by a Victorian grandmother. You were taught to work jolly hard, you were taught to improve yourself, you were taught self-reliance, you were taught to live within your income, you were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness, you were taught self-respect, you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour, you were taught tremendous pride in your country, you were taught to be a good member of your community. All of these things are Victorian values.16
However, the discrepancy between Thatcher’s ideal of ‘Victorian values’ and the reality of her politics has been highlighted by many scholars. Raphael Samuel states that, while urging a return to Victorian values, Thatcher proceeded to wage war against Britain’s traditional industries. Her rhetoric praised and upheld the traditional, but in practice she undertook a far-reaching program of modernisation.17
Although she promoted frugality and thrift under the rubric of Victorian values, she did not try to reduce consumer credit and household debt actually grew throughout the 1980s. Moreover, while praising the Victorians and advocating a return to ‘their’ values, she attacked such Victorian establishments as the public service ethic, the Universities, the Bar, the House of Lords and the Church of England, and she deregulated the City of London.18 In other words, she appeared to be protecting
stability and tradition when actually she sought change and transformation.
A further contradiction lies in her claim that the Victorian values are also perennial values. In a speech delivered to the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce in 1983, Thatcher claimed that the values she promotes “are not simply Victorian values. They do not go out of date. They are not tied to any particular place or century. […] they are part of the enduring principles of the Western world. And if we just write them off and wave them goodbye, we are destroying the best of our heritage”.19 Thus, while Thatcher
seems desiderous to identify with and revive the Victorian era, she simultaneously
16 Thatcher, Margaret, “Radio Interview for IRN programme The Decision Makers” (15 April 1983),
Margaret Thatcher Foundation, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105291 (last accessed: 09/10/14).
17 Samuel, Raphael, “Mrs Thatcher’s Return to Victorian Values”, in Smout, T.C. (ed.), Victorian
Values: A Joint Symposium of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy: December 1990,
Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992, quoted in Mitchell, Kate, op. cit., p. 49.
18 Mitchell, Kate, op. cit., p. 51.
19 Thatcher, Margaret, “Speech to the Chamber of Commerce (bicentenary)” (28 January 1983),
Margaret Thatcher Foundation,
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=105244 (last accessed: 10/10/14).
erases historical distinctions by declaring Victorian values timeless values. If, at the beginning, her relationship with the Victorian past is marked in terms of difference and alterity, a nostalgic lament for the golden age, her final statements become a contradictory assertion of continuity between the present and the past; she removes the Victorians from their historical context and eliminates the historical specificity she claims for ‘Victorian values’.
Culturally, Thatcher’s appeal to Victorian values coincided with the boom of the “heritage industry”, a term used to describe the expansion and convergence of a number of cultural institutions to remake the past as entertainment (the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a mania for collecting Victorian artefacts, like jewellery, clothing and furniture, and by the restoration of many Victorian mansions). It also coincided with debates about the historical value of this industry. It may be argued that heritage industry was in part influenced by Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values, by her particular use of history, and, indeed, many critics accused the heritage industry of being ahistorical, of cultivating an uncritical nostalgia for the past with little interest in historical understanding.
All the political and cultural uses of the Victorians outlined thus far derive from a perception of the Victorian era as different from the contemporary. There is another set of narratives, however, that focus on the connections between the Victorians and us. Such accounts interpret the nineteenth century as a moment of transition, marking the advent of modern society. Historians like Gary Day, Richard Gilmour and Matthew Sweet highlight similarity and continuity, rather than difference and rupture. Sweet and Day, in particular, challenge the version of Victorian values promulgated by Thatcher, arguing not only that the Prime Minister was necessarily selective in what she chose to represent as Victorian values, but also that to speak of a return to these values is erroneous; this idea, in fact, assumes that Victorian values have faded away into history. For Day, instead, they have never ceased to be a shaping force throughout the twentieth century.20
20 Day, Gary, Varieties of Victorianism: the Uses of a Past, Macmillan, London and New York 1998,
This approach is perhaps best epitomised by the work of Matthew Sweet, who, in Inventing the Victorians (2001), suggests that contemporary culture propagates a misperception of the Victorians, one that is designed to make us appear superior. He questions the traditional narrative of disjunction between the Victorian past and the present, and in so doing he tries to establish another narrative which positions the Victorian era as the beginning of the modern world.21 Trying to debunk various
stereotypes about the period, Sweet suggests:
that Victorian Culture was as rich and difficult and complex and pleasurable as our own; that the Victorian shaped our lives and sensibilities in countless unacknowledged ways; that they are still with us, walking our pavements, drinking in our bars, living in our houses, reading our newspapers, inhabiting our bodies.22
He argues that the Victorians moulded contemporary culture and bequeathed to the modern society many cultural features that are usually seen as products of our century, such as the theme park and shopping mail, free education and pornography. However, once he has established the similarities between Victorian culture and the contemporary one, he goes further to erase any difference altogether. In fact, he finally declares that “we are the Victorians. We should love them. We should thank them. We should love them”.23 Here Sweet is essentially saying that our attitude toward the
Victorian era should be surprisingly homogeneous, because the Victorians still inhabit our own world. The diverse and multi-layered identity ascribed to the Victorian era in the preceding pages of his work dissolves into a fusion of the period with the present. As a consequence, contemporary culture is also flattened and rendered stable, if not static: we are the Victorians and we should love and be grateful to them.
21 In his article “What is Neo-Victorian Studies?” Mark Llewellyn casts out our relationship with
the Victorians in a similar light to Sweet when he cites “our continued indebtedness” to the nineteenth century (Llewellyn, Mark, “What is Neo-Victorian Studies”, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1, 1, 2008, p. 165). Even after a gap of a century or more, he suggests, we remain attached to our nineteenth-century forebears as their successors – whether as critics or as writers of fiction.
22 Sweet, Matthew, Inventing the Victorians, Faber and Faber, London 2001, quoted in Matthews,
Samantha, “Remembering the Victorians”, in O’Gorman, Francis (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, p. 273.
23 Joys, David, “Prude Awakenings”, Review of Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, The
Observer, 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/dec/02/historybooks.features, (last accessed: 15/10/2014).
In the light of these reflections, it may be argued that the best approach toward the Victorians lies somewhere in between the assertion of absolute continuity and the position of total rupture. According to Louisa Hadley, this is exactly what contemporary rewritings try to do: in fact, they reinsert the Victorians into their historical context and thus avoid a purely nostalgic approach to the Victorian past. Yet they remain aware that the present has emerged out of the Victorian context.24
Consequently, these novels reveal both the continuities and the discontinuities between the Victorian past and the present.
All these attempts to differentiate the “Victorian”, however, have shown the plurality of possible relationships with the Victorian era. The term, acquiring different possible meanings in the sixties, in the eighties/nineties and at present, “summons a diachronic understanding, simultaneously inviting a synchronic one of multiple interpretations”.25 Therefore, these different approaches can be read together, rather
than against one another. Consequently, attitudes to current re-workings seem to be determined by a synthesis of the denotative and connotative meanings of the term Victorian.26 This plurality of interpretations reflects on the abundance of terms used
for contemporary rewritings, discussed further below.
1.2 Defining Neo-Victorian fiction
In her essay “(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology, Contexts”, Andrea Kirchknopf notes the proliferation of terms for fictional rewrites of the Victorians, asking “is it Victoriana, Victoriography, retro-, neo- or post-Victorian novels we encounter when we read rewritings of the Victorian era? […] why so many terms? Why so many different perspectives?”.27 Trying to provide an
answer to these questions is not a simple task. However, two broad approaches to defining contemporary fictional reworkings of the Victorian era can be distinguished:
24 Hadley, Louisa, op. cit., p. 14.
25 Kirchknopf, Andrea, “(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Definitions, Terminology,
Contexts”, Neo-Victorian Studies, 1, 1, 2008, p. 59.
26 Idem. 27 Idem.
one makes the literary critical terminology of the novel, such as ‘historical novel’ or ‘historiographic metafiction’ its foundation, while the other takes the term ‘Victorian’ as a basis and attaches prefixes or suffixes to it. Some attempts also to merge the two approaches and create hybridised terms like “Victoriography”.
“Historical fiction”, itself a term constantly redefined, is the broadest possible category that can be applied to current rewritings. It generally refers to a particular type of fiction that uses characters, events, social conditions and the likes from a historical period and fictionalises them. Linda Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction”, defining it as “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages”.28 Written in one period, but evoking another, these
novels interact with history and, at the same time, question the possibility of such a venture. Sally Shuttleworth similarly states that “the historical novel carries with it a self-reflexive consciousness about the problems of writing history in our postmodern age. But it also usually displays a deep commitment to recreating the detailed texture of an age, to tracing the economic and social determinants which might structure these imagery lives”.29 Contemporary rewritings of the Victorian era perfectly fit in
these categorizations because, as Dana Shiller specifies, they “adopt a postmodern approach to history”,30 which involves fiction reconstructing the past by questioning
what we think to know about history and exploring how the present shapes historical narratives. However, from the point of view of terminology, both “historical novel” and “historiographic metafiction” refer to a much broader category than just rewritings of the Victorian past: as Kirchknopf explains, they “prove necessary in a generic sense, since they account for the heterogeneity of texts adapting previous historical eras and the ways these eras are addressed, but they do not specify the age
28 Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York 1988,
p. 5.
29 Shuttleworth, Sally, “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel”, in Shaffer, Elinor (ed.), The
Third Culture: Literature and Science, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1998, p. 255.
30 Shiller, Dana, “The redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian novel”, Studies in the Novel, 29, 4, 1997,
that is being refashioned”.31 A more specific term should therefore include some
reference to the Victorian era.
In her article “Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel” (1998), Sally Shuttleworth coins the term “retro-Victorian novel”, which she uses interchangeably with the expression “Victorian-centred novel”. As said before, Shuttleworth identifies retro-Victorian fiction as a type of historical novel, and explains that the category of historical novel is broadly understood and thus inclusive of historiographic metafiction.32 The term, however, has been discarded by many critics as overtly
nostalgic, and thus incapable of serving a critical purpose.33
Pseudo-Victorian fiction, an expression used by Gutleben and Letissier, refers to those novels which show “convergence with, and divergence from their source”.34
Kirchknopf predicts that the term will only be granted a short life, because of a supposed parallel development with the deconstruction of history as essentially narrative that deprived the term “pseudo-Victorian” of its heuristic power.
“Victoriography” is the title of a book by Julian Wolfrey, in which he defines reworkings of the Victorian past as “cultural writing formed out of interpretations and translations of the high ground of nineteenth-century culture”.35 This term is
however too generic in its meaning because it includes all kinds of rewritings of the Victorian era, literary and otherwise.
The term “Victoriana” was originally restricted to an exclusively material definition, denoting objects from the Victorian era. Cora Kaplan, whose 2007 book bears Victoriana as its title, applies the word differently. In her introduction she reveals a gradual expansion of the semantic field of the word. As she explains, “at the beginning of the fad in the 1960s, ‘Victoriana’ might have narrowly meant the collectible remnants of material culture in the corner antique shop”, but by the end of
31 Kirchknopf, Andrea, Rewriting the Victorians: Modes of Literary Engagement with the 19th Century,
McFarland, Jefferson 2013, p. 34 .
32 Shuttlerworth, Sally, op. cit., p. 254.
33 Heilmann, Ann and Llewellyn, Mark, op. cit., p. 5.
34 Kirchknopf, Andrea, “(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction”, cit., p. 60.
35 Wolfrey, Julian, Victoriographies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1999, quoted in Kirchknopf,
the 1970s it was extended to “a complementary miscellany of evocations and recyclings of the nineteenth century”, to finally broaden its meaning to “the astonishing range of representations and reproductions for which the Victorian […] is the common referent”.36 Even this term, like “Victoriography”, is too general since it
relates to different representations of the Victorian, not just novels.
The term “post-Victorian” is considered by many critics as the most appropriate to denote contemporary reworkings of the Victorian era. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff stress the existing debate between the nostalgic and innovative aspects of “Victorian”, defining “post-Victorian” as “a term that conveys the paradoxes of historical continuity and disruption”.37 Georges Letissier also adopts the term
“post-Victorian”, explaining his choice by suggesting that, “contrary to ‘retro-‘, ‘neo-‘ or ‘pseudo-Victorian’, ‘post-Victorian’ conflates post-modernism and Victorianism, highlighting the paradoxes of historical continuity and disruption that underpin the post-Victorian cultural movements”.38 Andrea Kirchknopf argues that the prefix ‘post‘
in “post-Victorianism” may be read “as a modifier of Victorian, underlining the presence of the Victorian tradition in everything that comes after”, and as a signaller “that contemporary practices are perceived to stem more from the Victorian than the modernist era”.39 Kirchknopf continuously underlines the postmodernist influence in
these texts, and finally states that she has come down in favour of “post-Victorian” because “it connotatively blends the Victorian, the modernist and the postmodernist eras”.40
As correct as this definition may be, and despite Kirchknopf’s attempt to stress the importance of both the Victorian and the postmodern contexts, the term “post-Victorian” inevitably focuses the attention on the influence of Postmodernism.
36 Kaplan, Cora, Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, Columbia University Press, New York 2007,
pp. 2-3.
37 Sadoff, Dianne F., and Kucich, John, Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture rewrites the Nineteenth
Century, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2000, p. xiii.
38 Letissier, Georges, “Dickens and Post-Victorian Fiction”, in Onega, Susana and Gutleben,
Christian (eds), Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York 2004, p. 111 note 1.
39 Kirchknopf, Andrea, “(Re)workings of Nineteenth-Century Fiction”, cit., p. 64. 40 Idem.
Furthermore, it may be argued that critical accounts need to understand the historical specificity of both the Victorian and the contemporary/postmodern contexts of neo-Victorian fiction rather than blending them. For this reason, the term “Neo-Victorianism” appears as the most suitable choice, because it suggests that “while the Victorian era is brought into contact with a new context, it is not subsumed within that new context”.41 The term does not deny in any way the connections with
postmodernism: as we will soon see, all the critics who have adopted this terminology have indeed underlined the relationship with it, stressing how these contemporary rewrites utilize postmodern literary practices. What the term “neo-Victorianism” wants to do is rather to emphasise the relative newness of the phenomenon,42
acknowledging its indebtedness to postmodernism but, at the same time, presenting it as a distinct creative practice, as a genre in its own right.
Dana Shiller, one of the first critics to define the genre, describes the neo-Victorian novel “as at once characteristic of postmodernism and imbued with a historicity reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novel”,43 thus highlighting its relation to both
its contemporary and its Victorian context. Louisa Hadley defines it “as contemporary fiction that engages with the Victorian era, at either the level of plot, structure, or both”.44 Heilmann and Llewellyn argue that “to be part of the neo-Victorianism […]
texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians”.45
These two critics separate neo-Victorian novels from other historical fictions set in the nineteenth century that stereotypically recycle Victorian clichés, because they do not
41 Hadley, Louisa, op. cit., p. 3.
42 This aspect has been underlined in a footnote of the introduction to Penny Gay, Judith Johnston
and Catherine Waters’s Victorian Turns, Neo-Victorian Returns (2008), where the political implications of the prefix “neo-“ are separated from its generic one. Thus, when added to words like fascism in a political sense “it implies a desire to return to the political beliefs of the movement’s past”; while “used in conjunction with a genre, the implication is rather a new, modified, or more modern style” (Gay, Penny, Johnston, Judith and Waters, Catherine, Victorian
Turns, Neo-Victorian Returns: Essays on Fiction and Culture, Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
Newcastle upon Tyne 2008, pp. 10-11 footnote 5).
43 Shiller, Dana, op. cit., p. 538. 44 Hadley, Louisa, op. cit., p. 4.
feel the need for critical inflection, they are conservative novels “rather than being texts about the metahistoric and metacultural ramifications of such historical engagement”.46 As already said, such an emphasis on the ‘metahistoric and
metacultural” points to a strong correspondence of these neo-Victorian novels to postmodern literary practices. As Samantha J. Carroll explains: “neo-Victorian fiction serves not one but two masters: the ‘neo’ as well as the ‘Victorian’, that is, homage to the Victorian era and its texts, but in combination with the ‘new’ in a postmodern revisionary critique”.47 She also adds that:
Neo-Victorian fiction’s representation of the Victorian past is also the lens through which a variety of present concerns are examined: the interaction of advances in cultural theory and developments in postmodern criticism; the deliberate complication of the supposedly separate jurisdictions of history and fiction; metafictional commentary on the mechanisms of fiction and the effect of narrative techniques on the construction of historical discourse; and, the imaginative restoration of voices lost or constrained in the past, with repercussions for the present.48
In his article “What is Neo-Victorian Studies?” Mark Llewellyn similarly states that neo-Victorian fiction consists of “those works which are consciously set in the Victorian period […] or which desire to rewrite the historical narrative of that period by representing marginalised voices, new history of sexuality, post-colonial viewpoints and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian”.49 In other words,
neo-Victorian fiction creatively integrates these twentieth-century insights into a hybrid ‘Victorian’ discourse for the postmodern era. As Robin Gilmour explains: “[the Victorian past] exists in dynamic relation to the present, which it both interprets and is interpreted by. Evoking the Victorians and their world has not been an antiquarian activity but a means of getting a fresh perspective on the present”.50
46 Ibidem, p. 6.
47 Carroll, Samantha J., “Putting the ‘Neo’ Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as
Postmodern Revisionist Fiction”, Neo-Victorian Studies, 3, 2, 2010, p. 173.
48 Ibidem, p. 180.
49 Llewellyn, Mark, op. cit., p. 165. 50 Gilmour, Robin, op. cit., p. 200.
1.3 Neo-Victorian fiction as historical fiction
Critical accounts cited thus far have all underlined the dual approach of Neo-Victorian novels, which self-consciously reflect upon their own position as historical narratives and attempt not only to narrate the Victorian past, but also to explore the ways in which that past has been narrated in the present. This dual approach, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, is characteristic of all historical fiction.
According to Georg Lukács, the historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon‘s collapse.51 As a Marxist critic, it is
unsurprising that he establishes such a direct relationship between historical context and fictional conventions. Indeed he argues that the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon changed the way in which individuals understood their position in relation to historical forces, because history became for the first time a mass experience that had a direct effect upon their life. According to the critic, it was as a reaction to this lived experience of history that the historical novel developed, thanks to the works of Sir Walter Scott: his novels remain indeed the benchmark against which all historical fiction must be measured since they achieve the “specifically historical” in their derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age.52 For Lukács, then, historical
fiction is intimately connected to the historical context, in terms of both the genre’s development and the incorporation of history within the text.
Neo-Victorian fictions similarly work within the conventions of the classic historical novel as defined by Lukács; they are indeed marked by a commitment to the historical specificity of the Victorian era. However, this historical commitment has been questioned by the critic Fredric Jameson, who has charged postmodernity with an inability to think historically. He says: “it is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten
51 Lukács Georg, The Historical Novel, Merlin, London 1962, p. 19. 52 Idem.
how to think historically in the first place”.53 He has accused postmodernism of
having supplanted the redemptive project of history with “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past”,54 an approach that he finds problematic
because if one’s relation to the past is a matter of randomly retrieving various ‘styles’, then one loses the impetus to find out what actually happened in that past.55 Jameson
finds in postmodern historicity an ever-widening gap between the actual lived past and its representation. According to him, postmodern scepticism regarding what we can know about the past has resulted in nostalgia for the ‘look’ of the past without significant interest in its substance. Consequently, the past as historical referent has dissolved in self-reflexive textuality. For Jameson, history is accessible only in textual form, and this has shifted postmodernist attention away from the actual events of the past toward their interpretation. Dana Shiller has tried to disprove Jameson’s critique of our current “historical deafness”56 by demonstrating that neo-Victorian novels
reveal a profound engagement with history and considerably enrich the postmodern present. She argues that neo-Victorian fiction addresses many of Jameson’s concerns by presenting a historicity that is indeed concerned with recuperating the substance of bygone eras, and not merely their styles. These historical novels take a revisionist approach to the past, borrowing from postmodern historiography to explore how present circumstances shape historical narrative, and yet they are also indebted to earlier cultural attitudes toward history. Furthermore, neo-Victorian novels demonstrate that acknowledging that we can only know the past through its textual traces does not mean that historical events are irretrievable, or not worth retrieving. These novels reshape the past in the light of present issues but, at the same time, show that it is still possible to recapture the past in ways “that evoke its spirit and do honour to the dead and silenced”,57 a task which may be considered typical of
historical novels themselves.
53 Jameson, Fredrick, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press,
Durham 1991, p. vii.
54 Ibidem, p. 17.
55 Shiller, Dana, op. cit., p. 538. 56 Jameson, Frederick, op.cit., p. x. 57 Shiller, Dana, op.cit., p. 546.
2
History and Fiction: the trial of
separation and reunion
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, history and the novel became parallel modes of representing reality. They developed together in a complementary way, even if they were generally perceived to be in opposition to one another. Each had intrinsic differences and eventually developed according to its own principles and necessities. Yet, both examined human experience in time and space. Frequently the two modes overlapped or influenced one another. Each contested the terrain of fact and imagination, and, in different ways, sought, for distinct purposes, to arrive at truths concerning the human experience in time. Both presented themselves as a vehicle for conveying historical knowledge, yet the novel distinguished itself from historiography both in matter and mode.
The aim of this chapter is to provide a brief history of the historical novel, exploring how the relationship between history and fiction has been constructed, and how this has impacted upon the development of both historical fiction and the discipline of historiography.
2.1 History and Fiction in the nineteenth century
2.1.1 The historical novel before Scott: origins and early manifestations
Whilst the historical novel is generally considered to have originated during the early nineteenth century, and particularly with the works of Sir Walter Scott, this mode of writing clearly has many antecedents before that period. Scott himself, according to Jerome de Groot, was concretising in novel form something that had been a mainstay of other types of literary production for centuries. De Groot states
that the use of creative forms to present and conceptualise history is a fundamental cultural practice which can be traced in early examples like Homer and Virgil.1 The
rebirth of interest for the classical period in Europe during the Renaissance led to a group of texts taking historical events as their subject, an early version being Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380s) while history as a subject for dramatic consideration found its initial flowering in the 1590s with the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others.
Brian Hamnett has argued that Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605), by Miguel de Cervantes, may be considered a founding work and an early example of fictional literature with interest in historical events.2 Don Quixote follows the exploits of a
landowner whose head has been filled with historical romances and who thinks of himself as a knight errant, part of a noble quest to save a damsel in distress. The book is obviously indebted to the picaresque novel of the second half of the sixteenth century, which deals with false autobiographies and histories of young ‘heroes’ making their way through the low life of Spanish cities, but it goes far beyond it. Miguel de Cervantes plays continuously with the ambiguous relationship between history and fiction, reality and fantasy. The author tells his readers that his story is a history, the true account of the adventures of the well-known knight from La Mancha. However, this true account turns out to be a false chronicle in which an insane old man convinces himself to be defending the virtues of olden days, which have degenerated since then. He cannot recognize and accept modern times for what they are, and for this reason he imagines to confront terrible fancied threats, often with disastrous results. The tale, however, is set against a realistic background, which includes also real-life figures, such as the Catalan bandit, Roque Guinart, in the second part of the novel. Another distinctive feature is the insertion of historical-type source materials, as though to indicate that the story of Don Quixote can be verified in archives or in older accounts. Cervantes even invents an Arab historian to comment on the action. In this way he blurs the frontier between the real and the imaginary.
1 De Groot, Jerome, The Historical Novel, Routledge, London and New York 2010, p. 12.
2 Hamnett, Brian, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-century Europe: Representations of Reality in
Don Quixote’s success depends precisely on its ability to maintain a balance on the slippery terrain between realism and imagination; the entire work is fictional, dealing with a figure who never existed in history, but it is related realistically. The characters’ obsessions and affectations can be recognized across time. Yet, at the same time, the novel constitutes an essay on the dangers of the imagination which infect the present and lead to romanticised madness. Cervantes’ innovations will be recognised by nineteenth-century novelists, with Scott and his successors drawing considerably from him.3
Many critics, like Jerome de Groot, argue that the novel increasingly emerged as a definable form during the latter part of the eighteenth century, with earlier examples like Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Cleves (1678) and the work of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731).4 Novelists like Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Henry Fielding (1707-54)
and Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) expressed awareness of the relationship between their fiction and the methods of writers of history and, indeed, adopted a narrative stance which was similar to that of history. As Elizabeth Wesseling states, these novelists began to draw upon information collected by antiquarians concerning the manners, customs, clothes, and architecture of former ages in order to situate the adventures of their fictional characters in historical surroundings.5 Their novels
simulated the more private forms of history - for example biography (Fielding’s Tom Jones), autobiography (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), or family history (Richardson’s Clarissa or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy), and sometimes also included references to public historical events (such as the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 in Tom Jones).6 The
3 When Scott introduces Edward Waverley, the main character of his novel Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty
Years Since (1814), he presents him as a foolish dreamer, fired by romantic fiction to seek adventure
but discovering the grim realities behind these fantasies. Scott also mentions the name of Quixote and it is clear that the protagonist is quite similar to the eccentric knight, but he is also a young man learning about himself through a journey which is a key trope of the novel.
4 De Groot, Jerome, op. cit., p. 14.
5 Wesseling, Elizabeth, Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel,
John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 1991, p. 27.
6 In her study Truth: the Theory and practice of documentary Fiction (1986) Barbara Foley has described
the works of authors like Defoe and Nashe in less positive terms, defining them “pseudo-factual fiction”. The term designates all those narratives whose materials are partly or wholly fictional, but which are nevertheless presented as factual accounts. The narrative is presented as the whole truth
century English tradition greatly influenced Scott, as he freely acknowledged. Yet this was not so much historical fiction as “historicized fiction”.7
Finally, a key type of historical fiction was that evinced from the Gothic novel, a genre popular during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Gothic novels were fascinated by the unknown, the mysterious, the terrifying. They were often set in the medieval period, and “their interest in the past was a fascination with savagery and mystery”.8 The genre is usually exemplified by, first of all, Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (1764), and by later works such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Walpole’s Otranto concerns the sins of the past (those of the fathers) haunting the present (their sons).9 The novel pretends to be a translation of a
sixteenth-century transcript of an eleventh-century Italian manuscript found in a library, and was published under the pseudonym William Marshal, the translator. Thus, the text presents itself as a piece of evidence, an historical document, but is actually a fantastical story of horror and ghostliness. The historical narrative is here a vehicle for expressing terror and fear. Walpole establishes the novel as a form that might investigate, trouble and complicate the past; certainly as a way of communicating the past in innovative and complex ways.10 Gothic novels saw history
not as a source of information or something to understand but as a place of horror and savagery. They did not seek their roots in real history and everyday experience, but exploited the popular taste for the fantastic. This placed the historical novel, as developed by Scott, more in the tradition of the pioneering realism of predecessors like Richardson and Fielding, although Scott did not disdain to adopt Gothic imagery if necessary. The rising historical novel became a more rational and realist form, shifting away from the excesses of the Gothic.
because it was based on eyewitnesses’ accounts or factual documents, which the author had merely edited without inventing anything new. They tried to simulate historiography but were actually fictitious (Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 33).
7 Hamnett, Brian, op. cit., p. 24. 8 De Groot, Jerome, op. cit., p. 15. 9 Idem.
2.1.2 Sir Walter Scott and the classical model of historical fiction
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was definitely the most successful practitioner of early historical fiction and there is almost universal agreement among scholars on the role he played in the development of the genre. As the first best-selling writer in the history of English literature, he managed to raise the historical novel to great heights of both prestige and popularity, demonstrating the range, reach and breadth of audience that the new type of writing might reach.
However, although Scott’s model may be regarded as an innovation, its various components are not new, but derive from earlier generic traditions. The originality of Scott’s ‘invention’ is therefore ascribed to the combination of various features from hitherto separate genres. Scott was influenced, first of all, by contemporary historiographical and philosophical developments. He was indebted to David Hume’s stress on the imagination as a faculty through which reality might be apprehended, and to other Scottish philosophical historians, like William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart, for their theory of the “otherness of the past”. These historians developed the theory that human civilization passes through distinct phases in its historical development, each of which has distinct characteristics, that is, its own economic infrastructure, social modes of organization and cultural forms of expression.11 This awareness of the ‘historicity of history’, however, still adhered to
the postulate of a universal human nature which, as we shall see, will be criticised by twentieth-century thinkers. As for his literary influences, Scott built on the strong foundations left by the English writers of the previous century (the domestic realism and the Gothic novel previously mentioned). He also learned a considerable amount from Maria Edgeworth’s treatment of the Irish context of her novels. Edgeworth was the leading exponent of the so called regional novel, characterized by the depiction of local colour. It was precisely this regional basis of her novels which attracted Scott, and he adapted it to Scottish society in his own historical fiction. Some scholars have also analyzed how Scott drew upon earlier narrative forms like the
century English rogue novel,12 while Elisabeth Wesseling has underlined the influence
of historical drama, more specifically the work of Shakespeare and Goethe, and of the late eighteenth-century German chivalric romance as written by Benedikte Naubert and Veit Weber.13
Thus, it may be argued that Scott’s real innovation was the mixing up of the historical and literary domain, which were brought together but were never completely fused. Scott used historical materials combining them with novelistic means in order to disclose the past in ways that the historians could not do, for example representing the daily lives of ordinary people which were usually ignored by official history. As Elisabeth Wesseling states, Scott intended his novels to occupy a complementary position in front of historiography and this implied both compliance with and divergence from the ends of and means of historiography.14
Georg Lukács was one of the first scholars to underline Scott’s importance for the history of historical fiction. As said in the previous chapter, Lukács suggests that historical works before Scott were “mere costumery”, and dismisses them, claiming that these “so called historical novels […] are historical only as regards their purely external choice of theme and costume. Not only the psychology of the characters, but the manners depicted are entirely those of the writer’s own day”.15 What Scott
brought was “the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age”.16 Lukács affirms that Scott’s
novels emerged at a special historical moment. The revolution and the Napoleonic wars created a dynamic sense of progress and, most of all, of history as process
12 In these works, exemplified by Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton
(1594), fictional characters encounter historical persons and witness historical events. Yet, historical circumstances are only briefly referred to in order to outline the setting, while the fictional plot develops in complete independence from the historical background, whose depiction, moreover, suffers from anachronisms and other incongruities (Fleishman, Avrom, The English Historical Novel:
Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1971, p .17).
13 According to Wesseling, these authors display a fascination with ancient manners and customs,
and testify to the attempt to represent them accurately, demonstrating the same interest for historical detail of Scott (Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 62 note 12).
14 Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., pp. 32-33. 15 Lukács, Georg, op. cit., p. 19.
because they “strengthen the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual”.17
This clear sense of connection with the past, and an awareness that the events of history have an impact upon the contemporary is something which has profound consequences for the historical novel, whose aim is to bring the past to life and make it accessible, in order to better understand the present. This didactic function has been underlined by many scholars. Elisabeth Wesseling, for instance, argues that Scott attempted to appropriate to the novelist what used to be the task of the historian, that is, the propagation of historical knowledge:18 Scott wanted to teach history and
supplement official historiography in the role of mediator between the past and the contemporary reading public. According to Horst Steinmetz, Scott wanted to “make clear to his contemporaries that however rapidly historical development may have taken place, so that many characteristics of earlier times have disappeared, yet, features of the past are still active and influential in the present”.19 Scott’s account thus
differed from official historiographical representation. The first indication of this are the departures from the chronology of the novel’s central historical events: for example, in Scott’s first work, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814),20 the reader
follows Waverley through the novel and becomes acquainted with the historical events in which Waverley participates in the order in which he is part of them. These central historical events do not present themselves from the perspective of history, but emerge through the private viewpoint of the unhistorical hero. This fusion of fictional
17 Ibidem, p. 23.
18 Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 44.
19 Steinmetz, Horst, “History in Fiction – History as Fiction: On the Relations between Literature
and History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in D’Haen, Theo and Bertens, Hans (eds),
Narrative Turns and Minor Genres in Postmodernism, Rodopi, Amsterdam and Atlanta 1995, pp.
86-87.
20 The novel follows the adventures of Edward Waverley, an English gentleman who visits the
Highlands of Scotland and becomes involved in the nascent rebellion of the Jacobite Bonnie Prince Charlie. Waverley is a dreamy romantic who is seduced by the Scottish way of life and allows himself to get caught up in events; it is not until the conclusion of the novel that he attains self-consciousness and understands the force and the consequence of his actions.
characters and events with historical ones caused some criticism from Scott’s contemporary scholars, but the novelist solved this problem by arguing that
such frivolities were pleasing to the reading public, and would seduce it into embarking upon a more thorough study of the past. In spite of its tenuous relation to solid fact, the historical novel could instruct the reading public by whetting its appetite for the more substantive nourishment of historiography. And if readers would content themselves with mere appetizers, a modicum of knowledge would still be conveyed.21
The attention to fictional characters also indicates a difference in focus between historiography and historical fiction: the historical novel writes domestic, rather than political history, by recreating the daily lives of anonymous, ordinary individuals who have left no traces in the historical records, thus enabling the reader to identify with them. A resulting characteristic is that real historical characters appear only on the background, while the principal action takes place almost exclusively in an area inhabited by fictional characters. According to Steinmetz, it is evident that a repetition of the familiar historical events “would have been superfluous, since Scott could not have done more than add a particularly memorable historical colouring […] and at the same time had to avoid the not inconsiderable danger of psychologising famous historical figures”.22 But this was also due to the fact that Scott wanted to avoid
anachronisms and conflicts with canonized history; he paid a lot of attention to historical details and did not approve of transgressions of historical facts in principle.
Scott’s contemporaries often criticized the lack of moral utility in his fiction, which was ascribed to the shallowness of his heroes. These detractors accused Scott’s characters to be devoid of inner life, preventing the reader to identify with them. As Wesseling states, these charges were not entirely accurate, because the author frequently focalized long stretches of narrative through the eyes of his characters, which means that they had a mental life.23 Hence, Scott’s characters do not lack inner
life, they only lack inwardness; they do not lack inner thoughts, they direct them towards the observation of their external environment. This mode of characterization is in line with Scott’s idea of the historical novel: he wanted to teach history, not to
21 Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 45. 22 Steinmetz, Horst, op. cit., p. 88. 23 Wesseling, Elizabeth, op. cit., p. 47.
