Volume 4
No. 1
Winter 2016
 D u rham E ng lish R e v iew 
An Und ergraduate Journal
Editor: Laurie Atkinson
Hidden Violence and Public Spectacle: Representations of Violence in the Novels of
Charles Dickens
Georgia Thurston, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
The West and the Western in Edward Dorn's Gunslinger
Clara Vlessing, University of Bristol
'A Great Deal of Unmapped Country Within Us': Consciousness and the Environment
in George Eliot's Novels
Julia Rothchild, Yale University
Chiastic Ticks: Narrative and Temporality in the Works of Lewis Carroll and J. M.
Barrie
India Harris, Girton College, University of Cambridge
Binding and Unbinding: Fashioning Narrative in Medieval Romance
Hannah Piercy, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
The Quest for the Epic: The Oxford Novel and
Homer’s Odyssey
Rebecca Roughan, Corpus Christi College,
University of Oxford
Review: John Tiffin, Paradigm Theory
(Christchurch, New Zealand: Ideas Lab, 2015-16)
Laurie Atkinson, St Chad's College, Durham University

D u r h am E ng li s h R e v i ew
An Undergraduat e Journal

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Mr Laurie Atkinson
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW
AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
VOL. 4
Endorsement of the Fifth Issue
1
Hidden Violence and Public Spectacle: Representations of
Violence in the Novels of Charles Dickens
Georgia Thurston
2
The West and the Western in Edward Dorn's Gunslinger
Clara Vlessing
20
'A Great Deal of Unmapped Country Within Us':
Consciousness and the Environment in George Eliot's
Novels
Julia Rothchild
34
Chiastic Ticks: Narrative and Temporality in the Works
of Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie
India Harris
47
Binding and Unbinding: Fashioning Narrative in Medieval
Romance
Hannah Piercy
70
The Quest for the Epic: The Oxford Novel and Homer’s
Odyssey
Rebecca Roughan
98
Review: John Tiffin, Paradigm Theory (Christchurch, New
Zealand: Ideas Lab, 2015-16)
Laurie Atkinson
125
Published by the Department of English Studies, University of Durham
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Front cover photograph © Mel Rodicq
Endorsement of the Fourth Volume
Winter 2016
I
t gives us great pleasure to welcome and endorse this fifth issue of the
Durham English Review. The Review is the work of undergraduate students
who have enthusiastically supported the journal, commissioned the essays,
and overseen the design and printing. In publishing high quality student essays in
the field of English Studies, the Review has done much to promote undergraduate
research. The ideal of research-led teaching is thoroughly embedded now in many
university English departments, but the best research-led teaching is that which
thrives on a continuing and dynamic exchange of ideas between lecturers and
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Research is not the preserve of lecturers and postgraduates. Since its inception in
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an admirable range of authors and topics, from Julian of Norwich to Toni
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support this fifth issue of the Durham English Review, edited by one of our most
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encourage readers everywhere to support the Review and contribute to its lasting
success.
Professor Stephen Regan (Advisory Editor)
Professor Simon James (Head of Department)
Department of English Studies, University of Durham
-1-
GEORGIA THURSTON
Hidden Violence and Public Spectacle:
Representations of Violence in the Novels of Charles
Dickens
V
iolence in Dickens’ novels always comes to threaten the narrator as
much as it does the characters themselves. Though casual violence
forces its way into plot and syntax throughout Dickens’ work, the
author is much more tentative about offering up detailed descriptions
of violence in set piece episodes of murder and capital punishment. It is in scenes
of intense privacy and publicity that the reader witnesses an author attempting to
simultaneously place himself both in medias res and as far from the negative
implications of violence as possible. The assumption, too easily made, that
Dickens consistently writes in a realist mode is liable to collapse when
considering violence: the violent act is not so much a representation of the actual
for Dickens, but of the rhetorical. Violence is allegorized to preserve a safe
distance between the author and his own material. John Carey’s The Violent
Effigy is seminal in considering presentations of violence in Dickens’ work
thematically, with an analysis of recurring motifs of violence.1 However, by
looking at a range of Dickens’ novels in light of the narrative construction of set
pieces of violence, as opposed to the contextual concepts of class and gender
which set them in motion, this article seeks to encompass the ways in which
violence poses difficulties for Dickens on a structural and narrative level.
Ultimately, violence in Dickens’ novels is self-consuming: though it initially
threatens to disintegrate public and private spheres, the unstable violence in
Dickens’ novels cannot sustain itself.
1
John Carey, The Violent Effigy (London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [first pub. 1973]).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
It will first be necessary to address the use and extent of censorship
during this period, as it calls into question whether Dickens limits the reader’s
view in set pieces of violence out of necessity or choice. Prior to the 1857
Obscene Publications Act, Gilbert asserts that there existed ‘a quieter, more
intangible form of censorship, perceived by many to be all the more powerful
because it went without saying.’2 The vast majority of Dickens’ writing career
then, unfolds in a period where the intended readership and popular response
posed the only clear boundaries to subject matter. The reception of the penny
dreadful during Dickens’ career brought into relief the anxiety that realistic
literary depictions of violence might influence impressionable readers to emulate
such behaviour; the Religious Tract Society was most fearful of penny dreadfuls
that portrayed ‘apparently realistic heroes’ rather than those of the supernatural.3
Censorship for Dickens becomes an internalised practice of the writing process,
as affirmed in his Preface to Oliver Twist (1837-8), where he asserts that:
No less consulting my own taste than the manners of the age, I
endeavoured, while I painted it in all its fallen and degraded aspect, to
banish from the lips of the lowest character I introduced, any expression
that could possibly offend; and rather to lead to the unfortunate inference
that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind, than to prove it
elaborately by words and deeds.4
Here, Dickens himself presents the crux of his narrative difficulties, wherein he
wishes to present the violence of the world without offending his respectable
readership. This position, however, is inevitably precarious.
2
Nora Gilbert, Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films and the Benefits of
Censorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 2.
3
Patrick A. Dunae, ‘Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth-Century Boys' Literature and
Crime’, Victorian Studies, 22:2 (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 133-150 , at
p. 139.
4
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1837-8]), pp. xvi-xvii.
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
In Great Expectations (1860-1), the reader is forced to look at moments
of violence through a narrator who is incompetent at perceiving and liable to
misread situations. For a novel that is so concerned with episodes of hearthside
brutality, the protagonist Pip is decidedly tentative about crossing the threshold
into direct descriptions of domestic aggression, and his face is markedly turned
away when violence befalls those around him. This is particularly felt through his
physical absence when Mrs Joe is struck down in her own home:
I became aware of my sister—lying without sense or movement on the bare
boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow on the
back of the head, dealt with some unknown hand when her face was turned
towards the fire—destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was
the wife of Joe.5
The verb ‘became aware’ stresses how Pip’s role as a first person narrator is
concerned with the act of discovery, rather than transmission. However, despite
the suggestion of enlightenment, it is a lack of awareness, a dullness of the senses,
that pervades these lines. This takes place on a narrative level, seen through Mrs
Joe’s face that lacks ‘sense or movement’, but it is similarly conveyed aurally.
The parenthetical clauses within the dashes are characterised by the plosive
consonants ‘t’, ‘b’ and ‘d’ which, while affording greater stress on each individual
word, also deaden these lines. Thus, the lyricism of the phrase ‘while she was the
wife of Joe’ shows a resignation that the violence befalling Mrs Joe within the
home has stripped her of any autonomy beyond it. At the moment when violence
is perceived, the diction takes on the senselessness of both Mrs Joe and Pip.
Carey emphasises Mrs Joe’s position near the fire and perceives this
setting as ‘an index, of course, of the criminal passions that lurk within’; but in
doing so, fails to capture the fact that the illuminating symbol of the fire
5
Dickens, Great Expectations, (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1860-1]), p. 118.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
emphasises characters’ inability to foresee danger.6 Acts of private violence are
only performed within the novel when the eye is unfocused. This is further seen
when Miss Havisham goes up in flames, which happens ‘In the moment when I
was withdrawing my head to go quietly away, I saw a great flaming light spring
up.’7 But Pip is also inept at perceiving the violence that afflicts his own body, as
is seen when he later asserts that ‘I was astonished to see that both my hands were
burnt; for, I had no knowledge of it through the sense of feeling.’8 The recurring
motif of the novel is that of partial vision and partial sense, and moments of
intense, private violence are obscured by Dickens through the use of an unseeing
Pip.
Through such episodes of clouded brutality within the home in Great
Expectations, Dickens creates a form of violence which can and must be
explained. But it is not the place of the author to clarify moments of violence, but
the antagonist himself, as is seen when Orlick retrospectively owns that
I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you to-night. I giv’ it her! I
left her for dead, and if there had been a lime kiln as nigh her as there is
nigh you, she shouldn’t have come to life again. 9
The conflation of past and present tenses creates a vividness, but also marks how
this is the reader’s first clear perception of the violence that befalls Mrs Joe.
However, more than this, at the moment of retelling the violence, Dickens ensures
that he is as far from the act as possible: the words of admission are firmly framed
within Orlick’s diction. So too in Bleak House (1853), it is not the third person
narrator who reveals the murderer of Tulkinghorn, but Inspector Bucket.
Narrative responsibility is repeatedly flung away from Dickens himself. Dickens
cannot quite transmit the moment of private atrocity under the full gaze of the
6
Carey, Violent Effigy, p. 15.
Great Expectations, p. 402.
8
Ibid., p. 402.
9
Ibid., p. 426.
7
-5-
HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
reader—it is instead obscured, and Dickens’ narrative mode begins to resemble a
pinhole projector. Unlike the penny dreadful The String of Pearls (1846-7), where
the demise of the imprisoned cook is centred in the act of how ‘the hammer
descended, crushing into his skull’, Dickens can only show his readers glimpses
of violent acts.10
Even Nancy’s murder in Oliver Twist, Dickens’ most overt display of
violence within a private sphere, does not maintain a straightforward narrative
gaze. The figure of Nancy is too much for even her murderer to behold, as the
narrator describes how ‘It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer
staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a
heavy club and struck her down.11 Both Sikes and the narrator actively refrain
from looking upon Nancy in the moment of her death. The third person pronoun
‘It’ stresses how the narrator seeks to distance himself from the moment of
violence, while the use of the present participle ‘shutting out’ in the subordinate
clause, which prefigures the finite verb ‘struck her down’, suggests that Sikes too
can only execute this intense violence if he maintains a safe distance from the
sight of it. Indeed, at the end of the novel, the reader is encouraged to forget the
dying eyes of Nancy by a narrator who covers them with images of the virtuous
and exultant. While the fortunes of the dead are ‘closed’,12 much like Sikes’
barred vision at Nancy’s death, the narrator ‘would fain linger yet with a few of
those among whom I have so long moved, and share their happiness’.13 At the
close, for both the reader and narrator, the ‘soft blue eye’ of Rose Maylie
supplants those of Nancy;
14
it is Sikes alone who is haunted until his final
moments by ‘The eyes again!’15
10
Anon., The String of Pearls: A Romance (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions,
2005 [first pub. 1846-7]), p. 86.
11
Oliver Twist, p. 454.
12
Ibid., p. 516.
13
Ibid., p. 519.
14
Ibid., p. 519.
15
Ibid., p. 488.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
The witnessing of violence is also distorted in Our Mutual Friend (1865),
which occurs outside the domestic space of the home. The Thames is a liminal
setting between privacy and publicity, the elements of land and water, and,
crucially, owing to the Hexams’ search for bodies at the outset to make a living, a
space that unites the living and the dead. The instability of such a setting ensures
that, when Headstone attacks Wrayburn by the river, the narrative gaze undulates
to blur the violent episode:
[Wrayburn] stopped upon the margin, to look down at the reflected night. In
an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames
shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the
sky.
Was he struck by lightning? With some incoherent half-formed thought to
that effect, he turned under the blows that were blinding him and mashing
his life, and closed with a murderer[.]16
The blows first break apart the marginal setting before enacting the ‘mashing’ of
Wrayburn’s life. By framing the violence with a meteorological lexis, Dickens
ensures that the attempted murder is vivid and holds a wider significance, without
actually having to narrate the moment Wrayburn’s face becomes ‘so much
disfigured that his mother might have covered it’.17 Like Great Expectations,
interpretation of violence is left to the characters themselves. Just as Wrayburn’s
gaze ‘closed on a murderer’, Lizzie Hexam is the one who ‘saw that the grass was
bloody. Following the drops and the smears, she saw that the watery margin of
the bank was bloody. Following the current with her eyes, she saw a bloody
face’.18 The repeated adjective ‘bloody’ initially catches the reader’s attention, but
Dickens is also emphatic in his anaphoric indirect statement ‘she saw that’.
16
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 2003 [first pub. 1865]), p. 682.
Ibid., p. 684.
18
Ibid., p. 683.
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
Dickens places the reader and the third person narrator in a position of witnessing
the spectators of violence, rather than the violent act itself.
Dickens and his tentative depictions of private violence find a useful
parallel in the fragile relationship between the crowd and the executioner. Michel
Foucault asserts that ‘The executioner may have been, in a sense, the king’s
sword, but he shared the infamy of his adversary.’19 Without the frameworks of
constitutional punishment to support him, the ‘great prophet of cosy, domestic
virtue’ runs the risk of allowing private violence to slip beyond his control.20
When there are none present except the narrator and the reader to witness and
judge episodes of violence, the cost of valorising the victim and explaining the
violence as meaningful is a necessarily damning verdict on those who set it in
motion: the antagonists, like Sikes and Orlick, as well as Dickens’ own narrative
voice. To counter this, within scenes of private violence, Dickens can only
unfocus the narrative gaze.
If the private realm of violence offers nowhere to hide for the narrators of
Dickens’ novels, the public realm is no less complicated. Indeed, Dickens’
writing is at its most distant within scenes of mob or publically advocated
violence: it is no coincidence that Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Tale of Two
Cities (1859), with their episodes of rioting and retribution, are firmly confined
within the historical past. All of Dickens’ completed works were written before
the 1868 Capital Punishment Amendment Act, which put an end to public
executions. Hence, throughout Dickens’ career, the violence of the public
execution served as a regular, accepted form of justice. Judicial and popular
support of capital punishment, as well as the historical precedents of the Gordon
Riots and French Revolution, ought to provide stability within Dickens’ narration
of public violence. Instead, capital punishment is either avoided or hidden from
view in Dickens’ novels.
19
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin, 1991 [first pub. 1975]), p. 53.
20
Carey, Violent Effigy, p. 16.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
In both A Tale of Two Cities and Barnaby Rudge, protagonists are able to
circumvent corporal punishment. Haredale and Varden strive against Barnaby’s
‘impending fate’ by going ‘to men of influence at court, to the young Prince of
Wales, and even to the antechamber of the king himself.’21 The anaphoric
repetition of the preposition ‘to’ stresses how true control over the body lies
beyond the grasp of the mob: it is the highest powers of state alone that can
govern its fate. In A Tale of Two Cities, where the mob and state authority are one
and the same, Carton redirects violence onto his own body in order to protect
Darnay from the guillotine. Yet even in Carton’s death, there is also,
subversively, an evasion of capital punishment, through the fact that he envisions
‘that child who lay upon [Lucie’s] bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning
his way up in that path of life which once was mine.’22 John Kucich asserts that
‘the second time [Carton] saves Darnay’s life, he displaces Darnay in Lucie’s
eyes as the man willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of others.’23 But this fails
to encompass how, in being willingly put to death, Carton subverts the very
nature of capital punishment which relies on removing the right to life; he lives on
through the child ‘who bore my name’. Carton’s death is simultaneously a
moment of self-murder and self-expansion.
Yet, by extending the character’s life beyond his execution through
soliloquy, Dickens, rather than maintaining a detached third person narrator, is
able to avoid portraying the crucial moment when the axe falls. This recurs
frequently in Dickens’ novels. Even in A Tale of Two Cities, death by the
guillotine is construed in numbers rather than detail. The narrator describes how a
young woman ‘goes next before him—is gone; the knitting women count
Twenty-Two.’24 The use of the dash creates a pause to represent the violent
moment of death. The placement of the punctuation is efficient, but it also marks
21
Dickens, Barnaby Rudge (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1841]), p. 803.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1859]), p. 443.
23
John Kucich, in Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State (London:
Macmillan, 1995), p. 154.
24
Tale of Two Cities, p. 440.
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
a moment of faltering for reader and author alike; the fall of the guillotine’s blade
creates a gap for Dickens which language cannot fill.
In Barnaby Rudge, the very public nature of hanging is stressed. The
crowd gathers ‘gazing at the slowly swelling cord’, where ‘places to see the
execution were let at high prices’.25 Dickens emphasises both the commercial and
voyeuristic rapture of public violence, but this remains the privilege of the crowd
alone. At the point of Hugh and Dennis’ hanging, the narrator asserts that ‘As
soon as [Hugh] had passed the door, his miserable associate was carried out; and
the crowd beheld the rest.’26 As in A Tale of Two Cities, it is the microcosmic
pause of the semicolon alone that depicts the moment of death. Through this,
Dickens again makes the distinction between the blood-thirsty crowd within the
scene and the respectable readership beyond it. The definition of the hanging as
‘the rest’ can be read in a dual light: it is both the unspoken interval in which
violence is performed, and the cessation of life by enacting ‘rest’ upon the body
by force. Jeremy Tambling asserts that ‘[the Gordon Riots] show the relationship
between patriarchy and property to be dependent on hanging.’ 27 Yet, when the act
of hanging is itself entirely absent from the narrative, the judicial framework of
violence in Barnaby Rudge is startlingly precarious. Similarly, in Oliver Twist,
the narrative breaks away from Fagin as he awaits hanging, ‘seated on his bed,
rocking himself from side to side’;28 nothing more is heard of the condemned
Hortense as she leaves Sir Leicester’s house in Bleak House, asserting that ‘It is
but the death, it is all the same.’29 While Carton’s absent death heightens the
pathos at the character’s martyrdom, the reader is left unsettled by the frequent
omissions of representations of capital punishment for other characters. Mrs
Rudge’s words about her husband resonate with Dickens’ faltering treatment of
public execution:
25
Barnaby Rudge, p. 776.
Ibid., p. 786.
27
Tambling, Violence and the Modern State, p. 134.
28
Oliver Twist, p. 531.
29
Dickens, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1853]), p. 892.
- 10 26
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
They seek his life, and he will lose it. It must not be by our means; nay, if we
could win him back to penitence, we should be bound to love him yet. 30
Dickens cannot bear to get too close to those he must condemn. The reader finds
an author who is unwilling to firmly form in words the moment when the floor of
the scaffold drops.
Ultimately, Dickens is much more adept at portraying characters waiting
for the violence of the state to be enacted on their bodies than he is the act itself.
Conjecture becomes the only narrative form in which public violence can exist.
This takes place in A Tale of Two Cities when Defarge and his followers discuss
the fate of Gaspard following Monseigneur’s murder:
One man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will
be burnt off before his face; that, into the wounds which will be made into
his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted
lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb
by four strong horses. That old man says, all this was actually done to a
prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen.
But how do I know if he lies? I am not a scholar. 31
In this instance, ironically, the very explicitness of the narration has the potential
to alienate the reader. At first, this section reads as a straightforward description
of the punishment to befall parricides, much like the account of Robert-François
Damiens’ execution in 1757.32 The use of asyndeton and emphatic adjectives in
the phrase ‘there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and
sulphur’ suggests Dickens’ delight in portraying the melodrama of the moment.
Yet, the hyperbolic brutality of this scene is estranging for the reader. Moreover,
all of the violence of this speech takes place within the same, extended sentence.
While this creates a cumulative effect by building clause upon clause of horror,
30
Barnaby Rudge, pp. 738-39.
Tale of Two Cities, pp. 199-200.
32
See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 3-6.
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
the violence does not expand beyond the confines of the sentence itself. But, more
than this, violence is inevitably framed with uncertainty through the use of two
indirect statements of ‘One man says’ and ‘That old man says’, while Jacques’
own voice creates another frame that distances the reader from any verisimilitude
in the presentation of capital punishment. The prospective violence exists
distinctly in others’ mouths; Dickens is simultaneously distanced from and
brought closer to the violence which threatens to alienate his respectable
readership.
This moment in A Tales of Two Cities enacts Dickens’ tenuous, dual
position as a narrator more widely. A tension is seen between the author’s desire
to be at the centre of violence—to behold the ‘ghastly figure’ of Nancy while
Sikes covers his eyes—and the compulsion to be as far from its negative
implications as possible.33 This notion is complemented by Flint’s suggestion that
‘Dickens may have encouraged his contemporaries to see him in this dual light: as
one who was both a larger-than-life individual, and as one who was so close to
their tastes and sentiments that he could merge his life with theirs.’34 Indeed, in
Bleak House, the use of the present tense places the third person narrator on a par
with the reader, because the narrator’s position is one of omnipresence, but not
omniscience. This is seen at the narrator’s apparent ignorance of Tulkinghorn’s
murder: ‘What’s that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Who was it?’35 Much of Carey’s
analysis of violence in Dickens is concerned with Dickens as a fragmented
author:
We need to remember this side of Dickens which yearns to see people
regimented, uniform in their behaviour, obeying rules. Opposed to it always
33
Oliver Twist, p. 454
Kate Flint, Dickens (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 12.
35
Bleak House, p. 796.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
is the violent and anarchic side of him. The strength of each side is
determined by the strength of its opponent. 36
Carey frames Dickens’ narrative concerns as though they are clashing forces; I
would consider the desire to relish violence and the duty to abhor it, rather, as
pulling in different directions. Hence, there is a resignation when depicting
violence that the narrator cannot satisfy either of these diverging interests. This is
reflected in Dombey and Son (1848), when the narrator apostrophises ‘Oh for a
good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant
hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark
shapes issue from amidst their homes’.37 The narrator cannot wholly occupy the
role of the ‘good spirit’, drawing morals from episodes of violence, just as the
drive to impose ‘dark shapes amid [characters’] homes’ becomes a ‘lame demon’:
instead, he must hover between the two narrative stances. Flint describes Dickens
as an author who ‘organises his texts around the roof- and wall-penetrating
abilities of a roaming narrative viewpoint’.38 Yet, more often than not, it is as
though Dickens is waiting for another to take on the responsibility of this role.
With the narrative drives of delight in violence and desire for propriety pulling in
different directions, set pieces of violence are most challenging for Dickens
because they threaten to bring about the disintegration of the narrator himself.
In order to escape this, Dickens retreats into an increasingly rhetorical
mode of narration within episodes of violence. Tambling defines the violence
enacted upon Tulkinghorn in Bleak House as occupying an allegorical rather than
a realist style, and this is a useful approach for the depiction of violence in
Dickens’ work more widely.39 The murder of Tulkinghorn is an implied rather
than explicit deed, which is only revealed by Dickens through the ceiling frieze
that points towards the body. The narrator comments:
36
Carey, Violent Effigy, p. 32.
Dickens, Dombey and Son (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1848]), p. 757.
38
Flint, Dickens, p. 71.
39
Tambling, Violence and the Modern State, p. 79.
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
[T]he Roman, pointing from the ceiling, shall point, so long as dust and
damp and spiders spare him, with far greater significance than ever he had
in Mr Tulkinghorn’s time, and with a deadly meaning. For, Mr
Tulkinghorn’s time is over for evermore; and the Roman pointed at the
murderous hand uplifted against his life, and pointed helplessly at him,
from night to morning, lying face downward on the floor, shot through the
heart.40
The shifting tense between future, present and past stresses how the murder holds
a significance which breaks beyond the confines of the singular moment. The
narrative gaze is fixed on the room itself until the last possible moment, though
the ‘stain upon the floor’ and the ‘Roman, pointing from the ceiling’ draw the
reader toward the site of violence. Dickens’ explicit reference to the ‘deadly
meaning’ of the frieze emphasises the writer’s anxiety to draw out significance
from acts of violence. Tambling cogently asserts that ‘Mr Tulkinghorn dead is the
expression in allegory of what he was before in life, the withdrawn depository of
noble secrets. His death plays out what he was before.’41 Yet more than this,
through the allegorical death of Tulkinghorn, Dickens also plays out the major
theme of the novel on the character’s body: that secrets are ultimately destructive.
This notion of an allegorical, rather than realistic, violence can also be
extended to Dickens’ other novels. Political revolution in A Tale of Two Cities is
centred in the amputation of heads. Madame Defarge, having watched the
execution of the governor before the Hôtel de Ville, ‘suddenly animated, […] put
her foot upon his neck, and with her cruel knife—long ready—hewed off his
head.’42 At first, this moment of violence seems—unlike any other in Dickens’
novels—to appear in plain sight. Startlingly brutal and outside of the confines of
the home, this episode takes on an exoticism that is distinct from the attacks
40
Bleak House, p. 799.
Tambling, Violence and the Modern State, p. 80.
42
Tale of Two Cities, p. 259.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
levelled at Mrs Joe, Nancy or Tulkinghorn. The only way that Dickens can rein in
such a uniquely shocking moment is by expanding its significance to encompass
the political climate as a whole:
Saint Antoine’s blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by
the iron hand was down—down on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville where the
governor’s body lay—down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. 43
The directional lexis creates order out of Madame Defarge’s savagery, while
Dickens’ use of the dash forces a pause and reflection in the midst of the
accelerating prose. The allegorization of the violence serves a dual purpose of
reiterating the horrifying decapitation and providing Dickens with the stability of
the act’s wider political resonance. In front of the Hôtel de Ville, Dickens’
narrative attempts to tread the boundary between the embodied physical
experience of decapitation and its allegorical implications for the state.
Nancy’s death in Oliver Twist can also be read allegorically. Ideas of
home and shelter are of recurring importance for the character. She proclaims to
‘have no certain roof but the coffin-lid’, and ironizes her position and home,
calling it ‘such a home as I have raised myself with the work of my whole life.’44
The symbolic importance of raising oneself and the preclusion of social mobility
through the imagery of ceilings is played out in physical terms through Nancy’s
murder: while Nancy struggles to raise herself, Sikes consistently strikes her
down. Dickens stresses how Sikes beats Nancy’s ‘upturned face’,45 and how,
nonetheless,
43
Ibid., p. 259.
Oliver Twist, p. 388; p. 444.
45
Ibid., p. 454.
44
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
[R]aising herself with difficulty on her knees, [she] drew from her bosom a
white handkerchief—Rose Maylie’s own—and holding it up in her folded
hands as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would let her, breathed
one prayer for the mercy of her Maker.46
The present participles ‘raising herself’ and ‘holding it up’ portray the character’s
ongoing attempt to undermine her social and physical restriction by Sikes. She
looks beyond Sikes and reaches ‘as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength
would let her’; in her final moments, Nancy attempts to transcend the constraints
of working class life in favour of spiritual elevation. It is all the more poignant,
therefore, that Sikes ‘seized a heavy club and struck her down.’47 Nancy occupies
the role of the fallen woman as much in her violent death as she does in life. An
allegorical mode of narration attempts to give meaning to the life of the character,
as much as it does her violent death.
The violent act cannot be divided from the commonplace, much as the
episodic and roaming narrative structures attempt to facilitate it. Violence extends
backwards, through allegory, and forwards, as it consistently gives way to more
violence. This is owing to the fact that neither public nor private spheres are
stable enough within Dickens’ narratives to accommodate singular acts of
violence. Indeed, we frequently see a blending of private and public spaces
following violence. In Barnaby Rudge, Haredale’s home is brutalised when the
mob ‘pulled down the solid iron fence, and […] made deadly weapons of the
bars.’48 Public, mob violence infiltrates the middle class home. In Oliver Twist,
this is inverted, as Dickens uses the mob to open up and judge the privateness of
Nancy’s murder. The force of this is felt through the second-hand violence of the
crowd at Fagin’s arrest:
46
Ibid., p. 454.
Ibid., p. 454.
48
Barnaby Rudge, p. 556.
47
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
I can see the people jumping up, one behind another, and snarling with their
teeth, and making at him like wild beasts; I can see the blood upon his hair
and beard, and hear the dreadful cries with which the women […] swore
they’d tear his heart out!49
The violence of the mob in Oliver Twist is distinct from Sikes’ because it is
envisioned rather than fully realised: the people only ‘make at’ Fagin and women
only ‘swore’ to tear at him. A cycle of violence is established, but it is less
explicit than the initial murder of Nancy, just as the personified ‘La Guillotine’
becomes a distanced, institutionalised reproduction of Madame Defarge’s
decapitation of the governor in A Tale of Two Cities. Foucault describes the
‘double role’ of execution as ‘the principle of the communication between the
crime and the punishment’ and ‘the exacerbation of the punishment in relation to
the crime.’50 In Dickens’ novels, the only way this spiral of violence can be halted
is when violence is turned upon the original perpetrator. Carey asserts that ‘the
writing deteriorates once the violence becomes virtuous’, but this fails to take
account of the fact that violence must be construed as a self-consuming force in
order to attain resolution.51 Sikes inadvertently hangs himself before the mob in
Oliver Twist; Headstone is drowned with Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend;
Madame Defarge, when reaching for her pistol to kill Miss Pross, accidentally
shoots herself in A Tale of Two Cities. Violence becomes a self-consuming act,
both in structural and narrative terms.
Violence in Dickens’ novels is decidedly complex because it marks the
fissure of the author’s diverging narrative interests: revelry in the violent act and
the duty to shroud it from view. Consequently, when violence occurs, the
narrative bleeds inwardly and outwardly. Cycles of violence can only be
concluded by turning them upon antagonists themselves, while allegorical modes
49
Oliver Twist, p. 480.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 56.
51
Carey, Violent Effigy, p. 29.
50
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HIDDEN VIOLENCE AND PUBLIC SPECTACLE
of narration ensure that violence maintains a significance beyond the singular
moment. For Dickens, violence must be self-consuming and resolved; without
this, there is the risk that ‘Private vengeance, sir, or public sentiment, or both
combined—destroy him’.52
Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge
Bibliography
Primary sources
Anon., The String of Pearls: A Romance (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions, 2005 [first published 1846-7]).
Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1837-8]).
—, Barnaby Rudge (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1841]).
—, Dombey and Son (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1848]).
—, Bleak House (London: Penguin, 2012 [first pub. 1853]).
—, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Penguin, 2012; [first pub. 1859]).
—, Great Expectations, (London: Penguin, 2003 [first pub. 1860-61]).
—, Our Mutual Friend, (London: Penguin, 1997 [first pub. 1865]).
Secondary sources
Carey, John, The Violent Effigy (London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [first pub.
1973]).
Dunae, Patrick A., ‘Penny Dreadfuls: Late Nineteenth-Century Boys' Literature
and Crime’, Victorian Studies, 22:2 (Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1979), 133-150.
Flint, Kate, Dickens (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [first pub. 1975]).
52
Barnaby Rudge, p. 249.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Gilbert, Nora, Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films and the
Benefits of Censorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Tambling, Jeremy, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State (London: Macmillan,
1995).
- 19 -
CLARA VLESSING
The West and the Western in Edward Dorn’s
Gunslinger
I
n 1968, Edward Dorn was living in England, where he wrote his long-form
epic, or anti-epic, Gunslinger. In a 1990 interview Dorn claimed that this
fresh transoceanic vantage point altered his perspective on his native United
States. He agreed that the change of continents made him aware of ‘how
American’ he was and described the experience as ‘liberating’.1 Taking a fresh
outlook on the nature of American identity allowed him to conceive a series of
new confrontations, between transatlantic migrants and indigenous American
populations. It was Dorn’s belief that these confrontations could best be played
out in the particular geographical setting of the American South-West.2
Gunslinger’s drive and purpose come from its association with the West. Dorn
extracts humour and stimulates debate through his indirect exploration of the
origin, evolution and abuse of this landscape. He assumes a sweeping poetic voice
that, in its worldly, wry and laid-back tone, seems appropriate to the vast empty
space that is the setting of the Western. However, in Gunslinger the term
‘Western’ is ambivalent, taking on a multitude of interlinked meanings. It
signifies, alternatively or simultaneously: the wild West of the frontier; the film
genre taking its inspiration from that ‘wild West’; the relationship between
ontological and phenomenological Western philosophies; and the contemporary
Western world, distinguished from the East by its capitalism and materialism. In
Gunslinger, place is internal rather than external and the West functions as a
mental rather than a physical space. The poem undermines what it means to be
1
John Wright and Edward Dorn, ‘An Interview with Edward Dorn’, Chicago Review, 39
(1993), pp. 102-47, at pp. 38-39.
2
Christopher Beach, ‘Migrating Voices in the Poetry of Edward Dorn’, Contemporary
Literature, 32 (1991), pp. 211-28, at p. 205.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Western. It utilises the tropes of the traditional Western to examine Western
beliefs and values, but finds these empty and self-conscious, capable of holding
only relational meaning and indicative of a culture that has lost track of reality
and certainty.
Interpretations of the American West have been progressively stylised and
homogenised. Writing at the turn of the twentieth-century Frederick Jackson
Turner describes the frontier as variously: a ‘meeting point between savagery and
civilization’, ‘the line of most rapid and effective Americanisation’, ‘productive
of individualism’, ‘another name for opportunity’ and ‘a region of ideals’.3 This
depiction of the West as the epitome of American freedom and adventure is one
taken up by the Hollywood directors of the early 1900s. As a film genre, there is
an inherent artificiality in the ‘Western’. The genre communicates a series of
exact images, key signifiers anchored in a specific geographic and historic
location: dusty canyons, cacti, saloons, cattle, horses, buckskins, spurs, guns,
ropes and Stetsons. However, while the setting of the Western is evidently the
American South-West, its transformation into a fictionalised state renders it as a
place that both does and does not exist. It is an interpretation of a popular
interpretation. With the rise of the ‘Spaghetti Western’ in the ’60s, Westerns were
often shot in Southern Europe, creating a huge physical disparity between the
signifier and signified.4 As the Western established itself, these signifiers—cacti,
horses, etc.—were reduced to the status of simulacra, representing rather than
venturing to reproduce a real location. Dorn’s exploration of this act of reduction
is in accordance with the contemporary philosophy informing Gunslinger. Guy
Debord’s 1968 critique of consumer society The Society of the Spectacle argues
that ‘the current age prefers the sign to the thing signified’, obsessed with ‘the
3
Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of
the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays, with commentary by John Mack
Faragher (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 32-69.
4
Jordan Savage, ‘“What the Hell Is a Flowery Boundary Tree?” Gunslinger, All the
Pretty Horses and the Postmodern Western’, Journal of American Studies, 46 (2012), pp.
997-1008, at p. 999.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
spectacle’ a vast illusive commodifying force.5 Playing with this preference for
representation over reality, Dorn amalgamates the aesthetics of the Western with
what he dubs the ‘neo-wild West’.6 He defines this by the stagnation of the values
that Jackson Turner praises the old West for: ‘independence’ and ‘freedom from
corruption’.7 To Dorn: ‘The West is not a home [...] No one is at home here. And
the man who claims he is, by whatever device, has the saddest project of all to
prove it’.8 As the Western states were colonized by claims on land, the word here
implies the falsity inherent in Dorn’s feelings towards the West. As Marjorie
Perloff suggests in her ‘Introduction to Gunslinger’, his interest in the Western
landscape is an interest in the success of its contrivance as a wide-reaching myth.9
The archetypal images of the Western provide Book I of Gunslinger with a
clear sense of cultural location. The opening scene includes a quest, a saloon, a
gun, a horse and a cowboy, although the quest is somewhat unusual: the
characters are on a journey to find super-rich business tycoon and filmmaker
Howard Hughes. The reader is instantly lulled into security by the poem’s first
lines: ‘I met in Mesilla | The Cautious Gunslinger | of impeccable personal
smoothness’.10 The purpose is evidently introductory and the controlled metre,
combined with the immediate invocation of both the first person and a location, is
resonant of a cowboy ballad. The first image of the Slinger himself is an
inscrutable one, devoid of any intent of realism. He is all surface: ‘personal
smoothness’ and ‘slender leather encased hands’ and stands as an emblem of the
Old West. Initially the characters are straightforwardly familiar: the Gunslinger,
his questioning side-kick and apparent narrator ‘I’, and Lil. Lil plays the role of
5
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York:
Zone Books, 1994), p. 4.
6
Dorn, The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau (New York: William Morrow
& Company, Inc., 1966), p. 24.
7
Ibid., p. 31.
8
Dorn, Views ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundations, 1980), p. 59.
9
Marjorie Perloff, Introduction to Gunslinger (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1989), p. vii.
10
Dorn, Gunslinger (London: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 3. Hereafter all references
will be to this edition.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
the quintessential saloon madam, speaking in a dialect overflowing with the
phrases of Western cliché: ‘Long time | no see | what brings you, who’s your
friend, | to these parts’ (p. 7). The Slinger himself could be seen as a warped
character from Hughes’ 1943 Western The Outlaw.11 Like Billy the Kid in The
Outlaw, the Slinger’s power comes partly from his impressive skills in combat:
‘what | you call in your innocence | “the draw” [...] that | shocks | the eye-sockets
of my detainers’ (p. 37). The Slinger is ironically distanced from the Western
cliché of “the draw”. His ‘draw’ is reduced to the cinematic: it ‘shocks’ the ‘eyesockets’ rather than causing actual damage. The Slinger‘s power is adapted to the
visually obsessed world he finds himself in.12 Within the stereotype of a Western,
characters are parts within a whole, working to display a particular message of
good winning against bad, frontier spirit and American strength. In fulfilling their
Western stereotypes, the group status of Gunslinger’s characters supersedes their
individuality, unified in a quest to find Hughes. But Gunslinger is a parody of
those messages. The group ironically become a mechanism to critique massconformity to a Western capitalist society. At the start of Book II their quest is
described as a tapestry where ‘…they who are in it move | and love its moving |
from sleep to Idea [...] To See | is their desire’ (p. 45). The Western genre
involves a tension between movement and stasis. The cowboy is an explorer of
new lands; he is on his horse and on the move. Yet, the plot is necessarily
permeated by stasis, the conventions of the genre do not allow for any change of
setting, the landscape is monotonous and ultimately, when the cowboy rides off
into the sunset, little has changed. Characters in Gunslinger move in a similar
way. They are constantly in transit and never reach their destination. Like
Debord’s spectacle, which is ‘essentially tautological’ and static, ‘the sun which
11
Sam Ladkin, ‘“as they wander estranged” Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger’, “the darkness
surrounds us”: American Poetry, spec. issue of Edinburgh Review, 114 (2005), pp. 59-95,
p. 77.
12
Debord notes that within the spectacle ‘truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the
highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness’. Debord, Society
of the Spectacle, p. 4.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
never sets on the empire of modern passivity’.13 The quest is still incomplete at
the end of the book, when the Slinger heads into the ‘ojo caliente’ (p. 200), the
hot eye of the sun.
Charles Olson, a professor at Black Mountain College where Dorn was a
student, influenced his writing significantly. In 1950, Olson published the essay
‘Projective Verse’, a plea for ‘open’, ‘high-energy’ poetry where ‘ONE
PERCEPTION [...] MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A
FURTHER PERCEPTION’.14 This element of ‘Projective Verse’ plays to the
picaresque nature of the Western and is one Dorn adopts: events are instantly
followed by seemingly unrelated events, as the characters encounter new
challenges and are placed in different situations. But these instances or
perceptions give way to one another with such rapidity that Gunslinger is not
traditionally episodic. The action of the poem pays little attention to the structures
of time. Although the Western is a genre driven by plot, which crudely enforces a
particular morality, the poem’s storyline is subordinate to the action around its
narration. Morality becomes an irrelevant human construct as the characters’
quest is gradually subsumed into and consumed by an evaluation of Western
thinking. Dorn explores the relationship between mind and body, knowing and
being, signifier and signified. Meaning in Gunslinger is relational, constantly
delayed or skewed. The generic signs of the Western are driven beyond their
established bounds. The artificiality of its tropes is demonstrated through the
insecurity of image, language and grammar.
The Western image is immediately subverted when, comically, a horse
walks into a bar. As his horse comes with the Slinger into the saloon, the
hierarchy of cowboy and loyal beast of burden is ruined and the expected
sequence of events confused. In his essay on ‘Gunslinger and the Postmodern
Western’, Jordan Savage argues that this action takes the ‘signifier out of context’
13
Ibid., p. 6.
Charles Olson, quoted by Richard Gray, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century
(London and New York: Longman, 1990), p. 279.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
and, the Slinger’s question ‘Is my horse a horse?’ (p. 17), necessitates ‘not that it
be accepted as part of an archetypal terrain, but rather that it be accurately and
immediately defined’.15 By forcing a definition on the horse outside its ordinary
setting and based on its own being, Dorn casts off the fallacy of inherent meaning
encouraged in the Western. The horse is no longer a relational signifier but a
whole entity.
The stable image of the Western is undermined by the open and mutable
language that creates it, allowing for a plurality of interpretations. Gunslinger is
extended into a philosophical discussion of meaning. Dorn writes in a jumble of
discourses from unexpected sources: a fusion of Elizabethan-sounding archaisms,
science fiction, adverts, rock songs, comic books and drug lingo. Each of these
types of discourse is reliant on the power of suggestion and necessitating
interpretation, riddled with puns and wordplay that generate surplus meaning
from apparent unmeaning. As in the literal understanding of the ‘A horse walks
into a bar’ joke, apparent metaphors are revealed to be factual descriptions, the
nature of reality is unstable.
The mutability of language allows alternative meanings, which transcend
time and space. The horse is pictured with ‘the texan’s hat on | a Stetson XX sorta
clockwise [...] you would split your levis and dropped your | beads to seen it’ (p.
13). The description is confused both by the image itself, of a horse in clothes,
and the double meanings of the words: the split ‘levis’ are jeans, but also genes,
with ‘XX’ representing homogametic sex chromosomes. Construed as such, the
passage is about genetic mutation suggestive of the nuclear missile testing that
was a feature of Dorn’s contemporary West, rather than the Old West. In
Gunslinger, the recognition of beings as words not only changes their state, it can
make them disappear completely. The Slinger’s mode of attack is description.
Subject to the Slinger’s power, a ‘Drifter’ (p. 25) is revealed to be ‘a plain,
unassorted white citizen’ (p. 28). In vocalising the entirety of the citizen’s identity
15
Savage, ‘“Flowery Boundary Tree”’, pp. 1006-07.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
in such simplistic terms, the Slinger has objectified him, trapped him within his
cameo role and written out any possible future or presence. With this device,
Gunslinger suggests that description and viewing are secondary to being. Any
attempt to describe or attribute meaning is shown up as futile and reductive.
The characters’ or reader’s understanding of the West is wholly
undermined. Dorn’s critique of ‘being’ in the film genre, the Western, forms a
wider critique of ‘being’ in Western philosophy as he uses Gunslinger to consider
Heideggerian discourse. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that
the evaluation and study of existence had become lost behind humanity’s
superficial desire for meaning and purpose: Western thinking has lost track of the
task of being and has become distorted.16 Heidegger’s philosophy undermines the
notion of fact or objective reality within the poem. Even Dorn’s use of grammar
undermines our perception of reality. When Lil says ‘My virtue is not presently on
the market [...] bad time of course | because I might be amused | to make it with a
horse’ (p. 170), ‘it’ seems a likely innuendo for sex. But the horse’s response
causes us to readjust that assumption, reducing ‘it’ from a definite act to a symbol
on the page: ‘Make It, Claude frownd | It aint nothing but a neuter pronoun.’ (p.
170). Once again, being trumps knowing. While the reader may think they ‘know’
what ‘it’ means, its purest existence is as a ‘neuter pronoun’. The trajectory of ‘I’
shows the value of being over knowing. In Book I, ‘I’ represents the last remnant
of a nagging and self-conscious ego, whose intellectual desires are treated as
oddly inappropriate. ‘What does this foregoing mean? | I asked’ (p. 28) is an
unacceptable question to the Slinger, for whom the interpretation of experience is
unnecessary: ‘Questioner, you got some strange obsessions, you want to know |
what something means after you’ve | seen it, after you’ve been there’ (p. 29). In
Book II, ‘I’ dies, no longer obsessed with internal ‘meaning’ he is able to occupy
the dual role of character and grammatical function: ‘I is dead, the poet said. |
16
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Modern Perennial
Classics, 2001), p. 8.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
That aint grammatical, Poet.’ (p. 56). To preserve him, the other characters pickle
‘I’ in acid belonging to a character named Kool Everything. This act enables ‘I’ to
contain ‘Everything’ (‘we stand before an original moment | in ontological
history’, p. 67) in an impressive achievement of both language and existence.
When ‘I’ returns, in Book IIII, he is able to grapple with the poem’s
wider philosophy and the way in which the ‘West’ in Gunslinger stands for
Western thinking. The effects of the LSD have enabled ‘I’ to understand the
American West as a state of mind rather than a physical place: ‘Entrapment is this
society’s | Sole activity, I whispered | and Only laughter, | can blow it to rags’ (p.
155). ‘I’ is no longer searching for meaning, but finds it in the seemingly
ridiculous ‘laughter’, puns and riddles that replace the perceived falsity of ‘the
spectacle’: mainstream consumerist language and thinking. Space and place are
shown as incidental and modified by the mental processes that attribute them with
‘meaning’. Place, as with all meaning, is a fabrication. As Savage contends:
‘Land is only land: it has no intrinsic values other than those which are assigned
to it externally, according to an artificially developed human code.’17 As location
is a human construct, the boundaries and towns of the West bear the same
proximity to reality as lines on a map do. The journey of the characters is only
apparently, rather than inherently, progressive and linear. Geography constitutes a
small fragment of history.
Even the historical setting of the Western, traditionally around the latter
half of the 19th century, is rendered artificial by Gunslinger. Despite Olson’s
belief in space as the core element in any portrayal of America, Dorn substitutes
its supremacy for that of time. 18 Early on, the Slinger asserts that ‘Time is more
fundamental than space’ (p. 5). Unlike space, time in Gunslinger is unequivocal;
it cannot be modified by perception. But it is still traversable. As a time-traveller,
17
Savage, p. 78.
Michael Davidson, ‘“To Eliminate the Draw”: Narrative and Language in Slinger’, in
Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), pp. 113-50, at p. 128.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
the Slinger’s notion of the cosmos is as a single entity, both time and space are
within his range. The mixture of discourses, which allow the narrative to take in
several time zones simultaneously, confuses the historical setting of the Western:
PROJECTIONS OF THE FUTURE BORE ME
Like back in Olde Towne & beyond
the Slinger spat
you know why everybody
in this state’s fat? (p. 124)
The Slinger moves from the capitals of the future, to the archaic spelling of the
past and on to a complaint about the present, in the course of a single sentence.
The narrative is not a physical journey, nor a chronological one, but a mental
journey.
Therefore, the Western motif must be understood more in terms of the
profound than the geographic. Despite the special attention he gives to the
frontier, Jackson Turner extends that, ‘American history has been in a large
degree the history of the colonization of the Great West’.19 Gunslinger ascribes
the characteristics of the Southwest not just to all of America, but to all of the
Western world. In Book III a goggled bi-plane pilot arrives, possibly a reminder
of Hughes, and refers to an ‘assay’ entitled ‘Western Man | or Imprudential
Behavior’ (p. 133). This elision of the West with a dangerous lack of caution
extends itself across the poem. In 1968 Nixon had been elected President; unalternative and conservative, he was a keen advocate of American capitalism. 20 In
Gunslinger the South West comes to stand for the corruption of capitalism, which
Dorn described as ‘one of the worst systems ever developed’.21 In a speech to the
poet, the Slinger unites all the reasons why the unfair ‘divisions of hunger’,
19
Jackson Turner, Rereading Jackson Turner, p. 31.
Gray, American Poetry, p. 277.
21
Wright, ‘Interview with Dorn’, p. 28.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
describing the sharing of resources, will bring about the end of the human race:
the ‘Stars’ of the media, the ‘Rotors’ of war and technology, the ‘Alarms’ of their
tedious routine and the ‘Prose’ that is acquiescent in this destruction (p. 121). The
Western world is false and greedy, no longer able to help those in need. In a close
echo of Heidegger’s belief that humanity has lost track of ‘being’, Debord
stresses the effects of capitalism in the ‘downgrading of being into having’.22 This
downgrading is literalised in Gunslinger, when Dr Flamboyant drives a ‘1976
Avocado’ (p. 166). He has transformed food, a necessity, into a capitalist luxury,
the car. The Slinger concludes his speech to the poet saying: ‘The Whole Set is
Sinking’. Implying a film set, the narrative evokes its cinematic background. The
governing system is depicted, once more, as a man-made façade, insufficient in
recognising real existence. Elsewhere Dorn subtly evokes the war in Vietnam.
The war is linked to the self-excusing immoral ways of the capitalist elite: ‘We’re
Scientists Al,’ Robart claims, ‘Sometimes/we have to do Things we hate | Things
that even sicken us’ (p. 152). Elsewhere the Slinger casually constructs an idea
for a film about ‘the war | in, well you know where the War is’ (p. 79). The
opposing East defines the West, and so the silent Vietnam War defines American
values. But the war is conveyed as a near fiction, its location is unspoken, and
Vietnam itself is never directly addressed. The war hints at the aggression of the
capitalist system and dissatisfaction with that system, its inability to acknowledge
and aid the oppositional and other.
In Gunslinger, capitalism is shallow, artificial and inhuman. Vegas, the
characters’ destination, is all spectacle, a ‘vast decoy’, ‘real, like a hunter’s duck’
(p. 169). Not only is it fake, it is deliberately so, acting as bait to lure people in.
Robert Venturi’s 1968 research project, famous for first using the term
‘postmodern’, iterates that space in Vegas is less important than spectacle: ‘it is
an architecture of communication over space [...] The message is basely
22
Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 7.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
commercial; the context is basically new’.23 Like Dorn’s ‘decoy’ Vegas, Venturi
implies a location based on commerce and imitation. The natural, ‘landscape’, is
hidden by the emphasis on abstract ‘communication’, modified by ‘meaning’
rather than ‘being’. Excitement, desire and spectacle replace actual existence,
Debord’s spectacle lies in the ‘world’s loss of unity’.24 Hughes too is a decoy: ‘He
aint never bin seen! | And he said You maybe oughta look for a bean | Under at
least three shells’ (p. 91). His ability to assume disguises, change names, buy up
entire cities or fly around the world enables him to resist location. One of
Hughes’ many hotels, the Landmark Hotel, had grounds holding replicas of
famous landmarks from around the world.25 In hiding there, Hughes was able to
play God, artificially creating and inhabiting a version of the real world, born
entirely out of capitalism. His money and status grant him excessive power to
separate himself and modify his environment: as Davidson writes, ‘For Dorn,
wealthy entrepreneurs [...] are the true Western demigods’.26 ‘The Cycle’ between
Books II and III is an extensive demonstration of Hughes’s mentality and the
workings of capitalist entrepreneurism. Within ‘The Cycle’ Hughes becomes a
figure referred to as ‘Robart’, a version of his middle name ‘Robard’,27 and an
ironic anagram of ‘trobar’, or conceivably a pun on robot.28 Dorn’s version of
Hughes/Robart is highly robotic in his systematic desire to eradicate differences
and impose a firm cultural order: ‘We’re gonna have Order | Even if we have to
inject it’ (p. 152). He avoids being fully discovered, mysteriously hiding behind
sunglasses: ‘His eyes flash inside the Amber’ (p. 97). The extent of
Hughes/Robart’s power negates conventional order: ‘There are not things there as
such | Material is not with the K detached | All is transhistorical, functions | Have
23
Venturi, quoted by Ladkin, ‘“as they wander estranged”’, p. 75.
Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 10.
25
Ladkin, ‘“as they wander estranged”’, p. 74.
26
Davidson, ‘“To Eliminate the Draw”’, p. 118.
27
Ibid., p. 121.
28
Robert von Hallberg, 'Edward Dorn: “This Marvellous Accidentalism”', Boundary
2, 9:2 (Winter, 1981), pp. 51-80, at p. 68.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
no date’ (p. 98). In his insistence that ‘all is transhistorical’, he enforces a fresh
perception on historic events. His mentality relies on a reversible timelessness,
possible without any real progression. He desires to modify time to the same
degree as he has modified space, hence in ‘The Cycle’ he is presented with a
Keatsian urn that ‘bears the inscription: EMIT NO TIME’ (p. 104). But Dorn
denies Hughes any satisfaction from this mentality with the ‘impudent’ second
carving in the urn: ‘MADE IN JAPAN’. The use of the past tense ‘made’ serves
as a clear indicator that the urn has its own history and creation is out of Hughes’
control. Dorn attacks Hughes’ rigid conformist capitalism with an older Western
belief coming from the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who, like Heidegger,
insisted on the unity of the knowing mind and the experiencing body. 29 The
superiority of this philosophy is demonstrated in both the tale of the reinvigorated
‘I’ and in the lack of reality in the West of Vegas or Hughes. While Parmenides
viewed objects as eternal and indestructible, Hughes’ power necessitates that
everything is a material commodity, capable of being owned and becoming
obsolescent.
Dorn’s Western is no epic. The heroic deeds are mental rather than
physical and it does little to celebrate the events it describes, as the epic expounds
to. Gunslinger is closer to an allegory. Places and people stand for ideas or are
merely illusions. When the characters reach the brazenly named ‘Universe City’,
they discover the old name for the town was ‘Truth or Consequences’ (p. 70).
Davidson notes that in the, supposedly, non-fictional, real America: ‘Truth or
Consequences, New Mexico (formerly Hot Springs), has given up its original
name in favor of the name of a TV quiz show’.30 This blend of media and
geography, reality and artifice epitomizes the hypocritical dualism of the West in
Gunslinger. As their existence is not valued, the ‘meaning’ of places is unfixed,
threatened by mass-media behaviorist thinking and, oddly, meaningless.
29
30
Ladkin, Society of the Spectacle, p. 68.
Davidson, ‘“To Eliminate the Draw”’, p. 118.
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THE WEST AND THE WESTERN IN EDWARD DORN'S GUNSLINGER
Before he rides away, figuratively and perhaps literally, into the sunset,
the Slinger offers some advice to I: ‘Goodbye I, keep your eye | on the local
species’ (p. 200). The ideas behind the poem are encapsulated in that line, the
over-thinking, mentally modifying ‘I’ has been transformed into the experiencing
‘eye’. In Gunslinger, the essence ascribed to the space of the West is a spectacle
and an illusion. The foundation of America and the Western are unveiled as
myths. Action and experience are valued over location, as knowing is subsidiary
to being. Being American requires a reinterpretation of history and exploration of
inherited geography as a space that existed before its realtors, unmediated by
capital. Despite its allegorical tendencies, Gunslinger is neither didactic nor
moralistic. It presents the faults and failures of Western society without analyzing
them. The flexibility allowed to meaning insists that, unlike a generic Western,
Gunslinger demonstrates the impossibility of presenting a single objective truth.
Instead Dorn enables the reader’s interpretation to stand, uncorrupted, as its own
testimony.
University of Bristol
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Dorn, Edward, Gunslinger (London: Duke University Press, 1989).
Secondary Works
Beach, Christopher, ‘Migrating Voices in the Poetry of Edward Dorn’,
Contemporary Literature, 32 (1991), 211-28.
Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New
York: Zone Books).
Dorn, Edward, The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau (New York:
William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1966).
- 32 -
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
—, Views, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundations, 1980).
Fredman, Stephen, Poet’s prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Foster, Thomas, ‘“Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos”: Edward
Dorn’s Multiculturalism’, Contemporary Literature, 38 (1996), 78-105.
Gray, Richard, American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (London and New
York: Longman, 1990).
Heidegger, Martin, Poetry, Language, Thought. (New York: Harper Modern
Perennial Classics, 2001).
Ladkin, Sam, ‘“as they wander estranged” Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger’, “the darkness
surrounds us”: American Poetry, spec. issue of Edinburgh Review, 114
(2005), 59-95.
Okada, Roy K. and Dorn, ‘An Interview with Edward Dorn’, Contemporary
Literature, 15 (1974), 297-314.
Savage, Jordan, ‘“What the Hell Is a Flowery Boundary Tree?” Gunslinger, All
the Pretty Horses and the Postmodern Western’, Journal of American
Studies, 46 (2012), 997-1008.
Steinhoff, Eric, ‘A Map of Locations’, Chicago Review, 49/50 (2004), 7-21.
Turner, Frederick Jackson, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The
Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays, with
commentary by John Mack Faragher (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1998).
Von
Hallberg,
Robert,
'Edward
Dorn:
“This
Marvellous
Accidentalism”', Boundary 2, 9:2 (Winter, 1981), 51-80.
Wesling, Donald, ed., Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Wright, John and Dorn, ‘An Interview with Edward Dorn’, Chicago Review, 39
(1993), 102-47.
- 33 -
JULIA ROTHCHILD
'A Great Deal of Unmapped Country Within
Us’:
Consciousness and the Environment in George Eliot's
Novels
'T
here is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would
have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and
storms.’1 Of George Eliot’s many and varied goals for literature,
perhaps her most enduring mission is to render realistically human
consciousness. She endeavors to explain the ‘gusts and storms’ of our minds, to
elucidate the basis of personality and how people make choices. She conceives of
her mission as that of a cartographer: confronted with the vast ‘unmapped
country’ of consciousness, she makes many specific observations of people’s
thoughts and actions, and combines them into a plot of mental territory. As an
entity of potentially infinite complexity, the mind presents the ultimate challenge
to the realist author’s powers of description. Eliot is not content to simplify; she
searches for mechanisms subtle enough to represent minds as they truly exist, in
in their full emotional convolution.
In order to portray abstract mental traits—a burst of tenderness towards
others in an otherwise self-centered person, for example—Eliot consistently
approaches the mind as if it were a place. She describes some minds as
landscapes or networks of roads; others are old houses or rocky, weedy seabeds.
Her descriptions recall Satan’s memorable declaration in Paradise Lost, ‘The
mind is its own place’.2 But whereas Milton’s evil protagonist insists on the
mind’s ability to remain unchanged no matter what the external circumstances,
1
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin Classics, 1995 [first pub. 1876]), p.
277.
2
John Milton, Paradise Lost (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005), I.254.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Eliot uses landscapes to represent the opposite: how minds are deeply affected by
the places in which they find themselves. Eliot’s achievement in creating what I
describe as ‘mental scenery’—places inside people’s heads—lies not just in
showing the essential features of consciousness, but in emphasizing how integral
our surroundings are to the make-up of our minds.
The simplest way Eliot uses places to depict mental traits is by direct
comparison. The minds of the three Meyrick sisters in Daniel Deronda are ‘like
mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that,
flights of steps and sudden outlooks’.3 By this spatial likeness Eliot provides an
abstract sense of the eccentricity and unusualness of these girls’ inner worlds.
More specifically, because the houses are ‘mediaeval’, we understand that their
characters have a touch of whimsy and picturesque intricacy. The comparison
emphasizes what has already been conveyed by other means about the Meyrick
girls’ appreciation for obscure knowledge about culture and history. It also
suggests what their personalities lack: attention to style, ostentation, refinement,
and grandeur.
Besides affording an abstract conception of the flavor of the Meyricks’
personalities, the comparison to a medieval house can be read like a map of the
mind, in which the elements of the house are the building blocks of thought. If the
house represents the brain as a whole, the ‘flights of steps’ that run throughout it
are the pathways in the brain, perhaps neural connections; the ‘unexpected
recesses’ are the highly developed areas, like expanded musical or artistic centers.
After their thoughts race along pathways and through interesting nooks and
crannies, the Meyrick girls arrive at ‘sudden outlooks’, from which they can see
far and wide. Eliot does not only describe the static materials that make up a
house; she evokes movement throughout it, ‘from this into that’, and thus
suggests the way in which thought travels through a mind. It moves not in straight
lines, nor by expected logical pathways, but spasmodically and circuitously;
3
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 197.
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
nevertheless, now and then, a grand sight materializes. Thus the house’s
architecture is a three-dimensional map of the multidimensional progressions and
meanderings of thoughts. Because Eliot’s comparison asserts no precise
correlation of mental feature to physical attribute, she avoids the pitfall of
oversimplification, and instead presents a stunningly subtle depiction of
consciousness.
In other instances of mental scenery, landscapes represent emotional
fluxes within a framework of personality, as opposed to the mind as a whole
entity. When the spoiled Gwendolen returns home after her family’s financial
ruin, she comforts her mother, exhibiting tenderness, generous resolution, and
self-confidence. ‘It was one of her best moments, and the fond mother, forgetting
everything below that tide-mark, looked at her with a sort of adoration.’ But ‘later
in the day there was an ebb; the old slippery rocks, the old weedy places
reappeared’.4 The seascape’s geographic features embody currents of personality
in Gwendolen, both admirable and less so. The rocks and weeds are her selfcenteredness and other undesirable characteristics. As weeds are rooted in the
ocean floor, these traits are embedded in her consciousness. Gwendolen’s
benevolence towards her mother arrives in the form of waves, and as it does so, it
obscures the substratum of egoism. But in Gwendolen altruism never stays for
long, for it cannot: forces of nature—the wind and the pull of the moon on the
tide—wash any good feeling back out to sea. Because of nature—which we might
understand to be her nature, or the set of traits she has inherited—the tide of
goodness cannot fail to rush outwards, leaving exposed the ugliness of her
underlying personality. Gwendolen’s selfishness is embedded in the most
fundamental substance of her consciousness, the bottom of her mental sea; it can
never be fully superseded by generosity.
The metaphor suggests that Gwendolen is dominated ultimately and
irrevocably by unfavorable traits. But Eliot tempers this cruel depiction, as she
4
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 230.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
nearly always does, with a surge of sympathy. First, goodness does exist in
Gwendolen, even if it is comparatively short-lived; her landscape is not a dry
beach, barren of waves. Second, it is not by any fault of hers that goodness seeps
out of her regularly; no effort, no matter how committed or concerted, can stop
the natural motion of the sea. Many of Gwendolen’s personality deficiencies have
arisen from sources beyond her control, and therefore she merits more
compassionate scrutiny. By injecting the seascape with Gwendolen’s emotions,
Eliot conveys not just her relative levels of altruism to egoism, but also suggests
how we might understand Gwendolen’s character as a function of external
factors, devoid of the agency she herself seeks.
Given the multi-layered insights about consciousness that Eliot’s
comparisons yield, it follows that only descriptions of the complex inner
workings of educated or high-thinking minds should demand spatial metaphors.
But mental scenery exists not only in people like Gwendolen and the Meyrick
girls, who have bright minds perhaps more intriguing than most; it is found in
people from many walks of life. The clergyman Mr. Farebrother’s generosity
makes ‘his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided
between natural grandeur and social slovenliness’.5 The musician Klesmer’s
‘personality, especially his way of glancing around him, immediately suggested
vast areas and a multitudinous audience, and probably they made the usual
scenery of his consciousness’.6 The malevolent Mr. Wakem’s motives ‘run in
fixed tracks’,7 as if they travel along a patch of furrowed land. The sensitive and
deformed Philip Wakem ‘felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air
of a northern spring’.8 The scenes Eliot uses vary from a swamp to a thorny
wilderness, from a tract of land to the waves of the sea. She uses descriptions of
5
Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [first pub. 1871-2]), p. 166.
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 482.
7
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [first pub. 1860]), p.
251.
8
Ibid., p. 166.
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
these places to illuminate the minds of a large range of people, from laborers and
elite socialites to musicians and doctors.
Applied to almost every kind of character that lives in her fiction, mental
scenery thus represents a commonality between people. What all scenery has in
common is what people’s minds have in common: not any particular surface
traits, but an element of fixedness, a substratum of stability. A landscape may
undergo erosion, ecological shift, or other radical change, but its basic topography
is never fully altered. Just so, the mind is almost never entirely remade; each
person contains a kernel of selfhood that is intractable. That is not to say that
humans may not change in substantial ways: just as a landscape might be
converted from a wild field into a garden by careful cultivation, minds may be
altered so that they are almost unrecognizable. Any mental transformation,
however, leaves the underlying soil essentially unaffected. In Eliot’s portrayal of
consciousness, elements of character can be restructured for better or worse, but
each mind begins at a fixed starting point. Minds undergo only incremental
change; mental development is never catastrophic. In this schema, no person has
unlimited potential; rather, people are constrained by a set of possibilities that
have been determined by something other than conscious choice.9
Eliot’s inquest into consciousness does not end at this doctrine of mental
determinism. Ever attentive to the motives that drive processes, she seeks to
further characterize the determinant of determinism: in other words, she seeks to
understand what forces determine the make-up of the mental substratum itself. If
any adult who displays generosity must have begun life with at least a certain
disposition towards that trait, what force determined the original level of
9
On the influence of Charles Darwin, George Henry Lewes, and especially Herbert
Spencer upon this apparent determinism in Eliot, see Jill L. Matus, ‘George Eliot and the
Sciences of Mind: The Silence that Lies on the Other Side of Roar’, in A Companion to
George Eliot, eds Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), pp.
457-70; and Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism,
Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
generosity? Why are some children born more selfish than others? What
determines the starting point of our personalities? To answer these questions,
Eliot turns again to the environment. While her narratives put forward a series of
interconnected causes of mental determinism, throughout her oeuvre she returns
to the same overarching explanation: landscapes mold our minds. Indeed, mental
scenery as described above is such a powerful representational tool for exposing
the vicissitudes of our thought precisely because those vicissitudes are governed
by external places, the scenes of our lives. Mapping minds onto places like a
medieval house or a seascape yields insight because minds are subject to the
sculpting power of such places.10 But it is insufficient still for Eliot, the great
follower of details, to conclude that minds are impacted by their physical
surroundings. Her quest is to fracture this declaration into its component pieces.
Using nuances in narrative style and voice, Eliot illuminates how places
may determine separate components of minds, including decision-making, moral
drive, and personality. In one instance of careful molding of narrative, Eliot
makes a rare foray into the first person in order to emphasize an important
juxtaposition of mind and place. When Mr. Tulliver rides into the countryside to
reclaim a loan he made to his brother-in-law Mr. Moss, he travels into the
economically depressed country along the ‘Basset lanes, with their deep ruts’.11
Eliot’s narrator, who has until that point remained in its typical philosophizing
third-person voice, steps in to give a personal account of the people of Basset:
If any one strongly impressed with the power of the human mind to triumph
over circumstances, will contend that the parishioners of Basset might
nevertheless have been a very superior class of people, I have nothing to
urge against that abstract proposition; I only know that, in point of fact, the
10
See Diana Postlethwaite discussion of Eliot's belief that the novelist cannot study
people apart from their environments. Postlethwaite, ‘George Eliot and Science’, The
Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Lewis Levine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 98-118.
11
Eliot, Mill on the Floss, p. 77.
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
Basset mind was in strict keeping with its circumstances. The muddy lanes,
green or clayey, that seemed to the unaccustomed eye to lead nowhere but
into each other, did really lead, with patience, to a distant high-road; but
there were many feet in Basset which they led more frequently to a centre
of dissipation, spoken of formally as the ‘Markis o’ Granby’, but among
intimates as ‘Dickison’s’.12
Eliot’s narrator bluntly disabuses the reader of any naïve notions about the power
of the human mind to rise above its surroundings. That is, the mind is constrained
by the shaping force of the environment. The idea that the people of Basset might
be psychologically unaffected by the material and moral poverty of their
surroundings is merely an ‘abstract proposition’; the truth is that they are unable
to ‘triumph over circumstances’. In the category of ‘circumstances’ that limit their
mental potential, Eliot includes both general economic hardship and the shabby
nature of the earth itself. The Basset lands are unkempt, ‘foul’, and unsightly.
Deeply rutted and mired in mud, the roads verge on impassable; to the
‘unaccustomed eye’, they in fact lead ‘nowhere but into each other’. Although the
Basset parishioners have become accustomed to their muddled landscape and do
know the route to the ‘high-road’, they choose instead the alternative path
towards ‘Dickison’s’, a place of depravity.
By juxtaposing a description of the Basset mind with one of the land it
inhabits, Eliot indicates that the landscape itself presents the parishioners with
their set of cognitive choices. The twisted lanes represent the decision-making
options open to them, and the muddiness of the Basset roads renders any choice
in some sense a poor one: no matter which road the parishioners take, they will
become mired in grime. Their land is a map of their psychological potential;
every connection in the jumbled neural network leads either towards a point of
immorality, or intersects with a path that ultimately ends there. Even through
higher ground is drawn on the map, and reaching that point is not impossible—in
12
Ibid., p. 78.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
fact, the parishioners know theoretically how to get there—raising one’s mind
above this decision tree embedded in one’s very earth requires ‘patience’ and
persistence in spite of significant obstacles and temptations. It should therefore be
no surprise that the Basset population remains on a moral low road, trapped in the
pitfalls of ‘pleasure-seeking’ and debt.13 There is a kind of reciprocal relationship
between mind and land: the mind is so shaped by the land that it cannot grow
beyond it; the land is embedded with and embodies the mind’s limited
possibilities.14
Further, Eliot argues not just that landscapes impose their characteristics
onto minds, but that the two are inextricable entities. In another instance of
narration intentionally sculpted to reveal consciousness, Eliot pays less explicit
attention to methods of decision-making and more to quirks of personality. She
uses a method that Gérard Genette describes as ‘focalization’, which refers to
narration that is focused through a single character, 15 to show how the personality
of Maggie’s insufferable aunt is indivisible from her surroundings:
Mrs Glegg had both a front and a back parlour in her excellent house at St
Ogg’s, so that she had two points of view from which she could observe the
weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her thankfulness for her own
exceptional strength of mind. From her front windows she could look down
the Tofton Road, leading out of St Ogg’s and note the growing tendency to
‘gadding about’ in the wives of men not retired from business, together with
a practice of wearing woven cotton stockings, which opened a dreary
prospect for the coming generation; and from her back windows she could
look down the pleasant garden and orchard which stretched to the river, and
13
Ibid., p. 79.
On Eliot’s metaphors and the mind’s embodiment, see Kay Young, Imagining Minds:
The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University
Press, 2010), pp. 96-118.
15
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980),
pp. 189-98.
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
observe the folly of Mr Glegg in spending his time among ‘them flowers
and vegetables’.16
On the face of it, this description of Mrs. Glegg’s small house in the town of St.
Ogg’s issues from the mouth of Eliot’s narrator, and not any specific character.
But what actually emerges is a synthesis of two viewpoints—the narrator’s and
Mrs. Glegg’s—combined by free indirect speech, that bears the traits of Genette's
‘focalization’. When Eliot directly quotes Mrs. Glegg—who expresses her
contempt for ‘gadding about’ and ‘them flowers and vegetables’—the woman’s
dismissive attitude towards chatting on the street and spending time in the garden
is conveyed in her own language. But most of the passage expresses Mrs. Glegg’s
self-satisfaction with her own abode using neither direct speech marked by
quotation marks, nor description explicitly focused on Mrs. Glegg’s thoughts.
Instead, her thoughts radiate through a description of her house. The
humble abode is described as ‘excellent’, but it is not objectively so; it is clear to
readers that this opinion lives in the mind of Mrs. Glegg, and is not shared by the
narrator. Just so, while technically the narrator states the woman’s own
‘exceptional strength of mind’, the assertion is plainly embedded in Mrs. Glegg’s
own inflated conception of herself. The idea that ‘woven cotton stockings’ might
indicate a ‘dreary prospect for the coming generation’ springs from Mrs. Glegg’s
own stiff traditionalism. Focalization’s most dramatic consequence in this
instance is the removed, ironic tone that calls into question the merits of Mrs.
Glegg’s personality. The narrator gently ridicules her unwarranted selfsatisfaction, her grandiose predictions about the doomed prospects of the youth,
and the false sense of superiority she displays by denigrating the time Mr. Glegg
spends in the garden studying flowers and insects as ‘folly’. Focalization enables
the narrator, positioned at an ironic distance, to reveal Mrs. Glegg’s faults.
16
Eliot, Mill on the Floss, pp. 119-20.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
A less overt product of Eliot’s chosen narrative technique here is the
merging of mind and place. In contrast to the preceding examples, in the passage
above Eliot neither maps mental characteristics onto geographic ones, nor maps
geographic features onto the mind. Instead, she suggests that to consider them as
separate entities that can be combined or not is not true to the nature of the world.
The focalization above generates a kind of reciprocity between Mrs. Glegg and
her abode: we view the house through the lens of the person, and the person
through the lens of her house. Thus Eliot ceases to treat landscape and mind as
two separate entities, one determined by the other, and instead displays them as
one-and-the-same. Mrs. Glegg’s egoism is wrapped up in the small ‘parlours’ of
her house, and her contempt for habits that are not her own is enveloped by the
view from her window. Mrs. Glegg and her abode are so deeply intertwined that it
seems one who viewed the house could divine Mrs. Glegg’s personality before
meeting her, and, conversely, one who knew her could predict the house’s
features before seeing it; to know one is to know the other. In her treatment of
minds as essentially inseparable from their surroundings, Eliot embeds in her
novels a doctrine of mental determinism. It is difficult to imagine a stronger
endorsement of the importance of the environment in determining our decisionmaking, our personalities, and core of our consciousness.
Eliot’s deterministic conception of the mind may ostensibly stain her
novels with pessimism. If consciousness is fixed from the start, human potential is
reduced to a series of predictable functions. Furthermore, unraveling the
vicissitudes of thought and fluxes of emotion loses its fascination. This attitude,
however, misinterprets the way in which determinism operates in Eliot’s fictional
worlds. To many characters, the landscapes that shaped them provide comfort and
pleasure. Maggie Tulliver directs her walk to the ‘Red Deeps, rather than to any
other spot’ because of the memories of a childhood spent with Tom that are
embedded in that place.17 Mr. Tulliver loves the mill so deeply that he ‘felt that
17
Eliot, Mill on the Floss, p. 299.
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
the shape and colour of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was
good, because his growing senses had been fed on them’.18 The molding power of
environment also gives hope to the daunting project of coming to know others:
Rosamond Vincy hopes to understand her husband better—although she never
does—by seeing the ‘old spots’ and ‘everything [he was] used to’ as a child.19
Moreover, those characters lacking a connection to a particular place are deficient
in some intangible moral qualities.20 It is a ‘pity’ that Gwendolen did not grow up
at Offendene, because ‘a human life’ ‘should be well rooted in some spot of a
native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth’.21
In contrast to Milton’s Satan, who thinks he needs no home, humanity is
nourished on the familiar places that determine—and in some way become part
of—consciousness.
Apart from the defensibility of the power of place over mind as a source
of virtue, the crowning reason that determinism does not condemn Eliot’s novels
to gloom lies in her conception of exceptionality. The enchantment of a character
like Dorothea Brooke is that she is better than her circumstances; the appeal of
Gwendolen is our inability to know her mind by surveying her unremarkable
home. While it may be true that most of the world’s consciousness is dependent
on its surroundings, Eliot lovingly endows her protagonists with the rarity of
being in some respects exceptions to the rule.22 Maggie Tulliver’s capacity for
independent thought rises above her station; Dorothea Brooke’s ardent morality
perseveres despite the narrowness of Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda’s
sympathetic nature elevates him above his peers. No character is entirely immune
to the power of place, but here and there, a mind struggles to overcome its
18
Ibid., p. 263.
Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 334.
20
On the potential for localized childhood memories to shape identity and knowledge, see
Bruce Robbins, ‘The Cosmopolitan Eliot’, in Companion to Eliot, pp. 400-12.
21
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 22.
22
On Eliot’s creation of ‘category defiers’ and her refutation of ‘categorical thought’, see
Catherine Gallagher, ‘George Eliot: Immanent Victorian’, Representations, 90:1 (2005),
pp. 61-74.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
limitations. These are the minds that consume Eliot; this is the kind of
consciousness she admires. In her unerring commitment to painting a complete
picture of real life, in all its nuance and frustrating contradictoriness, Eliot is not
content to portray merely life’s rules; she must also show how they can be
broken.
Yale University
Bibliography
Primary sources
Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin Classics, 1995 [first pub.
1876]).
—, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [first pub. 1871-2]).
—, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 [first pub.
1860]).
Milton, John, Paradise Lost (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005).
Secondary Sources
Gallagher, Catherine, ‘George Eliot: Immanent Victorian’, Representations, 90.1
(2005), 61-74.
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Oxford: Blackwell,
1980).
Matus, Jill L., ‘George Eliot and the Sciences of Mind: The Silence that Lies on
the Other Side of Roar’, in A Companion to George Eliot, eds Amanda
Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), 457-70.
Paxton, Nancy L., George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism,
and the Reconstruction of Gender, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991).
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'A GREAT DEAL OF UNMAPPED COUNTRY WITHIN US'
Postlethwaite, Diana, ‘George Eliot and Science’, in The Cambridge Companion
to George Eliot, ed. George Lewis Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 98-118.
Robbins, Bruce. ‘The Cosmopolitan Eliot’, in Companion to Eliot, 400-12.
Young, Kay, Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy
(Columbus,
OH:
Ohio State
- 46 -
University Press,
2010),
96-118.
DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
INDIA HARRIS
Chiastic Ticks:
Narrative and Temporality in the Works of Lewis Carroll
and J. M. Barrie
‘“I
f you knew Time as well as I do […] you wouldn’t talk about
wasting it. It’s him.”’1 So proclaims the Hatter of Wonderland’s
tea-party, where time is transformed into a personified—and
easily offended—‘him’. Jerome Hamilton Buckley writes of
this transformation, observing that ‘whatever the gender, time presents its several
faces again and again throughout Victorian literature.’2 Almost fifty years after
the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, time continues to raise its
face in the form of an ambiguously gendered crocodile in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and
Wendy: the novel adaptation of his successful 1904 play.3 The crocodile’s
presence is marked by the constant ticking of its ingested clock, as it repeatedly
emerges throughout the plot. Originally introduced as female (‘we shall see for
whom she is looking presently’), the crocodile materialises sometimes as male
(‘“the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you”’) and is frequently referred to
with gender neutrality: ‘“It liked my arm so much, Smee, that it has followed me
ever since, from sea to sea and from land to land, licking its lips for the rest of
1
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass,
ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 63. All subsequent references
will be taken from this edition. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland will hereafter be
referred to as Wonderland or WL, and Alice Through the Looking-Glass will hereafter be
referred to as Looking-Glass or LG.
2
Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of
Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3.
3
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, ed. Peter
Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). All subsequent references will be
taken from this edition. Peter and Wendy will hereafter be referred to as PW, and Peter
Pan in Kensington Gardens will hereafter be referred to as KG.
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CHIASTIC TICKS
me.”’ Carroll’s anthropomorphism and Barrie’s gendered zoomorphism of time
4
are just two examples of the temporal transformation that is central to
Wonderland and Peter and Wendy. The ease with which time can adopt different
forms underpins the questions of temporality raised in both works, where, through
the processes of gender, linguistics, cognition, and narrative, experiences of time
become continually distorted and manipulated.
There is an inevitable relationship between time and narrative, because—
to use the distinction outlined by Paul Ricoeur—all fictional narratives are tales of
time, ‘inasmuch as the structural transformations that affect the situations and
characters take time.’5 However, Peter and Wendy and both Alice books are tales
about time, defined as books in which ‘it is the very experience of time that is at
stake in these structural transformations’ as time commands thematic
predominance.6 Mark Currie has observed the similarity between Ricoeur’s
critical stance and that of the Russian formalist and structuralist approach to
narrative in the mid-twentieth century.7 Proposing narratives to be about form,
language, structure, or even narrative itself, the Russian formalist movement
involved extracting the form of a work and perceiving it as content. This approach
is enlightening in the study of narrative structures and dynamics, as it
acknowledges and elucidates the extent to which form underwrites both the text’s
architecture, and its thematic concerns.
Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie challenge ideas of temporal and narrative
convention, and strive to subvert the learnt ideas of time that inform our
perceptions of narrative. Critically, narratives have commonly been associated
with clocks, notably in the work of theorists Frank Kermode and Peter Brooks. In
The Sense of an Ending (1966), Kermode equates the clock mechanism with the
4
Peter and Wendy, p. 116, p. 120, and p. 119. All emphases are my own.
Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 66.
6
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, p. 78.
7
Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 3.
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mechanisms of plot, using his extended metaphor of the sounds ‘tick’ and ‘tock’
to explain human perceptions of narrative temporality:
Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it
says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it,
make it talk out language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional
difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical
beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them
to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only
when it is organized. […] The fact that we call the second of the two related
sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer
organization and form on the temporal structure. The interval between the
two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration.
The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call plot, an
organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval
between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of the
sort that we need to humanize.8
Plot makes possible the organising of time through language, by providing the
framework of beginning, middle, and ending. In Telling Time (1996), Stuart
Sherman argues that narratives act like clocks in the sense that they tell and
transform time, although he believes there are limitations, namely that ‘a story
will not […] work well as a clock.’9 This functioning is arguably dependent on
form, and an exception to Sherman’s assertion would be narratives that
appropriate the rhetorical form of ‘chiasmus’. Etymologically linked to the Latin
word for ‘crossing’, the chiasmus is a linguistic technique in which syntactic
structures are reversed to create a parallelism. For example, ‘“Why, you might
just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
8
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 44-45.
9
Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form, 16601785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) , p. x.
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CHIASTIC TICKS
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is
the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”’ (WL, 61). The figure of chiasmus is, I wish
to argue, structurally adopted in what have previously been entitled ‘quest’
narratives. The quest narrative—as exemplified in Treasure Island (1883) and
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)—is conventional to children’s literature, as it
prevents books becoming too radical or ‘frightening.’10 It creates a safe narrative
space with a pre-determined ending, allowing the protagonist to leave and enact
adventures, although their inevitable return to safety is dictated by the underlying
chiasmus.
This proposed ‘chiastic narrative’ works curiously like a clock. From the
first tick of a novel’s beginning, the clock hands circle round, sometimes quickly
and sometimes slowly as the narrative discourse expands and contracts, but
always progressing forwards until resuming the position at which they started.
The ending may echo the beginning, but the influence of the intervening cycle
instills it with a difference. Although the minute and second hands—in one full
cycle of the clock-face—continue round and meet in the same place, the hour
hand will incrementally have shifted forwards, creating an ending that is ‘same
but different’ (although this ‘ending’ is both relative and temporary, as the clock
mechanism is infinite). Chiastic narratives always contain an underlying sense of
time; the reader knows in advance what the ending will be, and it is only a matter
of time before the clock hands swing back to where they started, and the
protagonist returns—albeit changed— to where his or her journey began. This
clocklike chiasmus can be sensed in Peter and Wendy and both Alice books,
where throughout the narratives it can be felt unfolding before circling back round
on itself, to end at its beginning.
Ideas of narrative and time are so closely associated through perception
and language that the distortion of one inevitably results in a distortion of the
other. Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie subvert our ideas of time by offering
10
H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn., (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), p. 163.
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alternative, yet still logical, models of time that differ from our inherited
conception of time figured in ticks and tocks. Wonderland is a place of suspended
time; everybody is late, and yet time stands still. There is an absence of temporal
structure, and it is not until Looking-Glass that Carroll proposes the chess board
as an alternative method of structuring time and narrative events. Barrie is less
radical with his substitutional models of time, and instead of introducing a new
temporal structure, he reverts back to the more primitive method of time
measurement that is ‘moons and suns’ (PW, 136). This antiquated method is
contrasted with ‘human time’ represented by the habits of the children, and the
constant ticking of the clock from within the crocodile.11 For Barrie, time
becomes something that is—quite literally—internalised, but ultimately
unreliable, as it eventually wears down.
Both authors demonstrate the instability and artificiality of time as a
concept, by linking temporality to narrative as something that is learnt, and not
innate or inherited. We learn about time through its embedment in language—
both thematically and in the construction of tense—and we learn about narrative
through the passing of time, as it is a developmental aspect of the mind. Many
writers have studied the formative influence of storytelling on young minds, and
particularly in relation to fairytales (being a form to which children are frequently
exposed from a very early age). In his essay ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), Walter
Benjamin expresses his belief that the fairytale is ‘to this day the first tutor of
children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.’12 He exalts the fairytale,
writing of the abandonment of ‘psychological shading’ within storytelling, and
arguing in favour of universal narratives and their formative influence upon the
mind:
11
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. McLaughlin and Pellauer, (London:
University of Chicago Press, 1990) , p. 3.
12
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), pp. 143-166, at p. 157.
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And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes
psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in
the memory of the listener; the more completely the story is integrated into
the latter’s own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to
someone else someday, sooner or later.13
J. M. Barrie figures this ‘place’ in memory as quite literal, transforming the
child’s mind into a layered palimpsest of dynamic maps that the mother can
‘travel’ through. He lists typical features found in the cartography of the child’s
mind, explaining that ‘either these are part of the island or they are another map
showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand
still’ (PW, 74). This list contains archetypal fairytale images, such as ‘princes
with six older brothers’ and ‘one very small old lady with a hooked nose’ (PW,
74). Fairytale characters are evidently such an important aspect of the child’s
dynamic learning mind that they occupy a physical ‘place’ and become a feature
of mental cartography, and in Wonderland Alice uses fairytales to comprehend
her experiences: ‘“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing
never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!”’ (WL, 33). Alice is
here using ‘in the middle’ in its common idiomatic sense, to convey her
involvement in the fairytale plot. However, as an idiom it also conveys a sense of
structural placement in narrative, being the second of the three temporal
categories imposed on narrative: beginning, middle, and ending.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the fairytale is the predictability of
the traditionally structured beginning and ending, where for most children the
resulting ‘happily ever after’ will be known from the first four words: ‘Once upon
a time.’ In other words, the tock will be known from the very first tick. Children
quickly become familiar with these conventions, and Barrie uses Peter Pan as a
fictional example of a child with little formative narrative experience, which thus
13
Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 149.
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makes him incapable of predicting the ending of the fairytale that initially draws
him to the Darling’s house:
‘O Wendy, your mother was telling you such a lovely story.’
‘Which story was it?’
‘About the prince who couldn’t find the lady who wore the glass slipper.’
‘Peter,’ said Wendy excitedly, ‘that was Cinderella, and he found her, and
they lived happily ever after.’ (PW, 96)
Upon learning the ending, Peter instantly attempts to leave and share it with the
lost boys, because ‘I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys know any
stories.’ (PW, 96). To use a term that is imperfect, but currently accepted as being
the most sufficient (having replaced ‘story skeleton’, ‘canonical story’, and
‘archetype’), it can be observed that knowledge of ‘masterplots’ becomes,
through time, an increasingly fixed element of the mind’s cartography.14
However, Barrie demonstrates the instability of this knowledge, and also its
dependence on time. ‘Masterplot’ refers to a certain skeletal structure that appears
in stories told repeatedly in myriad forms, and universally recognisable
masterplots include ‘quest’, ‘revenge’, and ‘tragedy’. The story of Cinderella,
with its recognisable patterning of ‘neglect, injustice, rebirth, and reward’, is also
a masterplot.15 The memory loss of the lost boys means that any previously
possessed narrative, or masterplot, awareness has elapsed upon arriving in the
Neverland, and thus—unable to predict it—they wait to be told the ending of
Cinderella. Similarly, as soon as Wendy, John, and Michael enter the quest world
of disrupted time, their narrative knowledge begins to fade.
Wendy is the only character to retain her assuredness of their quest
ending, with its chiastic structure, although this belief does not remain intact, and
she too begins to forget. Michael is too young to have acquired much narrative
14
15
Abbott, Introduction to Narrative, p. 47.
Abbott, Introduction to Narrative, p. 46.
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CHIASTIC TICKS
awareness, and so it quickly fades from his mind, while John has a little more
understanding, as is perhaps suggested in his belief that ‘all they had to do was go
straight on, for the world was round, and so in time they must come back to their
own window.’ (PW, 104). John can initially recognise that to progress cyclically
means eventually travelling backwards, although he soon forgets this. Having the
most unwavering knowledge of narrative dynamics means Wendy remains aware
of their eventual and inevitable departure from the Neverland. She encourages her
brothers to remember and ‘fix’ their beginnings more securely in their minds, as
she pre-empts the similitude between their beginning and ending:
Wendy did not really worry about her father and mother; she was absolutely
confident that they would always keep the window open for her to fly back
by, and this gave her complete ease of mind. What did disturb her at times
was that John remembered his parents vaguely only, as people he had once
known, while Michael was quite willing to believe that she was really his
mother […] she tried to fix the old life in their minds by setting them
examination papers on it, as like as possible to the ones she used to do at
school. (PW, 136)
The ‘examination papers’ support the notion that narrative understanding is
developed through reinforcement. Masterplot knowledge is learnt, but becomes
subject to fading away when in a place devoid of ‘human time’, indicating the
necessity of functioning time for retainment. However, despite their fading
knowledge of them, the masterplots themselves are still at work. Character
behaviour in Peter and Wendy demonstrates perfectly what Freud, in his short but
influential essay ‘Family Romances’ (1909), later calls the ‘commonest’ of
childhood ‘romances’ (where ‘romance’ is used in the sense of ‘daydreaming’).16
Speculating on the relationship between childhood fantasy and cultural fictions,
Freud explores a masterplot that recurs within a myriad of genres: the masterplot
16
Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London:
Penguin, 2003), p. 40.
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of displaced and replaced parents. Particularly ingrained in fairytales, this
masterplot entails the child’s fantasised ‘family romance’ providing an alternative
genealogy, and allowing them to make sense—through fiction—of their position
both in the world and in the familial structure. As indicated in the previous
quotation, Peter and Wendy become idolised substitute parents to the lost boys,
who become ‘quite willing to believe that she really was his mother’ (PW, 136).
Masterplots continue to function and dictate character behaviour, though the
children’s elapsed knowledge of these dynamics means they are unable to
recognise them, as they begin to internalise the world of the Neverland, and no
longer perceive their imagined familial dynamic to be fictional.
Another way in which Barrie proposes the learnt nature of temporality is
by exploring the process of child language acquisition, and specifically the
figuring of time within language. Time is linguistically comprehended through
tense, and Wendy’s deteriorating knowledge of narrative is exposed through her
altered use of it: ‘the questions were all written in the past tense. What was the
colour of Mother’s eyes, and so on. Wendy, you see, had been forgetting too.’
(PW, 137). Correct usage of tense is a linguistic feature that develops slowly in
children, and Barrie demonstrates his characters using it incorrectly. When
Michael first flies across the nursery, he screams ‘I flewed!’ (PW, 100), and
although in his misconjugation the past tense ‘flew’ is used accurately, Michael’s
overextension of rules concerning past-tense suffixes demonstrates his
developmental grasp of linguistic structures. The narrator later explains that
‘Neverland has again woke into life. We ought to use the pluperfect and say
wakened, but woke is better and was always used by Peter’ (PW, 112), indicating
that Peter’s knowledge of tense is also developmental. By exploring time through
the linguistics of child language acquisition, Barrie further argues that temporality
is learnt, just as language is learnt. Additionally, the word ‘as’ (‘just as language
is learnt’) is significant here in its declarations of temporality: these are processes
that occur simultaneously, as well as analogically.
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Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s work concerning narrative universality,
Peter Brooks links the processes of narrative assimilation and construction,
claiming:
The desire and the competence to tell stories also reach back to an early
stage in the individual’s development, to about the age of three, when a
child begins to show the ability to put together a narrative in coherent
fashion and especially the capacity to recognize narratives, to judge their
well-formedness. Children quickly become virtual Aristotelians, insisting
upon any storyteller’s observation of the “rules,” upon proper beginnings,
middles, and particularly ends.17
Alice takes to Wonderland several learnt ‘rules’ of narrative, particularly in
relation to ‘proper ends’. Knowing that every beginning has an inevitable
conclusion, she searches for endings when she is denied them, recognising that to
ask a riddle is to enter into a contract in which it is expected that the answer will
later be provided:
‘I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles–I believe I can guess that,’ she
added aloud.
‘Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?’ said the
March Hare.
‘Exactly so,’ said Alice. (WL, 61)
Alice is unused to unfinished narratives, and continues to hope that they will be
completed: ‘she again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and she
looked up eagerly, half hoping that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was
coming back to finish his story.’ (WL, 30). Although she is aware of this
convention of inevitable endings, she remains unaware of the chiastic narrative
17
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press), p. 3.
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she is caught in, worrying that she may never return home (WL, 30). Lewis
Carroll disrupts narrative convention to a greater extent in Looking-Glass, in
order to demonstrate Alice’s newly developed awareness, and continues to place
the typical ending—the return to the childhood home—at the beginning of the
novel. Alice’s premature return foreshadows Freud’s anecdotal description in
‘The Uncanny’ (1919) of the ‘unintentional return’, whereby accidentally and
repeatedly returning to the same location ‘by a different route’ evokes a ‘feeling
of helplessness, the […] same as the uncanny.’18 In a scene of startling similarity,
Alice continues to take different routes that all lead back to where she began:
‘Well, this turn goes to the hill, I suppose – no, it doesn’t! This goes straight
back to the house! Well then, I’ll try it the other way.’
And so she did: wandering up and down, and trying turn after turn, but
always coming back to the house, do what she would. (LG, 137)
Alice displays her knowledge of ‘the return’ and its significations in her
recognition of the relationship between place and plot, exclaiming ‘“I’m not
going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again—
back into the old room—and there’d be an end of all my adventures!”’ (LG, 137).
Lewis Carroll distorts narrative convention in order to demonstrate,
through Alice’s responses, that temporal knowledge is acquired, and he
consistently disrupts her learnt ‘rules’ of language in order to unsettle time. He
undermines the human perception of time by exposing the inadequacy of
language as a container, as it allows time to become destabilised within it.
Language in Wonderland is fluid and malleable, and the repeated instances of
punning, or ‘paronomasia’, act as a foundation for misinterpretation by exposing
the multiple levels of meaning present within a word. These misinterpretations
can have alarmingly serious consequences, as discovered by the Hatter during his
performance for the Queen:
18
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. McLintock, p. 144.
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‘I’d hardly finished the first verse,’ said the Hatter, ‘when the Queen
bawled out “He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!”’
‘How dreadfully savage!’ exclaimed Alice. (WL, 64)
Playing with the idiomatic sense of ‘killing time’, Carroll replaces it with the
more violent ‘murdering time’, and Alice’s response is interesting in light of the
Victorian notion of ‘savagery’, which implied being located beyond the
boundaries of civilisation. The murdering of time is ‘savage’ in the sense that
‘savagery’ connotes a form of otherness that is without education, and it is
potentially this lack of temporal learnedness—which Barrie has already
demonstrated to be important—that allows Time to be murdered. In Wonderland,
language becomes unreliable, as Alice realises every time she is prompted to
recite verse, only to discover that ‘the words did not come the same as they used
to do’ (WL, 19). Time is expected to be regular, and yet it is comprehended
through language, which runs in accordance to its own variable and incomplete
laws. Carroll appears to be arguing that if the lexical container of time can be so
drastically unsettled, then surely time itself is equally unstable, and not as fixed as
we perceive it to be. Wonderland is a place of timelessness, where time can be
paused with ease, putting it—to use Kermode’s term—perpetually ‘in the
middest’.19 Carroll keeps elements suspended through his rejection of endings,
making Wonderland a place of endless beginnings and impossible conclusions.
Conversations are abruptly cut off, stories become aposiopetic, and questions or
riddles never receive an answer. Alice is constantly meeting characters—such as
the Dormouse and the Mock Turtle—who insist on telling her invariably
unfulfilled stories. For example, Alice’s paronomastic misinterpretation of ‘tail’
for ‘tale’ means that instead of ‘tailing off’ into a natural conclusion, the story is
abruptly ‘curtailed’: ‘“Please come back and finish your story!” Alice called after
19
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 8.
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it. And the others all joined in chorus “Yes, please do!” But the mouse only shook
its head impatiently, and walked a little quicker.’ (WL, 29).
Before
unsatisfactorily
ending,
lexical
misinterpretation
causes
conversations to circle linguistically ‘round and round’: a spatial pathway that is
echoed in the behaviour of characters in Wonderland and the Neverland, as both
worlds contain cyclical structures without apparent beginnings or endings. The
characters are in perpetual movement, although it is not a movement of
progression; they move in non-progressive patterns constrained by temporality. In
narrative terms, characters are enclosed in dilatory space, never looking
backwards or forwards to the tick and tock between which they are situated.
Examples of these structures include the ‘Caucus-race’ of Wonderland, which
involves its participants circulating a course that has no discernible beginning or
ending, and the movement of the Hatter’s tea-party:
‘It’s always six o’clock now.’ A bright idea came into Alice’s head. ‘Is that
the reason so many tea-things are put out here?’ she asked. ‘Yes, that’s it,’
said the Hatter with a sigh: ‘it’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash
the things in between the whiles.’ ‘Then you keep moving round, I
suppose?’ said Alice. ‘Exactly so,’ said the Hatter: ‘as the things get used
up.’ (WL, 64)
The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all participate in an endless teaparty, routinely moving around the table in the same direction. Their tea-party is
stuck in time, and time dominates conversation, both in the lamentation of the
Hatter’s broken watch, and in their discussion of the aforementioned
personification. The image of the three characters moving around the table is
spatially mechanistic, as if they are the physical embodiment of a clock, where
each character has become a hand on a clock-face that circulates round the space.
However, the fact that they all move together and at the same pace makes this an
image of a faulty clock, demonstrating the impossibility of normalised time in
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Wonderland. If the three characters are constrained by their mechanistic structure,
it instills more sense in their protests following Alice’s arrival (‘“No room! No
room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming’ (WL, 60)) as her presence
disrupts their existing arrangement.
The Neverland also offers unexplained resistance to the arrival of the
children (‘Nothing horrid was visible in the air, yet their progress had become
slow and laboured, exactly as if they were pushing their way through hostile
forces’ (PW, 106)), and the island becomes an almost cyclical pattern reminiscent
of Wonderland’s tea-party in its spatiotemporal patterning:
On this evening the chief forces of the island were disposed as follows. The
lost boys were out looking for Peter, the pirates were out looking for the
lost boys, the redskins were out looking for the pirates, and the beasts were
out looking for the redskins. They were going round and round the island,
but they did not meet because all were going at the same rate. (PW, 112)
As with the tea-party, this is an image of a faulty clock. Moving at the same pace
ensures that nobody ever reaches each other, with the exception of the crocodile
who ‘had passed the redskins, who were now on the trail of the other pirates’
(PW, 121). The crocodile is the only component of the structure that ever passes
anybody, and its characteristic ticking supplements the mechanistic image as it
becomes the ticking second-hand that circulates around the clock-face. A further
complication to this image of unified pace lies in the fact that a necessary line is
missing. The sustained anadiplosis ensures that the sentences and their syntactic
structures follow a logical progression, allowing the reader to trace the patterning
of movement, although to transform this into a perfectly cyclical image an extra
clause is required: ‘Peter was out looking for the beasts.’ This would complete the
circle of images, and although its inclusion would be narratively inaccurate—the
reader knows that Peter is not looking for the beasts—it is interesting that Barrie
sets up a seemingly circular image, only to let it unravel at the moment where
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Peter’s presence should complete it. This demonstrates Peter Pan’s inability to be
fitted into structures, and also indicates that attempts at recreating clock-time
cannot work in the Neverland, as this form of time is not the temporal structure
around which the island works.
In Looking-Glass, the chess board becomes the structure around which
time and narrative work, as the characters participate in a giant game of chess—
‘“I declare it’s marked out just like a large chess-board! […] It’s a great game of
chess that’s being played – all over the world”’ (LG, 144)—and progress towards
the ending in a series of ‘moves’ outlined in the book’s paratext. There is a sense
of predetermined movement to the game, and a familiarity to Alice’s encounters
with characters she recognises from existing narratives, where ‘the words of an
old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock’ (LG, 160).
Alice’s proleptic interaction with Humpty Dumpty implies that she has moved
backwards in time, and is thus able to foretell his inevitable fall, predicting the
King’s promise to ‘send all his horses and all his men’ as ‘it’s in a book’ (LG,
187). In what is potentially a reflection of Victorian cultural anxieties surrounding
degeneration (following the introduction of Darwinian thought), Looking-Glass is
concerned with the notion of backwardness. Characters have to run in order to
stay in the same place (‘“it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same
place”’(LG, 145)), memory runs forwards as well as backwards (‘“living
backwards […] always makes one a little giddy at first […] but there’s one great
advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways”’(LG, 175)), and Alice
becomes a pawn on the chess board: the only piece that can never move
backwards, until the moment of promotion at which she becomes queen.
Lewis Carroll uses backwardness, and all its absurdity, to affirm the
conventional correctness of a narrative structure that is always running forwards,
and narrative rules of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are explored by the ‘virtual Aristotelian’
Alice:20
20
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 3.
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“I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there’s the
room you can see through the glass — that’s just the same as our drawingroom, only the things go the other way […] the books are something like
out books, only the words go the wrong way.” (LG, 127)
Alice here makes a subtle distinction between ‘wrong’ and ‘other.’ The room’s
alterations are purely spatial—everything is reflected and thus inverted—and it
becomes ‘other.’ However, the inversion of narrative is ‘wrong’, which Alice
later supports with her discovery that ‘“if I hold it up to a glass, the words will go
the right way again”’ (LG, 134, my emphasis). Language contains a greater depth
of meaning than the room’s spatial layout, and so any distortion causing it to run
backwards—or in any way that deviates from its inherent structure—becomes
‘wrong’ in a book concerned with the disruption of narrative conventions.
Moving backwards is used to create both narrative and temporal
distortion. In writing the Neverland, Barrie reaches backwards to an antiquated
form of time measurement, where the temporal structure is that of nature: ‘it is
quite impossible to say how time does wear on in the Neverland, where it is
calculated by moons and suns, and there are ever so many more of them than on
the mainland.’ (PW, 136). Characters have an implied internal body clock running
in accordance to natural world, as seen in images such as ‘for that instant his time
was at noon’ (PW, 142), and adherence to clock-time has negative consequences,
as when Wendy chooses to let the children sleep instead of alerting them to
danger: ‘she thought you simply must stick to your rule about half an hour after
the midday meal. So though fear was upon her […] she would not waken them.’
(PW, 142). However, this naturalistic temporal structure is inconsistent, and there
remains a concern with the more anthropocentric form of time. The narrator
employs both methods of time measurement, and the temporality of the
Neverland ultimately echoes the nature of Peter Pan’s character in being
essentially ‘betwixt and between’ (KG, 17).
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The inconsistency and indefinability of time in the Neverland is used by
J. M. Barrie to expose the redundancy of linear time in a narrative that, owing to
its chiastic structure, has such a determined beginning and ending. He contrasts
the systematic ‘moves’ of Carroll’s Looking-glass world with Peter and Wendy’s
denial of a logical concatenation of events. Through the narrator’s character,
Barrie explores ideas of what Roland Barthes would later term ‘cardinal
functions’ and ‘catalyses’.21 In this distinction, cardinal functions act to connect
events and drive the story forwards, while catalyses are less necessary to the
progressive functioning of the plot. Cardinal moments determine how a plot’s
future will transpire, although in a chiastic narrative where the ending is predetermined by its very structure, cardinal events become insignificant, and the
book is free to run in accordance to catalyses. Barrie establishes supposedly
cardinal events, such as Captain Hook’s plan pertaining to the poisoned ‘“large
rich cake of a jolly thickness with green sugar on it”’: ‘“We will leave the cake on
the shore of the mermaids’ lagoon. These boys […] will find the cake and they
will gobble it up, because, having no mother, they don’t know how dangerous ’tis
to eat rich damp cake.”’ (PW, 121). However, these events later become
catalyses, serving little function in driving the plot forwards as they are
abruptly—and comically—dismissed as unimportant several chapters later:
‘always Wendy snatched it from the hands of her children, so that in time it lost
its succulence, and became as hard as a stone, and was used as a missile, and
Hook fell over it in the dark.’ (PW, 139). This polysyndetic dismissal is arguably
a consequence of form. In a non-chiastic narrative, events have a responsibility to
be pivotal, and to strive via cause and effect to create a logical ending. However,
the chiasmus ensures that the ending has already been created, and thus narrated
events are present simply to fill the temporal void that exists while the structural
21
Roland Barthes, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, trans. Lionel
Duisit, in Literary History, Vol. 6, On Narrative and Narratives (Winter 1975), pp. 247248.
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CHIASTIC TICKS
clock hands swing back around. Within the chiasmus, events do not have to be
cardinal, and can consequently be narrated at random, as demonstrated by the
Neverland’s narrator, as they toss a coin to determine which events to tell:
Which of these adventures shall we choose? The best way will be to toss for
it. I have tossed, and the lagoon has won. This almost makes one wish that
the gulch or the cake or Tink’s leaf had won. Of course I could do it again,
and make it best out of three; however, perhaps fairest to stick to the
lagoon. (PW, 139)
‘“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come
to the end: then stop.”’ (WL, 106). Conventionally, this is how narratives function,
though Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie both find endings problematic, as
demonstrated by the circular pathways present in their work. Although the
significance of temporality cannot be denied, efforts to summarise, or conclude,
any exploration of narrative and temporality are difficult, as both texts so actively
resist fixity. Many critics have attempted to comprehend the Neverland’s
temporality by attributing it to Peter Pan; he becomes ‘the form of time itself’ or
‘death itself’ and as such, an explanation is offered for ‘the riddle of his being.’
(PP, 153).22 Indeed, there is evidence for this interpretation in Peter and Wendy,
and in Peter Pan, the original play. His arrival is what brings the island back to
life (‘with the coming of Peter, who hates lethargy, they are all under way again:
if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething
with life’ (PP, 113)), and when scenes are suspended in time, only his word has
the power to release them:
22
'the form of time itself': Karen McGavock, ‘The Riddle of His Being: An Exploration of
Peter Pan’s Perpetually Altering State’, in J. M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ In and Out of Time:
A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. Donna R. White and C. Anita Tarr (Oxford: The
Scarecrow Press), p. 198; 'death itself': Sarah Gilead, ‘Magic Abjured: Closure in
Children’s Fantasy Fiction’, in Modern Language Association, 106/2 (Mar., 1991), pp.
277-292, at p. 286.
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The games on the rock and around it end so abruptly that several divers are
checked in the air. There they hang waiting for the word of command from
Peter. When they get it they strike the water simultaneously, and the rock is
at once as bare as if suddenly they had been blown off it. (PP, 119)
However, images such as this, and of the sun being ‘another of his servants’ (PP,
105), seem more suggestive of Peter being in control of time than of him being
‘time itself’, and a more productive approach to the character of Peter Pan is to
look ‘backwards’ to his mythical predecessors.
Wendy Darling and her brothers operate within a circular narrative that
adds a necessary time pressure to their experiences of the Neverland: eventually
they must return to the open window. This narrative structure is facilitated by
Peter, who acts as a catalyst, accompanying characters through the narrative
structure without ever experiencing it himself. Although Peter Pan facilitates the
chiasmus, the ‘quest’ is not the masterplot within which he belongs. His
masterplot is that of ‘tragedy’, to which he is linguistically connected through the
etymological root of ‘tragedy’: ‘he-goat song’,23 pertaining to Peter’s association
with the hybrid pipe-playing Greek God, Pan: ‘If you ask your mother whether
she knew about Peter Pan when she was a little girl, she will say, “Why, of course
I did, child”; and if you ask her whether he rode on a goat in those days, she will
say […] “certainly he did.”’ (KG, 12). In Barrie’s play Peter Pan, the association
is rendered materially through Peter’s pan-pipes, which figure most prominently
as he recognises the imminence of Wendy’s return home. As she recalls their
expectant parents, Peter ‘is by the fire making Pan’s pipes with his knife’ (PP,
133). Her attempts to coerce Peter into leaving with them only cause the pipes to
become ‘more riotous than ever’ as he resists her persuasions, ‘playing fairy
music on his pipes, the only music he knows.’ (PP, 133). Throughout their
supposed departure he remains distracted by music—‘You are quite safe now,
Wendy. Boys, good-bye. (He resumes his pipes)’—and speaks what he believes
23
'tragedy, n.', Oxford English Dictionary, last accessed 27 May 2016, <www.oed.com>.
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CHIASTIC TICKS
to be his last words to Wendy ‘through the pipes.’ (PP, 135). Materially, the pipes
function almost obsessively at the moment it becomes clear that Peter Pan must
remain in the Neverland, as if his musical association with Pan, and also tragedy,
is responsible for his inability to leave. Though he is etymologically destined for
tragedy, Barrie keeps Peter Pan suspended by enclosing him in a chiastic middle
to which he can never truly belong. Being atemporally constrained ensures that
Peter cannot fulfil his intended plot, just as he cannot grow up; the chiasmus
spatially acts as a container enclosed by oscillating events, and refuses
progression beyond either side. In contrast to the White Queen of Looking-Glass,
Peter’s memory cannot work forwards or backwards, because it cannot function
at all. He remains unable to identify either his surrounding structure, or the tragic
masterplot in which he should be placed.
However, even his association with tragedy is not fixed, as the scene from
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens continues: ‘Then if you ask your grandmother
whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a girl, she also says “Why, of
course I did, child,” but if you ask her whether he rode a goat in those days, she
says she never heard of his having a goat.’ (KG, 12). Though there is an
association between Peter Pan and tragedy, there is a temptation to overemphasise it, and forget that this association is not enduring, and does not
adequately account for his character. Ultimately, attempts to solve ‘the riddle of
his being’ are like attempts to solve riddles in Wonderland: impossible and
unproductive. His character defies fixed explanation, just as the story of Peter
Pan—in all its variously revised forms— possesses no fixed ending. There is
something undeniably tragic about the ending of Peter and Wendy, although the
source of this tragedy is greater than an etymological association with Greek
mythology. Sarah Gilead has defined the ending as ‘tragic ambiguity’: a
problematic form of ‘return’ resulting in loss and indeterminacy, rather than
productivity.24 In contrast to this form of return, the endings of Wonderland and
24
Gilead, ‘Magic Abjured’, p. 8.
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Looking-Glass possess a sense of certainty and closure, as they draw a clear
distinction between ‘dream’ and ‘reality.’ Wonderland is confined to the dream
segment, and Alice’s sister can only imagine Alice’s experiences by recreating
them in her own dream: ‘First she dreamed about little Alice herself […] and as
she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place around her became alive with
the strange creatures of her little sister’s dream.’ (WL, 110). Through
compartmentalisation, the Alice books resist tragedy, and the tragedy of Peter and
Wendy seems to derive from the text’s indeterminacy, and failure to distinguish
between the worlds of fantasy and reality. The Neverland is never dismissed, as
Wonderland is (‘“It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your
tea: it’s getting late.’” (WL, 110)) and never transformed into something didactic,
as in Looking-Glass, where emerging from the dream prompts Alice’s
philosophical speculation: ‘“let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. That is a
serious question […] it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of
my dream, of course—but then I was part of his dream, too!”’ (LG, 244). Despite
his attempts to resist closure elsewhere in the texts, Carroll ultimately creates a
productive ending, though Barrie refuses to do so. The ending of Peter and
Wendy does nothing to mediate the children’s fantastic adventures, and the
Neverland continues to exist in a world parallel to reality. Unlike Wonderland, or
the Looking-glass world, the Neverland resists any sense of closure. Barrie’s
structural rendition of the rhetorical chiasmus differs from Carroll’s, as it
suspends its eponymous protagonist in ‘tragic ambiguity’, circling around the
chiastic space without ever progressing towards the ‘happily ever after’ of the
quest narrative, or the destructive ending of tragedy. Defined by his intrinsic
ambiguity, Peter Pan exists as a product of form and structure; remaining
continually and atemporally in the Neverland, he ‘plays on and on till we wake
up’ (PP, 154).
Girton College, University of Cambridge
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Bibliography
Primary sources
Barrie, J. M., Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, ed. Peter
Hollindale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
—, Peter Pan and Other Plays, ed. Peter Hollindale and Michael Cordner
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Baum, L. Frank., The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ed. Susan Wolstenholme (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice Through the
Looking-Glass, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Oxford English Dictionary, last accessed 27 May 2016, <www.oed.com>.
Secondary sources
Barthes, Roland, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, trans.
Lionel Duisit, in New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, ‘On Narrative and
Narratives’ (Winter 1975), 237-272.
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938,
ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmung Jephcott and
Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143-166.
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Currie, Mark, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin,
2003).
Gilead, Sarah, ‘Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction’, in
Modern Language Association, 106/2 (March 1991), 277-93.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Hamilton Buckley, Jerome, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian
Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Oxford
University Press, 1967).
Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Porter Abbott, H., The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Sherman, Stuart, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and the English Diurnal Form,
1660-1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
White, Donna, R., and C. Anita Tarr, J. M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ In and Out of
Time: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2006).
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HANNAH PIERCY
Binding and Unbinding:
Fashioning Narrative in Medieval Romance
L
e texte est un tissu de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture.1
Roland Barthes’s famous claim is often translated as ‘[t]he text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’.2
However, the primary meaning of tissu is ‘cloth, fabric’, a semantic
undercurrent that draws upon the derivation of ‘text’ from the Latin textĕre, ‘to
weave’ (OED).3 The relationship between text and textile permeates medieval
rhetorical theory: Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova, for example, demands
[m]ateriam verbis veniat vestire poesis (‘[l]et the art of poetry come to clothe the
matter with words’).4 Yet the recognition of an affinity between text and clothing
in early literary contexts has been arguably underestimated. E. Burns, Nicole
Smith, and Andrea Denny-Brown have investigated the unstable and provocative
role of clothing in medieval literature, but their research has not explored the
theoretical resonance of costume.5 This article will unravel the ways in which
1
Roland Barthes, ‘La Mort de l’Auteur’, in Essais Critiques IV: Le Bruissement de la
Langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 61-67, at p. 65.
2
Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', in Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142-48, at p. 146. Text and textiles are paralleled elsewhere
in Barthes’s writing, for example in his description of textual structure as ‘“run” (like the
thread of a stocking)’, Image – Music – Text , p. 147.
3
See headword TISSU, in Collins Robert French-English, English-French Dictionary,
Unabridged / Le Robert & Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais, Anglais-Français,
Senior, eds Beryl T. Atkins, Alain Duval, Rosemary C. Milne et al (London: Collins,
1978), p. 664.
4
The Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine,
trans. and ed. E. Gallo (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 16, at l. 61; p. 17.
5
Nicole Smith, Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in
Late Medieval Literature (Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); E.
Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval French
Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Andrea Denny- 70 -
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medieval romance, with its particular focus on heraldry and sumptuous dress,
cultivates a self-conscious perspective through representations of clothing.
Sarah Kay argues that the analogy between clothing and literature
‘misleads if it is taken as suggesting that language covers “reality” as garments do
the body’, but her assessment of the body as ‘both hidden underneath, and yet
made socially legible by, its linguistic garb’ suggests that the relationship between
clothing and the body can approach the complex links between literary form and
content.6 Clothes reveal and conceal, express and contain. The clothed body
occupies a unique position between the individual and society, providing a means
by which one can (or, indeed, is socially impelled to) signify identity, gender, and
social status. Anxieties about ‘sartorial bodies’, Burns’s term for ‘the social
bodies formed from both fabric and flesh’,7 can be productively deployed to
explore the place of literary texts in the ‘intersection of individual fantasies, social
regulation, and ethical concerns’.8 As texts situated between French and English
culture and literature, twelfth-century Anglo-Norman lais add a further dimension
to this nexus of social meanings. Embodying the dynamism of the plurilingual
medieval society, where vernacular languages are ‘places of multiple but variable
contact between a wide range of linguistic, political and social cultures’,9 clothing
‘as a means whereby a work may draw attention to its own status as a cultural
representation’ is particularly active in these transitional texts.10 Beginning with
Amys e Amillyoun, I will suggest that this text reveals a consciousness of the
Brown, Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012).
6
Sarah Kay, ‘Flayed Skin as Objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de
Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles,
Clothwork, and other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), pp. 193-205, at p. 196.
7
Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 12.
8
Burns, ‘Introduction: Why Textiles Make a Difference’, in Medieval Fabrications, pp.
1-18, at p. 1.
9
Ardis Butterfield, ‘Rough Translation: Charles d'Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve’, in
Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, ed. Emma Campbell and
Robert Mills (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 204-25, at p. 210.
10
Kay, ‘Flayed Skin as Objet a’, p. 196.
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relationships between clothing, literature, and society, without realising the
implications of dress as a means for unravelling textual construction. Marie de
France and the Gawain-Poet, on the other hand, activate this further potentiality
of clothing. The perceived value of their work comes, I shall argue, partly from
the way that they self-consciously explore literary art by harnessing the dynamic
relationship between clothing and literature.
Centred upon the ease with which identity can be misrepresented by
changing one’s clothing, Amys e Amillyoun develops disguise, one of the most
frequent tropes in medieval romance, as a way of interrogating conceptions of
gender and identity. Clothing, as I will discuss in relation to Marie de France’s
Lais, has significant implications for gender. Dress does not simply demarcate
male or female sex: as Burns argues, the standard outfit of French courtly fashion
(the chemise, tunic, and mantle) ‘actually did little to distinguish women from
men’.11 Clothes and gender identity fashion each other, allowing writers to
explore the extent to which gender norms might be fabricated in the first place.
While Amys does not directly use clothing to unpick literary meaning in the same
way as the Lais or Sir Gawain, the text begins to break down both social and
literary constructions by employing disguise to question cultural assumptions.
Reading Amys alongside the Middle English Amis and Amiloun reveals
the special emphasis accorded to clothing by the Anglo-Norman text. In the
English version, the two men’s resemblance is not outlined until line eighty-five
and although they are strangely alike, the problem of differentiating them is
restricted to the observation that no-one ‘couþ say/ Ne knew’ which was which.12
In contrast, Amys invests its interests in their disturbing likeness from the
beginning.
11
Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 167.
Amis and Amiloun, ed. MacEdward Leach (London: Oxford University Press for the
Early English Text Society, 1937), ll. 94-95.
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De cors de visage bien resembleyent:
Si de une robe vestu estoient,
N’est home el mound qe les avisast
Qe l’un de l’autre desceverast.
E si furent de une estature,
De une forme e de une nature.13
(The two were so alike in face and body that, were they to dress in the same
clothes, no-one in the world seeing them would be able to tell them apart.
They also had the same height, shape and nature.)14
The Amys-Poet unravels our dependency on dress to signify identity, exposing its
inadequacy as a means of recognition. While the sumptuary laws of the fourteenth
century manifest the fear that clothing is not properly distinguishing social
identities, the twelfth-century Amys reveals the extent to which this concern
predates formal legislature.15 Clothing is already perceived as more disruptive
than the sumptuary laws’ concentration on social class later suggests, for in Amys,
identity itself is undermined. Amys and Amillyoun are fused and confused,
grouped together in the singular nouns [d]e cors de visage and jointly the subject
of each verb. Si de une robe vestu plays with the possibility that they might wear
a single outfit as if they were one person, rather than two identical robes. The
conditional construction frames the central problem posed by this text: if all that
distinguishes identity is clothing, why should it be impossible for two men to
have the same identity, or to exchange identity with their attire?
For clothing can, of course, be changed. This potential for transformation,
made more disturbing by the propensity of dress to conflate surface and
substance, changing one’s clothes and one’s identity (a concept inherent, of
13
Amys e Amillyoun, ed. Hideka Fukui (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1990), ll.
25-30. All subsequent references (in the Old French) will be taken from this edition.
14
‘Amis and Amilun’, in The Birth of Romance: An Anthology: Four Twelfth-Century
Anglo-Norman Romances, trans. Judith Weiss (London: Dent, 1992), pp. 159-78, at p.
159. All subsequent references (in translation) will be taken from this edition.
15
I accept Judith Weiss’s dating of the text. See ‘Introduction’, in The Birth of Romance,
pp. ix-xxxv, at p. xxix.
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course, in drama), similarly underlies Marie’s use of clothing to explore gendered
identity in the Lais. However, where ‘Lanval’ emphasises the potentially positive
aspects of self-fashioning, the focus upon disguise in Amys e Amillyoun associates
its sartorial changes with deceit, perhaps indicating the poet’s recognition of the
unease that might be provoked by the text’s homoerotic elements. When the two
men exchange clothing, their transaction of identity may be enabling on the level
of the plot, but the troubling potential of this exchange is also registered. As
Amillyoun says, quant nous averoms robes chaungé, | Donqe quideront de verité
| Qe vous seiez lour seignur (509-11; ‘when we have changed clothes, they will
truly think you are their lord’, p. 167): the two men resemble one another so
strongly that this disrupts verité itself. The implication that changing clothes can
threaten the ability to determine verité is borne out when [e] quiderount trestouz
pur voir | Qe ceo fuit lour dreit seignur (529-30, my emphasis; ‘they all thought,
without a doubt, he was their rightful lord’, p. 167). Again, the Middle English
version illuminates the disruptive connotations of the Anglo-Norman: although
Amis is recognised as ‘her lord, ywis’,16 this could suggest the strong belief of the
men rather than conveying the additional sense of ‘dreit’ as ‘rightful’.17 In Amys,
disguised identity is troubling because it disrupts verité, unravelling our
paradoxical dependence upon clothed appearance to expose truthful identity and
threatening to overthrow the means by which we ‘know’ others.
Amys has a vested interest in disrupting our means of reading others,
which inflects its sartorial unravelling in a different way to that of the Lais and Sir
Gawain: disguise as a way of breaking down divisive categories of knowing
furthers the text’s interest in the homoerotic. The marked ambivalence of Amys
towards opposite-sex romance is bound up in its representation of the men’s
sartorial and actual identities. By unravelling the categories through which we
16
Amis and Amiloun, l. 1151.
See headword DREIT in The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, gen. ed. William Rothwell
(London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1977-92). Online edition, under
revision since 2004. Last accessed 9 Nov. 2014 <http://www.anglo-norman.net/D/dreit>.
Hereafter AND is cited in parentheses.
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‘know’ others, Amys reveals the extent to which such categories are fabricated in
the first place, enabling the poet to refashion the bond between Amys and
Amillyoun as a relationship not constrained by socially-motivated classifications.
Because medieval ‘romances’ frequently do prioritise male bonds over malefemale relationships (Corinne Saunders, for example, argues that in the Morte
Darthur ‘the male fellowship of the Round Table seems conspicuously valued
above heterosexual desire’), Amys does not necessarily unsettle its generic
identity by presenting a homoerotic relationship.18 However, it does begin to
approach the unbinding of literary fabrication effected by the portrayals of dress
in the Lais and Sir Gawain, because the Amys-Poet fashions a framework of
opposite-sex relationships only to unpick this very construction. As Florie, the
most enthusiastic proponent of heterosexual love, deflates her feelings upon
marrying Amys, the text rewrites its own structure of heterosexuality.
[E]le respount moult simplement:
‘Tot soit a vostre talent!
Si vus me volez marier,
Jeo ne me deveroy pas corucer.’ (697-700)
(She replied very simply: ‘At your command, my lord! If you wish to give
me in marriage, I have no right to complain.’ p. 169)
There is no comparative moment to be found in the Middle English text and
although the Anglo-Norman poet might mark Florie’s response as made moult
simplement, its implications are far from simple. Undermining marriage at the
very moment of its fulfilment provides a contrast with romance narratives such as
Yvain. While Yvain and Gawain’s friendship conflicts with Yvain’s marital
loyalties, neither Yvain nor his lady voice criticism of heterosexual
18
Corinne Saunders, '"Greater Love Hath no Man": Friendship in Medieval English
Romance', in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature: The
Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2013), pp. 128-43, at pp. 134-35.
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19
relationships.
Amys constitutes a much more pervasive criticism of
heterosexuality, enabled by the way the text uses disguise. The identical
appearance of the two men, as I have argued, disrupts our conception of verité
and identity. In turn, this furthers the homoerotic aspects of their relationship, not
only because likeness of appearance mirrors likeness of sexuality to highlight
same-sex attraction, but by asking us to reconsider the ways in which we might
categorise others and therefore assume that we ‘know’ them. However, the men’s
resemblance also conceals the potentially troubling aspects of their relationship.
Their similar appearance could frame them as brothers or as each other’s double,
as indeed the Middle English text suggests by adding the detail that the two men
were ‘getyn in oo nyȝt’.20 Disguise in Amys is both enabling and concealing, on a
textual level as well as within the plot structure at which disguise normally
operates. It creates a framework within which homoerotic relationships can occur,
but it also encloses the potentially troubling nature of such relationships. The
entanglement of clothing and identity, heterosexuality and homoeroticism in
Amys demonstrates the potential of dress as a means for writers to unpick the
implications of socio-cultural pressures. While centred upon its specifically
homoerotic interests rather than the more self-reflexive deconstruction effected by
Marie and the Gawain-Poet, Amys e Amillyoun provides a powerful example of
how clothing can allow writers to wrestle with the fundamental problems of
knowing others and challenging social imperatives, problems with which
literature, to some extent, is always concerned.
Where Amys uses clothing primarily as a boundary that can be broken
down to further its interests in homoeroticism, Marie de France extends this
interrogation of clothing and social imperatives in ‘Bisclavret’ by exploring dress
as a topic in its own right. Even though (or perhaps because) Bisclavret’s
transformation is not a wholly traditional form of changing clothes, clothing is
19
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier Au Lion, Ou, Le Roman d’Yvain, ed. and trans. David
F. Hult (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994).
20
Amis and Amiloun, l. 40.
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central to this lai. The first question Bisclavret’s wife asks is [s]’il se despuille u
vet vestu (‘whether he undressed or remained clothed’).21 This seems a startlingly
illogical response to her husband’s story, but it opens the way for Marie to
interrogate the construction of human identity through clothing. Gloria Thomas
Gilmore rightly suggests that ‘[t]he text contrasts a pair of words that focus at last
on the textile itself [...] dras and despoille’.22 However, in focusing on the power
relationships of Bisclavret and his wife, Gilmore neglects the pointed opposition
provided by despuille and vestu in the lady’s first question. Despoiller can mean
‘to unclothe’, ‘to strip (of)’, ‘to deprive (of)’, ‘to divest (of office)’, ‘to lay oneself
bare’, or ‘to despoil, rob’ (AND). In contrast, vestir means ‘to wear’, ‘to provide
with clothing’, ‘to invest’, ‘to enclose’, ‘to be indicated or shown’, or ‘to become
operative’ or ‘valid’, tying a human being’s social role to clothing (AND).
Bisclavret’s return to human form further entwines social roles with human
nature: he labels this metamorphosis a revienc a meisun (96; ‘return home’, p.
69], embodying social and marital responsibilities in the meisun, which can refer
not only to the ‘house’ itself, but to the ‘members of a household’, the ‘family’
(AND). Bisclavret se despuille u vet vestu encapsulates the alternatives before
him, by exposing himself as a werewolf who se despuille, he is vulnerable to
despoilment at his wife’s hands, stripping away his social role as husband and
indeed, human being. In contrast, being a werewolf grants Bisclavret freedom
from constraint (note vestu as ‘to enclose’), removing the endowed social
responsibilities by which his human identity is made valid. Despuille and vestu
neatly encapsulate the problem of clothing in ‘Bisclavret’: it expresses the social
21
Marie de France, 'Bisclavret', in Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert, with an introduction and
bibliography by Glyn S. Burgess (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), pp. 49-57, at l.
69. All subsequent references will be taken from this edition. Line numbers of each lai are
given in parentheses. Translations, unless otherwise stated, are taken from The Lais of
Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby, 2nd edn (London: Penguin,
1999).
22
Gloria Thomas Gilmore, 'Marie de France's Bisclavret: What the Werewolf Will and
Will Not Wear', in Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress, eds D. Koslin and Janet
Snyder, pp. 67-84 , at p. 75.
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bonds that we need to have to be human, but in doing so it binds us with
responsibility, tying our identity to a codifiable social role.
But Marie also complicates the correlation between social roles and dress,
refuting the idea that clothing fixes identity by unravelling the opposition between
vestu and despuille. As Gilmore observes, the king’s relationship with Bisclavret
endows him with a social role even while he is dressed in the skin of a wolf.23
Instead of being outside the human community, [t]uz jurs entre les chevalers/ E
pres del rei se alout cuchier (176-77; ‘every day he would go to sleep between
the knights, close to the king’, my translation). Not only does Bisclavret retain
entente e sen (157; ‘understanding and intelligence’, p. 70], but the king gives the
wolf chierté (169), ‘value’ or meaning.24 When Bisclavret transforms into a social
human again— having ses dras reveste (285; ‘put on his clothing’, p. 72)—this
marks a return to his vested responsibilities. Yet his sartorial and social
reintegration had already begun with the granting of chierté (169). This reassesses
what it means to be a valued human being, as Bisclavret is accorded a meaningful
social identity without his human dress, unbinding the association between
externally signified status and human identity.
The equation of Bisclavret’s human identity with social responsibility is
further undermined by his final transformation, which takes place in the king’s
bedchamber. The potentially anti-social connotations of this setting, to which the
wolf is taken so that he will not suffer hunte (288; ‘shame’, AND) before the
court, are noted by Gilmore, who argues that Bisclavret cannot transform in front
of the king because ‘to dress in public would expose his nakedness as he shifted
back into human form’.25 However, the bedchamber acts not so much to protect
Bisclavret as to enclose him. It is not only the king, but Marie herself who has tuz
les hus sur lui ferma (294; ‘closed all the doors on the wolf’, p. 72). This sense of
enclosure also pervades Bisclavret’s first transformation, where he hides his
23
Ibid., p. 74.
See ‘Glossary’, in Lais, ed. Ewert, pp. 189-218, at p. 193. Hereafter cited as ‘Glossary’.
25
Gilmore, ‘What the Werewolf Will and Will Not Wear’, p. 78.
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clothes in la piere cruose e lee | Suz un buissun, dedenz cavee (93-94; ‘the broad
and hollow stone, dug out in the centre, under a bush’, my translation). We have
already questioned why the Amys-Poet might emphasise the disruption of verité in
his scenes of disguise: why, then, does Marie create enclosures for Bisclavret’s
transformations? Sealing off the scenes of metamorphosis suggests that
Bisclavret’s transformation itself is his dangerous state. Bisclavret does not pose a
threat because he is a werewolf: he represents a danger because his disguise does
not completely mask his identity. Like the disguise of Amys and Amillyoun, this
reveals that identity is not dependent on clothing. But in ‘Bisclavret’ Marie
assigns a priority to clothing’s significatory role, which means that the breakdown
in sartorial meaning becomes a danger to literary signification, shrouded over
even as it is perceived. Marie wraps up the implications not only with
metaphorical enclosures, but in the short form of a lai, which will swiftly move
on to the next tale, leaving questions unanswered and problems unresolved.
David Williams writes of the werewolf as an interruption to signification,
arguing that ‘[t]he werewolf’s return to human form seems to bring […] a new
perception that the body […] is a container somehow inadequate to the self’.26
However, while Marie demonstrates that neither Bisclavret’s clothed body nor his
animal fur wholly delimit his identity, ‘a new perception’ is not introduced at the
end of the lai. On the contrary, Marie re-establishes the system of reading others
through appearance which she had apparently unravelled by challenging our
expectations of a man in wolf’s clothing. Bisclavret’s wife is revealed as morally
ugly when he mutilates her and her children are thereafter bien cuneüz | [E] del
semblant e del visage (310-11; ‘recognisable by their appearance’, p. 72]. It is in
this sense that Bisclavret most truly constitutes an interruption of meaning.
Signification is disrupted only temporarily; he is restored to his clothed human
body and his wife’s misdeeds are reflected in her appearance. This realignment,
as I have suggested, occurs partly because of the interlacing of narrative and
26
David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval
Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), p. 125.
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sartorial reading. ‘Bisclavret’ is particularly concerned with the fashioning of
narrative: Bisclavret’s problems begin when s’aventure li cunta (61; ‘he told her
his story’, p. 69) and the effect upon his wife is that l’aventure se esfrea (99; ‘the
adventure frightened her’, my translation). Marie’s Lais often comment explicitly
on their own forms: ‘Guigemar’ begins by referring to contes ke jo sai verrais, |
Dunt li Bretun unt fait les lais (19-20; ‘stories which I know to be true and from
which the Bretons have composed their lays’, p. 43], while ‘Lanval’ announces
itself as [l]’aventure d’un autre lai, | Cum ele avient, vus cunterai (1-2; ‘the story
of another lay, which I shall recount to you just as it happened’, my translation].
‘Bisclavret’ extends this to engage actively with the process of literary making.
But while Marie questions the process of creating meaning, the lai becomes a
temporary disruption that binds fractured signification within its own symbolic
and formal enclosures, allowing codes of reading through appearance to be
reinscribed.
The ending of ‘Lanval’ offers open subversion in place of the halfshrouded meaning of ‘Bisclavret’, accompanying a sharper focus on how clothing
shapes gendered identity. ‘Lanval’ reveals Marie’s sophisticated deployment of
attire to address one of her most significant preoccupations, the construction of
gender roles through clothing. While Marie herself works without the modern
conception of gender developed by theorists such as Judith Butler, her role as a
writer—creating gendered identities with her texts—provides a perspective from
which gender can be seen as a construct.27 Working against the ‘vernacular
exempla and sermons’ that ‘often document a clerical concern with making
gender visible in clothes’, Marie’s view of gender as constructed by clothing
suggests it can be refashioned.28 This possibility is realised in the figure of
Lanval’s lady, who Burns argues is ‘[d]ressed elegantly as a courtly lady but
performing actions typically reserved for kings, lords, knights, and male
27
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
28
Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 3.
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However, it is the view of female attire as antithetical to knightly
behaviour that Marie unravels: Lanval’s lady is dressed in feminine fashion and
she appropriates the power of male actions, although her actions themselves are
not always those of a knight. Unlike Chestre’s Sir Launfal, which undermines the
lady’s power by ascribing it to her supernatural status (the garments she gives
Launfal turn black when he breaks his promise to her and she later magically
blinds Guinevere), Marie’s lady assumes status through her femininity, not in
spite of it.30 Nakedness, which, Burns notes, usually objectifies the desired female
figure of troubadour poetry for the ‘private pleasure’ of the male gaze, is crucially
inflected by the interplay between clothing and bare skin.31 When Lanval first
sees the lady, she is
[e]n sa chemise senglement.
Mut ot le cors bien fait e gent;
Un cher mantel de blanc hermine,
Covert de purpre alexandrine,
Ot pur le chaut sur li geté;
Tut ot descovert le costé,
Le vis, le col e la peitrine;
Plus ert blanche que flur d’espine. (99-106)
(clad only in her shift. Her body was well formed and handsome, and in
order to protect herself from the heat of the sun, she had cast about her a
costly mantle of white ermine covered with Alexandrian purple. Her side,
though, was uncovered, as well as her face, neck and breast; she was whiter
than the hawthorn blossom. p. 74)
29
Ibid., pp. 170-71.
Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal, ed. A. J. Bliss (London: Nelson and Sons, 1960).
31
Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 69. On the male gaze, see Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), pp. 14-30.
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Rather than describing her as undressed, Marie names an item of clothing that
reveals the lady’s nakedness, dressed in senglement a chemise, while an
extravagant mantle exposes her costé. In contrast to Burns’s proposition that the
typical lady of courtly romance is ‘fetishize[d] […] by describing clothed bodily
parts as if they were naked, or more commonly by burying female corporeality
beneath extravagant layers of luxurious dress’, this lady’s clothing accentuates
her nakedness instead of substituting for it.32 This diverts the sense of ‘fetish’
Burns discusses, challenging the dynamics of voyeurism by allowing the lady to
fashion her own sexuality.
The climax of the tale extends this refashioning of the lady, as she [s]un
mantel ad laissié chaeir, | Que meuz la puïssent veer (605-06; ‘let her cloak fall
so that they could see her better’, p. 81). While positioned as a sexual object
before the male gaze of the Arthurian court, the lady is also able to transcend this
role because she has constructed it herself. Burns’s discussion of female clothing
recalls a strand of postmodern feminism that acknowledges how the ‘very
accoutrements of femininity can produce a counterideology of resistance’: I
would argue this is applicable to the lady’s courtly dress and to her nakedness.33
Burns follows through the exploration of this theory in the work of social
historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who writes that
[m]uch of the social history of early America has been lost to us precisely
because women were expected to use needles rather than pens. Yet if
textiles are in one sense an emblem of women’s oppression, they have also
been an almost universal medium of female expression.34
The dichotomy Ulrich creates between the needle and the pen, textile and textual
expression is complicated in ‘Lanval’, for when clothes are represented in
32
Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, p. 70.
Ibid., p. 14.
34
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘Cloth, Clothing, and Early American Social History’, Dress,
18 (1991), pp. 39-48, at p. 40.
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literature, this dichotomy breaks down. Moreover, Marie’s pen creates a woman
who expresses herself through textiles and her own nakedness, moving from
object to self-constituting subject. Marie herself also performs a literary
refashioning, making the pen a medium for female expression in both the world
of the lai and the literary world of the author. This lady disrupts the hierarchies of
agency implicit in conventional portrayals of naked female bodies viewed by the
male lover-poet, as Marie unravels and challenges generic expectations, rewriting
the agency associated with tropes that are conventionally ‘an emblem of women’s
oppression’.35
Marie tightens her focus further upon the relationship between clothing
and gender in ‘Guigemar’, turning from broader literary conventions of clothed
and naked women in romance, to specific items of clothing that restrict or express
gendered roles. I would describe these ‘cultural regulators’—codifiers of human
activity and expression—as a function that is shared by literature. In ‘Guigemar’,
Marie selects items of clothing that function to bind and, through them, unravels
assumptions about how clothing might demarcate gender roles. The binding
function of the garments is stressed from the outset: when Guigemar [d]e sa
chemise estreitement | Sa plaie bende fermement (139-40; ‘bound his wound
firmly and tightly with his shirt’, p. 45), Marie emphasises estreitement and
fermement with the end half-rhyme. Similarly, when Guigemar’s lady ties the
knot in his shirt, the linguistic emphasis is again upon the knot as a bond rather
than as a token of purity. The end rhyme of plait (559) and seit (560) is
complemented by the frequency of knotting lexis in the surrounding line, with
desferat (561; ‘undo’, AND), despleer (562; ‘untie’, AND), plet (564; ‘knot’),36
and desfereit (565; ‘undo’, AND). Marie plays upon the semantic range of faire—
‘to do’ and ‘to make’ as well as to tie a knot—in a manner that is particularly
suggestive because the end rhyme between pleit and seit unites the knot with the
concept of being, binding together clothing and identity (AND). Both belt and
35
36
Ibid, p. 40.
‘Glossary’, p. 209.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
shirt are emphasised as items that bind, but their difference ought not to go
unnoticed: holding costume together is the purpose of a belt, while a shirt is not
normally associated with binding.
This discrepancy in the functions of these items suggests that the lovers’
bonds differ according to gender: the lady’s, [d]unt a sa char nue se ceint, | Par
mi le flanc aukes estreint (571-72; ‘which she would gird about her bare flesh and
draw tightly around her loins’, p. 50), is more explicitly regulatory than
Guigemar’s. This belt predates chastity belts, which Albrecht Classen
convincingly demonstrates were retrospectively ascribed to medieval misogyny
by their very inventors.37 However, while Classen may claim that this belt has
‘only allegorical meaning’, its constraining properties align it with the idea behind
the chastity belt, albeit not the actual mechanism.38 The belt is not strikingly
autresi (570; ‘similar’, p. 50) to Guigemar’s shirt: its effect upon the lady’s body
is made explicit with char (571; 'flesh', p. 50) and flanc (572; loins, p. 50), but the
relation between Guigemar’s shirt and body goes unmarked. This episode is
paralleled in ‘Elidüc’, where the eponymous hero takes up the position of
Guigemar’s lady as the lover donning a belt. In contrast to the emphasis on bodily
constraint associated with Guigemar’s lady, Elidüc is only remarked to have
placed the belt entur sei (410; ‘around himself’, my translation). But while the
lady’s constricting belt purports to regulate female sexuality, Marie also uses this
item to engage with the underlying paradox in contemporary clerical views of
belts, which ‘perceive constraining clothing as a symbol for an unbridled body
that is, or will become, uncontrollably sinful’.39 Although Smith suggests that
Marie reconfigures the belt to express restrained chastity, following the tension
between the dual functions of binding (constraining the body) and unbinding
37
Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
38
Ibid., p. 110.
39
Smith, Sartorial Strategies, p. 31.
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(revealing the body’s lack of restraint) exposes a more subversive reading. 40 For
this belt is not imposed by Guigemar, but is voluntarily adopted by the lady. He
accepts the knotted shirt
par tel covent
Que el le face seür de li
Par une ceinture autresi. (568-70)
(on the understanding that she would make a similar pledge to him, by
means of a belt, p. 50)
In contrast to Guigemar, the lady will don the belt herself when she chooses. This
alters the purportedly regulatory belt, turning a chastity device into a symbol of
chosen fidelity and revealing the lady as unbound (or free to bind herself) in the
very action of donning the belt.
This redeployment of restrictive garments to express female agency—
which subordinates male interests to its own desires—undergoes a further stage of
modification. When the lady undoes Guigemar’s shirt, he demands [l]essez mei
vostre cors veeir, | La ceinture dunt jeo vus ceins! (818-19; ‘let me see your body
and the belt with which I girded you’, p. 54), placing himself in the subject
position. It is easy to imagine that Guigemar did place the belt upon his lady,
despite her promise to se ceint (571; ‘gird herself’, my translation). However,
there is no mention of this and the narrative proceeds as [i]l la baisë, ataunt
remaint (576; ‘he kissed her and let the matter drop’, p. 50). This incongruity
opens up the question of how men might wish to construe their actions, with
Guigemar projecting himself as uninfluenced by female agency. But while
Guigemar attempts to regulate the lady’s agency, he is no less bound to her than
she to him. His dependency on her is revealed through linguistic slippages
40
Smith, ‘Marie de France: Guigemar and the Erotics of Tight Dress’, in Sartorial
Strategies, pp. 23-55.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
between plaie (113; ‘a wound’, AND), plait (559; ‘a knot’),41 and depleie (160; ‘to
undo’):42 Guigemar’s plaie is healed as he is bound by a plait, which cannot be
depleie except by the lady herself. The interplay of wounds, knots, and identity
contrasts with Guigemar’s reframing of the lady’s belt, where he attempts to elide
her individuality with her sartorial bond: he [n]el poeit creire fermement (814;
‘was not completely convinced’, p. 55) of her identity, until he was able to vostre
cors veeir, | La ceinture dunt jeo vus ceins! (818-19; ‘see your body and the belt
with which I girded you’, p. 54). Guigemar attempts to fix the belt’s meaning,
representing it as a device he imposes upon a woman whose identity is
constrained by this sartorial item. This act of reframing the belt is reminiscent of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the court effects an appropriation of
Gawain’s girdle as a badge of chivalric honour.
[A]lle the court als,
Laghen loude therat, and luflyly acorden
That lordes and ladis that longed to the Table,
Uche burne of the brotherhede, a bauderyk schulde have,
A bende abelef hym aboute, of a bryght grene,
And that, for sake of that segge, in swete to were.
For that was acorded the renoun of the Rounde Table.43
Yet while Gawain’s girdle has received continuous critical attention, the belt in
‘Guigemar’ is often glossed over, its meaning assumed to be transparent.44
In ‘Bisclavret’, I have suggested that Marie encourages the tendency to
wrap up significance in the short, enclosed form of a lai, binding her tale with a
formal and self-containing resolution. However, the way assumptions about
41
‘Glossary’, p. 209.
‘Glossary’, p. 196.
43
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Cleanness; Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson
(London: Dent, 1996), ll. 2513-19. All subsequent references are to this edition.
44
For a representative article on the ambiguity of the girdle, see Ralph Hanna III,
‘Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle’, Viator, 14 (1983), 289-302.
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reading lais have inflected scholarly approaches to such texts differently from
approaches to romance demands attention. While Sir Gawain also fashions a
formal sense of resolution—its return to ‘Brutus bokes’ (2523) aligning with the
structure of romance as ‘completing a circle, back to where it began, in a
symmetrical process that starts and ends in equilibrium’—few have been tempted
to allow this text to close off its ambiguities.45 Susan Crane, for example,
summarises the central interpretative problem posed by Gawain's return to court:
‘Are the courtiers overestimating Gawain’s success, carelessly laughing and
failing to recognize the spiritual fault […] Or are they rather underestimating
Gawain’s success, presumptuously adopting as their own this “pur token”?’46
When so few readers have been prepared to accept the court’s reframing of the
girdle, need we feel persuaded by Guigemar’s comparable reinscription of the
lady’s belt? ‘Guigemar’ behaves in a different way from Amys, ‘Lanval’, and
perhaps ‘Bisclavret’. While these texts are potentially problematic on a thematic
level, presenting homoerotic or female-dominated relationships, ‘Guigemar’, like
Sir Gawain, complicates its own textual fabric. I propose that we ought to read
not only Sir Gawain, but ‘Guigemar’ as a text that deliberately cultivates tension
and ambiguities. Like the enclosures of ‘Bisclavret’, the natural and architectural
landscapes of ‘Guigemar’ fashion a world of prisons and enclosures,
accompanied by a contrasting freedom when Guigemar embarks on his adventure
along a path [f]ors a la laundë (147; ‘into an open space’, p. 45). Paralleling the
binding belt and shirt, this symbolic landscape weaves a thematic and aesthetic
portrayal of restriction. This encourages the reader to reflect on Guigemar’s
attempts to fix meaning by imposing the regulatory function originally suggested
by the belt, locating binding at the heart of the text’s interest in gendered
relationships.
45
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of
Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 57.
46
Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the
Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 13435.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
While Marie’s exploration of bonds should not be underestimated, it is
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that most fully realises the potential of dress to
unravel literary meaning, using clothing to unpick the fabrication of romance
itself. Central to this is the immediate impetus fashioned by the Gawain-Poet’s
representations of dress. To an even greater extent than the tight clothing
portrayed in ‘Guigemar’, it is the focus upon garments specially invested with
contemporary significance that allows the poet to explore and unpick literary
construction so thoroughly.
The girdle’s instability has special significance because, like the belt in
‘Guigemar’, it ought to function to bind. But where critics such as Geraldine
Heng have observed the potency of the girdle as an object that ‘aptly lends itself
to a demonstration of the properties of the linguistic signifier’, few have
considered the extent to which the implications of binding in this text are revealed
not by the girdle itself, but by the passages which anticipate it.47 In the Green
Knight’s first appearance at court, the mane of his horse has ‘knottes ful mony |
Folden in wyth fildore aboute the fayre grene’ (188-89), ‘bounden bothe wyth a
bande of a bryght grene’ (192), while his axe ‘[a] lace lapped aboute, that louked
at the hede, | And so after the halme halched ful ofte,/ Wyth tryed tasseles therto
tacched innoghee’ (217-19). Both are related to the girdle by colour, but more
central is the sense of binding. The poet knots these descriptions with binding
lexis, as the ‘knots’ and ‘lace’ (later a referent for the girdle) are ‘folden’,
‘bounden’, ‘halched’, and ‘tacched’. By enforcing a sense of the girdle as bond
before it actually materialises, its unfixable significance is rendered all the more
problematic. But these early bonds also reveal an interlacing of sartorial and
textual knotting, through their self-conscious regard for the text’s audience. As
Helen Cooper remarks, Sir Gawain is ‘exceptional […] in that it changes almost
completely between a first and second reading’.48 A first-time reader cannot know
47
Geraldine Heng, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’,
PMLA, 106 (1991), pp. 500-14, at pp. 508-09.
48
Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 47.
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the significance of the stress upon binding, while subsequent readings render this
obvious. Heng, in her reading of knots as interpretative points of contention,
claims they appear ‘where the pressure of an investment speaks itself’: I want to
suggest that knots appear where the text ‘speaks itself’, or where the poet reveals
how he conceives of the text speaking.49 These early knots, uniting clothing,
binding, and reading, function in precisely this way by exposing how the GawainPoet creates his text for an audience, for whom these descriptions will take on
further significance on a second reading.
The girdle should not be considered in isolation, because it works
alongside other garments to reveal the poet’s interest in narrative construction.
Heng’s suggestion that ‘the specter of a knot coalesces […] where analysis
reading is to occur’ allows for interpretative difficulties that are symbolic rather
than actual knots.50 In this article I have argued that clothing is a knot through
which ‘socially attuned’ writers (a characteristic Stephen Knight attributes to the
Gawain-Poet) can unravel the cultural influences acting upon their literary
compositions.51 Sir Gawain’s fourteenth-century fashions have been viewed
largely as an attempt to reflect the audience’s contemporary environment,
recalling ‘the Cheshire contingent of the court of Richard II’ through the ‘material
culture of that court […] its silks and pearls, embroidered tapestries’.52 However,
the Gawain-Poet’s representations of dress have a deeper resonance than this, for
he weaves together portrayals of fashionable dress that are not only
contemporary, but are pervaded by specific topical anxieties. At the high point of
his indulgence in Bertilak’s castle, Gawain is depicted in lavish fourteenthcentury attire:
49
Heng, ‘Feminine Knots’, p. 509, my emphasis.
Ibid, p. 509.
51
Stephen Knight, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in Medieval
Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1986), pp. 99-122, at p. 119).
52
Sarah McNamer, ‘Feeling’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), pp. 241-57, at p. 254.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
[h]e were a bleaunt of blwe that bradde to the erthe;
His surkot semed hym wel that softe was forred,
And his hode of that ilke henged on his schulder—
Blande al of blaunner were bothe al aboute. (1928-31)
This detail provides a marked contrast to the later metrical romance ‘The Greene
Knight’, where the most specific description of Gawain’s attire is the reference to
his stirrups’ ‘silke of Ynd’.53 The Gawain-Poet, on the other hand, depicts the
very fashions with which contemporary society was most concerned. Gawain’s
long mantle and hood model the ‘superfluitee in lengthe of the forseide gownes’
condemned in Chaucer’s ‘Parson’s Tale’,54 while the wearing of furs was
regulated by a 1363 statute which allowed knights to wear neither ‘Gown furred
with Miniver nor of Ermins’.55 While this description of Gawain does not
condemn elaborate fashions, it is suggestively positioned before Gawain’s
deception of Bertilak, a particularly provocative moment because of the monetary
language Gawain employs. Urging ‘of the chepe no charg […] | As is pertly
payed the porchas that I aghte’ (1940-41) could awaken anxieties about the rise of
a middle class, whose potential to usurp aristocratic prerogatives and undermine
social distinctions may have been a source of apprehension for Sir Gawain’s
upper class readership. Indeed, these anxieties about the middle class’s potential
to destabilise the social hierarchy are evident in the sumptuary laws’ incomebased distinctions of permissible attire, decreeing that those who ‘have no Land
nor Rent to the Value of an Hundred Pounds by Year, shall not take nor wear
Cloth […] than within the Price of Four Marks and a Half the whole Cloth’.56 The
fashions of Sir Gawain do not merely recall the court of its readers, but arouse
53
‘The Greene Knight’, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn
(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), pp. 309-35, at l. 275.
54
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 287-327, at l. 419.
55
The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 1 (Burlington: TannerRitchie and the University of St
Andrews, 2007), p. 381.
56
Ibid., p. 380.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
specific social fears, over-investing the sartorial framework with meaning and
exposing the ways in which texts are inescapably fashioned by their contexts.
The same kind of specific detail harnessing contemporary fears is
specifically associated with binding during the Green Knight’s first appearance.
Smith observes that he wears ‘a short, tight jacket with hose clinging to his legs’,
a new fashion condemned by the clergy.57 But this tight garment is only one
aspect of constraint: the Green Knight’s hair also encloses him, ‘[t]hat half his
armes therunder were halched in the wyse | Of a kynges capados that closes his
swyre’ (185-86). This again recalls current fashions, sometimes so tight as to be
unpractical: Odile Blanc notes that men often needed help to don their closefitting jackets.58 Unpractical fashions were noted by contemporary authors in
sometimes extreme ways; Blanc cites the late thirteenth-century Grandes
Chroniques de France, which attributes the rout of the French troops to the
knights’ elaborate garments.59 The Green Knight’s hair also harnesses the fear
that fashionable clothing undermines social distinctions: suggestively likened to a
‘kynges capados’, it threatens to usurp royal status at the moment the Green
Knight challenges Arthur’s court. Through both Gawain and the Green Knight,
the poet creates a sartorial framework interlaced with topical anxieties. Sarah
McNamer claims that Sir Gawain’s contemporary setting ‘doubles the efficacy of
its own story even as it blurs the boundaries between performance and life’, but
the overtones of fourteenth-century life also unravel the text by exposing the
fourteenth-century poet.60 ‘The aim of such mirroring’ is not only to reflect the
audience’s culture, but to draw attention to the mirror itself, the means by which
the text refracts its own process of making meaning.61
57
Smith, Sartorial Strategies, p. 16.
Odile Blanc, ‘From Battlefield to Court: The Invention of Fashion in the Fourteenth
Century’, in Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress, pp. 157-72, at p. 161).
59
Ibid., p. 163.
60
McNamer, ‘Feeling’, p. 254.
61
Ibid., p. 254.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
This disruption aligns with ‘the subversion of the genre through the
disturbance of the moral and chivalric assumptions’ Sir Gawain has often been
considered to perform.62 While Cooper does not espouse this view, her
consideration of Sir Gawain’s generic affinities usefully argues that to show
Gawain sinning
risks compromising the highest secular and aristocratic ideologies of the
Middle Ages. Writers of romance very rarely, however, allow such stories
to suggest that those values are mere delusions. 63
Like Cooper, I do not wish to suggest that Sir Gawain bleakly empties romance
of meaning. However, this poem is extremely interested in the construction of its
own ‘delusions’, both within and beyond its sartorial representations. Compare
Bertilak’s castle to the tower in ‘Guigemar’: in place of [d]e vert marbre fu li
muralz (221; ‘the walls built of green marble’, my translation), the Gawain-Poet
creates a castle ‘pared out of papure’ (802). Highlighting literary construction,
this description subtly references its contemporary context, in which paper had
just been introduced for book production.64 While Marie de France writes with a
self-conscious awareness of both form and generic tropes, the Gawain-Poet’s
self-consciousness is of a different kind. This is, I would suggest, partly because
of his historical moment. With romance well-known in both French and the
English vernacular, generic conventions made possible not only ‘subtlety’, as
Cooper suggests, but deconstruction of generic signification.65 By weaving a
framework of clothing particularly invested with meaning and anxieties to create
a point of contact between the worlds within and outside the text, the Gawain-
62
Derek Pearsall, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in Enigma’, The Chaucer
Review, 46 (2011), 248-60, at pp. 249-50.
63
Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 370.
64
See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. 1 (Cambridge
University Press, 1980).
65
Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 14.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Poet heightens the stakes of his sartorial representations, enabling their ultimately
unfixable significance to unpick the fabric of his literary world.
Clothing in medieval romance is a locus for conflicting meanings,
harnessing the ambiguity provoked when dress is considered alongside human
agency, which attributes to it new and individual meanings. While the importance
of the girdle in Sir Gawain has long been acknowledged, clothing is fundamental
to understanding not only Sir Gawain, but the Lais and Amys e Amillyoun on a
much broader level. It is not just the symbolism of clothing within a text, but the
potential for an interaction between sartorial and textual fabrics, which makes
clothing so central to considerations of narrative construction. Although I have
addressed a small fragment of sartorial representations, these examples illustrate
what can be achieved when writers engage sensitively with contemporary issues,
generic conventions, and the means of fictional construction. Written two
centuries apart, these texts weave a complex pattern of binding and unravelling,
reaching ever deeper to interrogate the fabrics they carefully interlace. ‘[T]he art
of poetry’ does not only ‘clothe the matter with words’, but uses clothing to
undress both the matter and the manner of literary significance.66
Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge
Hannah wishes to acknowledge the support and advice provided by Dr Lucy Allen
during the original writing of this essay for an undergraduate dissertation.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Amis and Amiloun, ed. MacEdward Leach (London: EETS, 1937).
Amys e Amillyoun, ed. Hideka Fukui (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society,
1990).
66
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, p. 17.
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
The Anglo-Norman Dictionary, gen. ed. William Rothwell (London: Modern
Humanities Research Association, 1977-1992). Online edition, under
revision since 2004.
The Birth of Romance: An Anthology: Four Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman
Romances, ed. Judith Weiss (London: Dent, 1992).
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Dean Benson, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
Chestre, Thomas, Sir Launfal, ed. A. J. Bliss (London: Nelson and Sons, 1960).
Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier Au Lion, Ou, Le Roman d’Yvain, ed. and trans.
David F. Hult (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994).
Collins Robert French-English, English-French Dictionary, Unabridged / Le
Robert & Collins Dictionnaire Français-Anglais, Anglais-Français,
Senior, eds Beryl T.Atkins, Alain Duval, Rosemary C. Milne et al
(London: Collins, 1978).
Geoffrey of Vinsauf, The Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Its Sources in
Early Rhetorical Doctrine, ed. and trans. E. Gallo (The Hague: Mouton,
1971).
Hahn, Thomas, ed., Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales (Kalamazoo, MI:
Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).
Malory, Thomas, Complete Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971).
Marie de France, Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert, with an introduction and bibliography by
Glyn S. Burgess (London: Bristol Classical, 1995).
—, The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby,
(London: Penguin, 1999).
OED Online, gen. ed. John Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Online edition, under revision since 2008.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Pearl; Cleanness; Patience, ed. J. J. Anderson
(London: Dent, 1996).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
The Statutes of the Realm: Printed by Command of His Majesty King George the
Third, in Pursuance of an Address of the House of Commons of Great
Britain;
from Original Records and Authentic Manuscripts, 4 vols (Burlington:
TannerRitchie Publishing in collaboration with the Library and Information
Services of the University of St Andrews, 2007).
Secondary Sources
Barthes, Roland, 'La Mort de l'Auteur', in Essais Critiques IV: Le Bruissement de
la Langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 61-67.
—, 'The Death of the Author', in Image - Music - Text, trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana, 1977), 142-48.
Blanc, Odile, ‘From Battlefield to Court: The Invention of Fashion in the
Fourteenth Century’, in Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress:
Objects, Texts, Images, ed. Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Ellen Snyder
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 157-72.
Burns, E. Jane, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval
French Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002).
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1990).
Butterfield, Ardis, 'Rough Translation: Charles d'Orléans, Lydgate and Hoccleve’,
in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, ed. Emma
Campbell and Robert Mills (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 204-25.
Classen, Albrecht, The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Cooper, Helen, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from
Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
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BINDING AND UNBINDING
Crane, Susan, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the
Hundred Years War (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002).
Denny-Brown, Andrea, Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and
Late-Medieval England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press,
2012).
Gilmore, Gloria Thomas, 'Marie de France's Bisclavret: What the Werewolf Will
and Will Not Wear', in Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress:
Objects, Texts, Images, ed. Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Ellen Snyder
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 67-84.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols
(Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Hanawalt, Barbara, ‘Of Good and Ill Repute’: Gender and Social Control in
Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Hanna III, Ralph, ‘Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle’, Viator, 14
(1983), 289–302.
Heng, Geraldine, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight’, PMLA, 106 (1991), 500-14.
Kay, Sarah, ‘Flayed Skin as Objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume
de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine’, in Medieval Fabrications:
Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane
Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 193-205.
Knight, Stephen, 'The Social Function of the Middle English Romances', in
Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), 99-122.
Mann, Jill, ‘Price and Value in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Essays in
Criticism, 36 (1986), 294-318.
McNamer, Sarah, 'Feeling', in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 241-57.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural
Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 118.
Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009).
Pearsall, Derek, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: An Essay in Enigma’, The
Chaucer Review, 46 (2011), 248–60.
Phillips, Kim M., 'Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws',
Gender & History, 19 (2007), 22-42.
Piponnier, Françoise, and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline
Beamish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Saunders, Corinne, '"Greater Love Hath no Man": Friendship in Medieval English
Romance', in Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English
Literature: The Influence of Derek Brewer, ed. Charlotte Brewer and
Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 128-43.
Smith, Nicole Danielle, Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and
Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature (Notre Dame, IN.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, ‘Cloth, Clothing, and Early American Social History’,
Dress, 18 (1991), 39-48.
Williams, David, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval
Thought and Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996).
Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100c.1500, eds Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Carolyn Collette, Maryanne
Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter (Woodbridge:
York Medieval Press, 2009).
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REBECCA ROUGHAN
The Quest for the Epic
The Oxford Novel and Homer’s Odyssey
S
ylvia Plath, when describing the difference between poetry and a novel,
once remarked, ‘I feel that in a novel […] you can get in toothbrushes.’1
This may appear to be an unusual point of departure for a discussion of
epics, novels and their respective heroes, yet Plath’s distinction
highlights one of the key features of both: their scope. The scale of both genres
allows authors to cover with breadth and depth of large events and minor details.
Homer’s Odyssey presents a quest of ‘epic’ proportions, yet the hero is recognised
through a mark as subtle as a scar. The epic scope appears with even greater
freedom in the novel—Bakhtin’s ‘multi-generic genre’—one in which there is not
only space for scars, heroic battles and toothbrushes, but also for an intertextual
revitalisation of genre.2
The novel has a history of borrowing from epic. It also shares epic’s
heroic focus, usually a focus on the hero’s journey.3 Early epic journeys were
primarily geographical, yet the development of the novel saw the hero’s journey
become increasingly personal. Early novels such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
(1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) took the idea of the heroic Odyssean
quest and used it as an extended metaphor for changing perspective, using the
hero’s attained knowledge to attack a political system, rather than to present a
heroic ruler, as the Odyssey does.
The hero of the novel remains hugely indebted to the epic hero, yet even
these very first reworkings demonstrate this more psychological approach. The
1
Appears on Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath (audio CD) (London: British Library Publishing,
2010).
2
Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin and the Ideas of Their Time
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 151
3
Dean Miller,The Epic Hero (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2000).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
development of the epic novel also tended to exclude heroines: Barrett Browning
defined Aurora Leigh as a ‘novel-poem’, rejecting ‘the unrelentingly masculine
tradition of epic poetry’.4 The supposed masculinity of the form and the
exemplary masculine models of the valiant epic heroes made it a natural
framework for the early Oxford novel, especially given that the curriculum was so
heavily based around the classics. The ideals esteemed in epic also appear in the
early Oxford environment—sporting prowess and academic achievement
constituting masculine 'glory' (epic’s kleos).
The Oxford of the early Oxford novels (the mid-nineteenth century) was
one in which the ‘correct’ academic development of men was being interrogated.
The ‘Victorian complex which tied together liberal education, the concept of the
‘‘gentleman’’, the public schools […] and preference for ‘all-rounders’ over
specialists’ was championed by the ‘most influential figure’ of the day, Matthew
Arnold.5 The relationship between public schools and Oxford is welldocumented; the emphasis that public schooling placed on classical and athletic
education meant nineteenth century Oxford undergraduates were schooled with a
Homeric ideal of strength, wisdom, and gentlemanly conduct. It is unsurprising
then, that one of the earliest engagements with the Oxford-undergraduate-as-hero,
Arthur Clough’s narrative poem ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich’ (1848), takes
its metre directly from epic.
The development of the Oxford novel’s hero, from the championing of
Thomas Hughes’ earnest Tom Brown (1861),6 to the lampooning of Evelyn
Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather (1928),7 traces the same literary journey as epic itself
in the modern world: from heroic to mock-heroic. This is an epic journey,
4
Alison Case, ‘Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh’, Victorian Poetry, 29:1 (1991), pp.
17-32, at p. 17.
5
Robert D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 8-9.
6
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford (London: S. W. Partridge & Co., 1921).
Hereafter all references will be to this edition.
7
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (London: Penguin, 2003)
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
however, and thus digresses, notably in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Jude as
Oxford epic hero straddles a gap between the serious readings presented in the
idealised Oxford of the nineteenth century and the liberated mocking of the
twentieth. As a result, his own position in this literary history becomes tragic. An
anomalous but pivotal text, Jude's introduction of an unlikely quester into an
environment shaped by public school idealism creates Oxford’s first subversive
novel and consequently diverts the entire course of the sub-genre.
The Telemacheia and Tom Brown at Oxford
The Telemacheia, the part of the Odyssey that deals with the journey into
manhood of Odysseus’ son Telemachus, has long been accepted as ‘the ancestor
of the Bildungsroman’.1 It should come as no surprise then, given the period’s
emphasis on classical education and the prevalence of the mock-epic in the work
of novelists such as Henry Fielding,2 that the Victorian university novel portrays
coming of age in a ‘Homeric light’.3 Thomas Hughes’ first novel, Tom Brown’s
Schooldays (1857), echoes in its climax (Tom’s fight with Slogger Williams) the
construction of the Iliad. The emotional impact of this reading upon Arthur,
argues Richard Jenkyns, calls to mind Homeric tears and sets the ‘stage’ for an
‘epic combat’.4 Yet while Schooldays is Iliadic in tone, its sequel follows the
Odyssey. The second chapter of Tom Brown at Oxford focuses on Tom learning
through a boating experience—immediately placing our hero’s journey in an
Odyssean vessel.
This journey’s crucial function is of learning. Telemachus’ most frequent
epithet is pepnumenos (wise) which he ‘earns’ through his learning in the course
1
Rutherford, R. B., ‘The Philosophy of the Odyssey’, The Journal of Hellenistic Studies,
97 (1966), pp. 145-162, at p. 148.
2
For an extensive exploration of the mock-epic in the period’s novels see Henry Power,
Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical
Literature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
3
Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980),
p. 213.
4
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 213
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of the epic. The idea that the development of the protagonist from boyhood to
5
manhood comes with the acquisition of wisdom appears throughout Tom Brown
at Oxford. Chapter IV describes our hero as ‘very green’ (38), an image that is
reflected nostalgically in XLV when his friend Hardy asks whether Tom does not
enjoy graduated life ‘thinking how much wiser you are than the undergraduates’
(499). The undergraduates are ‘green’ and unwise; through their time at Oxford
they reach maturity with an increase in ‘wisdom’.
It is possible to trace this wisdom in both texts. In Tom Brown at Oxford,
just as in the Telemacheia, the presence of a guide is a considerable part of the
learning process. Burke suggests that the ‘mentor’, a man ‘worthy of emulation,’ 6
is a stock part of the Bildungsroman. The term originates straight from the
Telemacheia: Mentor is the Ithacan who Athena disguises herself as when
advising and mentoring Telemachus. The Oxonian equivalent of the term is a
tutor; the academic staff who guide their students. Therefore the word that
Hughes uses to mark out Tom’s mentor is ‘tutor’ (15). The role is established by
five oblique references (for example, ‘here and there a tutor or fellow dropped
down amongst us’, 6) before a specific tutor is introduced, not an academic, but
Hardy—an older undergraduate who provides Tom’s moral compass and guides
his character development throughout the novel.
Hardy and Tom first meet when Tom attempts, rather comically, ‘A Row
on the River’ (Chapter II). This attempt is described grandly as his ‘voyage’ and
‘adventure’ (9). The mention of ‘heavy storms’ (9) and the description of Hardy’s
sight of him after capsizing (‘his eyes rested on our hero’s half-drowned head’,
12) gives the incident mock-epic elevation; Tom’s ship is the diminutive ‘tub’ (9).
The mock-epic struggle is curbed by the appearance of Hardy, who saves Tom
‘from drowning’ (14) and is subsequently referred to by Hughes twice as ‘tutor’:
5
John Heath, ‘Telemachus ΠΕΠΝΥΜΕΝΟΣ: Growing into an Epithet’ Mnemosyne, 54
(2001), pp. 129-57, at p. 130.
6
Kenneth M. Burke, The Oxford Novel as Bildungsroman: an Analysis of the Works of
Six Writers (PhD Thesis) (Maryland City: University of Maryland, 1989), p. 90.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
‘Tom got on famously under his new tutor […] Tom poured out his thanks to his
tutor’ (15-16, my emphasis). Athena, the goddess of wisdom (and military
victory) appears to Telemachus in the guise of an advisory man, eventually
leaving Telemachus victorious with his father in his battle against the suitors, and
wiser. So too does Tom’s wisdom and success increase with the mentorship of
Hardy, whose name suggests hardiness. Tom’s rowing career is a physical
demonstration of his progress and his later success in the college boat parallels
Telemachus’ return voyage. Scott describes Telemachus’ development in terms of
his two journeys: ‘On the voyage from Ithaca to Pylos, Telemachus was […] only
a passenger […] but on the return trip he was the sole commander […] with the
assurance of a veteran seaman.’7 Both Telemachus and Tom are initially guided
before exhibiting personal boating success and in both cases the boating
development extends beyond the physical into a metaphor for character
development.
Having established Hardy as Tom’s physical guide, the rest of the novel
demonstrates his positive spiritual and intellectual influence over Tom. One
pivotal moment in Tom’s development is illustrated by Tom’s maturing reaction
to Hardy as he:
[began] to do justice to the man who had not flinched from warning him
and braving him, who he felt had been watching over him, and trying to
guide him straight, when he had lost all power or will to keep straight
himself. (209-10)
The idea that Hardy keeps Tom ‘straight’ is foreshadowed early in his physical
guiding of the hero’s excursion, just as in the Odyssey Athena-as-Mentor
physically guides both Telemachus and Odysseus. As Peter V. Jones puts it,
7
John A. Scott, ‘The Journey Made by Telemachus and Its Influence on the Action of the
Odyssey’, The Classical Journal, 13:6 (1918), pp. 420-28, at p. 424.
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‘Telemachus’ journey was her responsibility and her purpose’;8 the link between
the moral guide and physical guide is implicit in the Odyssey and Tom Brown at
Oxford.
Another aspect of the ‘Homeric light’ with which Hughes’ imbues his
work is the classical physical ideal: the ‘manliness’ which Hughes takes from the
Athenians and reworks into a ‘muscular Christian’ (106 f.) mould. The idea of
muscular Christianity was championed by Hughes in various writings on the
subject.9 Particularly inspirational was his head teacher at Rugby, Thomas Arnold
(father to Matthew Arnold), who taught that ‘a moral struggle takes place at every
point in life’, and who himself became a mentor-figure to many Rugby students
(he appears as the Doctor in Tom Brown’s Schooldays).10 The idea that this
struggle was best conducted through physical and moral strength was emphasised
by the physical education which formed a core part of Rugby and created a
passion for amateur athletics in the boys, strongly inhibiting the development of
professional sport for other social classes.11 The physical ideal was classical: as
Jenkyns points out, ‘the Athenians of the fifth century were essentially amateurs,
perhaps the most brilliant amateurs that the world has ever seen’.12 In Tom Brown
at Oxford, the undergraduates are assimilated with these ‘amateurs’. Jervis
addresses his eight as ‘Old companions, thranitai…’ (150) using the Greek word
for rowers, affirming the conception of Oxford as ‘The modern Athens, [which]
like the ancient, cultivates muscles as well as mind.’ 13 Tom’s physical
development throughout the novel and his appreciation of Hardy as a man who
8
Peter V. Jones, ‘The Kleos of Telemachus’, The American Journal of Philology, 109:4
(1988), pp. 496-506, at p. 502.
9
See Hughes, True Manliness (Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., 1880.); and The Manliness of
Christ (London: Lond. & Co., 1894).
10
William E. Winn, ‘Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of “Muscular
Christianity”’, Church History, 29:1 (1960), pp.64-73, at p. 69.
11
Ibid.
12
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 217.
13
Charles Reade, quoted in Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, p. 216.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
combined brains and hard work with physical prowess echoes the classical light
in which heroism was measured.
Although the Homeric epics preceded fifth century Athens many of the
values align. Lattimore summarises the necessary attributes of a Homeric hero
(which must be tested in the epic through peira) as: ‘physical courage and
strength; ingenuity where these might fail; restraint, patience, tact and selfcontrol; and the will for home’.14 In Tom Brown at Oxford, Tom develops most of
these attributes, which are consistently lauded in the novel. The captain of the St.
Ambrose boat, for example, is ‘a noble specimen of a very noble type of our
countrymen […] Tall and strong of body; courageous and even-tempered…’ (33).
While Hughes’ additional endorsement that ‘the last thing such men understand is
how to blow their own trumpets’ (33) does not strike a chord with the Homeric
heroes, the sense of virtue to be found in strength is carried across wholly. In the
Odyssey this is most literally shown in the symbol of Odysseus’ bow, which
Telemachus comes close to being able to wield (XXI), whilst in Tom Brown at
Oxford the majority of such descriptions appear with respect to rowing.
As well as figures to be celebrated, in both Bildungsroman fiction and the
Telemacheia there is an emphasis on the separation of the hero of the story from
other lesser men. For Telemachus it is the unruly suitors, especially Eteoneus who
is described as ‘babbling nonsense, as a child | would do’ (IV.31-2).15 For Tom it
is the ‘gentleman-commoners’, who Hughes’ takes great delight in describing as
so ridiculous that they ‘might have had hippopotamus for breakfast if they had
chosen to order it’ (19): they are hyperconsumers just like the Odyssean suitors.
Whereas in the Odyssey Telemachus leaves the suitors having cried in
confrontation (II), but returning able to fight them as a man (XXIV), Tom Brown
at Oxford shows Thomas Arnold’s daily ‘struggle’ as Tom learns to distance
himself from their behaviour.
14
Richmond Lattimore (trans.), The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper & Row,
1967), pp. 15-16.
15
Odyssey, trans. by Lattimore. Hereafter all references will be to this edition.
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In Chapter VI Tom asserts that Hardy is ‘more of a gentleman’ (51) than
the gentleman-commoners, who are characterised by their velvet gowns and
eccentricities, and whose dominance has caused the college’s academic and moral
standards to slip. The fees of the gentleman-commoners bankrolled the college
but it remained difficult for them to keep up the classical ideal both in terms of
scholarship or discipline. They were unwelcome guests to the morally righteous,
just like the aristocratic suitors of the Odyssey. Chapter X exposes them as more
than just eccentrics but as bad friends as they refuse to return money to Drysdale.
The lesson is emphasised by Tom’s own father (‘your companions—friends I will
not call them’, 318) and Tom’s ability to comprehend the ‘great puzzle to find out
whether a man is really a friend or not’ (64) is an addition which, though
foreshadowed by the Odyssean false guest-host relationship of the suitors, is a
later development in the tradition. This is perhaps because the novel tends
towards the exploration of personal relationships rather than dealing with grand
political matters of state. In the Odyssey Ithaca has been left without a leader in
the absence of Odysseus whereas the actions of the characters in university novels
tend not to directly trouble the state. The gentleman-commoners are not linked
with political action and the message of Tom Brown is clearly critical of the
college’s dependence on their money and their unjust behaviour in the face of
great privilege. Like the suitors they are young aristocrats and potential future
leaders of society, yet they display unheroic qualities.
The means by which Tom understands the gentleman-commoners to be
unjust depend largely on the ideals of the Homeric guest-host relationship. Indeed
Hardy’s own initial distrust of Tom comes from an earlier distressing experience
with a ‘noble host’ (80), at Christ Church College. The first time the reader is
introduced to Drysdale, moreover, is after Tom is invited as a guest to breakfast,
an event described as ‘a good lesson in gastronomy’ (22). The occasion marks
Drysdale out as a good man; as Hughes puts it: ‘it is wonderful […] how you feel
drawn to a man who feeds you well’, on account of which Tom’s ‘liking and
respect for his host undoubtedly increased’ (22). The contrast of Tom’s
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
appreciation of the feast to St. Cloud’s disrespect (which will later be emphasised
in his refusal to loan Drysdale money) immediately sets up the latter as a bad
guest. He parallels the suitors, while Drysdale becomes an exemplary model for
hosting.
The Englishmen’s values and manners are explored throughout the text
(‘Don’t they say that one Oxford man will never save another from drowning
unless they have been introduced?’ (14) asks Tom, gently mocking gentlemanly
manners) and form rough equivalents to the Greek. Eating in Homer is ritualistic
(often after sacrifice or as depiction of guest-host relationship) and the learning of
appropriate manners in these ritual circumstances reappears in earnest in Tom’s
development. We are told that ‘Tom’s first wine had gone off most successfully’
(107) and the ritual of social events in the undergraduate calendar (as we see even
more emphatically in the commemoration balls) becomes pivotal to Tom’s
journey. Telemachus’ learning of appropriate guest-host interaction through the
ritual feasting of the Odyssey directly recalls the learning of social behaviour
through Tom’s ‘wine’. Both learn from more experienced men and Oxford’s
educational experience is shown to be just as ritualistic as the Homeric. The
learning of social behaviours is in a sense a timeless activity.
One form of learning that Telemachus escapes in the Telemacheia,
however, is the romantic. This forms a crucial part of the English Bildungsroman
through the protagonist’s ‘initiation into the mysteries of love’.16 Tom follows the
standard course of ‘two women, one who arouses his sexual instincts and one who
appeals to the ‘higher’ reaches of his mind and character’.17 Tom’s early
elopement with a barmaid produces the stimulus (Tom’s need to set right what he
has done wrong) for much the novel’s action and the development of his morality.
Alison Light describes the Bildungsroman as a ‘sentimental journey […] outward
16
George J. Worth, ‘Review: Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to
Golding, by Jerome H. Buckley’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 74:2
(1975), pp. 254-256, at p. 254.
17
Ibid.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
and upward through the world en route to psychic and economic autonomy’,18 yet
in the case of learning through love it is as much a journey towards dependence.
In the Odyssey the first four books see Telemachus as quester and, while he
certainly comes across a tempting woman (Helen), his sexual instincts are
untouched. Helen is married and older, no longer ‘the face that launched a
thousand ships’. It is in the case of Odysseus himself (with Calypso) that the
sensual journey of the quester takes place, with Penelope fulfilling the role of the
woman of ‘higher’ appeal. ‘Odysseus acts, Telemachus reacts’,19 notes Howard
Clarke, and thus whilst Telemachus does not learn through personal experience,
Odysseus does. Telemachus himself states that ‘I am grown up big, and by
listening to others | can learn the truth’ (II.314-15, my emphasis).
The art of combat is learnt first-hand. Telemachus attacks the suitors;
Tom’s opponents are various. Telemachus’ early comment that ‘we ourselves are
not the men to do it; we must be | weaklings in such a case, not men wellseasoned in battle’ (II.60-1) suggests the ‘very green’ hero we see in Tom. The
final battle between the suitors and Telemachus cements his status as a hero,
bringing him kleos (wished for by Athena at XIII.422). Tom moves from physical
fighting (Chapter XII) to fighting with justice in mind (‘I would sooner fight my
own way in the world’, 128) and eventually dedicates his life to fighting for
justice to others. Hughes felt Arnold had trained him at Rugby to ‘fight to which
we had all been pledged at our baptism’.20 Learning to fight the moral fight is
Tom’s most important lesson. St. Cloud and Drysdale are described as verbally
‘sparring’ (22) and the idea of employing language to fight appears throughout
the text, used increasingly by Tom to fight for justice (‘writing violent articles’,
485) as well as to ‘defend’ (486) his earlier near-affair. There are fewer fatalities
in Tom Brown at Oxford, but confrontations are just as crucial to the development
18
Alison Light, ‘Review: Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development, by Susan Fraiman’, Victorian Studies, 37:4 (1994), pp. 594-96, at p. 594.
19
Howard W. Clarke, ‘Telemachus and the Telemacheia’, The American Journal of
Philology, 84:2 (1963), pp. 129-45, at p. 138.
20
Hughes, quoted in Winn, ‘“Muscular Christianity”’ p. 69.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
of the hero. Verbal duelling is crucial to the Odyssey and eventually, for Tom, it is
the only way to fight.21
University novel questers: winners or losers?
The university novel is not restricted to mirroring a Telemacheian
precedent: in a sub-genre which contains such a fixed selection of attributes there
is infinite scope to subvert. Much like its epic predecessor, the Oxford
Bildungsroman’s distinctive format lends itself to use in challenging the system it
supports when it is told straight. Quint theorises on epics of ‘winners’ and
‘losers’, suggesting that epics of ‘losers’ (namely those who fail in their quests)
contain ‘the germ of a broader republican or antimonarchical politics’.22 In
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Phillip Larkin’s Jill (1946), Oxford as an
institution and the Oxford Bildungsroman are interrogated simultaneously: the
former through a tragic reworking, the latter with a mocking approach. The mockheroic passages of Tom Brown self-consciously nod to their hero’s small journey,
while the tragic and unheroic actions of Hardy’s Jude and Larkin’s John
individually attack Oxford as outdated.
The Guardian rates Jude the Obscure with its twelve ‘grim’ events as the
‘bleakest’ of Hardy’s novel.23 The hanging children are the most shocking image,
but the death of the protagonist of this negative Bildungsroman is the most
opposed to the genre’s conventions, though the struggle in the novel remains in
many ways epic. Telemachus fights suitors, Tom gentleman-commoners; Jude
has a very different opponent: his battle is against himself. While Jude’s
educational aspirations to Christminster (Oxford) are swiftly dismissed upon
inquiry (140) his tragic end is seemingly down to his being ‘repeatedly knocked
21
See John D. Niles, ‘Review: Verbal Duelling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and
Old English Traditions, by Ward Parks’, Speculum, 67:2 (1992), pp. 465-467.
22
David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 8.
23
Adam Frost and Jim Kynvin, ‘Which Thomas Hardy Novel is the Bleakest? –
infographic’, The Guardian (14 Jan. 2014), last accessed 2015, <www.theguardian.com>.
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off course by his sensual urges’.24 References to fighting in the novel are almost
wholly internal: ‘fight valiant against the feeling’ (375); ‘It is no use fighting
against God’ (409); ‘I have no more fighting strength left’ (410). These can be
read ironically in light of the earnest young Jude’s ‘mental estimate of his
progress’ (40) in which he recalls that ‘I have read two books of the Iliad, besides
being pretty familiar with passages such as […] the fight of Hector and Ajax’
(40).
Jude’s fatalism and tragic ending is not only a subversion of the
Telemacheian Bildungsroman tradition but in fact finds itself well-grounded in
another tradition of epic: the epic ‘loser’. Quint broadly defines two categories of
epic as ‘epics of the imperial victors and epics of the defeated’25—both similarly
grand traditions of adventure fiction with questers-as-heroes, yet in the one case
defined by ‘a quest that, however much it may be deferred by adventure, will
finally achieve its goal’.26 Epic ‘losers’ do not achieve their goals. This distinction
is heavily carried across into Bildungsroman, a genre which, like epic, frequently
attracts parody. The earnest Tom Brown has ‘a good bit of a Quixote in you
[him]’ (51), a direct contrast to Jude who is ‘Joseph, the dreamer of dreams [...]
And a tragic Don Quixote’ (240). Quixote is a naïve and amusing character who
is unable to see the world as others do. In Tom Brown this is manifest in a kind of
idealism which is eventually assimilated with a real world view for Tom. In the
character of Jude, tragedy unfolds as he is unable to come to terms with the
cruelty of the world that he lives in, and thus the narrative ends with him leaving
that world behind. In the move from Bildungsroman’s ‘winner’ to ‘loser’ epic
fiction may evolve into tragedy. In Jude the hanging of the children echoes the
final tableau of Greek Tragedy, and the infant deaths call especiaaly to mind
Hecuba and Medea.
24
Elisabeth Jay, ‘“Be Sure and Remember the Rabbits”: Memory as Moral Force in the
Victorian Bildungsroman’, Literature and Theology, 24:4 (2010), pp. 360-77.
25
Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 8.
26
Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 9.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
There is no room in Jude for the valiant battles of the Homeric heroes, for
the comic sparrings of Quixote, nor for the fights of fortunate young
undergraduates. Instead, the Homeric ideal appears with bitter irony. References
to strength are like those to fighting, usually internal and with either negative or
ironic connotation. The ‘oppressive strength of his [Jude’s] affection for Sue’
(211) is compounded by Jude’s aunt’s early fear ‘that Jude would not be strongminded enough to keep away from his cousin’ (104). The other most notable
appearance of strength is Jude’s ‘impulse for strong liquor’ (423)—Homeric
courage, it seems, become dutch. What appeared in Hughes’ as valiant, youthful
rowing—both metaphor and physical ideal—is in Jude the ironic background to
the protagonist’s deathbed.
Rowing in Jude is a gruesome festivity. The ritual of Oxford ‘boatbumping’ (485) attracts Arabella enough to leave Jude’s corpse in their apartment
where ‘the bumping of near thirty years [of his heart] had ceased’ (484, my
emphasis). These are the ‘Remembrance games’ (484), as Jude himself notes, and
they call to mind the Funeral Games of the Iliad (which Jude is ‘pretty familiar
with’, 40). To the reader not looking for the Homeric in Jude the Obscure, the
scene is tragic; to the reader, like Jude himself, versed in the funeral games of the
Iliad, the scene is gruesome. The heroic ritual mourning and ceremony displayed
by Achilles’ for Patroclus makes Jude’s death painfully insignificant in
comparison. Arabella’s anger that Jude’s death nearly makes her miss ‘the
procession of boats’ (486) presents Jude’s death as a trifling matter: ‘Why did he
die just now!’ (486). Even his burial is conducted to the ‘voices […] and an
apparent noise of persons stamping’ (488) from the conferral of ‘honorary
degrees on… illustrious gents’ (489). This is another engagement in the ritualistic
nature of Oxford which directly amplifies the tragedy of its failed quester.
Jude’s quest to become an undergraduate fails for many reasons. Hardy
himself struggled to identify a sole antagonist. Jude’s struggle with his God, his
feelings, and an institution which excludes him form a sample of Jude’s
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predominating demons in the novel. Hardy considered when there was talk of a
stage adaptation of the novel: ‘Would not Arabella be the villain of the piece?—
or Jude’s personal constitution? —so far as there is any villain more than blind
chance.’27 There is no single battle for the hero to prepare for. Thus the villain of
the piece is not as significant in the novel’s relation to the Bildungsroman and
Telemacheia as is the absence of a positive influence, more specifically, a lack of
mentor. Jude seeks to emulate the Homeric world of the university sub-genre, yet
finds himself fatally adrift within it.
The novel opens, ‘The schoolmaster was leaving the village’, presenting
the departure of a possible mentor-figure. It directly follows the epigraph which
states: ‘many […] have perished, have erred […] for women’ and is the antithesis
of Tom’s erring in his ‘tub’ before finding a ‘tutor’. The schoolmaster Phillotson
does not forever exit the narrative here, but his role as guide ends. The emphasis
which follows is on Jude’s being ‘self-taught’ (381), which becomes a marker of
the failure of both his academic and personal life. He is ironically nicknamed
‘Tutor of St. Slums’ (388), yet he is unable to teach himself. Sue is an ‘excellent
teacher’ (126) but cannot enlighten Jude. His inability to learn from mistakes
along with ‘blind chance’ causes continual tragic consequence. As Elisabeth Jay
expresses it, Jude ends the novel with a lack of ‘memory and spirituality’.28 Hardy
quotes Ecclesiastes 7:12, ‘Wisdom is a Defence, and Money is a Defence’ (104);
Tom’s defence is the former, the gentleman-commoners the latter. Jude is
possessed of neither and, vulnerable, his education becomes a steady path to
disillusionment.
Phillotson reappears in the novel and eventually is described as Jude’s
‘former hero’ (195); the former tutor is a microcosm for Christminster’s loss of
heroic gloss. The ‘Christminster dream’ (46) initially propels the novel and, as
Penny Boumelha suggests, makes Jude begin ‘as if it should fit into the
27
Hardy’s diary, quoted in Jerome H. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from
Dickens to Golding. (London: Harvard University Press, 1975.), p. 174.
28
Jay, ‘“Remember the Rabbits”’, p. 373.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
biographical meritocratic mould of the English Bildungsroman […] that might
[…] have led him towards some moderate worldly success.’29 This is the quest
which Jude-as-quester ultimately fails to achieve. He says later he will not ‘admit
that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have
made it a right one’ (389), which may at first appear to contradict Quint’s epic
hypothesis that ‘the losers’ epics would all—not so secretly—like to be epics of
history’s winners.’30 There is a sense of hope for the future in Jude’s acceptance
that ‘it takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one’ (389), which
corroborates Quint’s epic ‘losers’ view that the quester wishes to leave ‘the
possibility open that Fortune may change in the future’.31 Yet Hardy deals upon
Jude an even bleaker blow, for the audience of Jude’s hopeful future is the young
boy ‘Father Time’, a representative of the next generation, who is shortly to kill
himself and his siblings. There is no opportunity for Jude to bequeath his quest
and no real message of hope in Jude’s thwarted quest. ‘Better to love a woman
[…] than be a graduate’ (54) Jude asserts in the first book of the novel, and he
finally dies alone to the sound of the conferral of honorary degrees. Clearly for
Jude a romance-free Telemacheian passage would have been safer.
Compton
Mackenzie
suggested
that
Sinister
Street,
his
own
Bildungsroman, was intended not as ‘a life, but the prologue of a life’32, the same
function as that of the Telemacheia (in contradistinction to the account of
Odysseus’ adulthood). Yet the ‘prologue’ to Jude’s life is the prologue to his
death: coming-of-age is coming-of-death. The conferral of honorary degrees on
‘illustrious gents’ coincides with the burial of our failed would-be graduate,
heightening the tragedy and opening for the reader the possibility of interpreting
the novel as a ‘thinly veiled authorial attack of the elitist traditions of an
29
Penny Boumelha, quoted in Alex Moffett, ‘Memory and the Crisis of Self-Begetting in
Hardy's Jude the Obscure’, Pacific Coast Philology, 39(2004), pp. 86-101, at p. 86.
30
Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 209
31
Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 103
32
Compton Mackenzie, quoted in Buckley, Season of Youth, p. 18
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
anachronistic educational establishment’.33 This confirms Quint’s hypothesis that
epics of defeat contain ‘the germ of a broader republican or antimonarchical
politics’.34 Where university fiction is subversive the attack is guided towards the
educational establishment. The Telemacheian theme is carried up and undermined
in a novel marked by its lack of educational development.
That the subversion of form can constitute an ideological attack is
particularly resonant in light of the development of the Oxford novel itself. The
rise of the sub-genre came at ‘a period when Oxbridge was not only being
discussed and debated widely in the public sphere, but also perceived as being
under threat’.35 This led Oxford to define itself as ‘staunchly traditional […]
“ancient” in the face of new competition’36 as well as to a development of novels
that were ‘largely dedicated to extolling the virtues of the Oxbridge experience’.37
The Oxford novel in its twentieth-century form frequently became pointed satire
(‘If it is not quite true that everybody has at least one book inside him, it seems to
be the fact that every Oxonian has at least one book about Oxford inside him, and
generally gets it out’38). But when the status quo was being challenged, the
defenders responded by returning fondly to the literature of dreaming spires. The
writing of these novels was ‘rarely brilliant but […] never unkind’.39 If the epic of
winners ‘must have faith in the system of beliefs or way of life it bears witness
to’, 40 then the epic of losers becomes an attack on this very way of life.
Hardy’s involvement in the emerging tradition of the English
Bildungsroman, creating a thwarted quester (indeed his earliest conception of the
33
Jay, ‘“Remember the Rabbits”’, p. 372.
Quint, Empire and Epic, p. 8
35
Anna Bogen, Women's University Fiction, 1880-1945 (Number 5: English Fiction, 20th
Century, History and criticism) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014.), p. 10.
36
On the public school reforms of 1860 and Oxford’s role within them see Bogen,
Women's University Fiction, p. 10.
37
Bogen, Women's University Fiction, p. 11
38
A. A. Milne in Atlantic Monthly (1939), quoted in Burke Oxford Novel as
Bildungsroman.
39
Norman Longmate, Oxford Triumphant (London: Phoenix House, 1954), p.153.
40
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Epic Strain in the English Novel (London: Chatto & Widnus,
1958.), p. 12.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
novel was planned to end in direct ‘suicide’41) rather than the poor man who
becomes a gentleman, thus becomes a criticism of the educational establishment
as well as the novels which propagate it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the
treatment of dreams in Jude. Oxford is the ‘home of lost causes’ (96) according to
Arnold as quoted by Jude, and in Jude we see this glistening ‘Jerusalem’ as a city
which actively excludes Jude from its precincts. The hero finds that even with his
move to Christminster it remains impenetrable. The city in Dickens is a
corrupting force—one where Pip’s ‘dreams prove delusions’,42 and in Jude the
very city which Jude hopes will elevate him above his peers also corrupts him.
Arabella, once so esteemed by the naïve Jude, proves to be similarly false.
Arabella’s hair is revealed as fake on their first wedded night in an early
shattering of Jude’s own ‘delusions’. Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson provides
an interesting comparison here as a definitive Oxford satire of the early twentieth
century. When published in 1911 it capitalised on the contrast between the
illusion of its heroine and the reality of her behaviour (only the reader and women
of the novel could judge her, everyone else was instantly made to fall in love with
her) and ridiculed the antiquated nature of Oxford in the process. Bringing a
humorous approach to the bleak façade constructed by Hardy, it shines a different
light on the then fashionable femme fatale.
Yet for Larkin’s quester the city is not an illusion but a constant source of
confusion. Jill was published shortly after Larkin’s graduation, before the dusting
of nostalgia could settle and at a time when the heroic was being challenged.
When Jill’s protagonist John Kemp, a ‘scared, stuffed little rabbit’ (93),43 arrives
at Oxford, the city is announced by the cry of a porter because ‘all the nameplates
had been removed in time of war’ (4). This is an acute metaphor for John’s
experience of the city: nothing is made clear to him. The combination of the
41
Hardy’s diary, quoted in Buckley, Season of Youth, p. 164.
Buckley, Season of Youth, p. 46.
43
Philip Larkin, Jill (London: Faber & Faber, 2005). Hereafter all references will be to
this edition.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
protagonist’s ‘rising bewilderment’ (5) at the approach of each new thing and the
city’s lack of clear identity immediately signposts the Oxford of the
Bildungsroman as a place adrift. In the first few scenes we see the pattern that
will continue throughout the novel—one in which the hero does not learn or
develop. Time and time again his reaction to events is one of confusion rather
than conclusion. After he overhears Elizabeth and Christopher laughing at him
(91-92) his response does not develop beyond perplexity; his stock response does
not mature. Once again things are ‘all so bewildering’ (93). John ‘fails to
assimilate the lessons of life that might imbue his character with what it takes to
be different from the hysterical masses he meets’.44 He is crucially never elevated
above the other characters of the novel, unlike Telemachus and the suitors or even
Jude and the undergraduates, who are shown to have ‘not the slightest conception
of a single word [of Latin]’ (145). His lower class origins and the fact that John is
not an antihero but an ‘unlikeable hero’, mean he fails to impact upon those he
meets. The novel does not even take his name.
The mentor-figure in Jill falls away from John because he cannot
maintain his interest. The premise of the relationship between Mr Crouch and
John initially appears much like the ‘inspirational guide’ trope. Mr Crouch
himself hopes for this relationship, seeing himself as John’s ‘particular guardian’
(55), a ‘sculptor’ (52). He revels in his visit to John’s parents: ‘he felt like a
diplomat on a visit to some barbarous ruler, with the job of persuading him to
allow a railway to run through his territory’ (53-54). This rich image equates the
lower middle class with a barbarous ruling caste as well as forming a striking
contrast to what we discover of John’s own brain; he is ‘a powerful but delicate
machine’ (57). Crouch wearies of John and his position of influence on John’s life
is deliberately curbed by his sending John up to Oxford early. John’s Oxford
tutor, the Tutor, is ‘shy to make a definite suggestion’ (25); within twenty-five
pages of the novel both educational guides are lost. Crouch has already certified
44
Burke, Oxford Novel as Bildungsroman, p. 179.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
that John is unable to ‘advance a step without guidance’ (59) and so John’s
development is doomed.
John’s coming-of-age is not only inhibited by the absence of a mentor; he
also lacks a quest. Before the invention of Jill, John’s time at Oxford is focused
on pleasing Christopher. Yet even this quest is questionable: ‘He then gave up the
search for he did not know quite what, knowing only it had not been successful’
(19). The constant failure to achieve as quester is emphasised by his inability to
learn what he is actually seeking. John fritters away his time in Oxford on ‘empty
days’ which if they ‘had any object at all’ were to ‘please Christopher and win his
favour’ (40). In Christopher the reader is once more presented with the possibility
of a mentor, but John is ‘a feeble sort of worm’ (40), and Brideshead Revisited’s
aristocratic adoption motif is rejected in Jill. John’s Oxford is aimless and lonely,
before he creates Jill.
The creation of an illusion, we have already seen, foretells a doomed plot.
That Jill intriguingly and disconcertingly becomes real innovates the conceit.
While Jude’s dreams of Christminster are repeatedly rejected in the city, John
never intended to go to Oxford and therefore is unable to be disappointed by his
arrival in the same way. He is a ‘machine’ set in the direction of Oxford, not a
passionate would-be academic. Thus in his subversion of the Bildungsroman,
Larkin has his protagonist create his own ‘dream’, one which does not prove a
‘delusion’ but in fact becomes a reality, a reality which John is unable to deal
with effectively. Larkin subverts the Bildungsroman of the ‘loser’ by creating a
character that from the outset has no hope of being a ‘winner’. For John there is
not the ‘possibility that Fortune may change in the future’ though John of course
wishes to be a ‘winner’, and in Jill Larkin does not just attack the hero of the
Oxford novel (and by extension, Oxford itself), but imbues both the university
and its fiction with a sense of aimlessness. Unlike Odysseus, there is nowhere for
Larkin’s Oxford novel to go.
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Both World Wars had an immense impact upon Oxford and the fiction
that emerged from it. Though each was nuanced in its effect they both called into
doubt ideas of heroism. Brittain’s autobiographical Testament of Youth could
easily have followed one of the conventional routes of the Bildungsroman—the
hero succeeding against the odds and learning in the process. Yet World War I
caused her to drop out of Oxford to volunteer as a nurse for its duration, and the
sense that what Oxford offers in its secluded quads and dusty libraries was
ultimately somewhat self-indulgent is a motif which appears in Larkin’s
introduction to the second edition of Jill: ‘At an age when self-importance would
have been normal, events cut us ruthlessly down to size’ (viii). The age of
conscription and the usual age of studying as an undergraduate were wholly
aligned by the end of the war: at a time where one could really attain a kind of
military kleos, how could a novel which elevated the undergraduate to such a
height be written in earnest?
Perhaps this is why Brideshead Revisited’s Charles Ryder learns from
religion and not Oxford. Despite writing the defining portrayal of the hedonistic
undergraduate experience, Evelyn Waugh found the academic approach of the
university to leave its students ‘ill-prepared for modern life’.45 Waugh’s own
academic record was hardly impressive.46 This theory is developed in his satirical
Bildungsroman novel Decline and Fall in which Paul Pennyfeather ends the
novel almost exactly as he starts: as an ignorant undergraduate beginning a degree
at Oxford. Paul’s nostos earns him no real wisdom, it is the antithesis of the
moment in the Telemacheian Tom Brown when our hero is compared to the
unwise freshman. Larkin leaves John’s progress ambiguous. The city and the
form lose their glamour for Larkin and there is perhaps even a note of the sense of
hopelessness and aimlessness felt by society’s inability to learn from its mistakes
45
Burke, Oxford Novel as Bildungsroman p. 179.
See Paula Byrne, Mad world: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. (London:
Harper Press, 2009).
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
as another World War followed the first so quickly. Larkin’s vision of Oxford
seems marginalised by class; Waugh’s by not being at Christ Church.
The end of Jill is not without hope but the conventional Bildungsroman
has undoubtedly been destroyed. The courage and virtues extolled in the epic
heroes and the novels anticipated by them are replaced by a hero who is not even
brave enough to ask for more cake (10), and whose final act of courage becomes
one of utter drunken humiliation (224-225). Even the public school athletic ideal
is shown to be hollow in the behaviour of Christopher and his friends. Christopher
displays images of his school sporting achievements on the wall of their shared
set and yet there is no sense in which Christopher shares any of the epic heroic
qualities. Bakhtin’s statement that the novel is ‘ever questing, ever examining
itself and subjecting its established forms to review’47 suggests that the novel
itself is continually seeking its own meaning. The ‘brief idyllic escape into
fantasy’48 of the Oxford novel is examined in the period following each World
War.
The visit of John’s parents at the end of the novel when he is lying ill in
the infirmary is described by Larkin as ‘a sad mockery of the sight-seeing visit
they had planned’ (227-228) and the whole novel is itself ‘a sad mockery’ of the
Bildungsroman. John is not the ‘tragic Don Quixote’ of Hardy’s Jude because he
is ‘powerless to make a tragedy of the affair’ (96). The Bildungsroman in its
development and exploration of the characters’ self is undermined and gently
mocked through the news that John is: ‘a curious character: one of those
mysteries that are not worth solving’ (65). Just as the epic of winners and losers
gave way in the eighteenth century to mock-epic, the Oxford university novel in
the twentieth century becomes a ‘sad mockery’.
Conclusion – where next for the Oxford novel?
47
48
Bakhtin, Epic and the Novel, quoted in Tihanov, Master and the Slave, p. 145.
Burke, Oxford Novel as Bildungsroman, p. 229.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
The journey of the Oxford hero ends in battle. Yet it is not, in the end, the
battle against suitors, but the World Wars which attacked these heroes. The
undergraduate-as-hero motif became inappropriate, just as an increase in social
mobility inevitably challenged the public school classical ideal. Cyril Connolly
remarked in 1920 of Oxford that ‘certainly no women undergraduates could have
climbed in’,49 and the introduction of female undergraduates such as Brittain
challenged the masculine Oxford and the values that came with it. The Oxford
novel’s illusions were shattered by social progress in the twentieth century, and
its definitive novels have come to be something of a relic, even an
embarrassment.
We can trace the changing response to Oxford in the twentieth century
through the representation of its rituals. The rituals that appear in Tom Brown as
the stalwarts of an Oxford all-round education (and the creation of a muscular
Christian hero) are held up by later literature as a figure of fun, just as the stylistic
rituals of the Telemacheian novels are subverted and mocked. One would-be
mentor in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, for example, is Cousin Jasper, a
ridiculous figure, who Charles delights in ignoring entirely. The Oxford novel’s
turn from the heroic to the comic reflects the changing attitudes to Oxford’s own
traditions. The gowns which appear as the standard uniform of undergraduates in
Tom Brown at Oxford by the time of Jill are a source of confusion to the
protagonist and are presented as somewhat ridiculous to the reader. In our own
time these gowns are seen as a somewhat eccentric tradition, often utilised by the
press to emphasise Oxford’s elitism. One such article appeared in the Mail Online
last year consisted of photographs of students in academic dress celebrating the
end of their exams under the headline ‘Ministers tell students to cut out the pub
crawls [...] as Oxford's elite celebrate the end of exams by swigging bottles of
49
Bogen, Women's University Fiction, p. 14
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
champagne.’
50
We see then, that the stylistic features (and rituals) of Oxford,
Oxford novels, and epic as a genre are easily mocked and undermined.
Brideshead Revisited has become, to most, the definitive Oxford novel.
Interestingly, given its role as something of a eulogy to an Oxford ‘submerged
now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse’ (17),51 it has through its great
popularity rendered the genre something of a cliché. Brideshead serves as a
eulogy for an outdated class elevation, and the ‘low door in the wall’ that Charles
opens to find an Oxford that is an ‘enchanted garden’ (26) must swing shut
behind him, locking out generations of Oxford novelists to come. It is an Oxford
and an upper class which socioeconomic developments and the war have proved a
fallacy. Waugh’s own hero finds salvation not in the university but in religion.
Alderman’s The Lessons (2010) attempts to tell a similar story of Oxford yet was,
to one reviewer, but the account of a city of literary ‘ghosts’.52 The story has been
told.
Today the detective story remains one of the more popular Oxford subgenres, with the popularity of Inspector Morse (1987-2000) and its various spinoff series currently proving more enduring than the Oxford epic hero. The subgenre is responsible for the female Oxford novel Gaudy Night (1935), which
demonstrates impeccably the difficulty of fitting women into the university novel
(where it follows the classical model). It becomes something of a reverse
Bildungsroman: Harriet Vane’s quest is not the journey to development of self
(though this is a side-effect) but to find the perpetrator of a crime. The Oxford
detective is a sub-genre that has thrived while the Telemachean hero has
disappeared.
50
James Slack, and Jim Norton, Ministers tell students to cut out the pub crawls...as
Oxford's elite celebrate the end of exams by swigging bottles of champagne, MailOnline
(28 May 2014), last accessed 2015, <www.dailymail.co.uk>.
51
All quotes are from Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. (London: Everyman, 1993).
Hereafter all references will be to this edition.
52
Damien Barr, ‘Review: The Lessons, by Naomi Alderman’, The Independent (11 Apr.
2010).
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Novels may include toothbrushes, but Oxford novels as they stand
exclude many possible heroes and heroines. The anti-hero is no longer a
legitimate way to deal with the non-traditional Oxford hero. The Oxford novel
developed at a time when Oxford was the home of considerable ideological and
political debate and the influence of the Oxford Movement on literature is
distinctly epic in tone. Bright notes that the rise of Romantic literature was bound
to the Oxford Movement through shared features such as ‘a reverence for the
past’ and ‘a sense of nationalism’.53 Yet as access widens in the university there is
the inevitable sense of embarrassment which comes hand in hand with any such
nostalgic ‘reverence’. Brideshead’s complaint of ‘intruders […] a rabble of
womankind’ (17) is symptomatic of a sentimentality for outdated sub-genre, an
outdated Oxford. The quest for the contemporary Oxford novelist follows the task
of the epic hero in distinguishing themselves from the ‘others’: previous Oxford
novels and novelists. If there is a future for the Oxford novel it must find a way to
free new voices in an ancient university. Nothing else will prevent the sub-genre’s
Decline and Fall.
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
Bibliography
Primary sources
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure. (London: Penguin, 1994).
Homer's Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (London: Routledge, 1951.)
Hughes, Thomas, True Manliness (Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., 1880).
—, The Manliness of Christ (London: Lond. & Co., 1894).
—, Tom Brown at Oxford (London: S. W. Partridge & Co., 1921).
Larkin, Philip, Jill (London: Faber & Faber, 2005).
The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Lattimore (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).
53
Michael H. Bright, ‘Literary Romanticism and the Oxford Movement’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 40:3 (1979), pp. 385-404, at p. 386.
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QUEST FOR THE EPIC
Longmate, Norman, Oxford Triumphant. (London: Phoenix House, 1954).
Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (London: Everyman, 1993).
—, Decline and Fall. (London: Penguin, 2003).
Secondary sources
Anderson, Robert D., Universities and elites in Britain since 1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Barr, Damien, ‘Review: The Lessons, by Naomi Alderman’, The Independent (11
Apr. 2010).
Bogen, Anna, Women's University Fiction, 1880-1945 (Number 5: English
Fiction, 20th Century, History and criticism. (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2014).
Bright, Michael H., ‘English Literary Romanticism and the Oxford Movement’,
Journal of the History of Ideas, 40:3 (1979), 385-404.
Buckley, Jerome H., Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to
Golding. (London: Harvard University Press, 1975).
Burke, Kenneth M., The Oxford Novel as Bildungsroman : An Analysis of the
Works of Six Writers (PhD Thesis) (Maryland City: University of
Maryland, 1989).
Byrne, Paula, Mad world: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. (London:
Harper Press, 2009).
Case, Alison, ‘Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh’, Victorian Poetry, 29:1
(1991), 17-32.
Clarke, Howard W., ‘Telemachus and the Telemacheia’. The American Journal of
Philology, 84:2 (1963), 129-45.
Frost, Adam and Jim Kynvin, ‘Which Thomas Hardy Novel is the Bleakest? –
infographic’, The Guardian (14 Jan. 2014), last accessed 2015,
<www.theguardian.com>.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
Heath, John, ‘Telemachus ΠΕΠΝΥΜΕΝΟΣ: Growing into an Epithet’,
Mnemosyne, 54 (2001), 129-57.
Jay, Elisabeth, ‘“Be Sure and Remember the Rabbits”: Memory as Moral Force in
the Victorian Bildungsroman’, Literature and Theology, 24:4 (2010),
360-77.
Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1980).
Jones, Peter V., ‘The Kleos of Telemachus’, The American Journal of Philology,
109:4 (1988), 496-506.
Light, Alison, ‘Review: Unbecoming Women - British Women Writers and the
Novel of Development, by Susan Fraiman’, Victorian Studies, 37:4
(1994), 594-96.
Miller, Dean, The Epic Hero. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press,
2000).
Moffett, Alex, ‘Memory and the Crisis of Self-Begetting in Hardy's Jude the
Obscure’, Pacific Coast Philology, 39 (2004), 86-101.
Niles, John D., ‘Review: Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and
Old English Traditions. by Ward Parks. Speculum, 67(2), (1992) pp. 465467.
Plath, Sylvia, Sylvia Plath (audio CD) (London: British Library Publishing,
2010).
Power, Henry, Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the
Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015).
Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.)
Rutherford, R. B., ‘The Philosophy of the Odyssey’, The Journal of Hellenistic
Studies, 97 (1966), 145-62.
Scott, John A., ‘The Journey Made by Telemachus and Its Influence on the
Action of the Odyssey’, The Classical Journal, 13:6 (1918), 420-28.
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Slack, James and Jim Norton, Ministers tell students to cut out the pub crawls...as
Oxford's elite celebrate the end of exams by swigging bottles of
champagne,
MailOnline
(28
May
2014),
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<www.dailymail.co.uk>.
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Widnus, 1958).
Winn, William E., ‘Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of “Muscular
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Golding, by Jerome H. Buckley’, The Journal of English and Germanic
Philology, 74:2 (1975), 254-56.
- 124 -
LAURIE ATKINSON
Review:
John Tiffin, Paradigm Theory (Christchurch, New Zealand:
Ideas Lab, 2015-16).
‘A
theory of paradigms that is a theory of everything’: so Professor
Emeritus John Tiffin bills his six part MOOC, Paradigm
Theory.1 There is a great deal to excite here, and to unpack.
First, what is a paradigm? Plugged into a search engine, the term
yields a contemporary definition popularised by Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigms, according to Kuhn, are
‘universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model
problems and solutions for a community of researchers.’2 ‘For a time’, until the
norm paradigm—that which receives the consensus of a given ‘community’—is
refuted or rendered inadequate by anomalous data, and gives way to an alternative
system of ‘model problems and solutions’ in a phenomenon that Kuhn enduringly
conceives as a paradigm shift. Next, what is a MOOC? A Massive Open Online
Course is a model by which the content of a university course may be conveyed
online to an unlimited, and generally non-participatory student body. As Tiffin
optimistically puts it, ‘MOOCs make it possible for anyone at any time to access
the knowledge they want when they want it’.3 The author’s significant
modification has been to deliver his course in six eTexts released serially between
September 2015 and March 2016,4 and to establish a continuous dialogue with his
readers by means of embedded hyperlinks to Paradigm Theory’s delightfully
1
Paradigm Theory homepage, last accessed 12 Jul. 2016, <www.paradigmtheory.com>.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1996 [originally pub. 1962]), p.x.
3
John Tiffin, ‘1: Explanations of Everything’, in Paradigm Theory, p.6. Hereafter
references will be abbreviated in text by eText and page, e.g. (1.6).
4
At www.paradigmtheory.com.
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JOHN TIFFIN, PARADIGM THEORY
conceived ‘Socratic blog’. The further one reads, the greater is one’s appreciation
of the acute reflexivity with which Tiffin approaches both his subject matter and
his medium. Indeed, the two are inextricable within this theoretical text that never
ceases to question the rules, the conventions, the paradigms by which we publish,
teach, theorize. Tiffin, greedily inclusive in both his syllabus and students,
presents a work that is truly ‘massive’ in its ambition. But is it a theory of
everything?
This last question is perhaps not entirely fair, nor is it a demand of
academic accountability that the author has not foreseen. ‘[T]hese eTexts
introduce a theory of paradigms...’ (my emphasis), and as Tiffin reminds us on a
number of occasions (and with all manner of metaphors), paradigms are for
student and teacher a rabbit hole without beginnings or ends (1.8). Paradigm
Theory is offered as a textbook, but not a gospel, by a thinker for whom it
represents the culmination of a lifetime of intellectual inquiry. Yet Tiffin remains
genuinely critical of his most firmly held precepts, and fascinated by the
contributions of his initiates. Even the most jocular of his ‘Socratic questions’, for
all their apparently straightforward responses —‘Is there a paradigm of beards?’
‘Yes of course there is’ (and cites all manner of ‘shifts’ in what might
conventionally be described as ‘fashions’ in male grooming) — disguise more
serious inquiries, and indeed gaps in the original hypothesis: what ‘solution’ do
beards provide? ‘Why do humans cut their hair’ (2.17-18)?
Such scholarly caution—an admirable clarity of thought unclouded by
what is at times a densely involved discourse—should not disguise the
extraordinarily innovative theory that Tiffin puts forth. His point of departure is
post-Kuhnian, but dissatisfied by the vagueness of Kuhn’s definition of
paradigms, and the relative exclusivity of his paradigm of science to members of
the ‘scientific community’, Tiffin infuses his own paradigm theory with the
vocabulary of structural linguistics in a manner that does indeed suggest limitless
possibility (1.22ff.). We cannot think (in so far as neural activity is ruled by
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
preconceived models of thinking) without paradigms, much as we cannot speak
without langue. Tiffin introduces ‘syntagms’ as the concrete instances of such
paradigms, their parole. Paradigms, he goes on to acknowledge, do indeed
provide solutions to the problems of a community: they are the products of, and
responses to, a ‘problem domain’. Yet just as every speaker of language does not
acquire an identical langue (which, incidentally, one might describe as the
paradigm for the problem domain of ‘communication’), so every member of a
paradigm community will not be exposed to an identical network of syntagms,
and will not acquire an identical knowledge of a paradigm. ‘[T]he core of agreed
meaning [...] is always an approximation’ (1.32;39), and Tiffin coins the term
idiodigm (cp. idiolect) as a more realistic conception of the ‘physical reality of an
individual's neural activity’ (1.39). It is in the intersections of a community’s
various idiodigms that paradigms exist.
The terminology is not simple, and is hardly adequately explained here.
Indeed, the assiduously expanded paradigm/problem domain flow chart employed
in eTexts 3, 5, and 6 requires clearer organisation in order to be comprehensible
to the layman. However, Tiffin’s work bears two supreme strengths that make his
movement from the outline of paradigm theory synopsized above; to its
comparison with twentieth-century systems theory (eText 2); its application to the
paradigms of evolution (eText 3) and education (eText 4); paradigms’
problematization as means of simply solving problems (eText 5); and their place
in our increasingly complex contemporary conception of ‘reality’ (eText 6), not
only an immensely compelling, but also a highly pleasurable read. The first is the
author’s idiosyncratic style. Plunging head first down the rabbit hole, one reads
dubiously at first as Tiffin embarks upon Paradigm Theory proper with a
recollection of a Ghana-bound voyage across the Atlantic in 1968—‘the times
Bob Dylan sang of that were a-changing’ (1.12)—before going on to recall grad
student years in Wisconsin, Liverpool schooldays, malaria-induced hallucinations
of Fuseli-like imps, and beyond. This autobiographical, and often humorous strain
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JOHN TIFFIN, PARADIGM THEORY
prevails throughout, to such an extent that Tiffin feels it necessary to preface his
fourth eText with the apology: ‘I write subjectively and leave the reader to allow
for this’ (4.7). Yet as must be stressed again, the wisdom of Paradigm Theory is
not only subjective but inclusive, a movable feast to which the reader is invited as
student but also as peer. ‘In seeking to separate our subject from ourselves we
hide our humanity and disguise the impact it has on our study’ (4.7), and indeed,
one can soon only marvel at the effectiveness of the prose— deeply imprinted by
Tiffin’s own ‘paradigm of paradigms’, yet equally accessible and malleable to the
experiences and studies (the ‘idiodigms’) of each and every member of his
audience.
Thus, what seems to me to be Paradigm Theory’s second great strength—
its supreme applicability—has foundations in its first. Tiffin is himself engaging
with a shift in the paradigm of academic writing head-on in his decision to
publish Paradigm Theory independently, and as a MOOC. This is a step towards
the ‘HyperReality’ of the ‘virtual class’ and ‘Just in Time Tutors’ cited in his
fourth and sixth eTexts (4.42-45; 6.28-29) and posited in the earlier co-authored
editions, In Search of the Virtual Class, Hyperreality; Paradigm for the Third
Millenium, and The Global University..5 Tiffin’s approach has yielded great
intellectual rewards, but must also produce its own commercial obstacles. The
ideas in Paradigm Theory are made available (both by Tiffin’s lucid explanations,
and their open access medium) to any reader with a computer screen, but
necessarily adhere neither to the conventions of a recognisable scholarly
discourse nor to any single academic field.6 That such an erudite thinker regards
online, independent publication as the most viable and integrous means of
5
Tiffin and Lalita Rajasingham, In Search of the Virtual class (London: Routledge,
1995); Hyperreality; Paradigm for the Third Millenium, eds Tiffin and Nobuyoshi
Terashima (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); Tiffin and Rajasingham, The
Global University (London: Routledge, 2003).
6
Though Tiffin’s invitation to draft the programme for a new faculty of paradigmatique
at his characteristically piquant Global Open On-line Degree (GOOD) University (5.33)
provides a stimulating assignment for the enthusiastic student.
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DURHAM ENGLISH REVIEW: AN UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL
disseminating his ideas is testimony to the new challenges—the changing problem
domain—faced by academic writers and publishing houses of the twenty-first
century ‘global episteme’ (3.38). What might be described as Tiffin’s democratic
paradigm for epistemological inquiry has the potential for genuinely popular
engagement, but equally runs the risk of simply being ignored. One suspects that
the success of such an approach will rely on a deft webmaster and a conscientious
Twitter account, yet a vibrant social media presence seems an unlikely partner to
intellectual vigour. Perhaps the paradigm, or merely a few idiodigms of academic
publishing, is due for realignment. Can theory, one wonders, go viral?
If so, endeavours such as Tiffin’s must also have the resilience to endure
beyond a first month of frantic shares. Yet I believe that Paradigm Theory
possesses such resilience. It offers, if not even a comprehensive ‘introduction’,
then a perspective (a paradigm, if one hazards implosion upon Tiffin’s own
terminology) upon everything.
It feels somewhat disingenuous to consider as a caveat to a review in a
literary journal the applicability of Paradigm Theory to students of literature.
Happily, Tiffin provides his own assessment when he asks in his opening pages,
‘Who is this MOOC for? ’ I can only endorse his response:
Post-grad students in any discipline. All academic subjects are paradigms.
[...] It is for lovers and knowledge and doubters of belief. It is not an easy
read and it is not for people who are content with what they already know.
Or maybe it is, but it will annoy the hell out of them. (1.6)
Every student must question the paradigms of their subject, and here ‘subject’
extends far beyond Kuhn’s empirical, scientific fields. I urge readers, whether
doubting or content, to examine, if only in the first eText, the implicit strictures of
their specialism. And use the Socratic blog, at present sadly haunted only by
Platonic shades. The conversations to be had there belong to the scientific, but
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JOHN TIFFIN, PARADIGM THEORY
also to the creative mind (the distinction is paradigmatic), and Tiffin is well aware
that the most vivid elucidations available to him are often literary:
[...] as long as you’re in a room you’re inside, and as long as you’re inside,
you’re a prisoner. The door I will show you is different. It doesn’t lead into
another room. It leads out of the building. 7
St Chad's College, Durham University
7
Peter Hoeg, The Elephant Keeper’s Children (New York, NY: Other Press, 2013), p.5,
quoted by Tiffin at 1.7.
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
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