Prospectus: Exisitng Scholarship - Draft 1 Complete

Existing Scholarship

A lot of work has been done recently on Victorian popular fiction, but mostly by way of situating it in the Gothic tradition. Work that adopts the genre of the “Victorian Gothic, ” by scholars such as Robert Mighall and Julian Wolfreys, specifically considers what purpose the Gothic mode serves ideologically, politically, psychologically, and socially, when employed in narratives. Very little research has been done, on the other hand, to connect popular fiction, which includes the Victorian Gothic, with “classic” fictional realism, hence the motivation for this project. And so while work previously published on the Victorian Gothic may be useful in a tangential way, the way in which it often segregates the Gothic from the realist precludes such work as a primary critical resource.

For example, Ruth Robbins, in Victorian Gothic: literary and cultural manifestations of the nineteenth century, indicates an awareness of the epistemological issues implicated in realism when she says, “there is the belief that seeing is knowing. This tendency in criticism is intimately related to realist modes of representation” (Robbins 183). Immediately thereafter Robbins turns to say “However, this was not, of course, the only way of thinking about representation in the 19th c.,” thus compartmentalizing the Gothic and realism as two distinct ways of “thinking about representation.” While this study of Victorian literature is very much interested in “the belief that seeing is knowing,” it hopes to discuss such a tenet as a central prerogative of both realist and Gothic fiction.

Additionally, many scholars have, for all Victorian literature regardless of genre, made connections between the scientific discoveries and technological innovations of the period and its literary representations. Most famously, Gillian Beer traces Darwin’s influences on the Victorian novel in Darwin’s Plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, Eliot, and nineteenth-century fiction. Specifically thinking of Victorian realism, others have explained realist tendencies in novels as a reaction to or product of new and emerging technologies of the period; one such example is the telegraph, upon which Richard Menke in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems focuses. Menke’s work tries “to delineate the deep ways in which new technologies, and the wider understandings that a culture could derive from them, register in literature’s ways of imagining and representing the real” (Menke 3). By framing Victorian culture as one obsessed with the transmission of information, Menke sees the culture as cueing literature to try to comprehensively detail all aspects of real life, thus creating realism.

But once again, this work, in attempting to see Victorian science in Victorian fiction, rarely integrates a variety of genres. Menke, for example, lists several genres from Victorian literature as all having “informational economies,” but readers never get the sense that those economies, while sharing a unified cause in information technology and new media, do not resemble one another in their effects; realism is still unique in its attempt to capture reality and everything else has other business to which to attend. Patrick Brantlinger, as another example, sees science influencing realism and science influencing science fiction as two entirely separate phenomena; to him and many other critics, they were mutually exclusive reactions to the same historical circumstances.

That is not to say that considering realism and the supernatural equally is an entirely new and rebellious concept. Critical debates in studies in Victorian literature have been, for several decades now, advocating for an expansion of the canon to include genres previously segregated from the classic realist novel. The high brow/low brow divide has already been questioned and to a certain extent broken, as evidenced by critical trends towards considering popular fiction in order to construct a more nuanced conception of the Victorian novel as a genre. This dissertation does not, then, set out to simply reiterate that cry of outrage on behalf of the until recently less regarded popular novel, but rather hopes to use that as a starting point in continuing to examine how these popular genres, now that they've been invited to the table, add to critical conversations on the novel, genre, narration, realism, and representation.

There are the Victorians themselves to include in this consideration of genre as well. During the Victorian period realism and sensationalism were at times cast as a binary – some writers, such as Margaret Oliphant, would scorn sensation novels for their morally questionable plots, calling them “improper novels” and allying them with Romantic texts, and these criticisms helped to define realism against sensationalism and other non-realist genres. In many ways this segregation of genres informs how we refer to texts from the period today. Several of the texts at the center of this project have historically been and still are referred to as “scientific romances” or novellas – forms or genres distinctly other than “The Victorian Novel.”

Not all Victorians shared Oliphants sentiments, however. As Thomas Hardy wrote in his literary notebooks, “The division of novels into sensational & anti-sen[sational] [is] a mistake – wh. Arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic & sen[sational]. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree” (Nemesvari 26). In the spirit of Hardy’s words, one should, instead of organizing Victorian literature by genre - which would imply a placement of certain works in realism and other works in sensationalism, and never the twain shall meet - use genre to place Victorian literature in the context of the ongoing intellectual and aesthetic project writers engaged in during the period, one that was constantly in flux. Caroline Levine’s The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt was a breakthrough text for this notion, both as an investigation of Victorian writers deliberately and critically thinking about realism as well as a work that attempts to breech the classic/popular rift. She compellingly argues for Wilkie Collins, previously considered a sensation novel writer, as “an exemplary Victorian realist” (Levine 43).

Levine constructs her argument by providing an exhaustive and detailed reading of Victorian critics like John Ruskin and Walter Pater that calls for a rereading of Gothic and sensation fiction as engaging realism without explicitly attempting mimesis. She claims, for example, that “Victorian writers and readers understood suspenseful narrative as a stimulus to active speculation….a rigorous political and epistemological training, a way of fostering energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency” (Levine 2). In thinking of how this project will be indebted to Levine’s, one might consider an alternative title to be “The Serious Pleasures of the Supernatural.” I’ll be picking up where Levine has left off; she discusses novels by Bronte, Collins, Dickens, and Eliot, and I will be taking her argument and going one step further into the popular realm with Wells, Doyle, Stevenson, and Stoker.

George Levine, preceding Caroline Levine, is the first critic to argue that Victorians themselves were much more sophisticated than critics often give them credit for today. In The Realistic Imagination, he directly addresses imagined colleagues, saying, “We need to shift the balance in our appraisal of realism. It was not a solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity and faith in representation, but a highly self-conscious attempt to explore or create a new reality” (George Levine 21-20). With this new operating definition of realism, popular novels suddenly become ripe for exploration; I would like to see how they too might “attempt to explore or create a new reality.” Mimesis is certainly still very much a part of realism, but this new conception of it characterizes the movement as a generative and volatile process rather than one exclusively pursuing naïve or unproblematic modes of representation.

Srdjan Smajic’s article “Supernatural Realism,” published in the Spring of 2009 in Novel, may be the most recent addition to this reconsideration and new conception of realism; he even goes so far as to name his first subheading, “realism reloaded” to make clear to readers that his work hopes to destabilize realism as a fictional mode, and avoid the “myopic” (Smajic 1) view of previous scholars looking for a concrete definition. Smajic very carefully catalogues previous conceptions of both realism, the supernatural, and the relationship between the two, and then says

My aim here is not to prpose an improved, more flexible, and capacious definition of realism, though my argument should be understood as both a prolegomenon and an invitation to such a project. More moderately, for the time being, I wish to argue that supernaturalism, as far as the nineteenth-century British novel is concerned, is not disruptive but consistently and overtly constitutive of its realism. Literary realism, I will maintain, is not haunted by supernaturalism as the parasitic or saborteurial harbinger of ideological, epistemological, and ontological disruption but instead openly collaborates with it, everywhere weaving it into its formal properties, thematic concerns, and critical self-reflections. (Smajic 3)

This project will in many ways take up Smajic’s invitation, and carry on the work he begins with Silas Marner, Jane Eyre, and Waverly to include the late Victorian authors under examination here.
Suzanne Keen, in Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation, echoes Smajic’s work in “complicating the traditional opposition of realism and romance” (Keen 1-2) with a new literary term she coins called the “narrative annex,” which she says “draw attention and contribute to the generic diversity of the Victorian novel” by “extending and qualifying the boundaries of representation” (Keen 1-2). Despite what Keen claims her efforts accomplish, though, the notion of the narrative annex still gives primacy to the “dominant mode of the novel,” which she frequently identifies as realism.

As a final note on existing scholarship, the “basic aims and proposed argument” section outlined earlier mentions that film adaptations of the novels in question will also be invoked. One might assume that this would necessitate the involvement of the entire history of adaptation studies and adaptation theory, but such critical history will only arise as it is relevant to the discussion of Victorian realism. Adaptation studies, then, will be acknowledged but not directly engaged, often kept in notes for each of the chapters.

A quote to save for later.

“In this light, a sprawling Victorian triple-decker looks like both a treatment of a world as information, and an affirmation that such a mass of information could be arranged and made meaningful while still remaining true. The multivolume novel with its intertwined plots; the historical romance; the detective story; the tightly drawn, consciously literary turn-of-the-century tale – these Victorian fictional forms and genres all have their own informational economies” (Menke 4).

Richard Menke in Telegraphic Realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems

It's not that I've stopped working...

It's just that I've organically transitioned into writing my prospectus in a word document. I'm a little more than half way through it (hopefully) so it just makes more sense at this point to be working on it continuously in one version instead of posting pieces of it here. When the current scholarship section is complete I'll post it here. I also keep going back and adding to or revising the proposed argument section.

As I work on the "Current Scholarship" section....

...I'm wondering if I should actually stop to read some more or just go for it and plow through writing it without looking back.

I'm imagining that when I get to the actual chapter description section I will have no choice but to be more precise and detailed, so perhaps I should save time for reading in preparation for writing then. I know I'm going to have to reread parts of Dracula, The Time Machine, and maybe even the Invisible Man. I'm definitely going to have to read more Sherlock Holmes because I can't just vaguely refer to all SHerlock Holmes novels ever written - I'm going to have to focus on one or two.

Prospectus: Basic Aims and Proposed Argument(s) - Draft 1 Complete

Basic Aims and Proposed Argument

The roots of science fiction, as with all genres, have no clear beginning, but one might identify the Victorian period as one possible point of origin.  Most survey texts of the Victorian Novel will have at least a small section attributing significant and historic developments in science, technology, psychology, economics, and sociology to the proliferation of fiction featuring all of these disciplines, but, most prominently, science.  Louis James, for example, opens a chapter on “Science, Utopias and Dystopias” in The Victorian Novel with the claim that “While the term ‘science fiction’ only became used in 1926, the genre had its roots in the nineteenth century…as the century progressed, scientific discoveries became increasingly a subject for debate”(James 212).  Science became particularly prevalent in Victorian popular fiction hovering closely around the turn of the century, and while not identifying itself as part of a singular genre called science fiction, these popular novels combined the scientific and the supernatural in a way not previously done.

The novel across Victorian England, of course, exhibited a complicated mix of genres; genres that stand alone in other literary periods become, in the Victorian age, modes competing against other modes in a single text.  Strains of realism, the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Romantic, the melodramatic, etc., all circulated simultaneously and fluidly.  This heteroglossia in the novel fostered a literary environment in which the complex relationship between the scientific and the supernatural could precipitate.  To those whose preoccupation lies with taxonomy and categorization, this relationship might mark the birth of science fiction.

But the aim of this dissertation is not to identify the origins of the science fiction genre or engage at all in such a debate.  It will instead look at a set of closely related texts that have, in studies in Victorian literature, only recently been regarded as part of the period's literary canon, in many ways competing against mainstream fictional realism.  By examining these texts in order to not construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period but to synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, I hope to show that these popular novels, commonly essentialized as anti-realist and isolated in the science fiction genre, can contribute to a dialogue on the realism that was so central to the Victorian novel.  In many ways I will show that late Victorian popular fiction not only can but must participate in conversations about realism.  

The popular novels in question here will include those by H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.  All of these authors have written narratives featuring fringe or “mad” scientists who wield scientific discourse authoritatively but, usually by asking fundamental questions about the nature of reality, have radical ideas that cause others around them to dismiss them.  Jack Griffin, as title character of The Invisible Man, upsets the relationship between visual perception and ontology, The Time Machine’s Time Traveller posits time as a fourth dimension, Sherlock Holmes claims to gain access to a man’s innermost thoughts through observation, Dr. Jekyll’s theory asserts that each man in fact has two men within him, and Van Helsing believes in vampires.  These mad scientist figures, forced to experiment in private, not only represent but embody the frequent coexistence of the scientific and the supernatural discourses in the Victorian novel mentioned earlier.  Even though what the scientists discover, believe, or encounter might be “unrealistic” or seemingly supernatural, their methods are entirely empirical, constantly pursuing observational objectivity.  And within these characters, neither the supernatural or the scientific “win out,” but rather they simply co-exist, inextricably linked.  Within these narratives, the scientist would not be able to test reality and discover that which mankind cannot fathom without a scientific method, nor would that method have any meaning or purpose were the supernatural not possible.

I argue, then, that these mad scientists do not merely provide fantastical entertainment in their hair-brained experiments, but rather directly address issues spurred by realism and reflect or extend the intellectual work of Victorian realism that has already been located in writers and thinkers such as John Ruskin and Walter Pater, as well as novelists traditionally categorized as realists.  Both Victorian writers contemplating realism, such as George Eliot, and the Invisible Man, for example, challenge the assumption that seeing consistently and reliably facilitates knowing or being.  Both writer and character conduct similar experiments to test the limits of reality and how we might represent that reality. 

With their characters working on their behalf, writers like Wells, Doyle, Stoker, and Stevenson take up the same realist project that more readily accepted realist novelists recognizably do.  One might assume that since a particular work itself does not indisputably attempt to mimetically represent reality, to be objective, it then does not actually say anything about the process of representation. I would argue that the opposite is in fact true and it is precisely because many of these works contain strains of the "realistic" and the "fantastic" together that they are able to reflect back upon a debate surrounding one's ability to capture reality, to perceive it and represent it in conventional ways. The realist project or “the realist experiment,” (Caroline Levine) as recently recast by critics such as Caroline Levine and George Levine, does not merely attempt to produce or reproduce the real but rather questions its very nature, and these novels are very much in that spirit.  

Beyond reconfiguring how studies in Victorian literature have, until recently, rigidly divided canonical and popular texts, this project hopes to investigate implications these popular works from the fin de siècle have for the Novel as a form.  Situating these texts in their specific literary history will then open up questions about several much larger histories - the history of the novel, the history of genre, the history of science fiction, the history of realism, and the history of supernatural vs. scientific discourse.  These works, for instance, have historically been labeled as “novellas” rather than novels.  Why is this the case?  Is the relative length of a work enough to separate it from others?  To what extent has the categorization of these texts – as popular novellas – enabled them to engage in the Victorian realist experiment in the way described here?

The other contribution this project hopes to make to studies in Victorian Literature is the unique lens that film adaptation can provide when considering perceptions, representations and “laws” of reality.  In many ways it is neglectful to consider realism and mimetic representation without considering film as a form complementary and in contrast to the novel, as the development of film as a technology would have been occurring roughly around the same time these works were published.  The introduction of photography and then later film into Victorian culture fundamentally changed the way Victorians might have conceptualized reality in terms of time and space.  As Roland Barthes observes, film has the distinct ability to more convincingly masquerade as an analogon to reality, but it in fact cannot represent reality and, more importantly, distorts reality.  Keeping all this in mind, the project will, then, draw from film adaptations of the novels discussed as they are relevant to the larger discussion of the mad scientist figure and his stake in Victorian realism.

Oh, and by the way, the meeting with Green went really well.

She followed my ideas and said that it ...sounded like I had something that ....sounded like an actual project, and to get her a draft of my prospectus by the week of February 16th.

Here are some notes I scribbled down at the meeting:

Must include Jekyll and Hyde.  It will seem like a major oversight if I don't.

Stevenson and Doyle can share a chapter to make room for Jekyll and Hyde as the "extra" popular representations.

I should look at other Doyle novels.

I should read Wells' realist texts and use those as a bench mark.

She mentioned something about Virginia Woolf making fun of the Victorian realists, but I couldn't get it down.  All I have is "Woolf" and "evacuation" in my notebook.

I have to think about what I'm noticing as trends that go up and down.  Dynamic synchronic version (of history).

Right now the short list includes:

1. HG Wells (The Time Machine, 1895, The Invisible Man, 1897)
2. Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897)
3. Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes, 1887-1902)
4. Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1896)

The Time Machine (2002)

[Watched the 2002 adaptation of The Time Machine last night and was sort of horrified by the first third of it.] 

The film feels the need to give the Time Traveller (here named Alex Hartegan) a motivation for inventing the time machine other than pure scientific curiosity.  And so they give him a beloved, Emma, who, on the eve of their engagement, is murdered by a mugger who wants her engagement ring.  Stricken with grief, Hartegan obsesses over finding a way to change the past so that he may go back in time and prevent Emma's death. 

Not only does this new romantic motivation replace the scientific one, it actively deters it or represents it as socially unacceptable.  The film casts Hartegan's scientific curiosity as a distraction from his courtship of Emma - his work as an academic makes him late for his date, he forgets to bring her flowers because he stops to examine a stranger's cutting motor car on the street, for which she playfully chastises him, and his best friend, Filby makes similar comments about how he would be better off focusing on Emma rather than his crazy inventions. 

There's a lot to say here about the hegemonic discourse promoting the importance of heterosexual love which is the supreme generative force, even surpassing scientific innovation and progress.  But more specifically and more importantly, this addition to the adaptation reflects back on Wells' text in a way that emphasizes the novel's contribution to the late Victorian tendency to question the nature of reality for its own sake.  The novel begins in medias res, with the Time Traveller already part way through lecturing his dinner party on notions of time and space.  While the 1960 adaptation starring Rod Taylor does not begin exactly in this moment, it does begin with the dinner party scene where the Time Traveller explicates the fourth dimension - time - and unveils his time machine, which, unlike the 2002 adaptation, portrays the Time Traveller as investigating time travel purely as a way of debunking common assumptions about reality. 

[Below is an important quote for this, but I will probably use it earlier in the non film section of the chapter.] 

"You must follow me carefully.  I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted.  The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception" (Wells 1). 

[The take-away from this is that he's challenging assumptions about the nature of reality that are "universally accepted."]