PRINTING THE OTHER VICTORIANS NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTIONS OF EMBODIMENT AND IDENTITY by COURTNEY ANN FLOYD A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Courtney Ann Floyd Title: Printing the Other Victorians: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Embodiment and Identity This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Heidi Kaufman Chair Elizabeth Wheeler Core Member Mary Wood Core Member Nina Amstutz Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2019. ii © 2019 Courtney Ann Floyd iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Courtney Ann Floyd Doctor of Philosophy Department of English May 2019 Title: Printing the Other Victorians: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Embodiment and Identity This dissertation bridges the fields of Victorian literature, print culture, and disability studies to demonstrate that print and its attendant technologies allowed Victorians to imagine and define the “normal” body in contradistinction to various Othered embodiments. Scholars have long posited that novels powerfully enabled and informed political and national identities in (and before) the nineteenth century. More recently, critical disability studies scholars have illuminated the ways in which novels also enable and inform concepts about bodily normalcy and ability—not only via the representation of disabled characters, but also through such mechanisms as genre conventions and audience expectations. My analysis of the novels of Wilkie Collins, Richard Marsh, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot illustrates how Victorian print forms and technologies such as newspapers, advertisements, and personal archives helped generate and disseminate notions of bodily “normalcy” and identity in their form and content. In so doing, my project challenges preconceptions about whose bodies and identities received privileged representation in Victorian media culture, tracing a broader history of representation in Victorian society—one which includes the disabled, the gender non-conforming, and racial and sexual Others. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Courtney Ann Floyd GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Eastern New Mexico University, Portales DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts. English, 2013, Eastern New Mexico University Bachelor of Arts, English, 2011, Eastern New Mexico University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Victorian literature, print culture, and embodiment Digital Humanities PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Associate Director of Learning Technologies and Digital Humanities, University of Virginia, 2019-Present Graduate Employee, University of Oregon, 2014-2019 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Ernst Summer Dissertation Fellowship, “Printing the Other Victorians: Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Embodiment and Identity,” University of Oregon Department of English, 2017 Sarah Harkness Kirby Award, “‘Always the same unrememberable revelation’: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp and the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism,” University of Oregon Department of English, 2015 Sarah Harkness Kirby Award, “‘Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell’: Technology, Toys, and the Reproduction of Sounds and Speech in the Works of W. B. Yeats,” University of Oregon Department of English, 2015 v PUBLICATIONS: Floyd, Courtney A. “‘Always the same unrememberable revelation’: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp, the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism, and Golden Age Children’s Literature.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 74, no. 1, 2019, pp. 30-53. Floyd, Courtney A. “‘Take it when tendered’: M.E. Braddon’s Thou Art the Man (1894) and The Weekly Telegraph’s Media Model of Disability.” Victorian Review, forthcoming, n.p. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No dissertator is an island, and I, in particular, have benefitted from a surfeit of support during the inception and writing of my dissertation. In moving from institutional to personal in the following paragraphs, I do not mean to imply any ranking of importance but merely to impose some sort of order on the chaos of gratitude I feel for everyone who has helped me along the way. The Department of English at UO supported my work at a critical early stage with the Ernst Summer Dissertation Fellowship, which provided me the time and space to concretize the scope and goals of the project. Their further support in the form of travel grants allowed me to test ideas at a number of conferences. Conference attendees at NAVSA (2017), VPFA (2018), and VSAWC and RSVP’s joint Body and Page (2018), provided thoughtful feedback on early drafts of chapters II, III, and IV. Former English DGS, Lara Bovilsky, and Graduate Coordinator, Kathy Furrer, both made sure I kept on track with progress requirements and necessary paperwork—a Herculean task which made everything else possible. At UVA, three Rare Book School faculty—Eric Holzenberg, Jon Kristensen, and Katherine McCanless Ruffin—instrumentally shaped my methodology during their courses on the history of the book and nineteenth-century typography. So, too, did Constance Crompton during her DHSI course on TEI at the University of Victoria. And librarians at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland provided assistance identifying and locating primary materials which ultimately did not make it into this dissertation but nevertheless instrumentally shaped the chapters which do appear here. vii My advisor, Heidi Kaufman, inspired the topic of this dissertation in her Fall 2015 course, Archival In(ter)ventions. She has also been generous with her time, expertise, and advice and continues to evince an unwavering confidence in my skills and scholarship which has kept me going through bouts of Imposter Syndrome—for which I will be forever grateful. My committee members, Betsy Wheeler and Mary Wood, offered valuable feedback on chapters and served (perhaps unconsciously) as academic role models in myriad other ways. My fellow dissertators, Katie Jo LaRiviere and Angela Rovak, shared the ups and downs of dissertating by my side. It’s been such a pleasure sharing the journey with them. Our community sustained me during what would have otherwise been a long and lonely two years. Conversations with Annie Swafford led me toward work in the Digital Humanities, which has shaped not only my final chapter but also my career trajectory. My long-distance cohort provided camaraderie and thought-provoking conversations which have subtly shaped my focus and perspective at several key moments. Troy J. Bassett shared critical resources during the writing of my final chapter. My partner, Jared Floyd, did his best to help me succeed in countless ways and, like a true hero, kept me well-provisioned with coffee and snacks during especially fraught drafting sessions. My therapist, Rachelle Cornelius, helped me with tools and strategies to manage anxiety and work-related stress as I began planning the project. And, last but certainly not least, my emotional support dog, Charlie, forced me to exercise and get a little bit of sunshine, graciously napped by my side while I researched and wrote, and reminded me that even little victories deserve rewards and praise. Without him, I would not have completed this dissertation. viii To past Courtney. Look how far you’ve come. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 II. PRINTING DISABILTY: ADVERTISING, JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER, AND THE SHEFFIELD DAILY TELEGRAPH (1879-1880) .................................. 16 “New and vigorous blood”: Printing the Body in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph ........................................................................................................... 23 “An Unwilling Witness”: Testimonial and Cure in Jezebel’s Daughter .......... 38 “Memoirs Unwritten”: Print and Poison in Jezebel’s Daughter ...................... 56 III. “ALL MONSTERS AND DUST”: MARSH, STOKER, AND THE ARCHIVAL MANAGEMENT OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY ....................... 70 “A Repository of Bone and Gristle”: Bodies and Beetles in the Archive ......... 85 “Surprising [Non]Narration[s]”: Silence and Emptiness in the Archive .......... 90 “Transmigration is [Trans]migration”: Illustration and Gender in the Archive .............................................................................................................. 98 “Placed in Sequence”: Authority and the (In)Authenticity of the Archive ............................................................................................................... 107 “Take It and Keep It”: The Preservation of Ignorance in the Archive ............. 112 “Impossible Possibilities”: Information and Knowledge in the Archive .......... 119 “We Want No More Concealments”: Queerness and the Control of the Archive .............................................................................................................. 126 IV. TURNING BODIES INTO BOOKS: STEREOTYPING, EMBODIMENT, AND DANIEL DERONDA ...................................................................................... 139 Corpora Overview and Rationale ....................................................................... 145 “The Letter Killeth”: Stereotype, Type, and the Socially Constructed Body ... 152 “Strange printing”: Daniel Deronda and the Stereotype Process ..................... 167 “Yearning for transmission”: Stamping Souls onto New Bodies in Daniel Deronda ............................................................................................................. 170 “It is so with a nation”: Stereotyping, Sex, and Proto-Zionist Politics in Daniel Deronda ................................................................................................. 179 APPENDICES A. PATENT MEDICINES ..................................................................................... 186 B. TWITTER CORPORA DEVELOPMENT ........................................................ 190 C. ACC SOURCE LIST ......................................................................................... 192 D. VBC SOURCE LIST ......................................................................................... 196 REFERENCES CITED .................................................................................................. 207 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Jezebel’s Daughter, Clarke’s, and Allan’s advertisements ..................................... 16 2. Jezebel’s Daughter, Blair’s, and Clarke’s advertisements ...................................... 16 3. Jezebel’s Daughter, Jenner’s, and Towle’s advertisements .................................... 16 4. Beginning of Brandreth’s Pills advertisement ......................................................... 27 5. Complete version of Brandreth’s Pills advertisement ............................................. 27 6. Entire column with Brandreth’s Pills advertisement marked. ................................. 27 7. Tableau Public screenshot of a tree chart displaying ACC (1841-1900) breakdown by author and number of texts .......................................... 150 8. Tableau Public screenshot of a tree chart displaying VCB (1870-1901) breakdown by author and number of texts .......................................... 151 9. AntConc ‘stereotyp*’ Concordance for ACC .......................................................... 160 10. AntConc ‘stereotyp*’ Concordance for VBC .......................................................... 160 11. AntConc ‘type’ Concordance for ACC .................................................................... 163 12. AntConc ‘type’ Concordance for VBC .................................................................... 164 13. AntConc ‘stamp’ Concordance for Daniel Deronda ............................................... 173 xi LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. ACC ‘stereotyp*’ Hits ............................................................................................. 157 2. VBC ‘stereotyp*’ Hits ............................................................................................. 158 xii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “Why, I myself am an instance of a man who had a strange belief. Indeed, it was no wonder that my friends were alarmed, and insisted on my being put under control….The doctor here will bear me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’ Though, indeed, the vendor of a certain nostrum has vulgarised the truism to the very point of contempt. Isn’t that true, doctor?” I nodded assent, for I was so amazed that I hardly knew what to either think or say; it was hard to imagine that I had seen him eat up his spiders and flies not five minutes before. —Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897) In one of its primary subplots, Bram Stoker’s 1897 bestseller, Dracula, showcases a tragic intersection of embodiment, disability, and material print culture. Throughout the novel, Dr. John Seward, whom Lucy Westenra calls “the lunatic-asylum man,” is both troubled by and enthralled with the case of one of his patients: R.M. Renfield (56, 60). Renfield, it seems, is a man who experiences “periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which [Seward] cannot make out” until late in the novel (60). As it turns out, Renfield’s “fixed idea” is that “the blood is the life,” that consuming the blood of other beings will “strengthen[] the [body’s] vital powers” (218). More significantly for my purposes, both Renfield and this “fixed idea” are curiously mediated by his references to two real-world print objects: a series of popular advertisements and the Christian Bible. The unnamed “nostrum” to which Renfield refers in the above epigraph is almost certainly Clarke’s World-Famed Blood Mixture, a real product manufactured and marketed by Francis Jonathan Clarke from 1861-1888 and by Lincoln and Midland 1 Counties Drug Co Ltd from 1888 onward (Stoker 218; Homan, Hudson, and Rowe 48). Advertised widely in a variety of British periodicals from at least 1870 until well after World War I,1 Clarke’s purported to “cleanse the blood from all impurities, from whatever causes arising” and to “remove[] the cause” of ailment “from the blood and bones” (see item 1 in Appendix A; original emphasis). Its slogan, “for the blood is the life,” features prominently in its advertisements of this period (see items 1-2 in Appendix A). As a brief examination of Clarke’s advertisements makes apparent, Stoker’s memorable madman takes up the precise wording of the Clarke’s slogan. What’s more, his winking reference to the company and its advertising campaign—“though, indeed, the vendor of a certain nostrum has vulgarised the truism to the very point of contempt”— makes it clear that the reference is intentional (Stoker 218). What may be less apparent to modern readers is that both the Clarke’s advertisement and Renfield misinterpret the “scriptural phrase” to which they refer (218). For the Old Testament passage is in fact an injunction against the consumption of blood, not a prescription thereof (218).2 Dracula is a novel in which the fine line between sanity and insanity is measured not by medical science but by one’s ability to successfully engage with the written and printed word. For example, toward the middle of the narrative, the captain of the ship Count Dracula takes to England (the Demeter) uses the written word as a touchstone of reason while recording the details of an unexplainable situation (Dracula’s hunting) that 1. In Popular Medicines: An Illustrated History (2008), Homan, Hudson, and Rowe note that Clarke’s Blood Mixture was being sold as early as 1861 (47). The earliest advertisements I’ve come across date from the 1870s. The Wellcome Library’s Image collection includes a Clarke’s advertisement dating from 1925, and Holman, Hudson, and Rowe note that the mixture was still being produced in the 1950s (52). 2. See Deuteronomy 12:23 and Leviticus 17:11 in the King James Version of the Christian Bible. 2 has driven his crew mad. Entering the events into the ship’s log, he writes as if seeking refuge in the authority of the written record: “things so strange happening, that I shall keep accurate note henceforth” (79). Even more significantly, the captain’s account is eventually cited in a newspaper clipping which itself becomes evidence that the events the main characters are investigating—fantastic though they may be—are really happening, and that the characters themselves are therefore sane. Within this context, it is clear both that Renfield’s turn to print culture is part of a larger pattern in the novel and that it is a strategic move—calculated not only to speak to Renfield’s sanity, but to cement or shore up that sanity, much as the written record is supposed to do for the Captain of the Demeter. Yet in juxtaposing his mental disability with what Stoker’s audience would have perceived as diametrically opposed print forms, Renfield makes a critical error. In this moment, Renfield inadvertently reveals a fundamental misreading of the interplay of his chosen texts and print culture itself. Renfield’s insanity is reaffirmed, despite Seward’s momentary uncertainty as to his diagnosis, because he lacks access to the very print sources he wishes to marshal to his own defense. Consequentially, he cannot properly engage with the printed texts he cites. As his words echo the exact form and meaning of the Clarke’s slogan, Renfield becomes little more than an embodied advertisement, simultaneously attesting to his own mental disability and illustrating the paper advertisement’s lack of authority—its status as what we might call a “quack text.”3 3. Exposures of Quackery: Being A Series of Articles Upon, and Analyses of, Various Patent Medicines (1895), an exposé published by the Savoy press whose second edition was released in the same year that Dracula was published, takes Clarke’s advertising claims to task in four separate chapters. In no uncertain terms, the editors of Exposures of Quackery not only identify Clarke’s as a quack medicine, but note that its advertising campaign is utterly false: it contains no blood whatsoever (19-22). 3 By examining such encounters between fictional bodies and print and media objects, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that print and its attendant technologies allowed Victorians to imagine and define the “normal” body in contradistinction to various Othered embodiments, serving as a powerful tool not only for the sort of bodily self-fashioning Renfield attempts in the above passage, but also for the social management of Othered bodies. For such applications of the printed and written word to the body are not confined to the diegetic world of Dracula; as Richard Altick notes in Victorian People and Ideas (1973), “the Victorians [were] persuaded that the press was mightier than either pulpit or cannon, and that the health of an ailing society,” and, as I argue, of individual bodies, “could be restored by the reasonableness of the printed word” (72). In these pages, I articulate and interrogate Victorian conceptualizations of non- normative bodies and identities as they manifest in—and in response to—various aspects of material print and media culture. I borrow Steven Marcus’s term, “the Other Victorians,” in order to speak to embodied experiences of (dis)ability, race, and gender as well as the sexual “otherness” Marcus describes (xiii). I ask, what happens not only when the bodies of these “Other Victorians” meet print and media objects, but also when such meetings are intentionally staged? Why, in the Victorian period, did it suddenly become something like second nature for authors to depict characters turning to the realm of print and media to substantiate and/or repudiate claims to specific identities and embodiments? What stood to be gained and lost in such encounters, particularly for those most likely to be disenfranchised and disempowered in Victorian society? And why did Victorian fiction continue to depict and emphasize such encounters even when faith in the authority 4 of print and information management systems such as the archive began to crumble in the late-Victorian period? To answer these questions, I begin with a foundation of literary, Marxist, and Postcolonial analyses of the novel as a form. I then draw on the scholarly frameworks of disability studies, periodical studies, archival studies, book history, and the digital humanities to more accurately consider the complexity of Victorian engagement with a vast array of print and media forms. Scholars have long recognized the fact that literature, and especially the novel, is a particularly fecund site for identity formation. Both Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong contend that the novel is the site at which modern understanding and experience of middle-class society and individuality emerge in the eighteenth century (Watt 60-2; Armstrong, How Novels Think 3). In The Rise of the Novel (1957), Watt suggests that the novel and the concept of the individual arise and develop in tandem. Armstrong, writing nearly fifty years after Watt, declares more unequivocally that “the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same” (3). But if scholars tend to agree that the eighteenth century saw the rise of modern, middle-class societies and individuals in and through its novels, they also agree that novels take on a much more complicated role as sites of identity formation in the Victorian period. In The English Novel (1970), Raymond Williams posits that one of the defining characteristics of the Victorian novel is “a structurally similar certainty that relationships, knowable relationships, so far from composing a community or a society, are the positive experience that has to be contrasted with the ordinarily negative experience of the society as a whole” (15; original emphasis). Attributing this certainty at least in part to the rapid urbanization that accompanied the era’s technological revolution, Williams declares it a 5 structure of feeling.45 In other words, Williams argues that Victorian novels contrast an increasing sense that individuals and society are unknowable with an urgent emphasis on the necessity of knowing others and of being known oneself. And this structure of feeling constitutes the lived experience of an emerging ideology which, in turn, subtly shapes cultural production. Postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said were quick to recognize that British literature’s answers to such urgent questions of knowability are epistemologically violent ones. For both Spivak and Said, Victorian novels are forms obsessed with defining the British individual and empire as ideal and unrivalled. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), for example, Said argues that “the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other … imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other” (70-1). Spivak, whose now infamous essay, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” (1985), laid the groundwork for Said’s Culture and Imperialism, argues that British novels use colonial bodies to perform the task of “worlding,” to bring English bodies and identities and a British imperial worldview into sharp focus by serving as counterpoints of incontrovertible difference, i.e., as Others (243, 251). Implicit in these claims are conceptualizations of ideal identity and aberrance that themselves emerged in the nineteenth century, shaping not only how the English viewed colonial bodies, but also how they viewed their own. Tracing the etymology of the word 4. Williams defines the “structure of feeling” as the broad manifestation of “a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period” before it becomes fixed as a “world-view” or “prevailing ideology” (“Structures” 131, 129). 6 “norm” in Enforcing Normalcy (1995), Lennard J. Davis argues that the concept of normal arises in the nineteenth century as increased industrialization and the emergence of fields including Statistics and Eugenics lead to increasing emphasis on standardization (25-7). While such concepts certainly existed prior to the emergence of the “norm,” Davis maintains that this numbers-based categorization of things (and ultimately of bodies) had, by the 1850s, “extend[ed] into the very heart of cultural production” (39, 49). The novel in particular “is intricately connected with concepts of the norm. From the typicality of the central character, to the normalizing devices of plot to bring deviant characters back into the norms of society, to the normalizing coda of endings” (49). The novel as a site of identity formation is, by the Victorian period, primarily concerned with questions of knowability that center on the norm, whether that “norm” is defined by race, class, gender, ability, or all of the above: Who is normal? Who is not normal? And how do we know which is which? These questions arguably manifest in other areas of Victorian print and media production and management, the first and most important of which is the periodical press. Due to a spate of technological and legislative innovations, including the development of steam printing press (1810), the adoption of the Fourdrinier paper machine (circa 1830), the institution of the Penny Post (1840), and the abolition of the Stamp Duty (1855), England saw an ever-rising tide of new print productions during the nineteenth century. While many of these publications were novels—John Sutherland estimates that Victorians produced “around 50,000” novels before the end of the century—many more were periodicals (151).5 In fact, John North, editor of The Waterloo Directory (1976), 5. This estimate is somewhat muddied by the fact that novels were often published in periodicals and newspapers during the Victorian period. 7 conservatively estimates that there were 125,000 individual newspapers and periodicals published in England during the Victorian period (vii-x). This mass of periodicals functioned as a critical locus for inquiry and the dissemination of knowledge throughout the century. As Dallas Liddle explains in The Dynamics of Genre (2009), “magazines, reviews, and newspapers were the discursive context and physical medium of the most important British literature in the nineteenth century” (1). Attesting to the discursive power of the nineteenth-century press, Benedict Anderson famously argues that at the intersections of print and capitalism, certain media—daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and monthly reviews, as well as novels, for example—allow readers to imagine themselves as part of a large community (42-3). By implementing standardized linguistics and enveloping readers in a shared temporal perspective, in other words, Victorian periodicals created a sense of national unity and camaraderie by interpolating individuals in a shared temporal and linguistic space. As Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton point out, nineteenth-century “periodicals and newspapers structured readers’ days, weeks, and months” (2; my emphasis). While Anderson, in particular, focuses on the ways in which the press helped to generate and then mediate what we might consider a corporate body, or in his words, an “imagined community,” his argument has implications for individual bodies as well (43). At the same time as the Victorian press promised to create a knowable (and “normal”) community of individuals through the dissemination of timely knowledge and information to individual readers, however, the growing mass of Victorian novels and periodicals reduced the individual’s ability to know anything comprehensively, or even to appear knowledgeable to others. As an anonymous writer in the 23 July 1864 issue of The 8 Saturday Review observes, “the ordinary reader, desirous of no more than keeping himself pretty well informed about books whose titles are mentioned in drawing-room conversation, must feel his heart sink within him as he contemplates the surging sea of print upon which we are all afloat” (“Repose”). This “surging sea of print,” due to its sheer mass, worked simultaneously to ameliorate and exacerbate the problem of the knowable, making what Oscar Wilde once termed “the modern ideal,” that is, “the thoroughly well-informed man,” impossible to attain (Dorian Gray 195). Perhaps even more troubling for some Victorians, print threatened to disrupt the authenticity of social status and gendered privilege as well as the specific social use-value of individual gendered and classed bodies. For print, properly used, provided an opportunity not only for the (re)imagination and (re)constitution of community, but also of the self—and it seems that many Victorians recognized this potential, whether they looked forward to or feared its results. This recognition is clear, for instance, in Frances Power Cobbe’s December 1868 essay, “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors.” Cobbe takes to the pen to point out how harmful complacent journalism can be, since it has the power to categorize identities and thus impact lives. She makes it a point to note that she is responding to “the four categories under which persons are now excluded from many civil, and all political rights in England [enumerated in the essay’s title] … [which] were complacently quoted this year by the Times as every way fit and proper exceptions” (110). By responding in kind, she hopes to illustrate and question the fact that her gender classifies her with criminals, the mentally disabled, and minors whose varying states of cognitive ability render them, in some eyes, unfit to govern themselves, let alone vote. Cobbe doesn’t extend her argument beyond the scope of her own (gendered) interest in 9 the discussion. Even so, her essay emphasizes the role that print and media can play in the definition and experience of Othered bodies, including women, the disabled, criminals, people with non-normative gender and sexual preferences, and minorities. It seems to me that Cobbe’s real-world experience with print and Renfield’s fictional one both speak to the need for, and emergence of, a new kind of embodied literacy in the age of mass-printing. The increasing popularity and proliferation of print forms including the novel and the newspaper, in other words, necessitated a literacy which recognized the ways in which print acted—and could be made to act—upon one’s own body as well as on the bodies of others. If we have had a sense of this emergent, embodied literacy before now, it has largely been a piecemeal one, comprised largely of our awareness of metaphors which figured print alternately as food, medicine, and poison and imagined the bodies consuming that print as unwitting benefactors of or victims to its power. This dissertation brings two things to such an awareness: a sense of the scale at which such embodied literacy functioned—not just as piecemeal metaphor but as an adaptive strategy which worked across genres and media—and a sense of the stakes such literacy had for real and fictional bodies alike. I borrow the term adaptive strategy from both its anthropological and disability contexts, here, to denote a sort of socio-cultural coping and, indeed, survival mechanism which manifests in response to threatening (or potentially threatening) wide-scale, long-term systemic and social changes. For, as both Cobbe and Renfield demonstrate, in the dawning age of mass media, if one did not learn how to leverage print to one’s own embodied advantage, others would use it to define, limit, even elide one’s embodiment and identity. Over the course of the next three chapters, I examine iterations of such literacy as they appear in late-Victorian novels by 10 Wilkie Collins, Richard Marsh, Bram Stoker, Thomas Hardy, and George Eliot. My project highlights not only the ways in which print and its attendant technologies could be used to reinforce the ideological status quo surrounding bodily norms, health, and identity, but also how literacy about print’s effect on bodies could be used to subvert that status quo—at least in fiction. In the following chapters, I trace the print-based exploration, and, in some cases embrace, of non-normative embodiments and identities in widely popular novels and examine the implications of such exploration for fictional characters and readers alike. In Chapter II, I draw on periodical studies and critical disability studies to argue that the Victorian newspaper did not just imagine a community, as Benedict Anderson has shown, it also imagined the bodies that comprised that community—constructing Victorians’ conceptions of bodily “ability” by juxtaposing narratives of “disability” and “cure” on the page. Focusing on the serial publication of Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter (1879-1880) and the medical advertisements printed alongside it in The Sheffield Daily Telegraph (1855-1950), a major provincial newspaper, I contend that this process of imagining the “normal” and “abnormal” body—of, in other words, printing disability—linked bodies with print inextricably in the public imagination and generated what I call a media model of disability. Scholars have long approached disability via models of thought, ranging from medical models (which understand disability to be a failure of the body) to social models (which understand disability as society’s failure to design universally accessible infrastructure). In the media model of disability I identify, “disability” stems not from biology but from media forms which present and popularize narratives about bodies. The media model of disability I outline enables us to recognize 11 and provides us a vocabulary with which to analyze moments at which characters are primed to resist (and readers are primed to imagine resisting) the medicalization of their bodies through print. In Chapter III, I turn to a fictional site at which print meets and mediates the body: the personal archive of late-century gothic fiction. Though scholarship on nineteenth-century archives has tended to emphasize the function of the archive at the level of the state or empire, archives and archival logic also impact the knowability and normalcy of individual bodies in many of the period’s gothic novels. Analyzing Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), late-century novels which contain representations of archives and represent themselves as archives in the making, I argue that the fictional archive serves as a guarantor of a return to normalcy not, necessarily, in the face of the novels’ titular monsters, but instead in terms of the novels’ exploration of non-normative gender identity and sexuality. For, characters in both Dracula and The Beetle turn strategically to archives to mitigate the perceived threat of non-normative gender and sexuality—in themselves and others. By reiterating (or, attempting to reiterate) the legitimacy of heteronormative and cis-gender bodies and identities, however, the characters end up naturalizing the “transgressive” embodiments (often their own) to which they react. Both the ideal and the aberrant are archived, as it were. Consequently, I identify the fictional archive as an important record of evolving and fluid Victorian gender and sexual mores. Finally, in Chapter IV, I blend qualitative and quantitative readings of not one, but 155, Victorian novels in order to capture a clearer picture of nineteenth-century print culture and publishing discourse as it relates to embodied identity. Analyzing two 12 corpora, a positive control group made up of fifty-five novels featuring characters who are authors, editors, or publishers, and a larger pool of nineteenth-century novels and novellas which have been very loosely categorized as “bestsellers,” I argue that printing terms—particularly stereotype (and variants)—took on increasingly figural relations to the human body and identity in the late-Victorian period. Comprised of works published between 1841-1901, the corpora present a trajectory of nineteenth-century thinking about the body in and as a book. I draw upon these corpora to frame my close reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel which, in my reading, demonstrates the ubiquity of figural stereotyping terminology in late-Victorian England and its influence upon canonical fiction. Though the term stereotype never appears in Daniel Deronda, within the context of these corpora and the novel’s emphasis on printing and books, it becomes clear that the stereotype serves as an important context and subtext for Eliot’s construction of Deronda and Mordecai’s relationship. In drawing together Victorian literature and culture, periodical studies, critical disability studies, archival theory, gender studies, post-colonial theory, book history, and the digital humanities, I have attempted to challenge preconceptions about who the Victorians were, who appeared in their media, and, indeed, about how they understood and used their media. Beginning this work with a focus on fiction in its various forms (the novel, the serial novel, the late-gothic novel, etc.) and in its original publishing contexts allowed me to trace and analyze manifestations of embodied literacy in the cultural imagination. Faced with skyrocketing unknowability in the dawn of the age of mass media, the Victorians imagined themselves using pieces of that very mass media to know themselves in unprecedented ways both within and beyond the scope of the 13 emergent “hegemony of normalcy” Lennard J. Davis identified. Sometimes this “knowing” meant pressing themselves into normative narratives, as we will see in Chapter III, but occasionally this print-based knowing opened up ways of knowing—and being—oneself that defied the status quo, as, to an extent, occurs in Chapters II and IV. With more time and space, I would have liked to take this project beyond the confines of the fictional, making use of personal letters, diaries, archives, and newspaper coverage about the authors and publishers featured in this dissertation as well as the lesser-known, everyday Victorians of whom we catch glimpses in newspapers’ personal columns, scrap-books, and ephemera such as handbills. Indeed, an investigation of personal scrap-books would be a logical next step for this project, as the myriad clippings, annotations, pressings, and etc., recycle and recombine print forms as a means with which to project their creators’ personal aspirations for being, and being known, in the world in much the same way that modern social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram allow users to curate and arrange various images, texts, and hyperlinks into narrative assemblages of an imagined, or imaginary, “best life.” Even without this foray into non-fiction, however, my dissertation enables us to think more critically about the implications of mass media for the individual body both in and beyond the nineteenth-century; the interrelation of media forms (such as the newspaper and the novel, but also the serial novel and patent medicine advertisements) and their effects on embodiment discourse and conceptualizations of “normalcy”; the ways in which information management systems can reinforce heteronormativity and enable the exploration and embrace of embodied identity; and the effects of such embodied literacy on language itself. Indeed, the final chapter of this dissertation, tracing 14 the evolution of figural usage of printing terminology with a particular emphasis on stereotype and its variants, highlights the fact that conversations about print media, information management technologies, and embodiment are still very relevant in the twenty-first century. For the stereotype, an important printing process which became popular in the 1850s, still shapes the way we think and talk about embodiment, particularly in regard to race. And if nineteenth-century print technologies still influence our embodiment discourse, it follows that a clearer understanding of those technologies and the culture which used them is necessary to our own embodied literacy in the twenty- first century. 15 CHAPTER II PRINTING DISABILTY: ADVERTISING, JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER, AND THE SHEFFIELD DAILY TELEGRAPH (1879-1880) Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors. — Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1981) Even before their first appearances in the pages of Victorian newspapers, the ailing, impaired, and suffering bodies popular in nineteenth-century sensation fiction were surrounded by patent medicine advertisements. In the weeks leading up to the publication of Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter (1879-1880) in the Saturday supplement to The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, for example, the novel was frequently advertised alongside patent medicines such as Clarke’s World-Famed Blood Mixture, Allan’s Anti-Fat, and Towle’s Pennyroyal and Steel Pills (Figs. 1-3, below):6 Left to right: Fig. 1. Jezebel’s Daughter, Clarke’s, and Allan’s advertisements. Fig. 2. Jezebel’s Daughter, Blair’s, and Clarke’s advertisements. Fig. 3. Jezebel’s Daughter, Jenner’s, and Towle’s advertisements. 6. The OED defines a patent medicine as “a proprietary medicine manufactured under patent and available without prescription” (see the section on Special Uses under “patent, adj.”). As Thomas Richards notes, these minimally regulated and widely available products weren’t always patented—but they are generally referred to broadly as patent medicines (170). 16 In fact, such advertisements continued to frame the novel throughout its serial run. This long-term spatial association of the bodies in sensation fiction with those in patent medicine advertisements seems strategically pointed given that, as Martha Stoddard Holmes and Mark Mossman note, sensation fiction’s “poetics,” “plotting and characterization,” and “critical reception [use] the body as a nexus of expression, experience, and meaning making” (493). Placing these advertisements side-by-side, the newspaper amplifies the corporeal themes and foci not only of the patent medicine advertisements but also of the sensational narratives of popular serial fiction. As I will argue in this chapter, the newspaper’s various elements work together (though not necessarily in harmony) to generate a multimodal ecology of the body, leading readers to conceive—or model—the “normal” body in relation not solely to biological or social factors, but rather in relationship to the body’s print environment. In her foundational work on serial sensation fiction, Deborah Wynne has noted that periodicals such as The Sheffield Daily Telegraph “exist as sites of simultaneity in that they present a cluster of apparently unrelated texts at the same point in time and space, all having the potential to be read in relation to each other” (20). James Mussell maintains that “the study of periodicals requires the … acknowledgement that the individual number is the manifest interaction of its producers—including contributors, editors, readers, and the interactions of the market” (Science 5). “Any discussion of the periodical press,” he concludes, echoing Bakhtin’s claims in the epigraph to this chapter, “must include form” (Science 5). In fact, Mussell contends that “form was the way in which nineteenth-century serials imagined what they did not know” (“Cohering” 94; my 17 emphasis).7 From mastheads to correspondence columns, advertisements to serialized novels and scientific essays, the nineteenth-century newspaper was ultimately a medium comprised of media, a form defined by its agglomeration of other forms. And, as Mussell goes on to explain, its success lay in its manufacture and contextualization of novelty: “the nineteenth-century periodical … was a genre predicated upon the new,” and “in their telling of the new, periodicals accounted for new things, events, or phenomena by accommodating them within a world that had already been negotiated with their readers through repeated acts of telling, reading, and buying” (95). But to what end? Just what, to borrow Wynne’s diction, was The Sheffield Daily Telegraph inviting readers to do with this juxtaposition of advertisements for sensation novels and patent medicines? What knowledge, to use Mussell’s terminology, was the newspaper cohering with this repeated juxtaposition of forms? How might such editorial choices about the layout of various elements on the pages of the newspaper have related to, or acted upon, Victorian readers’ understanding of the body? No single scholarly framework provides satisfying answers to these questions. In its macro-level account of the nineteenth-century newspaper, for example, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) traces the role of “print-capitalism” in the collective imagination of nationalistic communities but neglects the bodies which comprised those communities (36). Similarly, drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts of textual dialogism and heteroglossia, scholars of Victorian periodicals have stressed the importance of the nineteenth-century press to the structure of daily life and even identity 7. While Mussell does not refer directly to patent medicine advertisements in his discussion of form, his work emphasizes the structural importance of recurring elements in newspapers—and advertisements for novels and medicines alike can certainly be considered recurring elements. 18 construction,8 but have largely overlooked the press’s role in what Lennard J. Davis has called “the construction of normalcy”—the processes by which various discourses emerged and interacted to create a distinctly Victorian ideal of the “normal,” “healthy” body by identifying bodies which were “abnormal” and “unhealthy” (44, 29). Scholars of sensation fiction, while increasingly cognizant of disability’s centrality to the genre, have been likewise at a loss to explain, in Holmes and Mossman’s words, why disability is “central to the very poetics of sensation fiction” (493). And, with the exception of Kylee- Anne Hingston, whose examination of the interplay between patent medicine advertisements in Harper’s Weekly and representations of bodies in Collins’s No Name (1862-1863) during its serial run in the magazine lays the groundwork for thinking about such juxtapositions as sites of competing disability narratives, the field of critical disability studies has yet to make a sustained consideration of the ways in which the formal properties of the nineteenth-century newspaper engaged with contemporary disability discourse and shaped readers’ lived experience of “ability” or “disability.” Drawing these discourses together, in this chapter I argue that The Sheffield Daily Telegraph’s repeated juxtaposition of advertisements for sensation novels and patent medicines created a conceptual link between both forms in readers’ minds with which the newspapers invited readers to imagine and, within the frame of that imagining, to understand and evaluate the body. Using this juxtaposition, The Sheffield Daily Telegraph placed both sensation fiction and patent medicine advertisements in conversation with each other and with already existing Victorian discourse about bodily 8. See Dallas Liddle’s The Dynamics of Genre (2009), Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton’s introduction to The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016), and Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein’s Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (2000). 19 “normalcy” and “ability”—setting itself up as a diagnostic tool (and, perhaps, a curative) for the bodies affected by that discourse.9 Ultimately, this process of imagining the “normal” and “abnormal” body via the interaction of advertisements and novels in The Sheffield Daily Telegraph meant that the newspaper and its constituent print forms (advertisements, novels, etc.) became entangled with the body in the public imagination. This entanglement, in turn, generated what I call a media model of disability in which bodily “disability” is understood not as biological or physical impairment but rather as a construction of the very media forms which present and popularize narratives about the body.10 Within this conceptual framework, I argue, print itself was understood by fictional characters and readers alike to confer, and to “cure,” disability. Because the valuable theoretical and historical work that undergirds my argument in this chapter comes from several fields, I spend the first part of the chapter situating the publication history of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph (SDT) within the interworking scholarly frameworks I have aggregated. The SDT, Sheffield’s first daily paper, was engaged with contemporary disability discourse from the very beginning, due to its owners’ vested interests in the patent medicine trade. When part-owner William Leng converted the newspaper’s Saturday supplement into a vehicle for sensation fiction beginning in 1864, the SDT’s long relationship with patent medicine advertisers framed 9. As noted briefly in the introduction to this dissertation (and discussed at more length below), Lennard J. Davis identified a “hegemony of normalcy” as one major product of nineteenth-century industrialization and scientific / mathematical discourse (44, 29). See Chapter I pp. 6-7 and p. 23, below. 10. Within Critical Disability Studies, historical understandings of disability are theorized as models of thought, ranging from a medical model (in which disability is understood to be an impairment or biological failure to be fixed) to a social model (which understands disability as the failure of a society to design infrastructure for all bodies instead of as a biological failure). See Lennard J. Davis, “On Disability as an Unstable Category,” in Bending Over Backwards (2002) for a fuller description of the various models in common scholarly usage today. 20 its serial publications. I contend that by preferentially publishing sensation fiction and juxtaposing it with patent medicine advertisements over the course of decades, Leng and, through him, the pages of the SDT not only made an implicit argument about the connectedness of novel and patent medicine, but also established and propagated a link between certain narrative forms and the management of “aberrant,” “suffering,” or “degenerate” bodies—in effect, generating a media-based model of disability. In the pages of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, in other words, print came to be seen and understood as a powerful tool with which disabled and otherwise “aberrant” bodies could be socially managed—“cured,” or obscured—or, conversely, with which abled bodies could be disabled. Even more subversively, as I demonstrate in the second part of this chapter, print came to be understood as a tool with which disabled characters (and readers) could shape others’ perceptions of their bodies, making discursive and cultural space in which they could comfortably inhabit their own embodied identities. The media model of disability, intentionally or not, made resistance to standard medical models of disability possible and popular. In the second part of this chapter, I trace the development of this media model of disability and its subversive implications by considering the repeated juxtaposition of advertisements for Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter and various patent medicines alongside the serial installments of Jezebel’s Daughter which appeared in the Saturday Supplement to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph from 13 September 1879 to 31 January 1880. The plot of Jezebel’s Daughter presents readers with an alternative to pervasive and harmful medical models of disability with a series of equations. First, the narrator implicitly equates print objects and the narratives they present with patent medicines and 21 the advertisements used to sell them. Second, within the context of the novel’s sensational plot—a string of Borgia-esque poisonings and miraculous cures connected to the eponymous Jezebel—print objects, patent medicines, and their correlated narratives are also all equated with poison. Correlating cure with narrative and then narrative with poison, Jezebel’s Daughter leads readers to a troubling question: is it safer for one’s physical, social, and moral wellbeing to simply abstain from narrative altogether? The novel’s postscript answers this question by contrasting “Jezebel’s” poisonous diary writing with the central, mentally disabled character, Jack Straw’s, decision not to provide written testimony in the wake of the poisonings and miraculous cures with which the novel concludes. Ultimately, it is this abstention from narrative, and from the media which spread narratives, which allows Jack Straw to leave the asylum and reintegrate into society without the necessity of a miraculous “cure” for his mental illness. Within the context of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, the novel’s exploration of narrative’s effects on the body harkens to the newspaper’s myriad print narratives which feature bodies. As I demonstrate in the following pages, almost all of the newspaper’s constituent forms— essay, advertisement, etc.—employ narrative modes. Thus, while narrative and print aren’t interchangeable, they are, for Victorian readers, highly permeable, overlapping categories. I argue that as part of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph’s ecology of the body, the representation of disability in and through narrative in Jezebel’s Daughter guides readers to understand print qua narrative as a literally enabling and disabling force. My argument in this chapter, therefore, has implications not only for the study of nineteenth-century newspapers, but also for critical disability studies and scholarship on Victorian sensation fiction. I position nineteenth-century disability discourse within the 22 discursive imagination of community Benedict Anderson delineated in his work, illustrating that the bodies comprising national and regional communities were also imagined. And, in doing so, I identify the provincial press as a primary locus of nineteenth-century disability discourse. Finally, in demonstrating that newspapers like The Sheffield Daily Telegraph served as sites where the formal properties of the newspaper imagine or “print” the disabled body, I also shed light on sensation fiction’s inextricability from conceptualization and representations of disabled bodies. “New and vigorous blood”: Printing the Body in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph Provincial daily papers began to spring up across England just as, in the mid- 1850s, a “hegemony of normalcy” emerged from “notion[s] of progress, of industrialization, and of ideological consolidation of the power of the bourgeoisie” extending, as Lennard J. Davis contends, “into the very heart of cultural production” (Davis Enforcing 39, 49).11 This temporal convergence was no coincidence. The nineteenth-century periodical press was, in Dallas Liddle’s words, “the discursive context and physical medium of the most important British literature in the nineteenth century” (1). Not only were many important scientific articles, accounts of key world events, and information relevant for daily life first published in the pages of newspapers and magazines during the nineteenth century, so too were many of the most celebrated Victorian novels.12 In fact, “by the later 1870s,” Graham Law explains, “the dominant 11. See Andrew Walker’s article, “The Development of the Provincial Press in England c. 1780-1914,” for a thorough account of the rise of the provincial press in England. 12. For instance, all of Charles Dickens’s novels were serialized, either in newspapers or as standalone part-issues. For more information, see John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson’s Dickens at Work (1957). 23 mode of instalment publication in Britain … had shifted unmistakably. … from serialization in single metropolitan magazines … to syndication in groups of provincial weekly papers” (“Imagined” 191). Benedict Anderson has argued that the novel and the newspaper were “the two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe,” marking “the birth of the imagined community of the nation” (24-5). Surprisingly then, as Law points out, “[Benedict] Anderson never recognizes that news and novels often occupied the same publishing space” in the nineteenth century; nor does he recognize the difference between London papers and the masses of provincials which sprung up and flourished after 1855 and the repeal of the Stamp Act (“Imagined” 185).13 As Law observes, provincial papers which serialized fiction present “a rather different picture” of the imagination of community than the one Anderson paints: these newspapers, and the novels serialized in them, played an important role “in reinforcing a sense of regional identity, in the face of metropolitan pressures to adopt national and imperial perspectives” (“Imagined” 185). Yet even with a more nuanced picture of the way in which, as Law states, provincial papers like The Sheffield Daily Telegraph “shored-up and rebuilt” the “local or regional community … through mechanisms that parallel those used in the construction of imperial identities” (200), we’re missing any real sense of the embodiedness of this community-imagining process, of the individual bodies imagining and imagined by local and regional communities. As James W. Carey points out, the news is always already engaged with social identities—and, I would add, the bodies upon which those identities 13. As explained by David Magee in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009), the 1819 Stamp Act “defin[ed] any periodical containing news or ‘comment’ as a newspaper (and thus subject to stamp, paper, and advertisement duties), commencing a legal-political repression that stifled the radical press” (“Unstamped” 648). 24 are founded—“invit[ing] our participation on the basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social roles within it” (17). So, too, is the national community which Anderson and those in conversation with his work have argued that forms “print- capitalism” such as the novel and newspaper allowed readers to imagine (36). As Pamela K. Gilbert has so compellingly shown, bodies were at the heart of Victorians’ conceptualizations of the public sphere and the social domain. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Gilbert argues, “the management of the social body through public medicine and discourses of health became the principal discourse with which to negotiate these new questions of citizenship and the Condition of England….The development of this discourse identified the healthy body and healthy desires as the basis of political fitness” (Citizen 3; my emphasis). By any measure, the newspaper is key not only to the imagining of community, but also to the imagining of the embodied self and the embodied Other. Taken together, these disparate ways of conceptualizing identity and community in the nineteenth century open up a new line of inquiry. If, on the one hand, we have newspapers and the novels printed in them working to generate an imagined community and, on the other, we have the conceptualization of the “healthy” body undergirding that imagined community even as new ideas about what it means to be “normal” and “healthy” are spreading through England, it stands to reason that we need to take a closer look at the way in which newspapers imagined and represented “healthy” bodies during the course of the century. This is particularly true of provincial newspapers, whose widespread circulations and often increased reliance on patent medicine advertisements for revenue make them critical mechanisms in the dissemination of bodily discourse and 25 the “hegemony of normalcy” Lennard J. Davis describes (Enforcing 39).14 According to Thomas Richards, patent medicine advertisements often “‘pick[ed] out perfectly normal physiological phenomena and indicate[d] to the person reading the advertisement that these normal phenomena [were] indications of incipient disease’” or, alternately, read like “a medical encyclopedia,” presenting readers with an overwhelming array of symptoms and conditions (Richards 176, 187). The ominously worded advertisement for Brandreth’s Pills quoted below, for example, declares: Because sudden dizziness or great prostration without warning takes hold of you, is there reason for alarm? Not at all, you only need a prompt dose of Brandreth’s Pills. More than usual exercise in the full-blooded is apt to produce alarming symptoms.…So, if dizzy, or if you suffer pain anywhere, down with from six to ten Brandreth’s Pills.…In twenty-four hours … you will be content. Constitutions are much alike. Vertigo, dizziness, and pain can come only when impurity in the blood is too much for “the life” in us to carry without a struggle. (Brandreth’s) Brandreth’s advertisements appear frequently in the SDT, often accompanied by customer testimonials which take up one-half to two-thirds of an entire column (see Figs. 4-6, below). Illustrating Richards’s point, this advertisement raises alarm by remarking on “sudden dizziness” and “great prostration” to imply that all bodies, even “full- blooded” healthy ones, are subject to unexpected, catastrophic illness (Brandreth’s).15 14. As I will discuss at more length later, the competing narratives about the body advertisements and other media forms in the newspaper present also work against hegemony. 15. Notably, the Oxford English Dictionary defines “full-blooded” as “(of a person) having the qualities associated with a constitution rich in blood … vigorous, hearty” (“full-blooded, adj.”) 26 Left to right: Fig. 4. Beginning of Brandreth’s Pills advertisement. Fig. 5. Complete version of Brandreth’s Pills advertisement. Fig. 6. Entire column with Brandreth’s Pills advertisement marked. 27 Patent medicine advertisements like Brandreth’s didn’t only encourage newspaper readers to view themselves as ill and suffering, however; they also presented themselves and their products (an important distinction, which I will discuss at more length in the following section) as cures for that illness and suffering. In the above Brandreth’s advertisement, for instance, the copy is punctuated with statements which identify the advertisement as “advice” to be given and taken in much the same way as a dose of medicine. “In all these fifty years I have never given advice which I would not act on myself,” the advertisement’s speaker states, adding, “so, if dizzy, or if you suffer pain anywhere, down with from six to ten Brandreth’s Pills” (Brandreth’s). After an additional spiel, which once again raises readers’ alarm by asserting that “vertigo, dizziness, and pain can come only when impurity in the blood is too much for ‘the life,’”16 the speaker concludes, “it is this struggle that Brandreth’s Pills aid. The wisely directed will give heed” (Brandreth’s). The testimonials included with many such patent medicine advertisements bear this rhetorical tendency out, apostrophizing the lucky day on which the testimonial writer first encountered the advertisement which led to their acquisition of the medicine. Both advertisement and medicine, it seems, must be taken regularly to maintain good health and wellbeing. But more on this later. For now, suffice it to say that provincial papers like the SDT fairly swarmed with patent medicine advertisements which were written to affect readers’ bodies in very particular ways. By the end of the century, the patent medicine industry was, Richards observes, spending “two million pounds a year in advertising costs,” and patent medicine advertisements were a predominant presence in the bulk of Victorian periodicals 16. The quoted words in this advertisement, “the life,” are a reference to another popular patent medicine advertisement: Clarke’s World-Famed Blood Mixture. For more on this brand, see Chapter I. 28 (Richards 172). Priti Joshi and others have estimated that, in the average newspaper, “the ratio of ads to news, editorials, or other content was roughly 50:50 … from the late eighteenth century onward” (Joshi 253).17 While this ratio includes all advertisements, patent medicine advertisements represent a hefty percentage thereof—particularly, as we will see shortly, in the SDT. Practically speaking, advertisement revenue enabled the existence of many newspapers.18 The 1909 Select Committee on Patent Medicines went so far as to suggest that advertisements for “secret remedies” “constitute one of the most considerable sources of income” for newspapers and periodicals, adding, “a number of small provincial newspapers could probably hardly exist at all without secret remedy advertisements” (Report, x). From its beginnings in the summer of 1855, the SDT had strong ties to the patent medicine trade. Originally owned and produced by “bookseller, printer and patent medicine dealer, Joseph Pearce,” the SDT began circulation as a four-page daily paper featuring approximately two pages of advertisements (including, but by no means limited to patent medicine advertisements) and two pages of news in each issue (“Sheffield Daily”; my emphasis). In April of 1861, the newspaper expanded from four to eight pages and began circulating a weekly supplement of four pages.19 Later that year, the 17. Joshi draws on Lucy Brown’s Victorian News and Newspapers (1988) for this ratio. 18. As noted in the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (DNCJ), written evidence regarding the importance of advertisements suggests that: “despite the low status of advertising and the refusal of certain professions such as lawyers to engage in it … [it was] the norm … for advertising to be cautiously celebrated both as a sign of progress and as responsible for the prosperity of the press” (King, “Advertising” 7; my emphasis). 19. Prior to 1884, the supplement was bundled with the Saturday issue of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, though the supplement had its own pagination and appeared under a masthead that read: Weekly Supplement to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph. In 1884, the supplement was given a new masthead that proclaimed it The Sheffield Weekly Telegraph, and in 1887 the name changed once more to The Weekly Telegraph. 29 proliferation of advertisements was still so noticeable that an anonymous author (likely, I suspect, the editor himself), comically skewered the fact in an article titled simply “Advertisements.” In the article, the author lists, among advertisements’ many benefits, their educational value (learning from scams and quack claims); the variety of “necessary” goods they draw one’s attention to; and their accessibility and affordability: Before me lies the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, full of news, and not its worst feature is its advertising department. “Money! Money!! Money!!!” says one; “£8,000 ready to lend” says another; and we are tempted to think we shall be rich in another half-hour, but then an awkward thought intrudes itself, and we leave the loan alone. (Don’t you see?) Cheek by jowl with the money comes its best substitute, education, which does not seem to-day to have much to say for itself….Now, friends, do you want workboxes, reticules, or tea caddies; door mats, fancy soaps, or sermons; railway trips, new publications, or Colliers’ candles; … do you wish that troublesome tooth drawn, or would you like to have a private Telegraph, just invest your penny in High-street. For this very trifling sum, I can really assure you that the mysterious being supposed to inhabit a dingy room crowded with papers, who is supposed to be eternally in that room reading and writing, gives me, still for the penny, the last B. O. of my defenders, the H. R. V.’s; for he is so good as to inform me when to go and look for my watch among the unredeemed pledges about to be sold. (“Advertisements”) 30 The newspaper’s ratio of advertisements to news remained roughly the same when Frederick Clifford and William Leng bought Pearce out in 1864 (“Sheffield Daily”). Clifford, who had been “London correspondent for the paper … and parliamentary correspondent for the Times” before becoming a co-owner, “became a barrister in 1859 and spent most of his time in London” (“Sheffield Daily”). The day-to-day operation of the SDT thus fell to Leng, who, according to a 1902 obituary printed in The Chemist and Druggist, was “at the age of seventeen apprenticed to Mr. Fulham, wholesale druggist and drysalter” (“Deaths”).20 At the conclusion of his apprenticeship, the same obituary states, Leng “commenced business on his own account in Hull as a chemist and druggist” and remained in the trade for eleven years (“Deaths”). As Philip Swan helpfully explains in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, “chemists and druggists were probably the largest source of supply for patent medicines” in Victorian Britain (228). That Leng not only apprenticed with a druggist but also maintained a business in the trade for more than a decade is, I would suggest, critical to our understanding of the newspaper’s juxtaposition of sensation fiction and patent medicine advertisements. Although the SDT’s editorial association with the patent medicine trade was never truly overt, Leng’s diction in early descriptions of editorial “intentions” and “principles” is decidedly corporeal (“New Year”). Upon taking ownership of the paper, William Leng (and, presumably, Frederick Clifford) wrote to its subscribers: The new year, which brings so many changes in its train, sees a change in the proprietorship of this journal. On such an occasion it is usual to make 20. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drysalter is “a dealer in chemical products used in the arts, drugs, dye-stuffs, gums, etc.; sometimes also in oils, sauces, pickles, tinned meats, etc.” (“drysalter, n.”). 31 some announcement of intentions and to give some indication of principles….As far as in us lies we mean to make the Sheffield Daily Telegraph inferior to no provincial paper in England, in the vigour of its management and the literary ability employed upon it. That will be our aim, and no expense will be spared and no means neglected in order to render this journal worthy of the wealthy, intelligent and populous community of whose feelings and interests it has so long and so generally been accepted as the exponent. However, we do not expect and we do not wish that our readers should take this upon trust. The proof of a very popular and just now very seasonable dish is said to be in the eating. So we may say of a newspaper that the proof is in the reading—its quality can only be tested by that daily “devouring” which to most people now-a-days is hardly less indispensable or less appetizing than fish and flesh, roast and boiled. (“New Year”; my emphasis) Building on this use of corporeal diction to describe his editorial intentions, Leng uses a powerful bodily metaphor as he turns to a discussion of principles, declaring: New and vigorous blood has been brought in, but it will run in the old veins and will give life and energy to the old frame. We shall, as heretofore, stand by the old land-marks until it can be clearly shown that those which would be substituted for them are not only newer but better….“Our country, right or wrong,” is not our motto; but neither shall we start upon the assumption that in all questions our country must necessarily be in the wrong. (“New Year”; my emphasis) 32 Figuring the newspaper as an ailing body and himself and Clifford as a blood transfusion for that body,21 Leng goes on to speak at length about the SDT’s political position and mission. “To the study of local questions and of local wants we shall always give zealous attention,” he declares, adding “and our opinions will be given without favour or prejudice, with a single eye to the welfare of the town” (“New Year”; my emphasis).22 Andrew Walker, in his account of “The Development of the Provincial Press in England,” points out that “during the middle part of the [nineteenth] century, the political influence of the local press was much remarked upon” (384). Although he refers primarily to the press’s engagement with parliamentary affairs—much parodied by authors including Charles Dickens and George Eliot—his discussion of the implications of this political orientation for readers makes clear that, even in the Victorian press, the personal was political, to borrow a phrase from Carol Hanisch.23 “Instead of providing uncontroversial news stories,” Walker explains, “the papers were increasingly opinionated. At a time of rapid urbanisation, many town and city papers had much to campaign about as cramped living conditions led to a litany of problems associated with … health, the environment, transport and education, all of which demanded political responses” (378-9; my emphasis). As with the generality of the provincial press Walker describes, the SDT was both politically affiliated and concerned with the bodies of its readers. A notedly conservative 21. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the term transfusion, as in blood transfusion, was in use from at least 1643 (“transfusion, n.” def. 2). 22. Although twenty-first century readers, particularly in the U.S., may associate the term welfare with governmental programs for low-income families, in Victorian England the term simply denoted physical, emotional, and economic well-being and prosperity (see “welfare, n.” def. 1 in the OED). 23. See Hanisch’s essay, “The Personal is Political” (1970). 33 paper, the SDT with Leng at its helm aimed to “meet the wants of the working classes” and see to “the welfare of the town” in a patristic fashion (“Enlargement” ; “New Year”). As Leng writes in the article announcing his proprietorship, “to the working men of Sheffield the Sheffield Daily Telegraph has always appealed, and not in vain. But we have never pandered to their prejudices or said a word knowingly to rouse in them jealousy and ill-feeling” (“New Year”). Leng would, in fact, earn fame when—as A.H. Millar writes—“in 1867, at some personal risk, he denounced the intimidation of non- union labour by Sheffield trade unionists under the leadership of William Broadhead” (n.p.). And it is—significantly—within this context of local community issues, of “welfare” and “the wants of the working classes,” that Leng first announced the expansion of the paper’s weekly supplement and the inclusion of fiction therein (“Enlargement”; “New Year”). In an article that appeared on the first page of the weekly supplement on 13 August 1864, Leng explains: In enlarging the Weekly Supplement we desire more especially to meet the wants of the working classes, while we provide for all classes an excellent newspaper for transmission abroad. To increase the interest felt in this Saturday’s paper, we have made provision for giving it several new features. GEORGE ROY, Esq., of Glasgow and Kilcreggan, has kindly granted us permission to republish those celebrated tales of his which caused the late HUGH MILLER to term him “the Prince of Story Tellers,” and has, as a special favour, consented to allow us to adapt his most famous tale—Generalship—to this locality….We venture to anticipate that 34 the Weekly Journal is destined to become the fireside companion of the industrious classes of this large district, and will be more than it now is “the People’s paper.” (“Enlargement”; original emphasis) Although the connection of fiction with public welfare here may seem tenuous, the Victorians themselves associated popular fiction—and especially sensation fiction—with the body in a variety of ways. Explaining this association, Pamela Gilbert reminds us that “within modernity, the body has always been our most basic text for the reading of self,” the “ingresses and egresses of the body” therefore serving handily as a metaphor for the exchange of ideas (Desire 5).24 Particularly in the case of sensation fiction, she explains, this metaphor has tended toward the language of infection, imagining the sensational narrative as a foreign invader upsetting the health and wellbeing of the reader’s body (3).25 Brantlinger identifies such bodily metaphors as characteristic of the novel as a form, noting that novels are self-aware (in a manner of speaking) of their status as pharmakon, at once “drug, medicine, [and] poison” (Brantlinger 212; “pharmaco-, comb. Form”). In this light, fiction functions much like the patent medicines William Leng compounded, sold, and later advertised, in his newspaper. Whether or not Leng had fully articulated this similarity of fiction and patent 24. Arguably, the association of fiction with bodily affect has roots that reach back to eighteenth century discourse surrounding sentimentality and the sublime, exemplified by Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). In the Victorian period, the popularity and critical reception of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839-40) marks a heightened sense of the way in which fiction with sensational elements could be said to affect the bodies of readers. As Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourão argue, “fears that the book,” which featured a criminal protagonist, “would foster crime” were seemingly realized when, “in 1840, at the inquest into the murder of Lord William Russell, his valet testified that he got the idea of murdering his master from the novel” (33). 25. Indeed, as Brantlinger demonstrates in The Reading Lesson, sensation fiction departs from the “epistemological empiricism” of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century discourse, coming to signify “some extraordinary shock or thrill to the reader’s nervous system, with no specific of necessary truth content involved in the transaction” (143). 35 medicine advertisements for himself in deciding to include fiction in the SDT, his well- established inclination for corporeal metaphor and concern for the welfare of his readership caused him to gravitate toward particular genres. In his account of the history of fiction serialization in the Victorian press, Graham Law categorizes the SDT and its “brother” publication, the Dundee Advertiser,26 as a “proto-fiction-syndicate” (Serializing 58). Leng, who had worked with his brother on the Dundee Advertiser from 1859 to 1863, leveraged his family connections to attract authors to the SDT (58). The first fiction the paper serialized was not, in fact, a novel at all; rather, it was a collection of short stories which began appearing in 1864 (“Enlargement” 9). However, in 1865 the newspaper began serializing novels with reprints, and then new works, by Scottish novelist David Pae. It is at this point, Law states, that the SDT’s proto-syndication of fiction begins in earnest. He explains: “the precise nature of the business arrangements between Pae and the two Leng brothers remains obscure … but whatever the detail of the arrangements, soon Pae’s stock of old stories was turning up in newspapers not only throughout Scotland, but also all over the north of England” (Serializing 59). Reliant at first upon Pae’s “evangelical melodramas,” by 1873 the SDT had shifted to a focus on sensationalism, particularly the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Law, “Imagined” 191). In part, as Law delineates, this was due to the rise of a new force in the serialization of fiction: Tillotsons “Fiction Bureau,”27 whose unofficial outreach man and spokesperson was none other than Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s soon-to- 26. I call it a “brother” newspaper because Leng’s younger brother, John, had taken up editorship of the Dundee Advertiser in 1851 (Law Serializing 58). 27. Though the name of the firm appears to be incorrectly punctuated to a modern reader, Tillotsons does not take the possessive apostrophe. 36 be husband, John Maxwell (Serializing 64, 66). With Maxwell’s help, Tillotsons attracted the attention—and business—of big-name authors who would otherwise have focused on selling to London literary markets. As Law explains: The system used by Tillotsons generally involved two distinct stages, concerning the sale of first and subsequent serialization rights. In the first instance … for each serial purchased they worked to create a ‘coterie’ of up to a dozen major British provincial weeklies with complementary circulations, which would pay substantial sums (by the early 1880s, up to £100 for the biggest names in the largest journals) to serialize new novels simultaneously, or virtually so, in advance of volume publication, which typically occurred shortly before the appearance of the final serial installment. (Serializing 69-70) This was the system used when, in September of 1879, the SDT purchased simultaneous serialization rights from Tillotsons and began serializing Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter at the same time as a number of Tillotsons-owned papers.28 Unlike the five other papers in which Jezebel’s Daughter first ran, the SDT early and frequently publicized the novel’s serialization alongside advertisements for patent medicines—as we have already seen.29 And I argue that the SDT’s more than ordinarily 28. Indeed, as Law points out, the SDT “continued to receive most of its fiction from Tillotsons until around 1880” (Serializing 118). The other newspapers in which Jezebel’s Daughter first appeared were The Bolton Weekly Journal, The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, The Cardiff Times, and The Nottingham Evening Post. 29. This difference in presentation of the serial stems from the fact that, as Law chronicles, “text was available from Tillotsons in the form of proofs to be reset by the local publisher or, from perhaps around 1876, as thin column-length stereotype plates made from papier-mâché molds, which could be simply cut to the required length (if necessary), mounted, and locked into the forme. The major city journals joining the coteries were often content to receive material in proof, while the country papers generally preferred it in stereo form” (69-70). 37 heightened representation of bodies makes this serial version unique and important, despite the fact that the newspaper was part of a “coterie” of papers which all printed installments of the novel from 13 September 1879 to 31 January 1880 (Law Serializing 69). Coupled with already widespread ways of thinking and writing about the genre of sensation fiction in the nineteenth century, the SDT’s juxtaposition of Jezebel’s Daughter (and other sensation novels) with patent medicine advertisements worked to amplify themes of “normalcy” and “abnormality,” “health” and “wellness” prevalent in both forms.30 In doing so, the newspaper linked disability discourse to the print forms themselves, as I will explore at more length in the following section. “An Unwilling Witness”: Testimonial and Cure in Jezebel’s Daughter I am a hunted man. Tillotson hunts me with demands for weekly parts … the Doctor hunts me with unlimited directions relating to exercise and fresh air – and volunteer translators and autography collections fill up the intervals. —Wilkie Collins, letter to A.C. Watt, 29 Oct. 188531 For the past quarter of a century there has been one continuous flow of letters bearing testimony to the truly wonderful cures effected by Clarke’s World-Famed Blood Mixture, the “finest Blood Purifier that science and medical skill have brought to light.” —Clarke’s advertisement, Pall Mall Gazette, 26 June 1895 In recent scholarship on literary representations of disability in the nineteenth 30. While similar layout practices occurred in many nineteenth-century periodicals, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Belgravia: A London Magazine, the SDT is unique among the other provincial papers in which Jezebel’s Daughter initially ran in that (1) it advertised these novels widely in its own pages and (2) those advertisements were often surrounded by patent medicine advertisements. 31. See Baker and Clarke’s The Letters of Wilkie Collins: Volume 1, 1838-1865. 38 century, Wilkie Collins has emerged as one of only a handful of authors whose inclusions of disabled characters in novels stand out for their complexity. Kate Flint remarks tellingly that “Collins seems fascinated not so much by the difference of the disabled, but by their similarity to the able-bodied” (154; original emphasis). Holmes and Mossman note that Collins does not “simply … deposit a disabled character in the plot to create a sensational charge but, rather, to investigate disabled subjectivity” (499). Collins’s disabled characters, unlike those of many of his contemporaries, are presented as complex people whose motives and desires shape the plots in which they exist in profound ways. In part, this nuanced representation of the lived experience of disability can be understood as an example of what twenty-first century authors and publishers call “own writing.” That is to say, Collins was writing from his own experience. As many biographers take care to note, Collins was born with a pronounced bump or bulge on the right side of his forehead and grew into a disproportionate youth: “he was very short,” Lyn Pyckett writes in her 2005 biography, “with extremely small feet and hands, and a misshapen forehead … he was also very short-sighted” (5). Peter Ackroyd writes that “his head was too large for his body” and that “he believed that his high shoulders, and his generally broad body, were ‘quite out of all proportion’ to his large and intellectual head” (1). In later life, Ackroyd observes, Collins grew a beard to “lend … much-needed symmetry to his face” (1). More than just physically “different,” for much of his career Collins also worked through chronic pain and illness. In fact, he’d been working through the pain of what may have been gout, rheumatoid arthritis, an undiagnosed venereal disease, or a combination 39 thereof from at least 1853, though letters he sent to his mother from boarding school indicate that he had trouble with his eyes throughout his life (Lycett 109-11; Ackroyd 79; Baker and Clarke 7). His condition began to worsen in 1879 and 1880, likely helped on by the combination of twenty-plus years of laudanum use and the medical treatment he was administered for his ‘gout’: “colchium and calomel” which we know today as mercury chloride (Lycett 381). It is little wonder, in light of his chronic pain and illness, that Collins, according to Holmes, “was one of the two most prolific producers of disabled characters in Victorian literature” (74).32 When Collins began writing Jezebel’s Daughter in 1879, his health was on the decline—as it would remain until his death in 1889.33 And, although disability studies scholars have begun to veer away from biographical explanations for the representation of disability in historical literature, Collins’s bodily state and mindset in the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s speak to the themes in Jezebel’s Daughter which are amplified through juxtaposition with patent medicine advertisements during the novel’s serialization. For, as Collins writes in the letter excerpted at the beginning of this section, between Tillotsons serialization of his fiction and the doctor’s ongoing directions for improved health and wellbeing, Collins was beginning to feel desperate: “I am a hunted man. Tillotson hunts me with demands for weekly parts … the Doctor hunts me with unlimited directions relating to exercise and fresh air” (Baker and Clarke 487). And, as we will see, this desperation seeps into the plot of Jezebel’s Daughter, finding counterparts in the myriad patient testimonials that accompanied patent medicine 32. The other, of course, being Charles Dickens. 33. See Andrew Lycett’s Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation (2013), pp. 377-381, and Peter Ackroyd’s Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life (2012), chapter 18, for more details. 40 advertisements in the pages of the SDT between September 1879 and January 1880. Jezebel’s Daughter was based, roughly, on Collins’s 1858 play, The Red Vial, which did meet not with critical or popular success on the stage and was never published as a play. Written as a narrative compilation of testimonies by secondary character, David Glenney, the serial novel’s main events take place between September of 1820 and January of 1821 while the narration itself takes place in 1870. In the first edition, Collins moved the dates forward by eight years—setting the events of the narrative in 1828 and 1829 and the narration in 1878.34 Like many of the most popular sensation fiction novels of the day, the structure of Jezebel’s Daughter falls somewhere between legal document and memoir, comprised of eyewitness accounts of events in which the narrator was personally, though not centrally, concerned. Admittedly, Jezebel’s Daughter modifies the most common structure—which can be seen at its finest in The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868)—by presenting itself as a manuscript written by one eyewitness who has made reference to the papers (including diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, business ledgers, and more) of the other individuals involved in the story without actually including those documents in the narrative. Despite this modification of form, the novel’s reliance on multiple, interconnected testimonies is repeatedly foregrounded both within and between serial installments. For example, the narrator, David Glenney, assures readers about the accuracy of his recollections in the first chapter of the novel. His work gathering and collecting testimony is not only chronicled as part of the story, but is also explicitly mentioned in the subtitles 34. This date shift is strategic for a number of reasons, including a powerful use of historical context which I detail in footnote 37. 41 of the novel’s parts: “Mr David Glenney produces his correspondence, and throws some new lights on the story,” we are informed in a section called “Between the Parts,” and “Mr David Glenney collects his materials and continues the story historically” we learn at the beginning of the second (and final) part of the novel (Collins 5, 133, 239; Installments One, Twelve, and Twenty-One). This structure has most often been read by scholars as one influenced by Collins’s background in law.35 Indeed, the entire genre of sensation fiction is considered by many to be inextricable from Victorian legal issues and practice. Jane Jordan argues that, “to understand the emergence of the sensation novel in the early 1860s, it is necessary to consider the context of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act,” adding, “many sensational plots drew on actual trials, involving divorce, bigamy, or murder” (507, 509). And Marlene Tromp maintains that the genre “participated in, shaped, and was shaped by the political-legal debates of the era, the debates over what was real, what was legislatable” (71). True to its genre, the inciting incident in Jezebel’s Daughter is the reading of one man’s will while the entire plot turns on the failure to properly execute another man’s will. In both the serial and the three-volume edition, Jezebel’s Daughter opens with two deaths—Glenney’s uncle, Ephraim Wagner, in London, England and a famous chemist, and Doctor Fontaine, in Würzburg, Germany. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, Mrs. Wagner (Glenney’s aunt) finds herself an equal partner in her husband’s business, which has a branch in London and a branch in Frankfurt. Mrs. Wagner is eager to implement her late husband’s wish to employ female clerks in both locations. But, as she 35. See Elizabeth Langland’s “The Woman in White and the New Sensation” and Jane Jordan’s “The Law and Sensation” in Companion to Sensation Fiction (2011). 42 reveals to her lawyer and nephew, she is even more eager to fulfill her husband’s dying wish: to try a humane and progressive treatment in the care of the mentally ill.36 In particular, Mrs. Wagner means to become the benefactress of one Jack Straw, a ward of Bethlehem Hospital who was “poisoned by accident” prior to the events of the story (21; Installment Two). The accidental poisoning nearly killed him and left him with reduced mental capacity, though it is later revealed that prior to the poisoning he was considered a “half-wit” (135; Installment Twelve). Admitted to Bethlehem Hospital at the request of an “exalted personage,” an unnamed daughter of George III,37 Jack Straw is frequently referred to as a “lucky lunatic” (19; Installment Two). With the princess’s help, Mrs. Wagner gains custody of Jack Straw and sets about trying her husband’s treatment: “trying the effect of patience and kindness in the treatment of mad people” (12; Installment Two). Meanwhile, one of Mr. Wagner’s Frankfort partners, Mr. Keller, sends his son, Fritz, to stay with Mrs. Wagner to prevent Fritz from marrying without Keller’s approval. Glenney befriends Fritz and learns that Mr. Keller objects not to Fritz’s intended wife, but to her mother, Madame Fontaine, who is more commonly referred to as “Jezebel.” Upon his arrival, Fritz receives an anonymous letter indicating that Madame Fontaine has 36. Glenney is quick to point out that his late uncle held “political opinions [which] were considered to be nothing less than revolutionary” but which, in “these days” (1870) “when his opinions have been sanctioned by Acts of Parliament, with the general approval of the nation” would mark him as “a ‘Moderate Liberal’” (8). 37. Although the novel does identify the princess as a daughter of George III, the novel’s historical setting and medical content would, I think, have more likely recalled George IV’s daughter, Princess Charlotte, to the average reader. Not only was George IV regnant by September 1820 (the narrative’s original start date), Princess Charlotte was popular with the public and heir-apparent. By changing the novel’s start date to September 1828, Collins makes this connotation even more powerful—Princess Charlotte died due to medical error during childbirth in early October of 1828. Finally, Collins refers to his unnamed princess as “the King’s daughter” in the present tense, even though George III died in January of 1820. 43 violated her husband’s will by stealing poisons her husband instructed his executor to destroy. The letter further suggests that Madame Fontane administered these poisons to her husband while he was ill, thereby hastening his death. It is through the characters of Jack Straw and Madame Fontaine that Collins most fully engages with another of sensation fiction’s major foci in Jezebel’s Daughter: medicine. As Meegan Kennedy notes, “sensation fiction is as fascinated with medicine as it is with the elements often associated with it: crime and female desire” (481). Different from “the pattern of illness … in the Victorian novel as a whole,” Kennedy argues, sensation fiction’s emphasis on medicine “is fascinated with the body and its responses” (481). Indeed, she points out, “with its blend of medicine, science, and law, and its natural habitat of criminal cases involving poisoning, murder, or insanity, the mid- century field of forensic medicine would seem to be tailor-made for sensation fiction” (482). In the first paragraphs of Jezebel’s Daughter, David Glenney foreshadows the novel’s emphasis on these very issues when he observes that the doctors “had no immediate fear of [his uncle’s] death,” but that his uncle “took the liberty of dying at a time when [the doctors] all declared that there was every reasonable hope of his recovery” (3; Installment One). This quip initiates what becomes an extended examination of social fears about the fallibility of medical men, the tendency to turn to patent medicines instead of doctors, and the fact that, as the end of the novel demonstrates, medicine itself was often comprised of poisonous substances.38 Importantly, medicine’s perceived coterminosity with poison in the novel primes readers to suspect medicalization in general, setting the stage for the novel’s use of a media 38. As Glenney writes in Chapter XVIII, “the doctor who is not honest enough to confess it when he is puzzled, is a well-known member of the medical profession in all countries” (89; Installment Seventeen). 44 model to resist medically-defined disability and the treatment thereof. But before these themes are fully developed, Collins complicates this nascent romantic plot. Just as Fritz’s father forced him to leave the country, Madame Fontaine and her daughter, Minna, are forced by circumstances to relocate. Fritz doesn’t know what’s become of them, or if they’ve procured acceptable lodgings. Fortunately for Fritz, his arrival reminds Mrs. Wagner of the need to speak to Mr. Keller and his partner, Mr. Engelman, about employing women at the Frankfort branch. Moving ahead with her plans regarding Jack Straw, Mrs. Wagner has her hands full and decides to send Glenney to Frankfurt in her stead. Before his departure, Glenney assures Fritz that he will do what he can to track down Madame Fontaine and Minna. Upon disembarking in Franfurt, Glenney runs into Minna. Their accidental meeting leads to a more intimate acquaintance; Madame Fontaine invites Glenney to visit, hoping he will be able to intervene with Mr. Keller on Fritz and Minna’s behalf. But Glenney proves reticent, distrusting something in Madame Fontaine’s nature. Madame Fontaine takes matters into her own hands, poisoning Keller with her husband’s chemicals so that she can administer the “cure,” get credit for saving his life, and thereby ingratiate herself and her daughter. Notably, Madame Fontaine, describing her miracle cure to Mr. Engelman, draws on the sort of testimonial language used to hawk patent medicines. Giving this miracle cure to Mr. Engelman with the caveat that she be Mr. Keller’s nurse, Madame Fontaine’s plan works perfectly. That is, it works perfectly until Mrs. Wagner decides to travel to Frankfort with her new companion, Jack Straw. For, as happenstance would have it, Jack Straw was in the employ of Doctor Fontaine before he was poisoned. In fact, he was poisoned with the very same substance Madame Fontaine 45 used on Mr. Keller. One word from Jack Straw could alert the entire household to the poisoner in their midst. In the end, Jack Straw is instrumental not only in the identification of the serial poisoner, but also in the medical rescue of his “mistress,” Mrs. Wagner, who is the last of Madame Fontaine’s victims. Declared dead and taken to the Frankfurt dead house to allow time for officials to investigate the suspicious nature of her death, Mrs. Wagner is in danger of being buried alive. But Jack Straw doses her with the remainder of the medicine in the same “blue-glass bottle” that “cured” him, and when the other characters leave her for dead, he insists on waiting in the dead house overnight so he can be there when she wakes (157; Installment Thirteen). The novel relies on testimony and documentary evidence to compile this account of Madame Fontaine’s poisoning spree and Mrs. Wagner’s miraculous resurrection. Throughout, it is Jack Straw’s embodied experience of the world, attention to detail, and memories, recounted by other characters, which enable the reader to piece together clues and make sense of the plot. However, in the end Jack Straw’s actual testimony is withheld from the record the novel presents—he refuses to either write or dictate his life story. After Jack’s refusal, Glenney concludes, “so the memoirs of Jack remain unwritten, for want of materials—like the memoirs of many another foundling in real life” (Collins 252; Installment Twenty-One). In a novel constituted by written testimonies, and in a genre which is so concerned with the documentation of individual lives, this failure to provide Jack Straw’s memoir is striking. Why does Collins choose to withhold the very testimony the novel’s successful resolution most requires? Why does Jack Straw refuse to write his own memoirs? And what does any of this have to do with patent medicine 46 advertisements and nineteenth-century conceptualizations of disability in popular discourse? In what follows, I argue that the similarity of Collins’s representation of medical rhetoric and the formal and rhetorical strategies of testimonial “cure narratives” which accompanied patent medicine advertisements is highlighted by the juxtaposition of advertisements for the novel and for patent medicines in the pages of the SDT. Read together, Jezebel’s Daughter and the patent medicine advertisements printed in the SDT correlate medical “cures” with poison and link both to print and narrative (via advertisements, recipes for medical cures, testimonies, and biographical narrative forms such as diaries), consequently presenting disability—and, indeed, ability—as a construction of print and narrative. By resisting print and medicine / poison alike, Jack Straw avoids being “cured” of an embodiment with which he deeply identifies and in which he finds joy. In the twenty-first century, we tend to think of testimony and testimonial as two distinctly different things: one associated with the law and the other, more often than not, with commercialism. In the Victorian period, however, there was significant overlap between the two terms. For instance, this section’s second epigraph, an excerpt from an advertisement for Clarke’s World-Famed Blood Mixture, showcases this conflation when it describes the letters customers send as “testimony,” and the mailing of reviews as a way of bearing witness (“Clarke’s”). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the primary difference between these terms in the nineteenth century was that the testimonial was understood to be a distinctly written form of testimony: “a written attestation by some authorized person … testifying to the truth of something,” or, “a writing testifying to one’s qualifications and character … a letter of recommendation of a person or thing” 47 (“testimonial, adj. and n.”). Before the rise of cheap illustration technologies in the late 1880s, many of the patent medicine advertisements promoted alongside novels like Jezebel’s Daughter were, as Alison Hedley observes, printed in “block[s] of dense, minimally illustrated letterpress columns” and relied on testimonials to sell their products (Hedley 138).39 In the process of advertising, these testimonials often became conflated with the medicines they were promoting in much the same way that Brandreth’s Pills became conflated with good advice in the advertisement discussed above (Figs. 4-6). For instance, the following advertisement for Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills, printed in the 4 October, 1879 issue of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, provides a signed testimonial to narrate the efficacy of pills and advertisement alike: I was suffering severely from wind on the stomach, indigestion, and spasms. I read your advertisement, and thought it was just the medicine to meet my case. I was at the time under one of the best medical men in Oldham, but found little or no relief until I took your pills, which I purchased of your agents, Messrs. Braddock and Bagshaw, of Yorkshire- street. I thank God I ever did so, for they have proved a great blessing to me. Before I took your pills I was ill nine weeks, and was never at the end of the street where I live. I almost despaired of ever being better, but I am happy to inform you I am better now than I have been for years, and I 39. As Thomas Richards notes in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1990), “the worst of the patent medicine advertisers—the cure-all hawkers—were the ones who relied most on the detailed testimonials of royalty, nobility, generals, lawyers, even doctors” (193). This reliance on testimonial was, in part, because “to the degree that patent medicine investigates the origins of diseases at all, it tends to regard them as manifestations of individuality,” recognizing that “disease is a socially constructed reality” but not wanting to “implicat[e] that any existing social structure was to blame for disease in the first place” (188-9). 48 attribute it only to the use of your pills. I am never without them, and the best of all is I have never needed a doctor since. — I remain, yours truly, Mrs. RATCLIFFE (Page Woodcock’s; my emphasis) Here, Mrs. Ratcliffe’s health seems to improve almost as soon as she “read[s] [Page Woodcock’s] advertisement,” so that the advertisement itself is made parallel to the pills that have made her “better now than [she] ha[s] been for years” (Page Woodcock’s). Like many testimonials in the patent medicine advertisements of this era, Mrs. Ratcliffe’s letter on behalf of Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills performs three distinct functions: first, it establishes the dire nature of her illness (whether or not said “illness” would actually be dire in a real-world scenario); second, it establishes the inability of the mainstream medical practice to effect a cure; third, it champions the product—in this case, Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills, as a miraculous cure and in so doing establishes the advertisement itself as a sort of print-savior and the product as a necessity for continued health in daily life. Compare this advertisement to Madame Fontaine’s story about her husband’s miracle cure (mentioned briefly in the previous section), related by Mr. Engelman to Glenney: It came in substance to this. Some person in her husband’s employment at the University of Würzburg had been attacked by a malady presenting exactly the same symptoms from which Mr Keller was suffering. The medical men had been just as much at a loss what to do as our medical men. Alone among them Doctor Fontaine understood the case. He made up the medicine that he administered with his own hand. Madame 49 Fontaine, under her husband’s instructions, assisted in nursing the sick man, and in giving the nourishment prescribed when he was able to eat. His extraordinary recovery is remembered in the University to this day. (95; Installment Eight) This description of the “remedy” tracks, point-for-point, the narrative arc of the above testimonial, moving from the curious illness to the “medical men” who are “at a loss what to do” to the “extraordinary recovery.” Sensation fiction and patent medicine advertisements’ mutual reliance on forms of testimony is no mere coincidence, but rather fixed in both genres’ focus on the “abnormal” human body.40 Both sensation novel and patent medicine advertisement, in other words, use testimonial narratives and rhetoric about “ideal,” “normal,” and “healthy” bodies to present what scholars including Lennard J. Davis refer to as cure narratives. Applied more generally, the term cure narrative denotes stories about the (often miraculous) curing of a disability, which are undergirded by ableist attitudes about disability and the body. But, as Davis notes, cure narratives don’t just present stories about cures—they first disable characters in order to enact those cures: The process of narrative … serves to wound identity—whether individual, bourgeois, national, gendered, racialized, or cultural. Readers read so that they can experience this wound vicariously, so they can imagine the 40. Not coincidentally, testimonial and confessional narratives written by Victorian invalids soared in popularity during the Victorian period. As Maria Frawley points out in Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2010), the nineteenth-century saw a boom in memoirs whose authors “counsel[ed] their ‘fellow sufferers’ on how to endure illness” (4). More interestingly, Frawley argues that, in sharing their life stories, “invalid narrators often undercut their reader’s anticipation of recovery and resolution and, in doing so, challenge the argument of some literary critics that sickness provided Victorian writers with a narrative means to enact crisis and to imaginatively represent resolution of personal and social conflicts” (4; my emphasis). 50 dissolution of the norms under which they are expected to labor. As a temporarily wounded person, the reader can see the way that society disavows various categories of being and at the same time can rejoice in the inevitable return to the comfort of bourgeois norms, despite the onus that these norms place on its beneficiaries as well as on those excluded from the benefits of bourgeois society. (Bending 98-9; my emphasis) For Davis, it is possible to read all novels as cure narratives in which both plot and protagonist start out “aberrant,” “disabled,” even “deviant” and, through the course of the narrative, are “cured” of such difference. But it is easy to see how his assessment might apply to patent medicine advertisements which perform similar narrative “cures.” But while Davis assumes that cure narratives acted cumulatively as a sort of temporary wish-fulfillment which must be repeated—like a patent medicine dose— indefinitely,41 other scholars have noted that the cure narratives presented by sensation novels and patent medicine advertisements in the same newspapers counteracted one another. Kylee-Anne Hingston, for example, has argued that the patent medicine advertisements printed in All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly with the installments of Wilkie Collins’s No Name “imply two beliefs” about the body which are subverted by “No Name’s letterpress” (121). While the advertisements surrounding the novel assume “first, the need for curing or controlling the body, particularly if sick or disabled; and second, the feasibility of somatic control,” Hingston explains, the novel itself “present[s] the healthy body as an anomaly and as unmanageable excess” (121). Though it does not 41. Davis argues: “the quick fix, the cure” enacted by these narratives “has to be repeated endlessly, like a patent medicine, because it actually cures nothing,” noting that, “modern subjectivity is a wounded identity that cannot cure itself without recourse to cure narratives” (Bending 99; my emphasis). 51 apply to all dialogic interactions between sensation novels and patent medicine advertisements, Hingston’s argument is a vital one. For, whether patent medicine advertisements and sensation novels presented complimentary or contradicting cure narratives, their very juxtaposition on the pages of Victorian newspapers implied that they should be semantically linked and, by placing them together, editors invited readers to make assumptions about the bodies they represented on the grounds of their very proximity. As with No Name and the patent medicine advertisements Hingston identifies in Harper’s, Collins’s use of the form and rhetoric of patent medicine advertisements in the above passage pushes back against the pervasive cure narrative those advertisements present. For in the above passage, Collins’s use of dramatic irony (readers are already aware of David Glenney’s suspicions about Madame Fontaine) creates a tension about the reliability of the cure. In stark contrast with Mr. Ratcliffe’s optimistic, exultant, innocent tone in the advertisement for Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills, the testimonial Madame Fontaine shares with Mr. Engelman seems—in light of Madame Fontaine’s nefarious tendencies—negative, foreboding, and meant to capitalize upon the hearer / reader’s naiveté. And because the juxtaposition of advertisements for the novel and for patent medicines in the SDT had already established a conceptual link between the forms, centered on the “curing” or “ableing” of the “disabled” body, this tension highlights the culpability of print forms in the process of effecting a “cure.” Put differently, this tension between Jezebel’s Daughter and advertisements such as Page Woodcock’s Wind Pills or Brandreth’s Pills calls attention to the fact that print forms such as the advertisement and 52 the novel could as easily harm as they could heal. To borrow Davis’s language, the dialogic interactions between the texts on the pages of the newspaper allow readers to understand that “the process of narrative” played out on the printed pages of novels and newspapers alike “serves to wound identity” (98). Print—particularly in narrative modes which center the body, pressing it into predetermined subject positions such as the patent medicine advertisement’s ubiquitous “sufferers” and “testifiers”—can, in this light, be said to disable as much as it can be said to cure. Taken in juxtaposition with one another, sensation fiction and patent medicine advertisements not only provided readers with competing cure narratives, they also provided readers with a way to explore and understand disability as an identity formed in and through the newspaper itself. The testimonial cure narratives presented by Jezebel’s Daughter and the advertisements with which it was printed acted directly upon characters’ and readers’ bodies, requiring them to identify as “broken” in order to narrate the “cure” expected of texts in these genre. But unlike the myriad (perhaps fictional) men and women whose testimonies populate advertisements, Collins’s character Jack Straw is acutely aware of the negative way in which print and its “cures” affect him. He demonstrates this awareness through his replies to a boorish lawyer during his very first appearance in the novel. Jack Straw’s first meeting with his soon-to-be benefactress, Mrs. Wagner, is made fraught by other characters’ prejudice toward the “lucky lunatic” (18; Installment Two). Unsatisfied with the way in which Jack and Mrs. Wagner are conversing, Mrs. Wagner’s lawyer interrupts her conversation with Jack in order to “get something out of him” (21; Installment Two). In the process, he classifies Jack as “an unwilling witness” (21; 53 Installment Two). Glenney recounts the incident thus: Having hitherto remained passive, this worthy gentleman seemed to think it was due to his own importance to take a prominent part in the proceedings. “My professional experience will come in well here,” he said; “I mean to treat him as an unwilling witness; you will see we shall get something out of him that way.[”] (21; Installment Two) Instead of forcing Jack, who has been calmly braiding a straw hat throughout the lawyer’s commentary, to narrate his past life and troubles, the lawyer merely elicits a facetious response which highlights the bodily requirements testimony imposes on characters in disability narratives: The unwilling witness went on impenetrably with his work. The lawyer (keeping well out of reach of the range of the chain) raised his voice. “Hullo, there!” he cried, “you’re not deaf, are you?” Jack looked up, with an impish expression of mischief in his eyes. A man with a modest opinion of himself would have taken warning, and would have said no more. The lawyer persisted. (22; Installment Two) Baited, Jack shares a sensational and cliched personal narrative to spite the condescending lawyer. By presenting himself as an unfortunate man of poor birth, Jack highlights the way in which “bearing witness” forces the witness into a rhetorical box: “Now my man! let us have a little talk. ‘Jack Straw’ can’t be your proper name. What is your name?” “Anything you like,” said Jack. “What’s yours?” “Oh, come! That won’t do. You must have had a father and 54 mother.” “Not that I know of.” “Where were you born?” “In the gutter.” “How were you brought up?” “Sometimes with a cuff on the head.” “And at other times?” “At other times with a kick. Do be quiet, and let me finish my hat.” The discomfited lawyer tried a bribe as his last resource. He held up a shilling. “Do you see this?” “No I don’t. I see nothing but my hat.” This reply brought the examination to an end. The lawyer looked at the superintendent, and said, “A hopeless case, sir.” The superintendent looked at the lawyer, and answered, “Perfectly hopeless.” (22; Installment Two) Collins’s arrogant lawyer provides my case in point, here. In making Jack “an unwilling witness,” not only does he conflate mental disability with deafness, betraying a stereotypical understanding of disabilities as interchangeable conditions with the same bodily meaning, he also presses him into a particular bodily narrative.42 In other words, he uses Jack Straw’s unwilling testimony to declare Jack “a hopeless case,” and prompts 42. Indeed, the lawyer might be said to use his leading questions here to figuratively press Jack into the sort of mould that was used to make stereotype plates in the nineteenth century—reducing Jack to a stereotyped narrative that can be repeated and reprinted. In Chapter IV, I tackle such figurative use of print technology and the stereotype at more length using corpus analysis and close readings of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). 55 the asylum superintendent to concur with this narrative. The testimony Jack has been bullied into offering does more to entrench biased opinions about his “disability” than to effect a “cure.” And this negative correlation of print and testimonial to “cure” is further developed in the pages of the SDT, where patent medicine advertisements reminded readers of real-world concerns about the factuality of testimonials and the efficacy and purity of the medicines to which they often turned for their day-to-day therapeutic and cosmetic needs. And, as we will see in the next section, in highlighting the power of the word and of print, the newspaper’s presentation and association of sensation fiction and patent medicine advertisements also called the intent and curative potential of print’s power over bodies into question. In doing so, the SDT concretized a model of disability which turned upon the page rather than upon biological “lack” or “brokenness.” “Memoirs Unwritten”: Print and Poison in Jezebel’s Daughter He opened an old cabinet, and took out a long narrow bottle of dark-blue glass….Down one side of the bottle ran a narrow strip of paper, notched at regular intervals to indicate the dose that was to be given. No label appeared on it; but, examining the surface of the glass carefully, I found certain faintly-marked stains, which suggested that the label might have been removed[.] —Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter Part I David Glenney had rightly conjectured that the label had been removed from the blue-glass bottle. Madame Fontaine shook it out of the empty compartment … and looked at the two bottles—the poison and the antidote[.] —Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter Part II Jack Straw is not the only character whose actions and experience call “cures” 56 and cure narratives into question in Jezebel’s Daughter. Nor is he the only character who associates “cures” with narratives and print. Both Doctor Fontaine and his wife, Madame Fontaine, are also instrumental in the novel’s association of cure with print narratives and, eventually, of both with poison. Doctor Fontaine, Madame Fontaine’s late husband, lays the groundwork for the novel’s association of both “cure” and printed cure narrative with poison in his will, when he stipulates: Be especially careful to destroy the labels on the bottles in the medicine chest….In almost every instance, these preparations are of a poisonous nature. Having made this statement, let me add, in justice to myself, that the sole motive for my investigations has been the good of my fellow- creatures. I have been anxious, in the first place, to enlarge the list of curative medicines having poison for one of their ingredients. I have attempted, in the second place, to discover antidotes to the deadly action of those poisons, which (in cases of crime or accident) might be the means of saving life. (29; Installment Three; my emphasis) Instructing the executor of his estate to destroy the poisons and to “be especially careful to destroy the labels,” Doctor Fontaine acknowledges the fact that curative medicines and poisons are functionally interchangeable without proper attention to detail and documentation (29; Installment Three). Mediated by the page, the revelation this label provides calls readers’ attention to the newspaper they hold and to the power of the narratives it contains to “cure” and “poison” in the reading. Regular readers of the SDT would have been familiar with growing concern about 57 the chemicals comprising everyday products. In fact, even before the first installment of Jezebel’s Daughter was printed, patent medicine advertisements in the SDT were attempting to get ahead of their bad press by positioning themselves in opposition to other patent medicines. Take for example an article-length advertisement for the Holman Pad, a vegetable compound which claimed to “exert a never-failing beneficial influence over the vital forces,” which appeared in the 19 April 1879 issue of the SDT. Presented as “Nature’s Laws,” “a lecture delivered by Professor Walsh (late of London, now of Leeds), at the Albert Hall, Leeds, on Friday November 22nd, a large and select audience being present,” the advertisement contended that “there exists such a widespread dissatisfaction with much of what is called medical practice, a series of vague and uncertain incongruities, and the thousand and one nostrums and inventions that have been palmed off on the English-speaking people during the past forty or fifty years” (“Nature’s Laws”). The author goes on to remark that there is “an almost utter want of confidence in men and things called Doctors and Physic” in England—an assertion supported by myriad articles on accidental and intentional poisonings, quackery, and criminal or negligent doctors which were published between January and September 1879 in the SDT (“Nature’s Laws”). In January of 1879 alone, the SDT reported on an “Alleged Poisoning Case in Staffordshire” (22 January), a “Suspected Poisoning by a Nephew” (23 January), and a “Suspected Poisoning of Thirty-One Horses” (28 January). The use of the word “suspected” recurs in articles about poisoning throughout the year, emphasizing a general consciousness of and paranoia about the possibility of accidental poisoning in Victorian culture. And articles such as “The Charge Against a Doctor” (1 April 1879) and “A Preposterous Prescription” (23 August 1879) illustrate raised awareness of the fallibility 58 of the medical profession and the potential for quackery in prescription. But the SDT and its constellations of serial novels and advertisements take these anxieties about poison and medicine, health and disability, doctors and quacks and root them firmly in print forms. In fact, the plot of Jezebel’s Daughter turns on the fact that neither Doctor Fontaine’s poisons nor his labels were destroyed, and passages of exposition frequently highlight this fact—as in the epigraphs to this section. Indeed, Doctor Fontaine’s emphasis on the labels in his will indicates that the paper mediating the use of the chemicals contains more (or at least as much) potential to harm than the poisons themselves. Narrator David Glenney takes particular care to note that, while “no label appeared on” the blue-glass bottle, there were “certain faintly-marked stains, which suggested that the label might have been removed” (96; Installment Eight). Later, readers are given a glimpse of Madame Fontaine handling the labels and instructions stored with her late-husband’s poisons wistfully: She emptied the box, and placed round her on the floor those terrible six bottles which had been the special subjects of her husband’s precautionary instructions on his death-bed….The labels on three of the bottles were unintelligible to Madame Fontaine; the inscriptions were written in barbarously-abridged Latin characters. The bottle which was the fourth in order … was wrapped in a sheet of thick cartridge-paper, covered in its inner side with characters written in a mysterious cypher. But the label pasted on the bottle contained an inscription in good readable German … the lines … were partially erased 59 by strokes of the pen—drawn through them at a later date, judging by the colour of the ink. In the last blank space left at the foot of the label, these words were added—also in ink of a fresher colour: After many patient trials, I can discover no trustworthy antidote to this infernal poison. Under these circumstances, I dare not attempt to modify it for medical use. I would throw it away—but I don’t like to be beaten. If I live a little longer I will try once more, with my mind refreshed by other studies. Madame Fontaine paused before she wrapped the bottle up again in its covering, and looked with longing eyes at the cyphers which filled the inner side of the sheet of paper. There, perhaps, was the announcement of the discovery of the antidote; or, possibly, the record of some more recent experiment which placed the terrible power of the poison in a new light! And there also was the cypher defying her to discover its secret! (144; Installment Twelve; my emphasis) Turning from the mysterious fourth bottle to one with which she—and most of the other characters—is more familiar, Madame Fontaine draws its label out of the compartment. This moment is important enough to warrant the intrusion of an altogether new and unnamed narrator, who remarks: “David Glenney had rightly conjectured that the label had been removed from the blue-glass bottle” (145; Installment Twelve). Madame Fontaine gloats over this bottle and label with particular glee, arraying them at her feet in order to tower above them as she exclaims, “alone among mortal creatures, I have Life and Death for my servants” (145; Installment Twelve). 60 Her power in this case extends not from the medicine in the bottle itself but from the legible instructions on the label to which only she is privy: Antidote to Alexander’s Wine. The fatal dose, in case of accident, is indicated by the notched slip of paper attached to the bottle. Two fluid drachms of the poison (more than enough to produce death) were accidentally taken in my experience. So gradual is the deadly effect that, after a delay of thirty-six hours before my attention was called to the case, the administration of the antidote proved successful. The doses are to be repeated every three of four hours. Any person watching the patient may know that recovery is certain, and that the doses are therefore to be discontinued, by these signs: the cessation of the trembling in the hands; the appearance of natural perspiration; and the transition from the stillness of apathy to the repose of sleep. For at least a week or ten days afterwards a vegetable diet, with cream, is necessary as a means of completing the cure. (145; Installment Twelve) It is this amalgamation of testimonial and instruction which causes Madame Fontaine to triumph in her power over life and death. The label’s smattering of personal narrative— “in my experience,” “my attention”—and its step-by-step instructions by which to effect a “certain” “recovery,” do much to recall the testimonials printed in patent medicine advertisements alongside the novel and place them in a menacing light. Madame Fontaine’s next devilish idea, laid out not long after the above scene, develops this correlation even further. While she is gloating over her poisons, Jack Straw knocks at her door. She sends 61 him away to buy time, and hides most of the bottles and labels, thinking furiously. As noted in a previous section, Jack Straw worked for Doctor Fontaine before the accident which led him, circuitously, to London and Bedlam. Madame Fontaine, anxious that he will draw suspicion to her by mentioning the blue-glass bottle with which he was “cured,” hopes to convince him not to speak of their history. Just in case a polite request won’t work, she decides to destroy the most incriminating portions of the blue-glass bottle’s label. Then, she calls him back for a chat—eventually broaching the subject in order to test the waters. “Mr Keller fell ill….Nobody poisoned him,” she asserts, part- way into their conversation (156; Installment Thirteen). Jack, not convinced by this assurance, argues: “Mr Keller was cured out of the blue-glass bottle, like me. And I was poisoned” (157; Installment Thirteen; original emphasis). Set on proving her point, Madame Fontaine responds: Your master the Doctor said that to frighten you. He didn’t want you to taste his medicines in his absence again. You drank double what any person ought to have drunk, you greedy Jack, when you tasted that pretty violet-coloured medicine in your master’s workshop. And you had yourself to thank—not poison, when you fell ill. (157; Installment Thirteen) Jack, reluctant to accept this version of events but puzzled nevertheless, asks: “If it was medicine … what is [it] good for?” (157; Installment Thirteen). This question provides Madame Fontaine with an opportunity, and like a quack doctor out to sell wares, she takes full advantage of the opening: At these words, an idea of the devil’s own prompting entered Madame 62 Fontaine’s mind. Still standing at the fireplace, she turned her head slowly, and looked at the cupboard. “It’s a better remedy even than the blue-glass bottle,” she said; “it cures you so soon when you are tired, or troubled in your mind, that I have brought it away from Würzburg, to use it for myself.” (157; Installment Thirteen) Recalling claims about product efficacy and the rapidity thereof made in patent medicine advertisements for products like Jenner’s Liver Mixture and Brandreth Capsicum Porous,43 Madame Fontaine “proves” that the product she offers Jack is medicine, not poison, by asserting that “it cures you so soon when you are tired” (157; Installment Thirteen; my emphasis). In actuality, what Madame Fontaine calls “medicine” is one of the poisons her husband developed in hopes of creating antidotes for all known poisons. But Madame Fontaine is uncharacteristically conscience-stricken at the thought of poisoning Jack, so she withdraws her offer and sends him away. However, Jack covets this new and powerful medicine, and sneaks back into Madame Fontaine’s room later to obtain some for himself. It is thus that, in offering and withdrawing the poison, Madame Fontaine sows the seeds of her own demise. Not long after this scene, Mrs. Wagner discovers that Madame Fontaine has stolen from the company in order to pay off debtors so that her daughter’s wedding won’t be called off. Madame Fontaine responds to her discovery by 43. An advertisement for Jenner’s Liver Mixture in the 25 October 1879 issue of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph claims that the mixture is “the only immediate relief and speedy cure of Sluggish Liver and Dispepsia” (Installment Seven; my emphasis). Similarly, an advertisement for Brandreth Capsicum Porous in the 1 November 1879 issue of the same paper emphasizes that its products as “comfortable, fragrant, and warming” before declaring, “they give instant relief in colds, coughs, and all acute affections” (Installment Eight; my emphasis). These are just two of myriad possible examples in the pages of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph alone. 63 poisoning Mrs. Wagner’s wine, and after a short but severe illness Mrs. Wagner dies. Just before she dies, Jack Straw doses her with the remaining contents of the blue- glass bottle. Consequently, he refuses to believe that she is dead. So, when her body is taken to the dead house so that officials can investigate the cause of death, Jack insists on staying the night with her to be there when she wakes. Madame Fontaine also decides to stay the night in the dead house, in order to ensure that Mrs. Wagner is dead. But, frightened to the point of hysteria by her sojourn in the house of the dead, Madame Fontaine reveals her presence and begs for a drink of the whiskey Jack and the watchman are sharing. Instead, they give her the dose of Alexander’s wine she offered Jack Straw. In an account passed on to David Glenney by the doctor at the novel’s conclusion, we are told that Madame Fontaine has been poisoned by her own chemicals. “‘I think you were the first person … who saw Mr Keller, on the morning when he was taken ill?’” the doctor asks Glenney (242; Installment Twenty-One). At Glenney’s affirmative reply, the doctor leads him to Madame Fontaine’s bedside, where Glenney states he saw “the same apathy; with the same wan look on her face, and the same intermittent trembling of her hands” which he’d witnessed in Mr. Keller (242; Installment Twenty-One). Notably, the doctor interrupts his revelation that Madame Fontaine has been “poisoned by ‘Alexander’s Wine’” with a description of a book she kept close at hand throughout her illness. Recounting how, dazed by poison and fever, Madame Fontaine seemed to forget he was in the room, the doctor notes: “she opened a drawer, and took out a book closed by metal clasps” (247; Installment Twenty-One). And it is the book, more than the poison, that strikes Glenney as interesting. He writes: I had not forgotten the clasped book that she had tried vainly to open, in 64 Doctor Dormann’s presence. Taking it myself from under the pillow, I left Mr Keller and the doctor to say if I should give it, unopened, to Minna. “Certainly not!” said the doctor. “Why not?” “Because it will tell her what she must never know. I believe that book to be a Diary. Open it, and see.” I found the spring and opened the clasps. It was a Diary. “You judged, I suppose, from the appearance of the book?” I said. “Not at all. I judged from my own experience, at the time when I was Medical Officer at the prison here. An educated criminal is almost invariably an inveterate egotist. The very people who have, logically speaking, the most indisputable interest in concealing their crimes, are also the very people who, almost without exception, yield to the temptation of looking at themselves in the pages of a Diary…. [“]Open that book of Madame Fontaine’s at any of the later entries. You will find the miserable woman self-betrayed in every page.” It was true! Every record of Madame Fontaine’s most secret moments, presented in this narrative, was first found in her Diary. (249- 50; Installment Twenty-One; original emphasis) Although the doctor’s emphasis here is on criminality, his conversation with Glenney identifies the diary as a record in which Madame Fontaine’s abnormal embodiment and identity have been captured, a mirror in which she can look at herself. Not only, then, is Madame Fontaine stricken by her own poison, she is also and equally poisoned by her 65 own writing—by her private egotistical testimony on the pages of her diary. Madame Fontaine’s ignominious end—poisoned by chemical and writing alike— stands in stark contrast to Jack Straw’s resolution. In closing his narrative, Glenney writes: We are easy about the future of our little friend….we have made no romantic discoveries … relating to the earlier years of Jack’s life. Who were his parents; whether they died of whether they deserted him; how he lived, and what he suffered, before he drifted into the service of the chemistry-professor at Würzburg—these, and other questions like them, remain unanswered. Jack himself feels no sort of interest in our inquiries. He either will not or cannot rouse his feeble memory to help us. “What does it matter now?” he says. “I began to live when Mistress first came to see me. I don’t remember, and won’t remember, anything before that.” So the memoirs of Jack remain unwritten, for want of materials— like the memoirs of many another foundling, in real life. (252; Installment Twenty-One; my emphasis) Even in Glenney’s fond remembrance, the narrative impetus to fix the disabled body into a certain type of tale emerges. Glenney mourns the loss of details of Jack’s early life, including the loss of a record of “what he suffered” (252; Installment Twenty-One). Resisting this overture, Jack, refusing even to play an unwilling witness, declines to testify to anything at all. And in doing so, he finds a measure of freedom in his identity that Madame Fontaine, scribbling in her diary, could not. “I began to live when Mistress first came to see me,” he declares, adding “I … won’t remember … anything before that” 66 (252; Installment Twenty-One). By incorporating the rhetorical patterns and emphasis on the print forms of the very patent medicine advertisements with which its installments were printed, Jezebel’s Daughter critiques the print testimonial’s role in nineteenth-century medical discourses. The novel tells a tale counter to popular wisdom about the benefit of autobiographical narratives and written testimonials written by invalids and “sufferers” throughout the period, which Martha Stoddard Holmes suggests “function[ed] as a critical form of self- preservation during the disruptions or transformations of self that are sometimes produced by bodily or other changes, disability included” (Fictions 133). While, as Holmes notes, “a satisfactory autobiographical narrative – mental, spoken, written – can … articulate a personal counternarrative of identity that is different from the stories that dominant culture tells about your experience,” Jezebel’s Daughter sees medical or bodily testimony as a print form which presses bodies into predetermined molds, using them to reiterate specific and debilitating narratives about disability (133; my emphasis). In the pages of the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, the novel’s emphasis on the ways in which testimony and documentary evidence interact with medicines and poisons to affect individual bodies competes with patent medicine advertisements’ medicalized understandings of disability as something that can be cured with repeated doses of text and medicine alike. Their juxtaposition generates an awareness that print can be used to disable as easily as it can be used to enable or cure, and this awareness in turn concretizes a media model of disability which identifies the written word and the page as the primary loci of disability. In this chapter I have argued that the nineteenth-century newspaper was a 67 significant force in the conceptualization and experience of disability in the Victorian period not only through its contents but also, and significantly, through its form. As what Dallas Liddle calls “the discursive context and physical medium of the most important British literature in the nineteenth century,” the Victorian newspaper is a crucial site at which the print-based bodily management and self-fashioning with which I am concerned in this dissertation occurred (1). Beginning with the newspaper not only allowed me to establish the real-world implications of this self-fashioning, but also—because the news and the novel shared the same space in the nineteenth-century—illustrated the way in which the narrative representation of fictional bodies can bear out this real-world body- management and self-fashioning. In the next chapter, I will take a more extended look at the way in which print production, categorization, and management comes to bear on fictional bodies by considering the archival management of non-normative gender and sexuality in the late-century gothic fiction of Richard Marsh and Bram Stoker. While, as Anderson and others have argued, the Victorian press was a site at which discourses of normalcy could be used to imagine communities (and, as I maintain, bodies), it was also, as I demonstrated in this chapter, a site at which multivalence and embodied difference could be naturalized. Similarly to the press, the fictional archives in fin-de-siècle fiction served as sites at which the “normal” and the “knowable” seem to converge into capital ‘K’ Knowledge and capital ‘T’ Truth—offering a sort of hegemonic refuge against the rapidly shifting social and personal spheres and roles of the century’s last decades. Yet, because even fictional archives operate upon a binary logic of inside/outside, inclusion/ exclusion, the seeming holistic, homogenous authority of the archive works in these stories to mask not only the chaotic information it attempts to 68 contain but the chaotic identities and lived experiences of the bodies its records document—making the archive an ideal site at which to explore and experiment with “non-normative” embodiment. The various print objects making up newspaper and archive could be deployed against restrictive narratives of “normalcy,” printing disability on the one hand and archiving queer embodied experiences on the other. Yet, as the following chapter demonstrates, while such printing and archiving can have radical implications for embodiment and identity, in most cases it serves the ends of Victorian middle-class hegemony. Even characters’ own self-fashioning seems, at least in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to make space for Othered characters primarily by enabling and allowing them to press themselves into “normative” modes of existence using books, archives, advertisements, and more—a tendency I attend to more thoroughly in the final chapter of this dissertation. 69 CHAPTER III “ALL MONSTERS AND DUST”: MARSH, STOKER, AND THE ARCHIVAL MANAGEMENT OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) Although we often think of archives today as the purview of various state and educational institutions, the fiction of the late-nineteenth-century indicates that Victorians themselves held much more complex views about what archives could and should be. Though not often referred to explicitly as archives, late-century fiction features a number of personal “records, “narratives,” “collections,” and “repositories” which document the lives and affairs of various characters via the amalgamation and preservation of information. What’s more, while such personal archives are often unavoidably complicit in the ideological agendas of various institutions and even British colonialism, in late- century fiction they often exist (and are created) to address the concerns, anxieties, or personal peril of one or more individuals at the local level. As such, they are essential not only to the consideration of embodiment and identity at the intersections of personal and imperial agendas, but also to this dissertation’s examination of the use of print and its attendant technologies to fashion the embodied self and to manage non-normative, Othered bodies. Ubiquitous as a concept though ambiguous in its myriad manifestations, the archive framed mid- and late-Victorian cultural life, involved implicitly in almost all 70 questions of knowability—including those surrounding the “normal” body. Because its representations vary so wildly, yet signify so powerfully, in late-Victorian fiction, for the purposes of this chapter, I define archives as the product of personal (or communal) creation, an intentional aggregation, organization, and preservation of material objects including but not limited to manuscript and print documents. My use of the term is informed by the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) widely-accepted definition of archives as “materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain” (“Archives”). From Oscar Wilde’s imaginary bric-a-brac shop in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to Dickens’s junk and curiosity shops in novels such as Bleak House (1853) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Haggard’s archaeological repositories in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), and Sherlock Holmes’s index and “brain-attic stocked with all the furniture [a man] is likely to use” in Conan-Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891) and “The Five Orange Pips” (1891) (Doyle, “Five” 103), Victorian fiction was rife with personalized iterations of the archive, an information management system which was almost intoxicating in what seemed to be its omniscient and omnipotent encapsulation of everything and everyone that was knowable in the British empire. When Wilde’s character, Lord Henry, waxes sardonic about the state of modern masculinity in the above epigraph from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), he brings this cultural faith in the institution of the archive into conversation with a complex set of social and cultural changes which pervaded the last decades of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of Wilde’s trials for “gross indecency” in 1895, already persistent questions and anxieties 71 about gender and sexuality became supercharged (Skal 350). Elaine Showalter points out that, “during this period … the words ‘feminism’ and ‘homosexuality’ first came into use as New Women and male aesthetes redefined the meanings of femininity and masculinity” (3). As with many discussions of gender and sexual equality today, Victorians’ anxiety about changing gender roles often stemmed from the potential impact of such change on the systemic structures of patriarchy and the social preeminence of heterosexual men. “By the 1890s,” Showalter notes, “the system of patriarchy was under attack not only by women, but also by an avant-garde of male artists, sexual radicals, and intellectuals, who challenged its class structures and roles, its system of inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, and its cultural authority” (11). But in the above epigraph, Wilde’s Lord Henry does more than make a timely reference to an ongoing cultural brouhaha. He makes an interesting, and pointed, rhetorical move that recurs in the gothic fiction of the 1890s. Declaring that “the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust,” Lord Henry correlates the Victorian quest for comprehensive information with modern gender identity (particularly masculinity) and then situates that information-oriented gender expression within a mental space figuratively described as an archive—a bric-a-brac shop replete with monsters and dust (Wilde 14-5). This chapter will examine the tendency in late-nineteenth-century gothic fiction to populate archives with monsters (as Wilde does) to divert readers’ attention from what’s really at stake in characters’ engagements with archives: cultural anxiety about expressions of non- normative gender and sexuality. 72 Through analyses of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), I argue that archives act as a disciplining tool in fin de siècle gothic fiction. These fictional archives address cultural concerns about shifting binary gender roles by managing information regarding the gender expressions and sexualities of the supposedly normative characters. In contrast to classic gothic fiction’s long-moldering archives, 44 the gothic novels of the 1890s present readers with documents and archives in the making; in these novels, characters’ creation of archives is a central and significant element of the plot, and readers are often cued, through the plot, to view the physical forms of the novels as the materializations of those archives. The archival framing of these novels is not so much concerned with the past and our approach to it as with the future and our ability to enter it, reputations intact.45 More often than not, the monsters in late-nineteenth-century gothic fiction gravitate preternaturally toward archives. At times they are figuratively birthed into existence by the collections of artifacts and manuscripts from which they emerge, as with the mummy in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892) and the demon in M. R. James’s “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (1895). At other times, in seeking the destruction of archives the monsters inadvertently bring about their own destruction. Although scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Thomas Richards have claimed that monsters “refuse easy categorization” and, indeed, disrupt and defy “the very order of things” with 44. Ina Ferris observes that, “from the outset, gothic fiction…typically framed its texts through a trope of scholarly retrieval, presenting itself as the rediscovery, translation, transcription, or piecing together of obscure documents from the past” (267). This trope responded to “one of the most widely canvassed issues in the period: how can we or how should we approach history?” (268). 45. Jacques Derrida’s contention in Archive Fever 1995) that the archive is “a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow” is foundational to my approach in this chapter (36). 73 their “catastrophic changes in form” and “ontological liminality,” monsters never seem to be far from sites of knowledge preservation and production in the novels and stories they inhabit (Cohen 6; Richards 48-9). What is it that draws monsters to archives in fin de siècle fiction? Why do fictional archives have such a magnetic pull on monsters in Victorian literature? In a chapter discussing just this juxtaposition, Thomas Richards claims that the alignment of monsters and archives has something to do with the unique relationship between knowledge and information that emerged in the last decades of Victoria’s reign. Monsters, Richards claims, represent entropy—the failure of order and knowledge, or, rather, the failure of humankind to maintain control over the knowledge they have amassed. Although this failure can be understood to emerge from Britain’s archiving activities, as with the monsters who emerge from archives as if born from the manuscripts and artifacts they hold, the failure can also be understood as something alien from the order and organization of the archive, as Richards notes: In the late nineteenth century, the problem of the disorganization of knowledge came to replace the problem of the organization of knowledge. Our idea of information still has something about it of the frustration the Victorians felt at watching all their knowledges fly apart. Information is knowledge fractured into bits and pieces that can be moved around easily but never really assembled successfully into an integrated whole….The concept of entropy came into being precisely because the possibility of positive knowledge was beginning to be eclipsed by an explosion of too much positive knowledge. Information was the name given to this 74 knowledge that came from everywhere and ended nowhere. Information was archival without belonging to an archive, vast but not total, extensive but not complete. Information was positive knowledge that refused to become comprehensive. (76) I would argue that the real paradox of monsters in late-century gothic fiction, is that they are at once part of and Other to the systems of knowledge and categorization that enable modernity. Both monsters and information, in other words, pose direct threats to the archive in that they possess the ability to destabilize the archive’s presumed completeness and omniscience from within. Information can become order, but it can also invite chaos and fluidity. Monsters are chaos and fluidity incarnate. Both threaten to break apart carefully constructed taxonomies. Both exist at once within and outside of the “order of things,” and consequently threaten to expose the myth of archival coherence. Yet when Wilde’s Lord Henry recalls these threats in his reference to the ideal modern man’s mental bric-a-brac shop, his anxiety hovers not around monsters, but around the effect the archiving of information has upon the male body. As he puts it, “we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place” and, in so doing, cause the rubbish and facts to be “priced above their proper value” (14-5). His phrasing, “keeping our place,” suggests that the structure and organization of the archive—here, the bins and shelves of his imaginary bric-a-brac shop—impose a value upon the items they manage that is not inherent in the items themselves (14-5). The mental bric-a-brac shop or archive enables a performance of identity that assists men in “keeping [their] place” by organizing and overpricing their own internal “rubbish and facts” (14-5). Read within the greater context of non-normative gender expression and 75 homosocial attraction that the passage, and the novel, develop, it seems that Lord Henry fears the use of “rubbish and facts” to situate oneself within a heteronormative taxonomy, or to archive oneself straight, so to speak (14). For Victorians invested in the maintenance of patriarchal heteronormativity, this is precisely the promise of the archive. For Lord Henry, however, the monsters are a feint, distracting us from the real danger: the archive itself. In what follows, I take Lord Henry’s perception of this threat at face value, using it as a jumping off point to consider the archival framing of The Beetle and Dracula. I argue that, in presenting their narratives as archives, Marsh and Stoker enable readers to engage in low-risk explorations of non-normative gender and sexuality by guaranteeing the archive’s reinstatement of heteronormativity (or the illusion thereof) at novel’s end. These stories about transgressive bodies and identities do not merely titillate or make the flesh creep; their very archivized form implies that they are first and foremost products and effects of a process of meaning-making, creating order out of chaos and fixed knowledge out of fluidity. Tales about the archiving of transgressive bodies have the effect of managing those bodies, slotting them into preexisting gender binaries and sexualities where their threatening difference is mitigated if not eradicated. The archive exists in these stories to stabilize gender roles and restore heteronormative order. Yet even in fiction, the archive is not the immutable source of capital ‘k’ Knowledge and capital ‘t’ Truth we like to imagine it, and the intended effects of such archival framing are just as often stymied by the archive’s functions as they are fulfilled by them. Jacques Derrida suggests that archives are predicated upon a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of materials and information, a process of “institutionalization” 76 which “imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a deconstructable history” (4). It is this process which has led Antoinette Burton to proclaim that archives “do not simply arrive or emerge fully formed; nor are they innocent of struggles for power in either their creation or their interpretive applications” (6). “Though their own origins are often occluded,” she adds, “and the exclusions on which they are premised often dimly understood, all archives come into being in and as history as the result of specific political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures—pressures which leave traces” (6). As they work to restore the heteronormative status quo in gothic fiction, archives unavoidably embed traces of “transgression.” And sometimes, those traces are enough to unsettle or even undo the archive’s neat management of characters’ bodies. With these traces in mind, I commence this chapter’s exploration of the function and “mis”-functions of fictional archives with an analysis of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, a gothic novel in which shifting gender roles and transgressive embodiments and sexual desires are explicitly emphasized via an archive comprised of eye-witness testimonies, diaries, and a detective’s case notes. The Beetle’s archive, created by “confidential agent,” or detective, Augustus Champnell, documents, polices, and manages the shifting gender expressions of prominent and respected politician, Paul Lessingham, whose embodied masculinity is in constant threat of transitioning, or “transmigration,” to use Lessingham’s own term (Marsh 205, 77).46 Put more plainly, I argue that as an archive 46. Although such embodied gender identity would not have been referred to as “transgender” at the end of the nineteenth century, it was nevertheless recognized as a distinct state of being—at least by some. I intentionally use the term transgender in this chapter, instead of resorting to contemporary terms (such as Havelock Ellis’s eonism) or equivocal phrases, to foreground this fact. Further, as my below close reading of passages from The Beetle demonstrates, by the end of the century Victorians were associating the language of corporeal transition with gender in ways that distinctly herald our modern use of terms such as trans, “transness,” and transgender. 77 The Beetle punishes and then displaces Lessingham’s experiences of “transness,” or transgender identity and embodiment, onto the figure of the Beetle (77). Critics tend to agree that The Beetle is, like many late-century gothic novels, ultimately concerned with the preservation or recovery and reauthorization of British masculinity and male sexual power.47 Viewed in this way, the function of archival body management in The Beetle is to protect British male characters from what it casts as the predatory femininity of both New Women and the colonial Other on the one hand, and from its own homosocial “queerness” on the other.48 Put differently, in The Beetle, the archive and its various print, manuscript, and media objects become tools with which the embodied expression of gender identity can be both shielded from “threats,” reinforced, and—when “aberrant”— managed. The British male characters—particularly the politician Paul Lessingham, a gentleman scientist named Sydney Atherton, and an out-of-work clerk named Robert Holt—who experience or witness moments of gender transition or sexual aberrance in the novel use the archive to displace their experiences, by projecting them all onto the body of the racial and sexual Other: the Beetle, a shapeshifting creature who travels to the metropolis to seek revenge for British imperial violence in Egypt. Like many real-world archives, The Beetle’s archive subsequently attempts to elide (or repress) information it considers unnecessary or detrimental to the archive—in this case, the protagonists’ 47. See, for instance, Victoria Magree’s Victoria Margree’s “‘Both in Men’s Clothing’: Gender, Sovereignty and Insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle,” Natasha Rebry’s “Playing the Man: Manliness and Mesmerism in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.” 48. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the term queer was used to describe the male homosexual as early as 1894 (see “queer, n. 2,” def. 2 for more details). W.C. Harris and Dawn Vernooy make a compelling case for this reading of the novel’s representation of masculinity in their article, “‘Orgies of Nameless Horrors’: Gender, Orientalism, and the Queering of Violence in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.” See especially pp. 345-8.” 78 gender slippages—via a series of exclusions and silences. However, unlike real-world archives which do not necessarily contain complete narratives, the fictional archive must provide readers with a sense of wholeness, depth, and change over time. Consequently, in The Beetle the fictional archive’s traces act more like finding aids than subtle hints, working to alert readers to the existence of excluded or repressed materials and perspectives which might alter their interpretations of the archive’s meaning. In some cases, however, one need not rely on traces to access embedded narratives about “transgressive” gender and sexuality in the archive. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the “institutionalization” of the archive is so fraught that it is as if, in Derrida’s words, its “limits[,] … borders, and … distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered,” and, as a consequence, “order is no longer assured” (Derrida 4-5). Much like The Beetle, Dracula features a homosocial group of men whose masculinity is under siege.49 Unlike The Beetle, however, the archive Dracula presents is not the product of one man’s aggregating, collating, and annotating labor. Shifts in the archive’s management and use so thoroughly disrupt the process of archival institutionalization in Dracula that the “political, cultural, and socioeconomic pressures” which Burton points out always shape the archive are laid bare (Burton 6). As a result, the archive’s attempts to manage non-normative gender and sexuality within the narrative are unsuccessful in that they are incomplete. As Alison Case has noted, one of the chief pressures shaping Dracula’s archive is 49. Scholars such as Roger Luckhurst have read the novel as “a record of the anxiety induced by the Woman Question so widely debated in the last years of the nineteenth century,” depicting female characters as threats to masculinity either via their predatory sexuality or their “invasion” of the male public sphere (Luckhurst xx-xxi). 79 a nearly overwhelming concern “about the ‘proper’ distribution of masculine and feminine qualities among characters” (Case 224). Professor Van Helsing begins the collection of documents which leads to the archive’s formation, but it is Mina Harker who initially takes charge of the archive, acquiring materials, processing them, and managing other character’s access. With her background in teaching, her familiarity with law, and her ability to write shorthand and use a typewriter, Mina is the character best equipped to manage the archive. But her control of the archive threatens to strip her of her femininity, and by extension challenges male supremacy. Consequently, the male characters (particularly Professor Van Helsing and Doctor Seward) wrest control of the archive from her in order to manage this threat. Ultimately, this gendered game of tug-of- war over control of the archive results in the destruction of the archive’s original documents. Left with only copies of the documents and objects they gathered, collated, and preserved, the group of heroes are at a loss about what to make of the whole experience and their resulting legacy. Professor Van Helsing must resort to sleight of hand to reinstate even the semblance of heteronormative order, offering Mina Harker’s fertile body as a substitute to the archive. Dracula’s fraught and broken archive, then, reveals the ways in which archival institutionalization attempts to manage gender and, in its failure, leaves us with narratives and characters whose queerness have been preserved. While both The Beetle’s and Dracula’s archives purport to manage the bodies and identities of their titular monsters, responding to the monsters’ attempted “reverse colonization” of England, I argue that both archives are much more concerned with the management of the gender and sexuality of British characters (Arata 623). Gender pressures are, admittedly, an integral part of the gothic genre. As Eve Kosofsky 80 Sedgewick observes in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), gothic fiction is predicated upon the terror generated by a “double bind” in which “intense male homosocial desire [is] at once compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds” (186-7). She explains: If such compulsory relationships as male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the middle distance of male homosocial desire, then it appears that men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain may always, just as arbitrarily and with just as much justification, be foreclosed. (186) But by the 1890s, questions about the embodiment of non-normative gender and sexuality were not merely the province of gothic fiction: they also converged in various real-world archives.50 In fact, archives were being created specifically to address questions about what “normal” gender and sexuality looked and felt like. Or, more often, they were being created to address which experiences and expressions of gender and sexuality counted as physically or morally “abnormal.”51 Perhaps even more importantly, 50. The obvious example, here, is the erotic encyclopedia compiled by an anonymous wealthy Englishman which Steven Marcus examines in The Other Victorians (1964). But, following Foucault’s work in The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1976), it is possible to read the Victorians’ various scientific examinations of gender and sexuality as archives of non-normative gender and sexuality (63-4). Two such examples are named in the following footnote. 51. See, for example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) or Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897). 81 such questions became integrally associated with the very concept of the archive.52 As Anjali Arondekar notes, scholars have long recognized that “sexuality … seek[s] its truth in the … archive” in large part because the archive itself has been perceived as a “fixed and finite” entity which can provide access to a “recorded past” that is similarly perceived as objective fact, capital “T” Truth (Arondekar 1-2). This seeking was as true of the Victorian period as it is of our own, with one notable caveat. While twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars seek the “truth” of sexuality in the archive in the hope of finding “sexuality’s recursive traces,” as Arondekar observes (1), I argue that the Victorians sought the truth of sexuality in the archive because it’s “objectivity” and “authority” seemed at once to promise a heteronormative safe-haven against the “madness” and “monstrosity” of non-normative gender identity and sexuality, and to enable an exploration of “non-normativity.” The first part of this argument is not entirely a new one. Michel Foucault identifies the nineteenth-century solidification of “a great archive of the pleasures of sex” within the fields of “medicine, psychiatry, and pedagogy” as part of the repression of sexuality he chronicles (63-4). Hence, conceptually, gender and sexuality are always already being codified as part of the archive’s formation and processes of representation—if only as traces of content which has been excluded from the official record. But—as I discussed above—because part of the function of the archive (imperial and otherwise) is to exclude that which does not fit within its ideological frame, a mechanism late-century authors seem to have grasped with 52. Thomas Richards provides an extended discussion of this conceptualization in The Imperial Archive (1993). In sum, he suggests the archive-as-concept is a “collectively imagined junction of all that was known and knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire” (11). 82 enthusiasm, the “objective” and “authoritative” archive also provides a site for embodied experimentation—at least in the realm of fiction. Extracting non-normative gender and sexuality from the archive has, nevertheless, proved challenging—particularly in the case of imperial or institutional archives which are not officially concerned with but are nevertheless invested in the documentation of the gender and sexuality of their subjects. In fact, scholars including Arondekar and Ann Stoler—both of whom work specifically with colonial archives—contend that forays into the archives to recover lost or hidden truths about gender and sexuality not only tend to be unsuccessful, but are also generally unproductive.1 Such searches often come up against the archive’s emptiness, silences, and fictionalizing effects instead of retrievable truths or evidence. Although it is possible to read such moments of absence and obfuscation for their affective resonances, as “the febrile moments of persons off balance,” the problem remains that to discuss the presence, even centrality, of gender and sexuality in the archive, one must often approach the subject obliquely (Stoler 1-2).1 The same is not quite true of fictional archives. While there are certainly gaps and silences about gender and sexuality in novels, and while these gaps and silences bear consideration like their real-world equivalents, fiction—as we have seen—often engages quite openly with cultural conceptualizations of and anxieties about gender and sexuality. Additionally, as Antoinette Burton and Marilyn Booth point out, fiction has “the power … to materialize those countless historical subjects who may never have come under the archival gaze,” including those largely silent “other Victorians” of whom Foucault speaks in the first volume of his The History of Sexuality (Burton 16-7). And, in fact, as Wilde’s Lord Henry insists and my analyses of The Beetle and Dracula confirm, late-century 83 gothic novels deliberately and repeatedly “materialize subjects” who not only “come under the archival gaze” but are re-formed within it. I do not intend, here, to conflate real-world archives with fictional representations thereof. Neither do I intend to imply that fictional archives can be understood to operate by the same logic and constraints as real-world archives with any sort of one-to-one correspondence. Rather, like Marilyn Booth, I contend that “to see fictional narrative as an alternative site of archival imagining … highlights the shifting and suspect nature of the archive,” allowing us to approach its cultural functions and resonances (275). As representations of cultural response to real-world entities, fictional archives can help us to understand how Victorians conceived of and used everyday archives to shape their own identities and manage others’ understanding of their embodied experiences. The narratives of both The Beetle and Dracula revel in the materiality of their archival records, signaling their significance. Indeed, both novels pointedly forground the diverse media their archives contain (photogravure images, stenography, diaries, and more), highlighting the capacity of those archives to produce knowledge by efficiently managing the information their media artifacts hold. I am interested in how, similarly to newspaper novels and patent medicine advertisements, the individual print objects (e.g. newspaper clippings) and other media (e.g. phonograph records) in these fictional archives operate on characters’ bodies, or at least on the discourses which shape their ability to live comfortably in their own bodies and identities. But, as will become clearer when I turn to Dracula, I am also interested the effects of information management systems on the embodied identities represented in the archive. 84 “A Repository of Bone and Gristle”: Bodies and Beetles in the Archive Comprised of three eye-witness testimonies, a handful of notes and telegrams, and an account extracted from the casebook of a detective, all of which are slightly overlapping in time and perspective, The Beetle’s status as an archival record, or compilation of print objects, is conspicuously foregrounded. But to what end? I argue that The Beetle’s archive works to manage the gender transitions and “transgressive’” sexuality of politician Paul Lessingham, displacing them onto the titular Beetle in order to restore heteronormativity (or the appearance thereof) by novel’s end. It does so primarily via the introduction and subsequent destruction of one document: a photogravure illustration of a beetle. Beginning with a brief synopsis and literature review in this section, I turn in the following sections to analyses of the archive’s various documents and artifacts and, ultimately, an interrogation of Lessingham’s interactions therewith. The novel-as-archive chronicles the machinations of a shapeshifting, androgynous creature, the Beetle, who has immigrated to London from Egypt on a revenge mission. Spurred by past events which are only revealed late in the novel, the Beetle takes lodgings near Hammersmith on the Western edge of London to punish a prominent politician, Paul Lessingham, for past indiscretions by tormenting him and his fiancé, Marjorie Lindon. The first archival voice we encounter is that of Robert Holt, an out of work clerk who is in such straights that he cannot even obtain a place in the work house (Marsh 7). Holt begins his “surprising narration” by explaining how, penniless and starving, he happens upon a house with an open window one rainy night. He convinces himself that 85 the house is empty, and proceeds to climb through the window into what he believes—at first—to be an empty room. Realizing, to his horror, that the room is not empty, Holt finds himself under attack by an unknown and unseen enemy—the Beetle. He imagines it to be a monstrous spider. It crosses the room and begins to climb him in a scene rife with the language of sexual assault. He finds himself paralyzed with fear while the creature “embrace[s] [him] with its myriad legs” (17). Then, the light flicks on. A wizened personage demands to know Holt’s business, mesmerizes him, and—after a long night and subsequent day—commands Holt to break into and steal something from Lessingham’s study. The being’s plans are carried through. Holt absconds with a packet of love letters from Marjorie to Lessingham. The narrative is taken up, at this point, by gentleman-scientist Sydney Atherton who witnesses Holt climbing out of Lessingham’s second story window on the night of the burglary. Atherton, who believes himself in love with Marjorie, quickly becomes caught up in the unfolding tragedy. He bears a grudge against Lessingham, which draws the Beetle to him by supernatural means. The Beetle, taking the form of an elderly, androgynous person of Middle Eastern descent, appears in Atherton’s lab and cryptically offers to take Lessingham out of the way so that Atherton can win Marjorie’s hand. Although Atherton professes to hate Lessingham, he refuses the Beetle’s offer. The Beetle attempts to mesmerize him and fails, the man of science being apparently impervious to mesmerism. The Beetle nevertheless continues to haunt Atherton’s lab, hoping to accomplish his vengeance through Atherton if not with Atherton’s help; his persistence pays off, as Lessingham comes to discuss matters with Atherton. While there, 86 a photogravure illustration of a beetle appears in Atherton’s lab,53 shocking Lessingham to such an extent that he exhibits signs of madness and physical transformation. Meanwhile, Holt turns up, half-dead and feverish, on the street where Marjorie and her father live. Marjorie has Holt carried into her house to convalesce, primarily because Holt—in his feverish ravings—has mentioned Lessingham’s name. Marjorie becomes infected by Holt’s fear and imagines she hears the beating of beetle’s wings. The sound follows her to her chamber that night, and after she sends her maid away, Marjorie has a breakdown. The Beetle, unseen but not unfelt, materializes on her bed and makes its way under her bedclothes. Traumatized but determined to save Lessingham, Marjorie coaxes Holt into sharing his story and turns to Atherton for help. She, Atherton, and Holt find the house in which Holt first encountered the Beetle. Holt is again affected by the Beetle’s mesmerism, and lures Atherton away. The Beetle captures Marjorie, forces her to wear Holt’s cast-off rags, and violently cuts her hair. He then summons Holt and, with a crossdressing Marjorie in tow, embarks on a journey across England by rail. Atherton, having lost both Holt and Marjorie, turns to detective Augustus Champnell for assistance. He interrupts a meeting in which Lessingham has been consulting Champnell regarding his past and present trouble with the Beetle. It turns out that, as a young man, Lessingham had travelled to Egypt, been taken in by a den of 53. In How to Identify Prints (2004), Bamber Gascoigne explains that photogravure was developed in 1827 by Nicéphore Niepce, but remained largely unused until experiments in the 1850s revived it for use on rare prints (38). The color image Marsh’s characters describe in The Beetle (see pp. 80-1 and 152) is likely not a hand-press photogravure but rather an innovation of the process for use with machine printing which developed in the 1890s (39). Referred to simply as gravure, this process involved the use of a grid like the half-tone processes still used in many newspapers today but involving the etching of tiny pits of varying depths, which allowed for the representation of tone (39). While there were a number of methods whereby photogravure and gravure could be adapted to color printing, none of them were well-suited to the representation of color. Gascoigne notes that “the quality of its excellence in monochrome work…becomes a disadvantage” in color work because it often leads to “a muddy appearance” (43). Given the technical limitations of the form, the brilliancy of color which Atherton notes in The Beetle is quite magical indeed. 87 female occultists, and been held captive, forced to participate in orgies and watch a series of human sacrifices. He was kept under mesmeric influence for months, but one day broke free, strangled his beautiful but evil captor, and watched her morph into a giant beetle before his eyes. He wants to believe that these memories were the product of drugs and fever-dreams, but fears that they are all too real. Lessingham, Champnell, and Atherton rush to rescue Marjorie and Holt. They search the house, finding Marjorie’s clothing, jewelry, and hair—some still attached to bleeding bits of her scalp—beneath loose floorboards. They question the only nearby neighbor and follow the lead she provides to the railroad. Thereafter, they find a dying Holt, who warns that Marjorie is still with the Beetle. The train carrying the Beetle and Marjorie crashes. It is unclear whether the Beetle survives. Marjorie’s unconscious body is found in one of the carriages. She undergoes three years of mental treatment before regaining her sanity. During this time, she writes and rewrites her account of the events leading up to her abduction, but is never able to put the rest of her experience into words. Eventually, she marries Lessingham. Atherton, finally cured of his infatuation with Marjorie, marries an heiress who funds his experimentation with weapons of mass destruction. Somewhere in Egypt, a cultist’s compound explodes—perhaps marking the final destruction of the Beetle and its followers. Critics tend to agree that the novel “is a text essentially of its time, typical of the fears and fantasies of the fin de siècle” (Vuohelainen xxx). “The Beetle … channels and exploits a number of fears, anxieties, and obsessions concerning different manifestations of the other in a narrative typical of much fiction of the time,” Julian Wolfreys writes, adding that the type of narrative in which The Beetle participates is meant to “mediate[] 88 cultural anxiety” (22). Chief among these fears and fantasies are modern gender identity and racial and sexual difference. “In Marsh’s novel,” Minna Vuohelainen notes, “the eponymous monster serves as a means of discussing contemporary anxieties, notably … issues related to gender roles, sexual deviance, and sexual violence … [but also] questions over the permanence of identity, knowledge, and progress” (xvi). W.C. Harris and Dawn Vernooy summarize the novel’s critical history more explicitly: “critics seem to agree,” they write, that The Beetle “documents British Imperialism’s attempts to imagine as Other the queer, the female, and the nonwhite in order to rationalize their extermination or education (that is, subjugation)” (339). There is decidedly less critical consensus about how to interpret the outcomes of the novel’s narrative project as it relates to the issues of race, gender, and sexuality it broaches. The first major sticking point is the novel’s ending. Readings of the climactic train crash which signals the end of the Beetle’s torment of Paul Lessingham tend either to emphasize the scene’s ambiguity, suggesting that the Beetle escaped and will return, or to understand it as the Beetle’s death scene. At stake in this indecision is a question of hegemony and resistance. If the Beetle dies, the reasoning goes, then the novel’s attempted subjugation of the racial and sexual Other the Beetle represents has succeeded. If, on the other hand, the Beetle survives, the ending can be interpreted as a critique of the repressive imperial apparatuses at work in the text. As Harris and Vernooy explain, “in this reading, The Beetle portrays Orientalism foundering in spite of itself, containing the seeds of its own failure within it all along” (371). Missing in both interpretive approaches is a consideration of the novel’s archival form, but also of the fact that our modern notions of gender, sexuality, and race are often 89 constructed archivally. I have already mentioned the “archive of pleasure” Foucault identifies and examines (63). Edward Said, in his seminal Orientalism (1978), points out that, “in a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held” (41; my emphasis). But as Arondekar points out, the archival contexts of gender, sexuality, and race are inextricable from one another. In their colonial endeavors, the British had a vested interest in differentiating themselves from the colonists amongst whom they lived—socially, culturally, economically, and sexually. They used records to do so. Among them, Richard Burton’s now infamous Karáchi report, which—though it never materialized—was used as evidence to claim, amongst other things, that “pedastery is to be understood as ‘geographical and climatic, not racial,’” and that “‘the races to the North,’” in other words Englishmen, “‘practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest of disgust’” (46). Given this cultural and historical context, approaching The Beetle and its discursive engagements with gender, sexuality, and race using the theory and methodology of archival studies is not only sensible, but necessary. For The Beetle is, above all, a novel which, like Dracula and other late-century neo-Gothic texts, is intentionally constructed as an archive and “narrates its own construction” (Luckhurst xiv). “Surprising [Non]Narration[s]”: Silence and Emptiness in the Archive The various documents of which The Beetle is comprised have ostensibly been arranged as they are for reasons of chronology.54 However, as scholars of archives are 54. In the final chapter, Detective Champnell identifies himself as the compiler of the archive. See his account of the archiving process on pp. 292-5. 90 aware, the order in which one encounters the various documents and objects within an archive is neither natural nor objective. Instead, the order, or collation, often creates the illusion that there is a singular, purpose narrative at work within the archive, thus subtly influencing one’s perception of the archive’s meaning. Tony Ballantyne suggests that “the archive—both as a physical space an as the product of collation, classification, and cataloguing—does not entirely preclude heterodox readings of the materials it houses, but it does provide a series of powerful ideological statements” (103; my emphasis). In much the same way, Robert Holt’s “surprising narration,” which records what are supposed to be the Beetle’s first significant encounters and actions upon reaching England, sets us up to associate the novel’s narrative engagements with questions of gender, sexuality, and identity with the body of the Beetle (7). Beginning with Holt’s first panic-stricken description of the creature, readers are steered toward such linking: “I realised that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body. Even then what it was I could not tell,” he writes, adding, “it mounted me, apparently, with as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular….Higher and higher! It had gained my loins” (16-7; my emphasis). The Beetle is sexualized before it is even descriptively embodied. Immediately after this scene, which critics read as a coded rape, the Beetle shifts into a human form.55 Interestingly, Holt’s first response to the sudden presence of a potentially hostile human in the room is to attempt to assign that human a gender. As he does so, however, he undercuts his own credibility with the observation that “a small brilliant light … caught [him] full in the eyes”: “for some seconds I could see nothing,” he explains, “throughout 55. See Vuohelainen’s introduction to the Valancourt edition, especially pp. xx-xxi. 91 the whole of that strange interview I cannot affirm that I saw clearly” (18). Nevertheless, he goes on to assert, “I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed. I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman. Indeed at first I doubted if it was anything human. But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man,—for this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine” (18-9). Having decided upon a gender and therefore pronouns, Holt describes the Beetle in detail: “there was not a hair upon his face or head, but, to make up for it, the skin, which was a saffron yellow, was an amazing mass of wrinkles,” he writes (19). He also observes that “the cranium, and, indeed, the whole skull, was so small as to be disagreeably suggestive of something animal. The nose on the other hand was abnormally large; so extravagant were its dimensions, and so peculiar its shape” (19). Holt’s description of the Beetle’s strange embodiment goes on for some time, drawing on stereotypical characteristics of Orientalized bodies to paint a portrait of a figure who is thoroughly racialized as Eastern and Other. After spending a night and day mesmerically paralyzed, Holt is again assaulted by the Beetle, and once again finds himself undecided about the creature’s gender: Feet stepped upon the floor,—moving towards where I was lying. It was, of course, now broad day, and I, presently, perceived that a figure, clad in some queer coloured garment, was standing at my side, looking down at me. It stooped, then knelt. My only covering was unceremoniously thrown from off me, so that I lay there in my nakedness. Fingers prodded me then and there, as if I had been some beast ready for the butcher’s stall….Fingers were pressed into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth, they touched my staring eyes, shut my eyelids, then opened them 92 again, and—horror of horrors!—the blubber lips were pressed to mine— the soul of something evil entered into me in the guise of a kiss. (23) Holt expresses his indecision and distances himself from the sexual implications of the Beetle’s prodding examination with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand. He uses the pronoun “it” and sentences in which the subject is not a human actor but rather a human appendage, “fingers,” and “blubber lips,” for example, throughout his description of the assault. At its conclusion, however, he takes up his use of male descriptors again, calling the Beetle a “travesty of manhood” (23). Shortly thereafter, the queer subtext of Robert Holt’s “surprising narration” becomes clearer even as his sense of determinacy about the Beetle’s gender becomes more ambiguous: That the man in the bed was the one whom, to my cost, I had suffered myself to stumble on the night before, there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt. And yet directly I saw him, I recognised that some astonishing alteration had taken place in his appearance … the most astounding novelty was that about the face there was something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood. (27; my emphasis) Questioning his own observational faculties, Holt nonetheless continues to call the Beetle by male pronouns. So when the Beetle’s motives for keeping Holt prisoner are revealed a 93 few pages later, the resulting erotic connotations of his words are telling: As I continued silent, and he yet stared, there came into his tone another note,—a note of tenderness,—a note of which I had not deemed him capable. “He is good to look at, Paul Lessingham—is he not good to look at?” I was aware that, physically, Mr Lessingham was a fine specimen of manhood, but I was not prepared for the assertion of the fact in such a quarter,—nor for the manner in which the temporary master of my fate continued to harp upon the theme. “He is straight,—straight as the mast of a ship,—he is tall,—his skin is white; he is strong—do I not know that he is strong—how strong!—oh yes! Is there a better thing than to be his wife?[”] (30) In providing a body (the Beetle’s) which becomes the focus of the archive’s questions— and answers—about gender, sexuality, and identity, Holt’s account of events indicates the initiation of the sort of powerful ideological narrative Ballantyne mentions in the passage quoted above. Namely, it indicates to readers that this archive will document an incursion by the racial and sexual Other as well as the repudiation of that incursion by upstanding British citizens. Any “queerness” we discover in the archive is supposed to be attributed to the Beetle’s presence there. Although Holt draws upon Orientalist discourse to explain the Beetle’s shifting gender and “queer” sexuality, the affective responses provoked by the Beetle cannot be explained merely by its status as a racial and sexual Other. Rather, the Beetle’s constant 94 sexualization and gender indeterminacy mark it as “a disruptive figure, one of prosopopoeia, that rhetorical figure for giving face or voice to what is unrepresentable” (Wolfreys 19). If, as Foucault has suggested, “the archive is first the law of what can,” and therefore also what cannot, “be said,” the Beetle acts as a sort of representational loophole (129). But a loophole for the representation of what? Given that the Beetle’s homoerotic inclinations are as clear as its coding as a racial Other, even by Victorian standards, I argue that the “unrepresentable” thing which the narrative leads us to associate, through prosopopoeia, with the Beetle’s body cannot be either a coded narrative of queer desire and experience or a narrative of reverse colonization. Rather, I contend it is the Beetle’s gender—and, more broadly, the concept of mutable gender embodiment itself—which, while “unrepresentable,” manifests in this narrative focalization of the Beetle’s racialized and sexualized but still ambiguous body. Approaching The Beetle as an archive, in making this recognition possible, makes clear that the novel’s engagements with issues of gender and sexuality are not limited to the explorations of racial Others, New Women, or homosexual men prior scholarship has identified. As an archive, the novel also manages the embodied experience and expression of “transness,” displacing it onto the Beetle’s body. Put differently, as a consequence of the fact that the narrative is presented as a series of testimonial documents which have been gathered, edited, arranged, and even omitted or redacted into a holistic narrative by a central archivist (Detective Champnell), characters’ non- normative and transgressive embodied experiences are linked to the Beetle’s aberrant body. The fictional archive tells a story in which all aberrance stems from the corporeal presence of the Beetle, shifting its artifacts as necessary to produce and reinforce that 95 story. The Beetle’s shifting gender reminds characters of the unmentionable fact that they may not exist stably within society’s preferred gender binary, either. Characters confronted by the Beetle’s transformations find themselves contemplating their own gender identities and embodiments. Often, they are less than pleased with the results of this contemplation. Holt, for example, begins to question his own masculinity almost as soon as he realizes that he is not alone in the empty room he enters at the beginning of his narration: “ordinarily I believe that I have as high a spirit as the average man, and as solid a resolution … but … a man can be constrained to a course of action of which, in his happier moments, he would have deemed himself incapable,” he states, explaining why he neither ran nor fought as a man “should” (16). That the Beetle comes to signal the “unrepresentable” fact of mutable, non-binary gender identity and embodiment in the text is supported by the fact that the Beetle itself triggers a series of archival silences and emptinesses. In this way, the Beetle instantiates the process of meaning-making in the archive, an anthropomorphic doubling of the institutionalization through exclusion and elision which Derrida describes in Archive Fever.56 Holt, for example, begins to sum up his experience by his inability to speak: “I cannot say; but looking back, it seems to me that it was as if I had been taken out of the corporeal body to be plunged into the inner chambers of all nameless sin” (51; my emphasis). Marjorie Holt, after her ordeal with the Beetle, “told, and re-told, and re-told again the story of her love, and of her tribulation” in writing, but “would never speak of what she had written” (295; my emphasis). “Her MSS,” we are told, “invariably began 56. See Archive Fever pp. 2-3. 96 and ended at the same point,” never revealing what happened to her while she was alone with the Beetle (295). Even Paul Lessingham uses negations to describe his time with the Beetle, referring to the period as “two unspeakable months” during which he was forced to observe and participate in “orgies of nameless horrors” (213; my emphasis). In what follows, I turn to one instance of emptiness related to gender identity and embodiment in The Beetle as archive: the recurrent appearance of a photogravure illustration of a beetle which circulates within the novel-as-archive without becoming a material part of that archive. The illustration, which appears in two instances and is endowed with marked significance, is destroyed in the first instance and “lost” in the second—readers are told that Atherton “locked the picture of the beetle in the drawer,” but it never appears again (152). Whether lost or repressed, the photogravure illustration does not make its way into the final archival record.57 Instead, it haunts the archive and its creators, informing not only the record they produce, but their own embodied positions in relation to that record. By tracing the illustration’s trajectory through the archive, its affect upon the archive’s creators, and its subtle exclusion from the final version of the archive, I argue, it is possible to conceive of the novel’s expression and exploration of “contemporary anxieties over shifting gender roles and sexual corruption” as something more than the violent repudiation of the bodies and identities of “the queer, the female, and the nonwhite” (Vuohelainen xx; Harris and Vernooy 339). Namely, the archive constructed within and represented by The Beetle at once narrates and obfuscates the embodied experience of “transness,” or gender in transition. As we will see in the next 13. Although the first edition of the novel (published by Skeffington & Son, 1897) contained four full-plate illustrations by John Williamson, none of these depicted a beetle as described in Chapter XIII and Chapter XXII. The cover itself might be argued to constitute this illustration as it did depict a beetle, but the cover is not done in photogravure which prompts me to consider the illustration missing. 97 section, the archive actively responds to Lessingham’s shifting embodiment by producing a document which turns reader’s attention from his body and back to the monster’s. “Transmigration is [Trans]migration”: Illustration and Gender in the Archive By the time readers begin Chapter XIII, “The Picture,” both the general public’s admiration of and Sydney Atherton’s supposed hatred for Paul Lessingham have been well-established. Most characters view Lessingham as “a fine specimen of manhood” (Marsh 30). His fiancé, Marjorie, claims that “all the world knows … history will be made by him,” adding, “he is one of the best, just as he is one of the greatest, of men” (86). Atherton, however, has not only spoken ill of the politician at every opportunity, but he has also indulged in the killing of a substitute for Lessingham: capturing and gassing a cat he imagines belongs to Marjorie’s beloved fiancé. So when, early in Chapter XIII, Atherton confesses a certain admiration for Lessingham, the effect is striking: I am free to confess—I have owned it before!—that, in a sense, I admire that man, —so long as he does not presume to thrust himself into a certain position. He possesses physical qualities which please my eye—speaking as a mere biologist. I like the suggestion conveyed by his every pose, his every movement, of a tenacious hold on life,—of reserve force, of a repository of bone and gristle on which he can fall back at pleasure. The fellow’s lithe and active; not hasty, yet agile; clean built, well hung,—the sort of man who might be relied upon to make a good recovery. (73-4; my emphasis) In their analysis of the novel, Harris and Vernooy point out that “little has been said 98 about what’s really—or most—queer about the novel … the homosocial and homoerotic energies circulating in the narrative,” and particularly “a recurrent sexual tension between ostensibly straight men that oscillates with murderous animosity toward those same men and the women to whom they’re romantically linked” (342). The homosocial and homoerotic energies of which they speak fairly leap off the page in the above passage. Atherton’s “scientific” appreciation of Paul Lessingham as a specimen of manhood is rife not only with sexually suggestive diction, but also with the rhetoric of sexual selection. Not only is Lessingham “well hung” and apt to “thrust himself into certain position[s],” but he is also in possession of “physical qualities which please [Atherton’s] eye,” qualities which bespeak potent, vigorous life: “a tenacious hold on life,” “reserve force,” “a repository of bone and gristle” (74).58 However, as Atherton’s uncharacteristic admiration of Lessingham’s body and masculinity reaches a crescendo, several things signal that Lessingham is not all he appears. First, the narrative connects Lessingham’s embodied state to the concept of the archive, calling him “a repository of bone and gristle” (74). If he is a repository, then one must wonder what knowledge he contains and preserves in his very tissue. Almost as if in response to this wondering, Lessingham begins to speak of “ancient superstitions and extinct religions” (76): [“]Didn’t the followers of Isis believe in transmigration?” “Some of them,—no doubt.” “What did they understand by transmigration?” 58. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin writes that “Sexual selection…depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring…Generally, the most vigorous males, those which are best fitted for their places in nature, will leave most progeny” (149; my emphasis). 99 “Transmigration.” “Yes,—but of the soul or of the body?” “How do you mean?—transmigration is transmigration.” (77) Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “passage of the soul at death into another body; metempsychosis,” transmigration is a concept that—in this passage, threatens to affect the bodies, and genders, of the living (“transmigration, n.” def. 4). Lessingham’s question—“but of the soul or of the body?”—illuminates Lessingham’s secret quite adroitly: what if, he asks, it is possible not merely for the souls of the dead to change form, but for the bodies of the living to change as well? Atherton, seeming to dismiss this troubling possibility, actually confirms it: if “transmigration is transmigration,” his words imply, metempsychosis and metamorphosis are one and the same. Their conversation continues at cross purposes, Lessingham “reluctan[t] to enlarge upon the subject he himself had started” but nonetheless loath to give it up, and Atherton keen on finding out what Lessingham is hiding (77). Suggesting that transmigration is, in varied forms, a concept common to most cultures, Atherton points out that “Christians believe that after death the body takes the shape of worms—and so, in a sense, it does,—and sometimes, eels” (78; my emphasis). His observation is not as offhanded as it seems. The eel had been an erotic symbol in England since at least the 1770s and was, throughout the 1800s, a topic of scientific interest not only because of its electricity, but because male and female eels could not, at the time, be distinguished from one another (Finger and Piccolino).59 59. According to Lennard J. Davis, “In 1876 Freud began his career when he was nineteen by dissecting eels and trying to find the male gonad,” Davis writes, “but Freud ended up failing in his attempts…the 100 Not long after this exchange, something happens to trouble Lessingham’s embodiment and, in so doing, his masculinity. The photogravure illustration appears: On the shelf, within a foot or so of where I stood, was a sheet of paper,— the size and shape of half a sheet of post note. At this [Lessingham] stooped to glance. As he did so, something surprising occurred. On the instant a look came on to his face which, literally, transfigured him. His hat and umbrella fell from his grasp on to the floor. He retreated, gibbering, his hands held out as if to ward something off from him, until he reached the wall on the other side of the room. A more amazing spectacle than he presented I never saw. (79; my emphasis) The pure affect generated by print in this passage is freighted with symbolic significance. The sheet of paper—which hasn’t even been described to readers at this point—is so powerful that it initiates a transfiguration. Lessingham drops his hat and umbrella, items which often serve to synecdochally denote the gentleman in Victorian literature, and becomes bestial: “gibbering, his hands held out as if to ward something off from him” (79). Shocked by the sudden appearance of an illustration which evokes his adversary— the Beetle—Lessingham is transfigured, or, to use the passage’s own terminology, undergoes a transmigration from human being to animal, and from resolute male to hysterical female.60 obvious insight is that the eel, itself a kind of phallic symbol, was paradoxically only known to be female” (108-9). Although Marsh could not have been aware of Freud’s failed research while writing The Beetle, he was likely well-aware of ongoing scientific fascination with the eel and its bodily ambiguity. 60. Although Lessingham’s behavior is not directly labelled as hysteria in this passage, the same corporeal response causes Augustus Champnell to describe him as a “Leader of Men…[who] was rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman” (265). Even more directly, Champnell instructs Lessingham to “play the man,” and informs him, “you disappoint me, Mr Lessingham. I have always understood that you were a man of unusual strength; you appear instead, to be a man of extraordinary 101 Informed by the content of their preceding conversation and tinged with the novel’s Orientalist prejudice, Lessingham’s transmigration takes on an “unnatural” implication for both his gender and sexuality, which is further hinted at, first, through reference to epilepsy (which was often linked with degeneracy, atavism, and the loss of masculinity) and,61 second, through reference to the illustrated beetle’s unclassifiable nature: “Lessingham!” I exclaimed. “What’s wrong with you?” My first impression was that he was struck by a fit of epilepsy,— though anyone less like an epileptic subject it would be hard to find. In my bewilderment I looked round to see what could be the immediate cause. My eye fell upon the sheet of paper. I stared at it with considerable surprise. I had not noticed it there previously, I had not put it there,— where had it come from? The curious thing was that, on it, produced apparently by some process of photogravure, was an illustration of a species of beetle with which I felt that I ought to be acquainted, and yet was not. It was of a dull golden green; the colour was so well brought out,—even to the extent of seeming to scintillate, and the whole thing was so dexterously done that the creature seemed alive. The semblance of reality was, indeed, so vivid that it needed a second glance to be assured that it was a mere trick of the reproducer. Its presence there was odd,— weakness; with an imagination so ill-governed that is ebullitions remind me of nothing so much as feminine hysterics” (267). 61. See Allen Bauman’s “Epilepsy, Crime, and Masculinity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man” for a detailed explanation of the links between emasculation, sexual “perversion,” and epilepsy. 102 after what we had been talking about it might seem to need explanation; but it was absurd to suppose that that alone could have had such an effect on a man like Lessingham. (80; my emphasis) The appearance of the photogravure illustration all but unmans Lessingham. Atherton, though incredulous that an illustration could initiate such a transformation, nevertheless responds as though he is conducting a scientific experiment: With the thing in my hand, I crossed to where he was,—pressing his back against the wall, he had shrunk lower inch by inch till he was actually crouching on his haunches. “Lessingham!—come, man, what’s wrong with you?” Taking him by the shoulder, I shook him with some vigour. My touch had on him the effect of seeming to wake him out of a dream, of restoring him to consciousness as against the nightmare horrors with which he was struggling. He gazed up at me with that look of cunning on his face which one associates with abject terror. “Atherton?—Is it you?—It’s all right,—quite right.—I’m well,—very well.” As he spoke, he slowly drew himself up, till he was standing erect. “Then, in that case, all I can say is that you have a queer way of being very well.” He put his hand up to his mouth, as if to hide the trembling of his lips. “It’s the pressure of overwork,—I’ve had one or two attacks like this,— but it’s nothing, only—only a lesion.” 103 I observed him keenly; to my thinking there was something about him which was very odd indeed. “Only a local lesion!—If you take my strongly-urged advice you’ll get a medical opinion without delay,—if you haven’t been wise enough to have done so already.” “I’ll go to-day;—at once; but I know it’s only mental overstrain.” “You’re sure it’s nothing to do with this?” I held out in front of him the photogravure of the beetle. As I did so he backed away from me, shrieking, trembling as with palsy. “Take it away! take it away!” he screamed. I stared at him, for some seconds, astonished into speechlessness. Then I found my tongue. “Lessingham!—It’s only a picture!—Are you stark mad?” He persisted in his ejaculations. “Take it away! take it away!—Tear it up!—Burn it!” His agitation was so unnatural,—from whatever cause it arose!—that, fearing the recurrence of the attack from which he had just recovered, I did as he bade me. I tore the sheet of paper into quarters, and, striking a match, set fire to each separate piece. He watched the process of incineration as if fascinated. When it was concluded, and nothing but ashes remained, he gave a gasp of relief. (80-1; my emphasis) Crouching and quaking, Lessingham attempts to shrug off the effects of the illustration as “a local lesion,” but Atherton’s description of Lessingham’s reaction paints a very 104 different picture, framed by scientific observation and tinged with gendered-language and innuendo. In fact, it is only with the illustration’s destruction that Lessingham manages to pull the tatters of his ideal manhood back into place. The photogravure illustration acts as what Arondekar describes as an “embedded sign [within the archive] whose form … speaks to the entanglements of” gender and sexuality with British imperial identity and the interconnected cluster of discourses we call science (Arondekar 17). Atherton’s scientific rumination on Lessingham’s reaction to the illustration and the fact that it “was an illustration of a species of beetle with which [he] felt [he] ought to be acquainted,” signals not just the Beetle’s threatening ambiguity, but also Lessingham’s. They may both be, figuratively speaking, outside of the natural order of things. The novel’s specificity about the form of the illustration—at that time, photogravure was largely associated with fine printing and scientific illustration—only underscores this. It becomes something of a shorthand for characters’ inability to accurately classify the Beetle as male or female, human or coleopteran. By extension, it signals Lessingham’s own potential need for reclassification. Is he “a fine specimen of manhood,” “straight as the mast of a ship” (30)? Or, is he, a “queer” and “hysterical woman” (75, 265)? The effect of the illustration, in other words, is to generate strategic narrative dissonance about depictions of Lessingham’s body within the archive. Lessingham’s potential transformation from human to animal and from masculine to feminine is first associated with the image of the beetle (and by extension the Beetle itself), and then deflected onto that image (and the Beetle). Its mention in the archive is a trace of the processes by which narrative dissonance about Lessingham’s body is elided. Its 105 destruction seems to return the archive to a state of authoritative order by acting to conceal these processes through its ordering process. Although the illustration emerges once more, threatening to reveal these processes and, consequently, Lessingham’s gender instability and likeness to the Beetle, its subsequent “loss” allows Lessingham to re- establish himself as an ideal man without ever fully confronting the nature of his non- normativity. But because it was once in the archive, the remaining traces of the illustration serve to embed what we might call Lessingham’s “transmigration” or “transness” in the record. Regarded from the perspective of reputation, “the Peril of Paul Lessingham” is not merely or even mainly the Beetle, but the archive itself.62 Until recently, the “great archive of the pleasures of sex” which Foucault explores has been read from the perspective of the late-century medicalization of gender and sexuality by scientists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing (History 63). Krafft-Ebing’s conflation of gender and sexuality has, in fact, dominated historical accounts and continues to influence the way we understand our own and others’ bodies in the twenty- first century. Yet my reading of The Beetle indicates that an understanding of transgender identity as distinct from non-normative sexual orientation was more common than has been thought. But, as I suggested in the introduction to this chapter, The Beetle is far from alone in situating characters’ explorations of gender and sexuality in archives or archival objects in order to manage them there. In the following section, I consider Bram Stoker’s Dracula to explore what happens when such archival management of gender and 62. The Beetle was initially published as a serial novel called The Peril of Paul Lessingham: The Story of a Haunted Man from 13 March to 19 June 1897 (Vuohelainen, “A Note on the Edition” xxxi). 106 sexuality goes awry.63 Dracula, while less immediately successful upon publication, has been a more enduring novel than The Beetle, despite striking similarities in plot and style—a fact which can, perhaps, be explained by the spectacular failure of Dracula’s fictional archive. “Placed in Sequence”: Authority and the (In)Authenticity of the Archive More overt than The Beetle in its formal representation, Dracula is coded as an archive with its first words. An unsigned note at the beginning of the novel informs readers that the manner in which “these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them,” boasting, “there is throughout no statement of past events wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them” (4). Yet this display of confidence is belied not only by the narrative which emerges in “the reading” of these documents, but also by characters’ anxieties about the archive’s dearth of “authentic document[s]” in the note with which the novel concludes (4, 351). In what follows, I argue that Dracula’s archive fails to completely manage characters’ non- normative gender and sexuality because characters’ struggles for control over the archive disrupt its institutionalization and lead to its destruction. Consequently, Dracula’s inauthentic and reconstructed archive, interposed with anxious and hasty obfuscations about the bodies it has failed to manage, documents not only characters’ but also its own queerness. After a concise summary and critical contextualization in this section, I turn in 63. When it was published in volume form, two months after Dracula came out, The Beetle was markedly more successful than Dracula. Julian Wolfreys states that “sales of The Beetle were stronger than Stoker’s tale of the Transylvanian vampire, The Beetle going through fifteen printings by 1913 and reaching its twentieth impression just four years later” (11). 107 the following sections to interrogations of moments at which the archive’s institutionalization is set in motion and interrupted, analyzing the effects of changes in archival management and their connection to characters’ expressions of gender and sexuality. Dracula’s failed archive lays bare what The Beetle’s archive does more to conceal: the archive’s mass of print and media objects work systemically to produce capital ‘K’ Knowledge, but they can also be taken up by individual characters to shape records, knowledge, and discourse about their own bodies and identities. Comprised of newspaper clippings, letters, shorthand diaries, typewritten manuscripts, phonographic recordings, shipping manifests, translated ship’s logs, bills of sale, and maps, the novel-as-archive delineates Count Dracula’s immigration to (or invasion of) England through the perspectives of a band of heroes determined to stop him: Jonathan Harker; his fiancé and then wife, Mina Harker (nee Murray); Mina’s friend Lucy Westenra; Lucy’s suitors, Arthur Holmwood (who inherits his father’s title Lord Godalming), Jack Seward (a scientist in charge of an asylum), and Quincey Morris (an avid hunter from Texas); and Professor Van Helsing, Seward’s mentor and a renowned medical specialist. As with The Beetle, Dracula lacks a central narrator—readers are expected to piece together the narrative of events like researchers, making connections between eye witness diary entries, journalistic accounts, and various pieces of correspondence. This means that the story itself unfolds rather slowly, with multiple accounts covering overlapping time periods. Many are familiar with the opening plot arc, in which Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania, encounters suspicious locals, finds himself the prisoner of Count Dracula, is preyed upon by three female vampires and “rescued” by Dracula, and 108 escapes with his mental health in tatters. While he is out of commission, the narrative is taken up by his fiancé, Mina, and her friend, Lucy, who are trying to enjoy a holiday in Whitby despite increasing anxiety about Jonathan’s lack of correspondence on the one hand and Lucy’s penchant for sleepwalking in only her nightgown on the other. When a nun writes to Mina that her fiancé is safe if worse for the wear, the friends part ways—never to meet again. Mina becomes Mrs. Harker, and Lucy succumbs to the symptoms of a mysterious disease, undergoing four blood transfusions before dying. Van Helsing, called to her sickbed by Jack Seward, suspects her illness is not quite natural, but only pieces the big picture together when he consults Mina and learns about her husband’s Transylvanian trial. Thereafter, the characters band together, pooling their information to create the record named in the opening note. Mina, with her technological skills and intimate connection to both Jonathan and Lucy, takes charge of this record, collating it chronologically, adding newspaper clippings to contextualize events, and making transcribed copies for each member of the group. When Van Helsing deems this activity unfit for a woman, she is cut off from both information and activity and falls prey to Dracula. Only when the men realize their mistake and give Mina access to and authority over the archive again can they make full use of their resources to stop the Count once and for all. But the damage has already been done in more ways than one, as the anxiety-ridden note at the novel’s end reveals. In order to reassure himself and the others that their archive has accomplished its intended goal despite its destruction, Van Helsing hastily gestures to Mina’s motherhood as a sign of success. In this gesture, Van Helsing reveals the novel to have been less about Count Dracula than about the gender and sexuality of its main characters. Most critics agree on 109 this, even without reading the novel as an archive. Analyses of the novel focusing on the New Woman and female sexuality, sexual “perversion,” and fear of syphilis, to name a few, have been common in criticism since the Dracula was published.64 Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal argue that the novel reflects Englishmen’s fears not only about gender and sexuality, but about embodiment more broadly (xi). Recent work has emphasized Dracula’s queernesses, particularly in regard to masculinity. Roger Luckhurst notes, for instance, that “all of the male heroes in the book suffer moments of collapse that are explicitly termed ‘hysterical’, a term commonly associated with the weakness of women … [and are] restored to manhood by [their] role[s] in the fraternity of vampire hunters” (xx). But this fraternity itself places male characters’ masculinity in jeopardy, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick points out in Epistemology of the Closet. By the time Dracula was written, Sedgewick argues, “male homosocial panic” was once again “up for grabs in a way that was newly redetached from character taxonomy and was more apt to be described narratively, as a decisive moment of choice in the developmental labyrinth of the generic individual (male)” (188). Under this rubric, any man had the potential to be secretly homosexual. The novel’s anxieties about women and its anxiety about male homosexuality cannot be fully separated. As Glennis Byron aptly summarizes, in Dracula, “female sexuality depletes male strength … but all kinds of female power are feared in [the novel]. If Lucy is linked to the New Woman through her sexual assertiveness, Mina is similarly linked through her intellectual abilities” (18). And alongside the women’s threat to male sexuality lurks Count Dracula’s own threat. As Christopher Craft notes, the 64. See David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood and Glennis Byron’s introduction to the Broadview Dracula for more details. 110 narrative is haunted by the possibility “that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male” (110). But more than just this give and take of gendered and sexual power, the inextricability of masculinity and femininity in the novel has to do with a gendered and highly sexualized struggle for control over the physical documents which comprise the novel’s archive. The has been little scholarship addressing Dracula’s representation as an archive, let alone on the connections between gender anxieties and the novel’s material documents and media objects. In a 1993 article titled, “Tasting the Original Apple,” Alison Case read the “novel’s complex narrative structure” as a stage for the “struggle between Mina and the men for narrative mastery, a struggle that turns out to be largely about the ‘proper’ distribution of masculine and feminine qualities among characters” (224). While she didn’t identify the novel as an archive nor its emphasis on material print and manuscript objects as archival, Case’s work went a long way toward such a reading in its analysis of Mina’s “tracing, collecting, collating and interpreting” actions and their implications for her femininity as well as for the masculinity of her husband and friends (223). More recently, digital archivist Caryn Radick conducted an analysis of the novel in order to identify “how Dracula reflects nineteenth-century trends in organizing information” and explore how the novel can inform modern archival practice (502, 517). Radick argues that Bram Stoker “grounds [the novel] in reality with his emphasis on documentation, research, and the organization of information. Although he relies on records and recordkeeping to tell his story, he also questions the trustworthiness of records by demonstrating the many ways they can be compromised” (506). Moving from 111 questions of archival access to questions of archival methodology and disturbances, Radick notes that while Mina and other characters preserve and use their collections in ways that many modern archivists would find questionable, their archival activities are “not entirely dissimilar” from modern ones (510). This is particularly true, she argues, within the context of the notes bookending the narrative: “the phrase about how the papers have been placed and the elimination of needless matters[] bears a resemblance to the arrangement and processing notes in a finding aid” (510). Drawing on the work of Case and Radick, I suggest that Stoker not only generates uncertainty about the archive by ensuring that “records [are] purposely destroyed a number of times through the course of the story,” as Radick notes, but also, as Case points out, by narrating a struggle for control over those records (Radick 511; Case 224). What’s more, this uncertainty serves a very specific purpose: it both disrupts and reveals the archival management of characters’ non-normative gender and sexuality, preserving records of their queerness despite the purported return to heteronormativity at novel’s end. “Take It and Keep It”: The Preservation of Ignorance in the Archive Let me begin with facts—bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. —Jonathan Harker’s Journal, 12 May Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. —Jonathan Harker’s Journal, 16 May 112 The first four chapters of Dracula, recounting Jonathan Harker’s harrowing adventure in Transylvania, do much to establish not only the archive’s management of gender, but the way in which manuscript- and print-making and keeping are always already involved with gender expression in Gothic fiction. Take this section’s epigraphs for example. In each, Jonathan turns intentionally to his manuscript record to process his experiences of the terrifying unknown. In the first, from a diary entry dated 12 May, his words exude an inherent faith in the objectivity, the masculinity of the written word and the “facts—bare, meagre facts” it contains (31). But in the second, dated 16 May, the gothic horror of his experience has grown on him, “destroying [his] nerve,” and Jonathan half-consciously associates himself and his writing with the feminine: “here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen” (35, 37). No longer secure in his “bare, meagre facts,” Jonathan, “feeling as though [his] own brain was unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end in its undoing,” takes recourse “to [his] diary for repose” (37). Like the heroines of Ann Radcliffe’s gothic tales, Jonathan turns to his diary not merely to document, but also to pacify his fears, noting “the habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me” (37). Between one entry and the next, something has shifted Jonathan’s gender position—if only subtly. The shock which has very nearly sent Jonathan into hysterics and, from thence, into effeminacy, is caused by his realization that he is Dracula’s prisoner, completely in the power of an “unnatural” man or “creature in the semblance of man” (35). Forced to wait passively in his room until his host pleases to see him, the scope of Jonathan’s daily—or rather, nightly—life quickly comes to resemble that of a woman’s. However, the effect of this shock on his writing is more prescient than anything. Comparing himself 113 to the gothic damsel in supernatural distress, Jonathan wakes in a dusty room in the Count’s castle and determines “not to return to-night to the gloom-haunted rooms” he has occupied during his stay “but to sleep here, where of old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars” (37-8). He falls asleep and wakes to what is one of the novel’s most iconic scenes: the moonlight entrance of Dracula’s “brides”: I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it; I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor….All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. (38) As with Lord Henry’s visualization of “ideal” modern masculinity in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in this diary entry Jonathan depicts himself surrounded by “long accumulat[ed] dust” and monstrous women he instinctively fears (38). But rather than distract from Jonathan’s threatened masculinity, the vampires call attention to it. His own desire, which Christopher Craft notes is remarkably passive, becomes monstrous. As he 114 writes, “it is not good to note this down … but it is the truth” (Craft 108; Stoker 38). This is more apparent a few paragraphs later, when he writes: I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth … I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart. (39) Like a stereotypical shy young woman, Jonathan does not act on his desire, but rather waits upon the act of another. And in that moment of waiting, the gender and sexual tableaux he presents becomes even more complex. For, in that pause, the Count arrives: But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion….In a voice which, though low and almost a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and then ring round the room, he exclaimed:— “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it?...This man belongs to me!...” The fair girl, 115 with laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:— “You yourself never loved; you never love”….Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:— “Yes, I too can love[.]” (39-40) Swooning like a Clarissa or an Emily St. Aubert, Jonathan wakes the next morning vulnerable—undressed and uncertain about what occurred after his terror overcame him. While he attempts to allay the implications of his uncertainty by focusing clinically on practicalities. He is in his own room, but he did not regain its safety on his own power; his watch remains unwound, and his clothing folded in a manner distinct from his own (40). Though uncomfortable with the implications of these details—that Count Dracula carried him to bed and undressed him—he hides his discomfort in continued ratiocination and forgetfulness: “these things are no proof, for they may have been evidences that my mind was not as usual, and, for some cause or another, I had certainly been much upset” (40). And in this complex mindset, part-ratiocinative and part-repressive, his thoughts turn again to his diary: “of one thing I am glad: if it was the Count that carried me here and undressed me, he must have hurried in his task, for my pockets are intact. I am sure this diary would have been a mystery to him which he would not have brooked. He would have taken or destroyed it” (41). Jonathan’s sleuthing impulse quickly gives way to the forgetfulness or repression with which it is paired in the above passage. And his desire not to know, or rather to unknow whatever happened between his fainting fit and awakening in his own bed, becomes such an important plot point that I contend it constitutes a late-nineteenth- century update of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick considers “one of the most distinctive 116 of Gothic tropes”: “the ‘unspeakable’” (Between 94). More than merely “unspeakable,” the events of Jonathan’s night in these passages become unknowable—especially when he reunites with Mina and reenters British society. In their excellent analysis of The Beetle, Harris and Vernooy identify such persistent epistemological uncertainty as an ideological tool. Considering the issue within the framework of postcolonial theory rather than via issues of gender and sexuality, they contend that “Orientalism … produces unknowability as itself a sort of knowledge, a category and instrument of knowledge as powerful—and as disabling for antihegemonic efforts—as the positivistic cataloging and mapping that constitutes a large part of the Orientalist and imperialist endeavors” (345). In other words, Harris and Vernooy suggest, the production of unknowability can be and is deployed in fictional and real-world archives to sharpen and shore up the sense of what is, what can be, and what should be known. Harris and Vernooy’s surmises ring true in Dracula, where the unknowability generated by Jonathan’s diary not only enables but in fact predicates the apparent restoration of his heteronormativity. In a moment that reads like a second proposal, Jonathan, newly reunited with his fiancé, makes the unknowable a condition of his marriage when he declares: Wilhelmina … you know, dear, my ideas of the trust between husband and wife: there should be no secret, no concealment. I have had a great shock, and when I try to think of what it is I feel my head spin round, and I do not know if it was all real or the dreaming of a madman….The secret is here, and I do not want to know it. I want to take up my life here, with our marriage.…Are you willing, Willhelmina, to share my ignorance? (99) 117 Having made this speech, Jonathan entrusts his journal to Mina’s care, instructing her to “take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know; unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here” (99; my emphasis). And interestingly, Mina accepts this new proposal, despite her characteristic curiosity and penchant for collecting information. She begins her married life by vowing to remain ignorant, to possess without knowing information. In her account of the event, written in a letter to Lucy Westenra, Mina transforms the imperative—Harker’s instruction to “keep it”—into a marital duty. As soon as the journal is in her possession, Mina hastens her impending wedding, asking “Sister Agatha to beg the Superior to let our wedding be this afternoon” (99). She then turns the journal into a wedding gift, wrapping it and sealing it before promising Harker that she will “never open it, unless it were for his own dear sake, or for the sake of some stern duty” (100). Put differently, having become the archivist, the literal keeper of the physical record, Mina initiates its institutionalization by ensuring that it cannot be accessed. This act anchors the archive’s purpose and value in Jonathan’s status as a married—and therefore supposedly heteronormative—man. The archive, under Mina’s direction as a new wife, perpetuates the ideologies of ideal masculinity and domesticity by producing unknowability. In the next sections, I pinpoint Van Helsing’s emergence as a rival archivist and analyze his philosophy of archival management, account for a shift in Mina’s archival approach, and then delineate the commonalities of and differences between Van Helsing and Mina in their burgeoning quest for control of Dracula’s archive. I then conclude my 118 analysis of Dracula by reflecting on the gender anxieties which emerge in the note with which the novel concludes. “Impossible Possibilities”: Information and Knowledge in the Archive Even as Mina takes up and settles into her dual role as archivist and wife, Dracula’s narrative introduces a rival archivist in Professor Van Helsing, who has begun collecting documents in the aftermath of Lucy Westenra’s scientifically unexplainable illness and death. His first acquisition occurs just before Lucy’s death, when Lucy— asleep and under the influence of the Count—attempts to destroy a memo she wrote the previous night, detailing the suspicious incidents surrounding her mother’s death. Lucy succeeds in ripping the document in half before Van Helsing “step[s] over and [takes] the pieces from her” (143). This act seems to initiate his awareness that there may be other documents of importance in the house. For one of his first acts after Lucy’s death is to “insist[] upon looking over Lucy’s papers himself,” claiming the right as “a lawyer as well as a doctor” and explaining to Jack Seward that “there may be papers—such as” the memo he’d previously acquired (152). Leaving Seward to go through the official papers in order to identify the Westenras’ solicitor, Van Helsing decides to search Lucy’s room for papers of a more personal nature. When asked, afterward, if he’d found what he was looking for, Van Helsing’s explanation calls to mind the narratives of archival romance or archive fever which pervade so much writing on the archive:65 “I did not look for any specific thing. I only hoped to find, and find I have, all that there was—only some letters and a few 65. See Suzanne Keen’s foundational discussion of such narratives in Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (2003). 119 memoranda, and a diary new begun” (153; my emphasis). He adds, almost as an afterthought, “but I have them here, and we shall for the present say nothing of them” (153). But his discoveries are more limited than he lets on here; instead of finding complete Knowledge and perfect Truth, he finds bits and pieces of a story—bits and pieces which ultimately lead him to Mina. But before he follows this small archive’s traces to Mina, Van Helsing, like a proper Victorian, sees to funerary arrangements and attends Lucy and her mother’s funeral with Godalming and Seward. After the funeral, he asks for (or, rather, insists upon) Godalming’s permission to keep and make use of Lucy’s papers (159). As he does, he slips into the role of archivist by denying their owner access to them: “I shall keep them, if I may; even you may not see them yet, but I shall keep them safe. No word shall be lost; and in good time I shall give them back to you” (159; my emphasis). The first meeting between Van Helsing and Mina establishes the fracture lines of what will become a continuous struggle in the novel’s background: the gendered fight over the archive’s control. But before I turn to that scene, it’s necessary to consider two moments which occur just before and slightly after it, chronologically. The first, occurring after their meeting, is a speech that is, I argue, Van Helsing’s clearest statement of a philosophy of archival management. The second is a chance sighting in London that changes the terms of Mina’s archival activities. Van Helsing, preparing to stake vampire-Lucy’s corpse shortly after her funeral, begins the process of convincing Seward to aid and abet by presenting his former student with a thought experiment: Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and 120 yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplate [sic] by men’s eyes, because they know—or think they know—some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that wants to explain it all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. (178) Going on to list a number of “nature’s eccentricities,” he bombards Seward with scientific mysteries until Seward is forced to interrupt him (180): I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind his list of nature’s eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam; but he used then to tell me the thing, so that I would have the object of thought in my mind all the time. But now I was without his help … so I said: “Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on.[”]… [“]My thesis is this: I want you to believe.” “To believe what?” “To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the 121 same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.” (180; my emphasis) While this passage seems to strikingly parallel Thomas Richards’s observations about the distinction between Information and Truth at the fin de siècle,66 apparently championing a fluid system of information and understanding rather than a fixed taxonomy of Knowledge and Truth, Van Helsing’s words are belied by his actions—here and elsewhere. Note his passing assumption that “there are things old and new which must not be contemplate [sic] by men’s eyes” (178). Note, too, his insistence that “big truth” is more valuable that “small truth,” that archives collect the latter in order to reach the former (180). Despite his Mulder-like insistence that “the truth is out there” and attempts to get Seward, a very Scully-like figure, “to believe,” Van Helsing’s desire for Truth and Knowledge does not stem from an altruistic wish to disseminate them once he possesses them. His philosophy of archival management is to seek and collect truth in order to contain it, to spare men’s eyes from its paradigm-damaging potential. This impetus meshes well enough with Mina’s archival-management-via- ignorance, but events conspire to alter Mina’s archival approach even before they meet. On a short trip to London, which Mina chronicles in her journal, Mina and Jonathan are taking a stroll along Piccadilly arm in arm when Jonathan flinches and curses, catching sight of a much younger looking Count Dracula. The sighting so disturbs Jonathan that Mina decides drastic measures are called for: I don’t like this lapsing into forgetfulness; it may make or continue some injury to the brain. I must not ask him, for fear I shall do more harm than 66. Refer to pp. 74-5 (above) for more details. 122 good; but I must somehow learn the facts of his journey abroad. The time is come, I fear, when I must open that parcel and know what is written. (161; my emphasis) When she finally puts resolution into practice a few days later, Mina has so departed from the “solemn duty” of the archival production of unknowability that she anticipates and prepares for another “solemn duty”: the need to share the information Jonathan’s shorthand diary contains in an easily accessible format (99, 167). She writes: There may be a solemn duty; and if it come we must not shrink from it….I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if required. And if it be wanted, then, perhaps, if I am ready, poor Jonathan may not be upset, for I can speak for him and never let him be troubled or worried with it all. (166; my emphasis) Ironically, it is this shift in archival protocol which enables the meeting between Van Helsing and Mina. Van Helsing writes to ask for Mina’s help and Mina sets a time for their meeting. Writing of their encounter after the fact, Mina recalls: I asked him what it was that he wanted to see me about, so he at once began:— “I have read your letters to Miss Lucy. Forgive me, but I had to begin to inquire somewhere, and there was none to ask. I know that you were with her at Whitby. She sometimes kept a diary—you need not look surprised, Madam Mina; it was begun after you left, and was made in imitation of you—and in that diary she traces by inference certain things 123 to a sleep-walking in which she puts down that you saved her. In great perplexity then I come to you, and ask you out of your so much kindness to tell me all of it that you remember.” “I can tell you, I think, Dr Van Helsing, all about it.” “Ah, then you have a good memory for facts, for details? It is not always so with young ladies.” “No, doctor, but I wrote it all down at the time. I can show it to you if you like.” “Oh, Madam Mina, I will be grateful; you will do me much favour.” I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit—I suppose it is some of the taste of the original apple that remains still in our mouths—so I handed him the shorthand diary. He took it with a grateful bow, and said:— “May I read it?” “If you wish,” I answered as demurely as I could. He opened it, and for the instant his face fell. Then he stood up and bowed. “Oh, you so clever woman!” he said. “I long knew that Mr Jonathan was a man of much thankfulness; but see, his wife have all the good things. And will you not so much honour me and so help me as to read it for me? Alas! I know not the shorthand.” By this time my little joke was over, and I was almost ashamed; so I took the typewritten copy from my work-basket and handed it to him. (170-1) 124 Circling as it does themes of information, knowledge, and access, this playful passage conceals a gendered tension which emerges more fully in the following scene. Having read the typewritten manuscript, Van Helsing declares: Oh Madam Mina, … how can I say what I owe you? This paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am daze, I am dazzle, with so much light; and yet clouds roll in behind the light every time. But that you do not, cannot, comprehend. Oh, but I am so grateful to you, you so clever woman….There are darknesses in life, and there are lights; you are one of the lights. You will live a happy life and a good life, and your husband will be blessed in you. (171) Baffling Van Helsing with the wealth of her information in a manner that she correlates with Eve’s longing to taste the fruit of the tree of Knowledge in the Old Testament, Mina declares herself “almost ashamed” (171). But Van Helsing responds to her joke with praise. More significantly, Van Helsing, a professor with a reputation for genius and mastery, calls Mina a “so clever woman” but nevertheless assumes that she “cannot[] comprehend” what he comprehends. Mina, in contrast, longs for the knowledge he represents and, in pursuit of it, gathers, organizes, and provides access to information which, in all his knowledge, Van Helsing lacks and is consistently unable to tame. Just over a paragraph later, Van Helsing declares Mina “one of [God’s] lights” (171). His comparison of Mina to an angel, a bringer of light, seems ironic when, only a few lines above, Mina has cast herself with the fallen Eve, mentioning the “taste of the original apple” with something that is almost, but not quite, shame (170-1). Somehow at once Angelic and fallen, Mina challenges Victorian taxonomies of womanhood, revealing 125 herself to be something outside of the natural order of things. Although still amicable, the lines have been inextricably drawn between these rival archivists: Van Helsing seeks access to Mina’s information in order to obtain and contain “impossible” Knowledge and Truth. Mina, on the other hand, has embraced information for information’s sake—seeing in it a tool with which to heal her husband and strengthen relationships even as she half-recognizes that this perception places her outside the bounds of conventionality. In the following section, I explore the moments in which their opposing philosophies of archival management disrupt the archive’s institutionalization and lay bare the queerness of the archive and its human subjects. “We Want No More Concealments”: Queerness and the Control of the Archive After Mina and Van Helsing meet, events quickly conspire to bring the novel’s band of heroes together and, initially, to place Mina in control over their combined archive. In her first hours at Jack Seward’s asylum, where all gather to plan the defeat of the Count, Mina begins seeking more material almost instinctively, exclaiming excitedly that the phonograph diary Seward has been keeping “‘beats even shorthand’” (205). And in her initial meetings with the men who will join Van Helsing and her husband, Jonathan, in the fight against Dracula, Mina reveals her own, newly evolved philosophy of archival management quite clearly. Archival management appears so much like second nature to her that, in the process of coaxing Seward into letting her listen to one of the cylinders, Mina reveals a flaw in his information management: [“]May I hear it say something?” 126 “Certainly,” he replied with alacrity, and stood up to put it in train for speaking. Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his face. “The fact is,” he began awkwardly, “I only keep my diary in it; and as it is entirely—almost entirely—about my cases, it may be awkward— that is, I mean—” He stopped, and I tried to help him out of his embarrassment:— “You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end. Let me hear how she died; for all that I can know of her, I shall be very grateful. She was very, very dear to me.” To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look in his face:— “Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world!” “Why not?” I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me. Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an excuse. At length he stammered out:— “You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular part of the diary.” Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naïveté of a child: “That’s quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!” I could not but smile, at which he grimaced. “I gave myself away that time!” he said. “But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?” By this time my mind was made up that the diary of 127 a doctor who attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum of our knowledge of that terrible Being, and I said boldly:— “Then, Dr Seward, you had better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter.” He grew to a positively deathly pallor as he said:— “No! no! no! For all the world, I wouldn’t let you know that terrible story! (205) After a few more diplomatic assays, Mina succeeds in acquiring the cylinders and carries them to her room to listen and transcribe. When she returns them to Seward, later, she observes: [“]I have been more touched than I can say by your grief. That is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart. It was like a soul crying out to almighty God. No one must hear them spoken ever again! See, I have tried to be useful. I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart beat, as I did.” “No one need ever know, shall ever know,” [Seward] said in a low voice. [Mina] laid her hand on [his] and said very gravely:— “Ah, but they must!” “Must! But why?”… “Because it is part of the terrible story, a part of poor dear Lucy’s death and all that led to it; because in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get. I think that the cylinders which you 128 gave me contained more than you intended me to know; but I can see that there are in your record many lights to this dark mystery….We need have no secrets amongst us; working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark.” (207; my emphasis) In this passage, Mina casually determines the mode and medium through which she will allow access to her archive, telling Seward that “none other need hear how your heart beat, as I did,” but insisting that everyone must read of how his heart beat (207). In doing so, she lays out a radical theory of archival management: universal access to information if not to original documentation. “We need have no secrets amongst us,” she insists, explaining, “working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark” (207). While radical, however, Mina’s new approach to the archive does not entirely depart from her framing of archival work as a domestic—and heteronormative—activity, as becomes clear in the following scenes, when her work as archivist compliments her womanly work among the brotherhood of vampire hunters. Not long after her exchange with Seward, Mina becomes privy to Lord Godalming’s hysterical grief and Mr. Morris’s stoic “trouble” (207, 214-5). In each of her initial interactions with these men, Mina sees herself in traditional women’s roles, depicting the emotional and even hysterical men as extra masculine because of their grief. She does so strategically, letting slip a sort of meta-archival cognitive process. As she acts and interacts with them, in other words, Mina draws on her knowledge of the archive to create a sense of community and intimacy. At the same time, she displays heightened awareness of the fact that each 129 present interaction must also enter the archive. Indeed, in her record of her interaction with Lord Godalming, Mina engages in a rhetorical acrobatics of gender associations: I suppose there is something in woman’s nature that makes a man free to break down before her and express his feelings on the tender or emotional side without feeling it derogatory to his manhood; for when Lord Godalming found himself alone with me he sat down on the sofa and gave way utterly and openly. I sat down beside him and took his hand. I hope he didn’t think it forward of me, and that if he ever thinks of it afterwards he never will have such a thought. There I wrong him; I know [sic] he never will—he is too true a gentleman. I said to him, for I could see that his heart was breaking:— “I loved dear Lucy, and I know what she was to you, and what you were to her. She and I were like sisters; and now she is gone, will you not let me be like a sister to you in your trouble? I know what sorrows you have had, though I cannot measure the depth of them. If sympathy and pity can help in your affliction, won’t you let me be of some little service—for Lucy’s sake?” (214; my emphasis) Mina’s self-framing serves to heighten the distinction between masculinity and femininity in this passage. Casting herself as a representative of womanly nature in order to excuse Godalming’s excessive display of emotion, then Mina introduces and dismisses sexual tension: “I hope he didn’t think it forward of me”; “I know he never will—he is too true a gentleman” (214). Thereafter, she frames herself as a sister. In the face of Godalming’s growing distress, however, her self-framing becomes even more 130 convoluted: In an instant the poor dear fellow was overwhelmed with grief. It seemed to me that all that he had of late been suffering in silence found a vent at once. He grew quite hysterical, and raising his open hands, beat his palms together in a perfect agony of grief. He stood up and then down again, and the tears rained down his cheeks. I felt an infinite pit for him, and opened my arms unthinkingly. With a sob he laid his head on my shoulder, and cried like wearied child. We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when the mother-spirit is invoked; I felt this big, sorrowing man’s head resting on me, as though it were that of the baby that some day may be on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all was. (215; my emphasis) Whether portraying herself as the representative of women’s nature in the abstract or as sister and mother, Mina constantly interpolates the potential impropriety and sensuality of their encounter. Her protestation, “I never thought at the time how strange it all was” serves rather to call attention to the potential impropriety of their encounter than to prevent others from considering it improper (215). And one must wonder why—because it seems obvious that calling attention to such gender dynamics is not a great strategy for the preservation of her own reputation. Read as the annotations of an archivist, I contend, these comments serve as catalysts for the reinstitution of Godalming’s masculinity. It is as if Mina is calling upon every iteration of femininity at her disposal to hold up against 131 the hysterical Godalming and show him still gentlemanly and masculine in comparison. As an archivist, Mina protects male heteronormativity—or ideal masculinity— and the homosocial bond first by maintaining and preserving ignorance about the potential queerness of her fiancé and then via the radical aggregation, production, and deployment of raw information. It is this second activity, however, that makes her just as much a threat as the Count within Dracula’s archive. If we harken back to Wilde’s Lord Henry’s mental tableaux—the monster, the information, and the dusty archive—it is fair to say that Mina, associated with information from the start, becomes increasingly inextricable from the chaos and threat it represents. Although she is working to maintain and preserve heteronormativity, her very activities mark her as queer—at least, in Van Helsing’s eyes—and threaten male supremacy over Knowledge and Truth. From Mina’s very first appearance in the novel, a letter she writes to Lucy Westenra, she is immediately coded as a binary-challenging figure. In it, we learn that Mina has been “keep[ing] up with Jonathan’s studies” (53). This statement is misleading in its brevity, but it indicates that, at the very least, Mina has done all of the reading required to take the bar and become a solicitor alongside her fiancé (53). In addition to these studies, Mina is a teacher, has learned to write shorthand, is skilled in the use of a typewriter, and dreams of “do[ing] what I see lady journalists do: interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations” (53). Indeed, Mina is so thoroughly connected to information technology and print culture in Dracula that she might well be one of the machine-women featured in the work of authors such as George Eliot and George Gissing, women whose work so consumed them that it began to subsume their identities: “She was not a woman, but a mere machine for reading and 132 writing,” the narrator states of one such woman in George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street (142). Take for example Mina’s narration of the production of typescripts at Seward’s asylum: I began to typewrite from the beginning of the seventh cylinder. I used manifold, and so took three copies of the diary, just as I had done with all the rest. It was late when I got through….Before I left [Seward] I remembered what Jonathan put in his diary of the Professor’s perturbation at reading something in an evening paper at the station at Exeter; so, seeing that Dr Seward keeps his newspapers, I borrowed the files of the Westminster Gazette and the Pall Mall Gazette, and took them to my room. I remember how much the Dailygraph and the Whitby Gazette, of which I had made cuttings, helped us to understand the terrible events at Whitby when Count Dracula landed, so I shall look through the evening papers since then, and perhaps I shall get some new light. I am not sleepy, and the work will help to keep me quiet. (208-9) Though she couches her achievements and information-management actives within a desire “to be useful to Jonathan,” her ambition is never fully contained by her sense of nuptial duty. Van Helsing seems to grasp this potential threat most fully. From the first, his praise for her is of the backhanded variety. He is therefore careful always to emphasize that her “male” brain is compromised by her weak female body: “her great brain is trained like a man’s brain, but is of a sweet woman,” he explains to Seward, at once point, reminding him of the necessity for care in dealing with her (316; my emphasis). 133 Though he is content, at first, to allow Mina to manage the archive, as her radical philosophy of archival management becomes more and more apparent, he decides to step in. For Van Helsing, a woman whose “man’s brain” becomes too developed is no longer a woman. She is rather, like Dracula and Lucy, a “Thing” defined by negations: un- woman and “un-dead” (200-1). In a speech to the whole group, Van Helsing declares: And now for you, Madam Mina, this night is the end until all be well. You are too precious to us to have such risk. When we part tonight, you no more must question. We shall tell you all in good time. We are men, and are able to bear; but you must be our star and our hope, and we shall act all the more free that you are not in danger, such as we are. (225; my emphasis) After some convincing, the men agree that “Mrs Harker is better out of it. Things are quite bad enough for us, all men of the world … but it is no place for a woman, and if she had remaining in touch with the affair, it would in time infallibly have wrecked her” (238; my emphasis). Such comments add strength to my claim that Van Helsing takes control of the archive in order to manage the threat of Mina’s queerness as much as to shield her from the physical threat of Dracula. Ironically, then, it is this very act that places her in harm’s way and preserves a record of her queerness in the archive. For Van Helsing’s disruption of the archive’s institutionalization makes Mina vulnerable to the Count and gives the Count an opportunity to destroy the archive. The very next day, Mina wakes pale and tired—symptoms which neither she nor the men connect to Lucy’s illness and demise. But even before it affects her body, the decision to cut Mina off from the archive affects the novel’s only traditional 134 heteronormative relationship. “It is strange to me to be kept in the dark as I am today,” Mina writes, “after Jonathan’s full confidence for so many years” (238). Not long thereafter, this seed of marital discord bears fruit in a scene that plays out Jonathan’s figurative cuckholding. Dracula, stealing into Mina and Jonathan’s bedchamber, pulls Mina from bed and declares: [“]And you, their best beloved one, are now to me flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn; for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done…” With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh, my God, my God! what have I done? (267-8; ellipses in original) In the aftermath of the scene, Jonathan is returned to a state of hysteria and effeminacy. Mina considers herself “polluted” (268). And Van Helsing, quietly taking everything in, decides “that Mina should be in full confidence” again, and “that nothing of any sort—no matter how painful—should be kept from her” (269). Seward writes, “I told her that she was to have all the papers in the safe, and all the papers or diaries and phonographs we might hereafter use; and was to keep the record as she had done before” (271; my emphasis). But it is too late, while they regroup and comfort Mina and Jonathan, Dracula storms the study and destroys everything but the typewritten backups stored in the safe. 135 Mina transitions further and further into an “un-dead” and “un-woman,” leading Van Helsing to confide despairingly to Seward, “‘Madam Mina, our poor, dear, Madam Mina, is changing’” (300). While the band of brothers, under the information-management of Mina, ultimately catches up with a fleeing Dracula and stakes him in the heart, they never quite recover from this archival tug-of-war. Even seven years later, in the novel’s closing note, they still fret about “the fact that, in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document! nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum” (351). Jonathan writes: When we got home we were talking of the old time—which we could all look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:— “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her 136 sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.” (351; emphasis added) Though the marriages of Godalming and Seward certainly figure into the novel-as- archive’s apparent restoration of heteronormativity,67 Van Helsing locates the proof of archival gender and sexuality management in Mina’s embodied motherhood. Even in his declaration that the signifiers of their success can be found in Mina’s mother-body, however, Van Helsing introduces gender ambiguity. He remarks upon Mina’s “brave and gallant” womanhood before he mentions her more stereotypically feminine characteristics: “sweetness and loving care” (351). It seems that even this final substitution of motherhood for archival authenticity cannot wholly repair the “damage” (or queerness) that the contested management and destruction of the archive have wrought. The archive has itself become queer, partially destroyed and reconstructed via reproduced copies of itself it no longer possesses the cultural authority to impose order and value on the information it contains. In this chapter I have argued that the archival framing of late-century gothic novels enabled authors to present narratives which explored non-normative gender identity and sexuality by positioning the archive as an unspoken guarantee that heteronormativity would be reinstated at novel’s end. I demonstrate that the archive exists in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and Bram Stoker’s Dracula not so much as a force acting in opposition to the novels’ larger-than-life monsters but, rather, as a conservative stabilizing force in the face of modernity’s non-normative gender roles and sexual 67. Admittedly, the phrase “Godalming and Seward are both happily married,” is not necessarily indicative of restored heteronormativity, as its ambiguity leaves the possibility that they have married each other quite open (351). 137 orientations. In this way, the novels’ emphases on print production and information management are inextricable from their representations of embodied identity, underscoring the importance of print in the Victorian cultural imagination as a tool not only for self-fashioning but also for the management of others’ bodies. In the next, and final, chapter, I turn to corpus analysis to trace this conception of print and information management in language. Namely, I trace the evolution of figural usage of the term stereotype and other printing terms in 155 Victorian novels, thinking through the implications of late-century figural usage by means of a close reading of proto-Zionism, embodiment, and printing terminology in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). 138 CHAPTER IV TURNING BODIES INTO BOOKS: STEREOTYPING, EMBODIMENT, AND DANIEL DERONDA I can make ships, printing presses, stereo-type plates, and telescopes; but, I cannot make men who will see and feel as I do. —Lord Stanhope (1810)68 In the 11 February 1893 edition of Pearson’s Weekly, an article titled “Stereotype Women” recounts the “curious case” of a woman who presented symptoms of a condition the French medical society called alternately “autographism,” “graphic urticaria,” and “desmography” (“Stereotype Women”). Describing her dermatological symptoms with what was by then familiar printing terminology, the article does much to illustrate the sorts of permeable boundaries between embodied identities, print objects, and technologies which I have worked to address in this dissertation. For, as inscribed letters manifest on the woman’s skin, the stereotype plate they call to mind seems to subsume her identity. The passage continues, If we take a blunt style, or a sharp-pointed pencil, and inscribe upon the shoulders, breast, arms, or thighs of such a subject, a word, name, or figure, by moving the instrument lightly over all the points of the words or inscription that we wish to produce, we shall almost instantly observe a redness to appear upon the line that the instrument has passed over….Two minutes later, the letter or inscription begins to appear under the form of a rosy-white outline of a much paler tint than the skin which surrounds it on all sides. 68. Epigraph taken from a letter, purported to be from the third Lord Stanhope to Major Cartwright and dated 25 July 1810, which was printed in the Carmarthen Journal on 9 November 1811. Original emphasis. 139 […] When the phenomenon has reached its complete development, and the relief is well established, the part of the skin upon which the word or figure was delineated assumes exactly the appearance of a stereotype plate, whence the name of “stereo-type woman” bestowed upon the first woman. (“Stereotype Women”) Though cynical twenty-first century readers may dismiss this “phenomenon” as little more than a childish game, the “symptoms” of which could have been caused by writing instruments which were moved less “lightly” over the skin than the article indicates, I would suggest that it is worth taking more seriously (“Stereotype Women”). The manifestation of the “stereotype woman” in the waning decades of the nineteenth century is, I contend, symptomatic not so much of a new disease as of a widespread fascination with print technology and book-making processes. As a technology with major cultural significance throughout every aspect of British cultural life, the book itself had long served as a metaphor for human life and the human body (and vice versa).69 But in the aftermath of massive technological innovations in printing and publishing between 1800 and 1830, a number of new print processes—including an improved stereotyping process—helped to spawn a rich lexicon which made its way slowly into common usage, ultimately changing the way Victorians wrote, talked, and thought about both individual and social bodies. From the invention of a paper-making machine by Nicholas-Louis Robert (1798) to Lord Stanhope’s iron-frame printing press (1800), the Times’s adoption 69. See, for example. Patrick Brantlinger’s discussion of the “book of the world” trope in the introduction to The Reading Lesson (1998) and Leah Price’s discussion of anthropomorphized books in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012). 140 of Friedrich Koenig’s steam-powered cylinder press (1814), the development of inexpensive embossed cloth bindings for book covers (1830s), innovations in color printing processes (1830s), and the perfection of the stereotyping and electrotyping processes (1829, 1839), it has been said that there were more innovations and revolutions in the printing and publishing world in the first decades of the nineteenth century than there were in the entire first four-hundred years after Johannes Gutenberg introduced Europe to the concept of moveable type.70 In this chapter, I have adopted three reading strategies that individually and collectively bring the significance of nineteenth-century print culture and publishing discourse into focus: close, distant, and surface reading. I begin by using quantitative analysis to, in the words of Susan David Bernstein and Catherine DeRose, “engage in a reading process that does not signify individual novels but rather takes groups of novels as its base unit of analysis” (45). This distant reading, as it has been called,71 enables me to explore the larger literary landscape within which, I argue, printing and book-making terms were taking on increasingly figural relations to the human body and identity in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While close reading enables an unpacking of the ways in which individual authors use terms such as stereotype, its methodological 70. This truism is often repeated in Book Historical circles without attribution, though in Apart from the Text (1998) Anthony Rota makes a similar argument (with later dates) when he observes that moveable type and the methods of hand printing were “so efficient that little of truly revolutionary change occurred between 1455 and 1955” (14). In this claim, Rota draws upon the work of Philip Gaskell in A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). Gaskell notes that the “fundamental processes” of printing “were not altered in any important way until the electronic revolution of the mid-twentieth century,” adding, “nevertheless it proved possible in the nineteenth century to speed the various processes by applying steam power to presswork, to binding, and to composition, in that order” (189). In other words, the Victorian printing trade was suddenly a mass printing trade. While its basic implements (the platen press, moveable type) would have been more or less recognizable to Gutenberg and his contemporaries, the scale and speed of nineteenth-century printing would have, I contend, seemed “truly revolutionary” to them (Rota 14). 71. See Heather Love’s adept overview of the term and methodology in her article “Close but not Deep.” 141 emphasis on particularized, deep interpretation limits our perspective to the immediate text and, by extension, limits the questions we can ask about text, terminology, and the wider implications and engagements of both. In the case of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a novel which critics tend to agree centers themes of history, knowledge, books, and printing alongside questions of embodiment and identity,72 for example, analyses based on close reading have missed what I contend is a powerful engagement with and figuralization of the stereotyping process for the very simple reason that the term stereotype never appears in the novel’s pages. Close reading, combined with distant reading methodologies, I suggest, recovers the ubiquity of the stereotype as a figure for embodied identity in late-Victorian literature and serves as an important context and subtext for Eliot’s constructions of Deronda and Mordecai’s relationship. Using an open-source text analysis program called AntConc to analyze two corpora (described at more length below) consisting of 155 Victorian novels and novellas, I consider the frequency with which printing and book-making terms appear, and identify the words with which such terms are most frequently paired, in order to analyze their evolving figural usage. AntConc is “a freeware, multiplatform tool” which generates a variety of result types, including a keyword-in-context (KWIC) concordance of all iterations of a given search term across the corpus, a cluster view which displays words directly adjacent to the term, and a collocates view which highlights “non- sequential patterns,” or relationships, between the search term and other corpus terms (Anthony AntConc). For each corpus, I collect data related to specific search terms, including stereotype (and variants thereof), type, stamp, and impression. The data I’ve 72. See, for example, John Lurz’s “The Memory of the Book: The Particular Bodies of Daniel Deronda” and Michael Toogood’s “George Eliot’s ‘strange printing’: Exegesis, Community, and Daniel Deronda.” 142 collected and analyzed is further visualized in ways that draw attention to forms of book- making and printing metaphors in my corpora by part of speech, author, author’s gender, genre, and year in order to establish a baseline understanding of figural usage. In other words, I am not only interested in how these terms were being used, but also in who was using them, and when they appear in the nineteenth-century. I build on this first reading by turning to surface reading as a methodology with which to analyze the implications of the lexicon of printing deployed by authors in this period. In their introduction to The Way We Read Now, a special issue of Representations, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus describe “surface” as “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth” (Best and Marcus 9). By understanding “surface as the intricate verbal structure of literary language,” they argue, we can “produce close readings that do not seek hidden meanings” and instead account for “patterns that exist within and across texts” (10-11). Indeed, as Heather Love has pointed out, surface reading is a way to achieve both the “richness” of close reading and the large-scale understanding of the systemic inner- workings within literature and culture that distant reading affords (374, 373). By first using AntConc results to pinpoint moments in my corpora when terms such as stereotype are deployed in ways that engage with issues of embodiment and identity, followed by closer attention to the particularities of those moments within the context of the specific novels in which they appear, I begin to make sense of details which, while “neither hidden nor hiding” (in Best and Marcus’s words), are nevertheless part of a larger pattern which is not perceptible without a large corpus of texts and a 143 varied reading approach (9). Focusing specifically on the appearance of stereotyping terminology in my combined corpus, I draw on the work of Ian Duncan and Daniel Novak to argue that the literary co-opting of book-making and printing terminology enabled Victorian authors to formulate the constructedness of physical bodies and, by extension, to theorize the “ideal” reproduction of those bodies into social and political communities. By conducting a surface reading of the stereotyping and lettering terminology in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), I showcase this literary co- opting at work—delineating, as a prototype, the sort of conceptual engagement with the processual logic of the stereotype that undergirds Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. In my concluding section, a close reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), I demonstrate the extent to which such figural print terminology informs canonical late-century narratives—and character development—even when it does not overtly appear therein. For, contrary to Lord Stanhope’s despairing claim in the epigraph to this chapter, Eliot’s own language in Daniel Deronda makes clear that people can be “made” to “see and feel” as other people do, drawing on the stereotyping process as a model for the corporeal “transmission” Mordecai Cohen hopes to achieve in and through his friendship with Deronda (“Letter”; Eliot 398). In fact, though the word stereotype never occurs in Daniel Deronda, the imagined stereotyping of Mordecai’s soul onto Deronda’s body is precisely the means by which Eliot envisions the reproduction of an entire nation, “the generations … crowding on [Mordecai’s] narrow life like a bridge,” which “see[s] and feel[s]” as Mordecai does (Deronda 423; “Letter”). 144 Corpora Overview and Rationale To trace the use of printing and book-making metaphors in late-nineteenth- century British literature, I compiled two plain-text corpora from lists tabulated with Troy J. Bassett’s valuable At the Circulating Library database and supplemented them with texts which were suggested in response to a Twitter query.73 The first corpus, a positive control group, consisted of fifty-five novels featuring characters who are authors, editors, or publishers.7⁠ 4 If the language of book-making was used figurally to think through issues of embodiment and identity in Victorian literature on a wide scale, I deduced that such figural usage would most naturally appear in works whose content engages directly with the writing and production of literature. In order to get a sense of when the terms in which I am interested began appearing, and whether such appearances corresponded to important dates in the history of British publishing and printing, I chose to include early- and mid-Victorian texts in the corpus. This Author Character Corpus (ACC), as I’ve called it, includes fiction published between 1841 and 1900 by forty-two different authors (eighteen women and twenty-four men), and consists of works scraped from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive (Fig. 7, below).75 The texts obtained from the Internet Archive have higher rates of error than the texts obtained from Project Gutenberg, as the Internet Archive’s plain-text files are derived by running microfilm or scanned materials through Optical Character 73. See Appendix B for the Twitter thread in which I solicited recommendations. 74. See Appendix C for the complete list. 75. Although Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive made this work possible, relying on publicly available plain-text files (for both corpora) meant that I could not be discriminating in terms of edition when selecting novels to include. This selection method consequently shaped the scope of the project. For instance, it made accounting for the ways in which figural usage of book-making and printing terminology in these texts may have changed over time (from serial to volume edition, for example) impractical. 145 Recognition (OCR) software.7⁠ 6 To address this inconsistency, I manually stripped all files of paratextual material (such as tables of contents, publisher’s advertisements, and edition information) and, for the Internet Archive documents, used a program called BBEdit to identify and remove characters which are not readable in plain text. Although it declutters the document files, such cleaning does not address the problem of words which have been incorrectly identified or have gone altogether unrecognized by the OCR software. In fact, such errors typically require manual correction. Due to the scale of the corpus, individually correcting each novel-length plain-text file was out of the question for this project. This means that the data I obtained from the ACC are, while reliable, necessarily incomplete. Each novel included in the corpus was still largely readable enough to produce usable and meaningful data, but the numbers I provide for specific terms which appear in the corpus in the following section potentially underrepresent actual word frequency. With the limitations of the Internet Archive texts in mind, I compiled my second corpus using only texts available on Project Gutenberg.77 This Victorian “Bestseller” Corpus (VBC), includes one-hundred novels and novellas published between 1870 and 1901 by twenty-five different authors (five women and twenty men).78⁠ The sharp decline in total number of authors reflects my choice to use only Project Gutenberg texts, as there is a much smaller pool of available works, the scope of which is in part determined by public knowledge of authors and texts. I use the term bestseller in scare quotes to call 76. As Susan David Bernstein and Catherine DeRose note, “OCR always results in errors that then need to be corrected” (45). 77. Although, as with any transcription, errors still occur in Project Gutenberg texts, the perceivable rate of error is much lower. 78. See Appendix D for the complete list. 146 attention to the fact that there is no standard measure by which we designate a nineteenth- century work as a bestseller. ⁠ Illustrating the inconstant nature of “bestseller” designations in the nineteenth-century, the list I used to compile this corpus included Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which was unsuccessful when first published, but not Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), which was wildly successful in terms of sales and popular reception. The categorization of texts as bestsellers was inconstant, determined in some cases by the success of the serialization, in others by the success of the volume. These determinations weren’t necessarily tied to year of publication, with “bestsellers” emerging after years of apparent readerly disregard. Success itself isn’t necessarily determined by the number of sales or the profits in a consistent manner—titles purchased by Mudie’s Circulating Library, for example, might be considered “bestsellers” even if relatively few copies were sold. Indeed, my goal in choosing to build a corpus based on a list of late-century “bestsellers” was merely to accrue a wide range of works including but not limited to those which have become part of the Western literary canon. I supplemented the list with works included in this dissertation (such as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle), and, finding it to be disproportionately composed of works written by male authors, included a number of works by popular women writers (such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon—who, shockingly, did not appear on the original list). Despite my supplementary efforts, the bulk of this corpus consists of the work of seven authors: Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, George Gissing, and H.G. Wells (See Fig. 8, below). As a starting point for further inquiry, however, even this limited pool of authors provides valuable data (as we will see in the following sections) about the way 147 printing and book-making terms manifest in and across specific genres. Such issues are not so much a limitation of this particular project as they are of literary research in the twenty-first century, particularly in the digital humanities. Advancements in technology have required us to rethink our assumptions about what counts as data in the first place—as Christine Borgman notes, “the meaning of data” and our ability to unpack it is “particularly ambiguous in the humanities,” though scholars have always faced “uncertainty … in knowledge representations … whether epistemic, statistical, methodological, or sociocultural” (28). In the process, technology and its effects on our research methodologies have also called attention to the fact that data is always already mediated. Lisa Gitelman points out that, “at first glance data are apparently before the fact: they are the starting point for what we know, who we are, and how we communicate,” a “ shared sense” which “often leads to an unnoticed assumption that data are transparent, that information is self-evident, the fundamental stuff of truth itself. If we’re not careful, in other words, our zeal for more and more data can become a faith in their neutrality and autonomy, their objectivity” (3). The way we think about printed data, books, newspapers and periodicals, and ephemera such as advertisements, has not only shaped the way we research but also the way we work to preserve materials through digitization—in turn limiting what we can do and how we can interact with digitally mediated data. As Paul Fyfe notes, the contents and structures of “digital collections inevitably condition much of the research we undertake” (717). Not only does public awareness about texts and their perceived literary value shape these collections, “intellectual property restrictions,” one of “the major forces shaping the horizon of digital research collections,” determine “what gets digitized, what is made available, and how 148 and where it can be accessed” (717). Data is always constructed, by hands and minds including but not limited to our own. Because I split these works into a positive control group and a larger test group, the corpora afford us a look at the way in which authors incorporated and repurposed aspects of their own trade not only in meta-fictional narratives, but in a variety of plots and genre contexts. Featuring novels published from 1841-1901, the corpora offer a sampling of sixty-years of such engagement, enabling a discussion of how authors’ usage of book-making and printing terms changed over time. And because the figural usage of such terminology was linked deeply with signifiers of embodied identity, these corpora also afford us a trajectory of nineteenth-century thinking about the body in and as a book which still influences our embodiment discourse today. 149 Fig. 7. Tableau Public screenshot of a tree chart displaying ACC (1841-1900) breakdown by author and number of texts. Square color and size correspond to number of novels in corpus, with dark blue indicating three novels, light blue indicating two novels, and sea green indicating one novel. 150 Fig. 8. Tableau Public screenshot of a tree chart displaying VCB (1870-1901) breakdown by author and number of texts. As with Fig. 7., sea green indicates 1 novel, while deeper blues indicate greater numbers—up to Wilkie Collins’s fifteen included novels. Erratum: the square reading simply “Edward” indicates novels written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. 151 “The Letter Killeth”: Stereotype, Type, and the Socially Constructed Body The last decades of the Victorian period marked what we might call the pinnacle of the figural evolution of book-making terminology, a moment when its technical denotation was still in common but no longer, necessarily, in primary use. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “the method or process of printing in which a solid plate of type-metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type, is used for printing instead of the form itself,” the term dates back to 1800 (“stereotype, n. and adj.,” def. 1). By 1850, the OED indicates, stereotype was being used in a figural sense to denote “something continued or constantly repeated without change; a stereotyped phrase … stereotyped diction or usage” (“stereotype, n, and adj.,” def. 3a). In the seventy-two years between 1850 and 1922, when the OED records the first usage of stereotype in its modern sense, figural usage of the term would evolve even more, shedding its technical associations until it finally came to denote “a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person,” “an attitude based on such a preconception,” or “a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type” (“stereotype, n. and adj.,” def. 3b). A cursory search of the term stereotype in the British Newspaper Archive supports this timeline, turning up 11,556 results between 1800-1849, 107,632 results between 1850-1899, and 54,866 results between 1900-1949.79 It is no coincidence that the period of highest usage begins in 1850, when, according to Philip Gaskell, a new and improved process brought stereotyping into widespread use for the first time in England 79. As of January 2019. Because new periodicals are being added on a regular basis, these numbers are not concrete. The downward trend in usage these figures depict continues into the present, with 10,949 results between 1950-1999, and 3,819 results between 2000-2018. 152 (201). Though there is evidence of stereotype manufacturing in the early eighteenth century, the process languished due to its costliness, difficulty, and impracticality for the small print runs which were common before the era of mass-printing (Gaskell 201). In its early iterations, the stereotyping process required each page to be specially set with “spaces and quads that were rather taller than usual,” so the plaster wouldn’t stick in “hollows in the type-page” (202). The typeset page would be brushed with oil, and then “plaster was mixed with water,” “poured over the type,” and allowed to set before the mould was baked and used (202). After baking, the mould could be attached to an iron plate and secured inside a casting box, which would be “immersed for about ten minutes in a pit of molten metal,” cooled, cleaned, polished, and sized to fit a standard hand-press (202). According to Gaskell, only one or two plates could be cast at a time, making the tricky process one that was also very time-consuming (201). Printers persisted in using the process, when justifiable, because of its long-term advantages: stereotyping freed up type for other projects; it allowed for easy reprinting (and made printing new editions a simpler task); and it reduced equipment wear and tear over time. As Gaskell notes, however, “the introduction of the flexible paper mould [or flong] and the pivoted casting-box” in 1829 revolutionized the process, “ma[king] stereotyping much easier and cheaper,” thereby opening it up to more frequent and workaday use (203). Invented in Lyon, this innovation in the stereotyping process made its way to England in the late 1830s—just as the Victorian period began (203). It came into use alongside several other revolutionary innovations, such as the steam-driven platen press (1830s), which enabled mass printing on an unheard of scale; machine-made, wood-pulp paper (1840s) which was cheaper and easier to source than traditional linen- 153 based, handmade paper; and the advent of the railroad (1833), which facilitated rapid dissemination of books and other printed materials across England and the UK. Notably, then, this improved stereotyping process made it easier to preserve and reproduce as well as to transmit books. Gaskell explains that, as the process gained popularity in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it became standard practice to “make two sets of plates straight away of books that were likely to remain in demand; one set was put to press, but the other set was used only as a ‘mother’ from which further sets of plates could be made when the earlier ones wore out” (204). This new stereotyping process also “came to be of fundamental importance” to the periodical press: “stereo rotaries,” Gaskell writes, indicating the steam-driven presses, invented by Robert Hoe in 1844, which used rollers instead of flat platens, “printed the major newspapers from the mid 1860s, when it also became common for flat column- stereos to be sent from London to the offices of provincial journals, so that local papers would include both typeset news of local origin and syndicated matter in plates from the capital” (205).80 Because most Victorian authors sold work to periodicals during their careers, it is safe to say that those who were actively publishing from late 1830 onward would have been, at least marginally, aware of the stereotyping process. Indeed, the first instance of the word stereotype in my Author Character Corpus occurs in the oldest included text, Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), which uses the term as a way to signal the preservation of “valiant deeds … for posterity” (Fig. 3). From the first iteration of the term in my corpora, stereotype almost always appears in its figural, rather than in its technical, sense. Together, the 155 combined texts 80. For a discussion of the provincial press’s use of stereotyped serial fiction, see Chapter II. 154 in the ACC and VBC capture a moment in history when usage of stereotyping terminology was evolving: simultaneously increasing in frequency and shifting from technical to figural. Ian Duncan, noting that Charles Darwin and William Whewell conceptualized the formation of knowledge via “two linguistic stages,” seems to describe this evolution when he writes, first, of “a breach in the received episteme, made by an act of figuration” and, second, of “the naturalization of the figure … by familiar usage” (16). The shift in usage my corpora capture, in other words, marks the linguistic branching of knowledge—the appropriation of processual jargon to describe lived experience. Overall, the term stereotype (or variations thereof) appears a total of forty-seven times in my combined corpora: thirty-one in the ACC and sixteen in the VBC (see Tables 1 and 2, below). For the ACC, which contains 8,628,515 words (or, more accurately, word tokens),81 stereotype makes up approximately .0000036 percent of the corpus. In the case of the VBC, which contains 12,846,150 word tokens, stereotype makes up an even smaller .00000124 percent. Considering these iterations of the term at the level of the books in which they appear puts these percentages into new perspective: thirty percent of the novels in the ACC and fifteen percent of the novels in the VBC contain the term stereotype (or a variant). While by no means a prevalent term with regard to word count, then, iterations of stereotype across both corpora suggest there is something intriguing happening with its use. The data becomes even more interesting when considered in terms of gender and genre. Fourteen of the forty-seven total uses in the combined corpora are by women, and 81. In linguistics and, by extension, text analysis, a word type encapsulates a word and all of its variants while a word token represents an individual instance of the word. See Linda Wetzel’s “Types and Tokens” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 edition) for a useful examination of the distinctions between the two terms. 155 thirty-three are by men. Broken down by corpus, use-by-gender is much more even in the ACC (twelve women and nineteen men) than in the VBC (two women and fourteen men), in part because there are fewer women included in the VBC and, in part, I suspect, because the ACC is comprised of texts that are explicitly about writers and publishing— making it much more likely for terms like stereotype to appear at all. Despite the overall gender disparity, the authors who use the term stereotype most frequently are Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who deploys it ten times over two novels, and Thomas Hardy, who uses it nine times over seven novels.82 This near-tie is significant, because it indicates that usage of the term transcends perceived genre boundaries (in this case sensation fiction and realism). Though Mary Elizabeth Braddon certainly worked in a realist mode, 83 and Hardy certainly used sensational tropes,84 their work was (and, generally, still is) considered to be quite distinct in terms of genre. Braddon’s usage of the term might be expected, given that she was an editor and her partner (and later husband), John Maxwell, was an influential publisher. Hardy’s usage is surprising, however, because he infamously despised technology and came as well to despise newspaper serialization (which relied quite heavily on the stereotyping process for syndicated publication).85 The fact that he used the term throughout his oeuvre speaks to the ubiquity of the figural sense of stereotype in the cultural imagination. Appearing in everything from realist fiction to 82. Other relatively frequent users of the term include Edward Bulwer-Lytton (six times over four novels), Grant Allen (two times over two novels), and H.G. Wells (two times over two novels). 83. See Pamela Gilbert’s “Braddon and Victorian Realism: Joshua Haggard's Daughter” in Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (1999) for a discussion of Braddon’s work beyond the frame of sensation fiction. 84. See, for example, William A. Cohen’s “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s ‘The Return of the Native.’” 85. See Patricia Ingham’s “The Evolution of Jude the Obscure” (1976), for a discussion of the serialization and censorship of Jude the Obscure in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. 156 historical romances, from New Woman novels to fin-de-siècle science fiction, stereotype snakes through late-century fiction, subtly shaping readers’ experience of the works in which it appears. Table 1: ACC ‘stereotyp*’ Hits Title Author Date Hits Cecil Catherine Gore 1841 1 Ranthorpe G.H. Lewes 1847 1 The Caxtons Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1849 1 My Novel Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1853 3 What Will He Do with It? Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1859 1 The Doctor's Wife Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1864 9 Not While She Lives Mrs. Alexander Fraser 1870 1 A Pair of Blue Eyes Thomas Hardy 1873 2 The Hand of Ethelberta Thomas Hardy 1876 1 Mr. Meeson's Will H. Rider Haggard 1888 1 Confessions of a Young Man George Moore 1888 2 Children of the Ghetto Israel Zangwill 1892 1 In the Year of the Jubilee George Gissing 1894 2 The Woman Who Did Grant Allen 1895 1 Cynthia Leonard Merrick 1896 2 The Type-Writer Girl Grant Allen 1897 1 Red Pottage Mary Cholmondeley 1899 1 157 Table 2: VBC ‘stereotyp*’ Hits Title Author Date Hits Lothair Benjamin Disraeli 1870 1 The Adventures of Harry Richmond George Meredith 1871 1 Desperate Remedies Thomas Hardy 1871 1 The Parisians Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1874 1 Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy 1874 1 Wyllard's Weird Mary Elizabeth Braddon 1880 1 The Merry Men Robert Louis Stevenson 1882 1 Two on a Tower Thomas Hardy 1882 1 The Woodlanders Thomas Hardy 1887 1 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy 1895 2 Old Mr. Tredgold Margaret Oliphant 1896 1 The Whirlpool George Gissing 1897 1 The War of the Worlds H.G. Wells 1898 1 The Inheritors Ford Maddox Ford 1901 1 The First Men in the Moon H.G. Wells 1901 1 A concordance view of the hits for stereotype (and variants) in the ACC displays terms in context with their surrounding text with striking results: in almost all of the instances in this corpus, stereotype is used in a figurative sense to indicate something that is perceived to be a standard or a frequently reiterated phenomenon, such as “schoolgirl phrases,”86 “rules,”87 and “convention[ality]”88 (Fig. 9, below). While the usage made evident by AntConc’s concordance view aligns with the figurative sense of the term stereotype provided in the OED,89 what is really exciting about these results is that they 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, My Novel (1853). 89. See above. 158 reveal such usage to have begun at least a decade earlier than the date listed in the OED,90 and they reveal that such figural usage is overwhelmingly linked to the human body. In many of the hits displayed below (see Fig. 9), stereotype occurs as an adjective, describing nouns having to do with the bodily actions, appearances, and identities. For example, the first hit listed shows that stereotyped is used to modify the phrase “womanly little speech.”91 Other examples include “stereotyped attitude,”92 “stereotyped expressions,”93 “stereotyped opinions,”94 and “stereotyped questions.”95 In one case, the results even depict the figurative stereotyping of people: hit number eleven describes a “guest and lacquey” who seem to be “stereotypes from one plate.”96 The same is true of the VBC. An AntConc concordance view of this corpus reveals such pairings as “stereotyped beauty,”97 the “stereotyped forms” of regiments,98 “stereotyped manner,”99 and “stereotype raiment” (see Fig. 10, below).100 90. As noted above, the OED dates figural usage of the term to 1850, citing as evidence a passage from George Ticknor’s Life of William Hickling Prescott (1864). 91. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Doctor’s Wife (1864). 92. Mary Cholmondeley, Red Pottage (1899). 93. H. Rider Haggard, Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888). 94. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (1895). 95. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and Allen’s The Type-Writer Girl (1897). 96. Ibid. 97. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wyllard’s Weird (1880). 98. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). 99. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895). 100. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (1871). 159 Fig. 9. AntConc ‘stereotyp*’ Concordance for ACC. Fig. 10. AntConc ‘stereotyp*’ Concordance for VBC. 160 Driving this evolving usage, and always already informing the term stereotype, was the concept of the type, which dates at least as far back as the 1500s (according to the OED) but experienced renewed popularity in the Victorian period (“type, n.” def. 1a, 5a). Never quite shedding its religious connotations as “something which is symbolized or figured,” especially “a person … of Old Testament history,” in nineteenth-century usage type took on scientific connotations to signify “the general form, structure, or character distinguishing a particular kind, group, or class of beings” as well as “a pattern or model after which something is made” (“type, n.” def. 1a, 5a). Instances of the word type far outnumber the word stereotype in both corpora, as might be expected. Type appears a total of 371 times in the ACC and 297 in the VBC. Linked to uniquely nineteenth-century understandings of the norm and ideal in its non-technical forms,101 as Lennard J. Davis explains in Enforcing Normalcy (1995), the type—as it appears in my corpora—alternately designates an imagined “standard” body and an imagined “ideal” one, a “mytho-poetic body that is linked to that of the gods,” “not attainable by a human,” and “visualized in art” as a figure “composed from the ideal parts of living models” (Davis 24-5). In the ACC, for example, type is used to describe “a handsome woman,”102 a “bureaucratic” man,103 “the ideal of … a woman,”104 and “the 101. See Chapter II, pp. 49-50 for my discussion of Lennard J. Davis’s work on this subject. 102. George Gissing, In the Year of the Jubilee (1894). 103. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (1895). 104. Henry Harland, The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box (1900). 161 perfect model,”105 as well as literal pieces of type and typewritten text (Fig. 11).106 In the VBC, type signifies “a compound of all that is best,”107 a “refined creature,”108 and a person who is “Napoleonic … brooding, thoughtful, and ominous” (see Fig. 12, below).109 Not unsurprisingly, the AntConc VBC concordance for type displayed below (Fig. 6) also illustrates a sense of type stemming from “scientific” discourse about racial embodiment, as in “Jewish type,”110 “so strong and perfect a type as the original Aryan,”111 “Mongolian type,”112 and “Chinese type” (Fig. 12).113 This sense of the word would undergird Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton’s, foundation of a new “science”: eugenics.114 Galton, an influential Victorian scientist, believed, like many of his contemporaries, that humankind could be divided into distinct races according to “natural” or “hereditary characteristics” which were supposed to be unique to each group 105. George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891). 106. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, My Novel (1853); David Christie Murray, A Daughter of To-Day (1894); Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1895). 107. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872). 108. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895). 109. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Parisians (1874). 110. Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872). 111. Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair (1870). 112. Ibid. 113. H.G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). 114. The OED attributes the first use of the word eugenics to Galton in his 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty. See “eugenics, adj. and n.” definition A in the OED. See also Galton’s footnote on Inquiries into Human Faculty pp. 24-5, which reads in part, “we greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which , especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing … The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea” (25; my emphasis). 162 (Galton 2). These characteristics, Galton suspected, might hold the key to “the true physiognomy of a race”; capturing the qualities dispersed by “physiognomical difference between different men,” he hoped to combine all of these “hereditary characteristics” into one master form (4). This hunch led him to collaborate on a set of composite photographs of Jewish faces which have become famous examples of pseudoscientific profiling, alongside Cesare Lombroso’s criminal types.115 Fig. 11. AntConc ‘type’ Concordance for ACC. 115. See the Wellcome Library’s digitized copy of Galton’s composite photographs, “The Jewish Type” and Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876). 163 Fig. 12. AntConc ‘type’ Concordance for VBC. Deriving from these senses of type, positive and negative, just as much as from the technical stereotyping process, figural uses of stereotype in my corpora seem to imagine typologies of bodies, behaviors, and social mores from which characters spring into life. Connoting, in particular, corporeal norms and ideals, the stereotype process and the concept of the type to which it harkened offered Victorian authors a compelling shorthand for both the constructedness and reproduction of bodily identities, behaviors, and ideas. In Jude the Obscure (1895), for example, Thomas Hardy’s usage of the term stereotyped keys into the novel’s larger thematic engagement with letters and the apparent fixity, or preordained-ness, of embodied identity. Throughout the novel there is a tension between Jude’s desire to be lettered (i.e., a man of letters) and his manual labor 164 lettering buildings. The epigraph to the novel, “The Letter Killeth,”116 provides a context in which to understand both this overarching tension and Hardy’s use of the term stereotyped. As Anna Kornbluh argues, “the murderous agency of the letter follows from its debased particularity, its tyrannical enslavement of the idea in representation and concomitant enslavement of the people in norms and prohibitions” (1). Much like the proverbial letter, the stereotyping process (and the stereotype plate itself) can be understood as a “lethally rigid norm[alization]” of the spirit of language, of the text (Kornbluh 2). Yet, as Kornbluh reminds us, “the epigraph is far from the novel’s last word on the letter.…tracing letters and calibrating shapes, the novel underlines the materiality of the letter irreducible to its normativity, the shape of the signifier irreducible to its signification” (2). Drawing on typography and geometry, Kornbluh argues, Jude the Obscure “instantiate[s] a surprising exuberance about the shape of letters, consequently projecting the malleability of social lineaments even as the novel tells the tale of lethally rigid norms” (2). Though the word stereotype only occurs twice in the novel, its use is similarly complex—revealing that embodied stereotyping can be externally or self-imposed, a social constraint or an unfettering. In the first instance, Jude despairingly contemplates his “present degraded position”: What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten. Drinking was the 116. A reference to 2 Corinthians 3:6 in the King James Version of the Christian bible: “who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” 165 regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless. He began to see now why some men boozed at inns.…He called for liquor and drank briskly for an hour or more. (65; my emphasis) Throughout the novel, Jude finds himself pressed into proverbial stereotype plates, forced into a preconceived narrative by those around him. Though he struggles to escape this societal imprinting, his inability to do so is central to the novel’s tragic realism. Jude’s first wife, Arabella, on the other hand, presses herself into various societal moulds, passing as a respectable middle-class lady with varying measures of success, in order to move through the world in ways a low-income, rural woman might otherwise have been unable to accomplish. The novel’s second instance of the word stereotype highlights a low-stakes instance of Arabella’s maneuvering as she experiments with her own embodied affect in the aftermath of her son’s death. “Utterly unable to reach the ideal of a catastrophic manner,” the narrator observes, Arabella “fumbled with iterations,” reaching for a “ceremonial mournfulness” before settling into a “stereotyped manner of strict good breeding … and limit[ing] her stay to a number of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability” (336-7; my emphasis). Even though Hardy’s usage of the term stereotype in Jude the Obscure is minimal, his deployment of the term in correlation with the novel’s larger themes exemplifies its complex application to human society and the human body. More than just a metaphor for the oppressive imposition of social and bodily “normalcy” and uncritical conformity, the stereotype becomes a tool with which to imagine the agentive printing and reprinting of one’s body. Put differently, the stereotype allows authors to signal both the negative and positive construction of bodies and, from bodies, societies— 166 a usage that informs Deronda and Mordecai’s relationship in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, as we will see in the next sections. “Strange printing”: Daniel Deronda and the Stereotype Process In a letter to George Eliot on 30 November 1875, the publisher John Blackwood wrote “when you are ready we shall be glad to stereotype so as to return type,” adding, in the next line, “it seems confoundedly prosaic to mention such things in connection with such a book” (Letters 196). The book he mentioned so reverentially was Daniel Deronda, and while there is no record that Eliot ever responded to Blackwood’s offhand observation, I take up his comment here as a way to begin thinking about the critical role of the stereotyping process in a novel that never uses the word stereotype. For, in calling his instructions about stereotyping “confoundedly prosaic” in contrast with Eliot’s last novel, Blackwood insinuates, despite myriad evidence to the contrary, that the process of print production lies both beyond the novel’s aesthetic greatness and beneath the notice of so lofty a writer. Yet even his opening phrase, “when you are ready,” gives the lie to his pretense, signaling as it does Eliot’s deep involvement with all aspects of book production, from writing to printing to marketing.117 Despite Blackwood’s somewhat obsequious affectation otherwise, Eliot often thought and wrote about the prosaic processes of print and their effect on her words and characters. In a letter to Blackwood dated 18 November 1875, for example, she noted, “I 117. Admittedly, Eliot’s involvement is often obfuscated by G.H. Lewes’ well-known management of her writing career. As Donald Gray notes in “George Eliot and Her Publishers” (2001), “Unquestionably, Eliot wanted to appear to maintain a distance from the commerce of her vocation … But that reading is incomplete. Eliot resisted Blackwood’s early attempts to make the tone and matter of her fiction more congenial to the readers of his magazine, and she often prodded him in her own name to attend to details of the production and promotion of her books” (182). 167 should be much obliged to Mr. Simpson … if he would rate the printers a little about their want of spacing,” explaining, “there are really some lines where the words all run into each other as in an ancient Greek transcription. I am anxious that my poor heroes and heroines should have all the advantage that paper and print can give them” (187-8; my emphasis). Frequently mentioning type size, paper, binding, and etc., in her letters to her publishers, Eliot, as Donald Gray argues, “imagined [her books] as physical objects that found their proper company with the handsome relics of the masters of her calling” (195). Not only classing herself with the masters, that is, Eliot worked with, and at times strove against, her publishers in order to ensure that the material form of each of her works (the paper, font, binding, and etc.) signaled its place alongside the literary greats not just as literature, but as an aesthetic object. For instance, as Gray explains, in letters leading up to the publication of her poetry collection, How Lisa Loved the King (1869), Eliot made clear to Blackwood that “she wanted [the book] to look like the 1820 edition of Keats’s poems, on good paper, 200 pages of 18 lines, ‘a darkish-green cover, with Roman Lettering’” (194). As John Blackwood later noted in a letter to Eliot written during the printing of Daniel Deronda, the results of her attention to detail not only in terms of narrative but also in terms of the “confoundedly prosaic” technicalities of print were undeniable: “the reading in type transcends even the impression the M.S. had left upon me … Stupendo, that oft misused Italian phrase, could never be so rightly applied as here” (Letters 196, 182).118 In fact, I would suggest that Eliot’s awareness of the physicality of the printed page and bound book were integral to her realist project in Daniel Deronda. As Daniel 118. John Blackwood to GE, St. Andrews, 10 November 1875. 168 Novak notes in Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, “typology and the typological or ‘statistical person’” is “an element of Victorian realism,” and especially of Eliot’s realism in Daniel Deronda, “that continues to puzzle its readers” (91-2). “The appearance, or rather non-appearance, of this statistical body has been especially problematic for readers of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” Novak argues, observing that “Deronda serves as the focal point in a novel that appears to move toward a series of re-embodiments” (92). This shifting embodiment is one of several reasons that critics have taken up to contest Daniel Deronda’s status as a realist novel, attributing this depiction of bodily identity to a transcendental, rather than realist, frame based on “biblical typology and kabalistic transmigration of souls” (Novak 103).119 But, as Novak maintains, and as my subsequent sections will demonstrate, Eliot’s representations of embodiment and identity are in fact grounded in a technological—and typological— realism, one which leaves room for transcendental fullness (92-3).120 For Eliot, books could come alive in the writing and printing as well as the reading, seeming to take on bodies and souls of their own. As she wrote: On certain red-letter days of our existence, it happens to us to discover 119. I draw on James K.A. Smith’s explication of Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame” and “radical frame” in How (Not) to be Secular (2014), here, to denote social imaginaries which, in the former case, “frame our lives within a natural (rather than supernatural) order … preclude[ing] transcendence,” and, in the latter case, “frame our lives within” a supernatural order (92-3). Eliot’s work is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious; rather, she creates a social imaginary which is primarily immanent but open to the possibility of spiritual and physical transcendence—as exemplified by that famous passage in Middlemarch: “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (182). In this regard, Eliot’s realism generates the sort of “immanent Romantic secularism” of which I write elsewhere. See “‘Always the same unrememberable revelation’: Thoreau’s Telegraph Harp, the Development of an Immanent Romantic Secularism, and Golden Age Children’s Literature” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 2019. 120. Although I agree with Novak’s frame argument, in using a different technology as a lens with which to read Daniel Deronda I come to different conclusions than he does. See footnote 121 for more details. 169 among the spawn of the press, a book which, as we read, seems to undergo a sort of transfiguration before us. We no longer hold heavily in our hands an octavo of some hundred pages, over which the eye laboriously travels … but we seem to be in companionship with a spirit, who is transfusing himself into our souls. (“J. A. Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith” 265) And if such seeming “transfiguration” was possible from books to bodies, it was equally possible for bodies to transform into, or at least to behave like, books—in all of the stages of their production and consumption. In the remaining pages, I examine Daniel Deronda’s use of printing terminology and trace the development of an extended stereotyping metaphor in the relationships of Mordecai Cohen with his pupils in order to examine the implications of the “confoundedly prosaic” stereotype not only for Eliot’s realist project, but also for the novel’s nationalist themes. “Yearning for transmission”: Stamping Souls onto New Bodies in Daniel Deronda In the oft dismissed “Jewish part” of Daniel Deronda,121 Deronda prevents a Jewish woman, Mirah Lapidoth, from committing suicide; vows to help Mirah find her long-lost relatives; encounters Mirah’s brother, Mordecai Cohen, in an East End bookshop and forms a deep spiritual bond with him; sets off at Mordecai’s urging on a quest to discover his true heritage; and ultimately takes on Mordecai’s spiritual mission 121. F.R. Leavis’s infamous remarks about the “Jewish part” have been so often reiterated that is seems perverse to trot them out again here. Eliot herself seemed to predict this reception when she wrote on 12 April, 1876, that “the success of the work at present is greater than that of Middlemarch up to the corresponding point of publication. What will be the feeling of the public as the story advances I am entirely doubtful. The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody” (Letters 238). But her letters and G.H. Lewes’s correspondence make clear that she wrote all of her novels amid a fog of what twenty- first century readers might call “imposter syndrome,” so her doubts on the matter are hardly indicative of the quality of the work. 170 after Mordecai’s death. Critics have frequently remarked upon the novel’s bookishness and its focus on history and spiritual heritage.122 Michael Toogood, for instance, investigating the ways in which “the novel’s formatting—its series of titles, subtitles, chapters, books, and volumes—and its notably anecdotal narrative form facilitate ‘exegetical’ reading,” argues that Daniel Deronda exceeds the bounds of “linear sequence and continuous reading” and pushes “into the realm of sophisticated hermeneutics and repetitious, episodic reading” (10, 14-5). Toogood also points out that the novel has a “self-reflexive relationship with print and the book,” as evidenced by a tableaux of what Eliot’s narrator calls “strange printing” (17; Deronda 403). Throughout the novel, Eliot systematically associates Mordecai with texts, transforming him into a sort of Ur book whose state shifts from serial to bound volume, from manuscript to typeset page. Described variously as a teacher whose pedagogical practice involves “engraving” and “printing” knowledge upon his pupils and a man whose conversation circles “a fixed idea,” making him “the new Lamentations of Jeremiah—‘to be continued in our next,’” Mordecai is associated with books and book- making so thoroughly that one character declares that Mordecai “require[es] all your remarks to be small footnotes to [his] text” and Eliot names an entire volume (Book V) after him (Eliot 402, 399, 489). In her work on the novel, Eileen Cleere contends that Mordecai has been accorded “thematic status as a quickly waning symbol of Jewish spirituality; an etherealized force of historical consciousness” (148). For Eliot—and Deronda—Mordecai embodies “the faint beginnings of” the Jewish “faith[] and institution[],” an early iteration of the Jewish 122. See Daniel Cook’s “Bodies of Scholarship: Witnessing the Library in Late-Victorian Fiction” (2011). Refer to footnote 72 for more examples. 171 type she would describe in her 1879 essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” (Deronda 306). The purport of Mordecai’s bookish associations becomes clearer when he is understood to be the embodiment of Jewish spiritual heritage and historical consciousness in the novel. So, too, is his role as a pedagogue. Though it is Deronda’s pedagogical relationship with Mordecai upon which the novel turns, he is not the only person Mordecai instructs. Mordecai’s first pupil, Jacob Cohen, the young son of the pawnbroker with whom Mordecai is living when Deronda meets him, provides great insight into the stakes as well as the methodology of Mordecai’s pedagogical praxis. We learn that “Mordecai … had given Jacob his first lessons,” and that in these lessons “he would begin to repeat a Hebrew poem of his own, into which years before he had poured his first youthful ardours for that conception of a blended past and future which was the mistress of his soul, telling Jacob to say the words after him” (402). Mordecai, contemplating his own pedagogical approach, muses that “‘the boy will get [the words] engraved within him … it is a way of printing” (402). This “strange printing,” as the narrator calls it a few lines after this passage, is never mentioned again—but, as Michael Toogood notes, the scene impresses upon readers “the importance of cultural ‘printing’” and “foreshadows the more successful ‘printing’ of Deronda” (Deronda 403; Toogood 17-8). Though Toogood considers this “strange printing” merely as a conceit which speaks to the novel’s experimental narrative structure, his passing analysis of the scene nevertheless hits upon what I contend to be a central metaphor (the stereotype) which informs not only the relationship between Mordecai and his pupils, but also the imagined relationship between Deronda and the Jewish “nation” he plans, under Mordecai’s guidance, to help “revive” (Deronda 443). 172 As Mordecai notes, still thinking upon Jacob’s education, his “strange printing” has a profound power: “‘my words may rule him some day. Their meaning may flash out on him. It is so with a nation—after many days’” (403). The language of printing manifests throughout Daniel Deronda, revealing the significance of stereotyping, and printing more generally, to Eliot’s vision for the “Jewish part.” One notable example is the term stamp. In one iteration of the term, Eliot’s narrator notes that “the name ‘Jewess’ was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese silk” (Fig. 13). In another, the narrator references the “ordinary stamp of the well-bred Englishman,” and in a cluster of others the narrator mentions “the strong stamp of race,” “the stamp of [Mordecai’s] people,” and “the stamp of consumption” (Fig. 13). For Eliot, the body, like the page, can be stamped with texts, inheritances, cultural lessons handed down from person to person. Fig. 13. AntConc ‘stamp’ Concordance for Daniel Deronda. Likewise, variations of the term impression, which itself signifies a singular pressing of paper to type forme or stereotype plate, appear ninety-five times in the novel and subtly reinforce the permeability, or, rather, printability of the body and mind. For 173 example, meditating on Gwendolen’s “impressibility” at one point in the novel, Deronda muses: I suppose some of us go on faster than others: and I am sure she is a creature who keeps strong traces of anything that has once impressed her. That little affair of the necklace, and the idea that somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evidently bitten into her. But such impressibility leads both ways: it may drive one to desperation as soon as to anything better. (339-40; my emphasis) At various other moments in the novel, Eliot’s narrator speaks of “deep,” “novel,” “force[ful],” “irresistible,” and “visionary” impressions on characters which shape them, for good or ill, into their final forms (Fig. 13). All of this terminology comes to head in passages which explicate Mordecai’s spiritual journey and embodied experience of the world, marking Mordecai’s relationship with Deronda as one that is fundamentally founded upon a sort of stereotyping. What Deronda calls “a spiritual journey embraced willingly, and embraced in youth,” Mordecai refers to as “the soul fully born within me,” which “brought its own world—a mediaeval world, where there were men who made the ancient language live again in new psalms of exile,” a soul which “spoke the speech … made alive with the new blood of … ardour, … sorrow, and … martyred trust” (421). He mourns, “while [that soul] is imprisoned in me, it will never learn another” language or song (421). Indeed, confiding his dilemma to Deronda, Mordecai explains that the spiritual message he has to offer the world, is, like his spirit, both “imprisoned” within and mediated by his body: “within it there might be … the breath of divine thought … but men would smile at it and say, ‘A poor Jew!’” 174 (421-2). Not only constricted by the “ebbing physical life” the narrator remarks upon some pages previously, in other words, the soul—or spiritual heritage—Mordecai bears within himself is also stymied by the fact that he is and has “written entirely in” Hebrew and he can neither change that embodiment or “write … more” in a new language (421- 22). Finding his own body insufficient to its destiny, Mordecai longs for “some young ear into which he could pour his mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to be executed” (398-9; my emphasis). Remarking upon the fact that “all his passionate desire had concentred [sic] itself” in this “yearning,” the narrator explains that “the hopefulness which is often the beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, was in Mordecai wholly diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried into the current of this yearning for transmission” (398-9; my emphasis). That this yearning is not merely for the publication of his physical books becomes clear when Deronda offers to publish his work: “I feel with you—I feel strongly with you,” said Deronda, in a clear deep voice which was itself a cordial, apart from the words of sympathy. “But—forgive me if I speak hastily—for what you have actually written there need be no utter burial. The means of publication are within reach. If you will rely on me, can assure you of all that is necessary to that end.” “That is not enough,” said Mordecai, quickly, looking up again with a flash of recovered memory and confidence. “That is not all my trust in you. You must be not only a hand to me, but a soul—believing my beliefs—being moved by my reasons—hoping my hopes—seeing the 175 vision I point to—beholding a glory where I behold it!” … “You will be my life: it will be planted afresh; it will grow. You shall take my inheritance; it has been gathering for ages … you will take the sacred inheritance of the Jew.” (422-3) Though there is some mixing of metaphor in these passages, their organizing focus— Mordecai’s “yearning for transmission”—together with Deronda’s publication-oriented response and Mordecai’s escalation “you must be not only a hand to me, but a soul”— contributes to the novel’s extended metaphor of “strange printing” (403). In latching on to Deronda as his “preconceived type,” Mordecai means to stamp himself onto Deronda, like a forme of type into a soft papier-mâché mould (405). Under Mordecai’s tutelage, Deronda will become “something more than the second soul bestowed, according to the notion of the Cabbalists, to help out the insufficient first”; he will become an “expanded, prolonged self,” one at once “more beautiful, … stronger, … [and] more executive” (400). This focus on embodiment calls to mind the twin concerns of dissemination and preservation which stereotyping was developed to address. Before the two men even meet, Mordecai longingly imagines a sort of living mould, “a man who would have all the elements necessary for sympathy with him, but in an embodiment unlike his own”—one that does not “bear[] the stamp of his people amid signs of poverty and waning breath” (399; my emphasis). Deronda’s body meets these anticipated needs on all fronts. Deronda possesses a “face and frame” which are “beautiful and strong”; he is a man “used to all the refinements of social life” with a voice which “flows with a full and easy current” and “circumstances … free from sordid need” (399). Most importantly, like a proper stereotype mould, Deronda is sympathetic 176 and receptive. In one of many scenes in which the men meet like “two undeclared lovers,” Eliot’s narrator explains: The more exquisite quality of Deronda’s nature—the keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which ran along with his speculative tendency— was never more thoroughly tested. He felt nothing that could be called belief in the validity of Mordecai’s impressions … what he felt was a profound sensibility to a cry from the depths of another soul; and accompanying that, the summons to be receptive instead of superciliously prejudging. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, life fortitude; and this state of mind now gave Deronda’s face its utmost expression of calm benignant force— an expression which nourished Mordecai’s confidence and made an open way before him. (419) Ultimately, by stamping himself onto Deronda like a type forme onto a mould, Mordecai means to reproduce, or reprint, his spiritual destiny and his nation, “the generations … crowding on [his] narrow life as a bridge,” in a new edition (423). Much like creation of a stereotype plate, Deronda’s relationship with Mordecai is inherently reproductive. Mould-like, Deronda takes Mordecai’s spiritual imprint, bearing it within himself in reverse so that he can then stamp it upon others (DD 399). Where Mordecai is impoverished and consumptive, Deronda is well off and healthy; where Mordecai bears “the stamp of his people,” Deronda has been passing as an English gentleman only to discover that he is, in fact, Jewish. And, as with a mould, it is this inversion that makes Deronda and Mordecai’s relationship a reproductive one—allowing the creation of plates from which new editions can be printed. 177 Bonnie Zimmerman, following Eliot’s own description of the men, describes their relationship as a “marriage” in which text and writing takes center stage: “completed through his mystical marriage to Daniel, Mordecai stands a Power, an authority, an author. At the moment when he feels, ‘I can write no more,’ he finds the other self who will write, not poetry, but history” (166). If, as Zimmerman contends, Deronda and Mordecai’s relationship is the novel’s “true marriage,” stereotyping becomes the novel’s true procreative act, as Mordecai explains: “It has begun already—the marriage of our souls. It waits but the passing of this body, and then they who are betrothed shall unite in a stricter bond, and what is mine shall be thine. Call nothing mine that I have written, Daniel; for though our Masters delivered rightly that everything should be quoted in the name of him that said it—and their rule is good—yet it does not exclude the willing marriage which melts soul into soul, and makes thought fuller as the clear waters are made fuller, where fullness is inseparable and the clearness is inseparable. For I have judged what I have written, and I desire the body I that I gave my thought to pass away as this fleshly body will pass; but let the thought be born again from our fuller soul which shall be called yours.” (632) For, in this complex request—“call nothing mine”—Mordecai speaks of the body of his thought (the manuscripts he has written) in distinction from his physical body, asking Deronda for a new edition—“let the thought be born again from our fuller soul”—the offspring of their relationship. Indeed, Eliot explicitly figures Mordecai’s stereotyping desires as maternal and reproductive when the narrator observes that “the sense of 178 spiritual perpetuation in another resembles the maternal transference of self” (419). Yet, such language leads us to ask: what does stereotyping mean for Eliot’s nationalist and proto-Zionist plot? for her larger realist project? “It is so with a nation”: Stereotyping, Sex, and Proto-Zionist Politics in Daniel Deronda Despite Eliot’s explicit connection of the novel’s nationalism with the novel’s “strange printing,” scholars interested in Daniel Deronda’s nationalist and proto-Zionist narrative project tend to overlook printing terminology in favor of more direct, or more embodied, readings. Edward Said, in “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” (1979), chronicles the history of Zionism in order to push against widespread feeling that it was “an idea … uncontaminated by human desires or will,” divorced from the failures and violence associated with attempts to realize it geopolitically (18). Turning to an analysis of Daniel Deronda to situate his argument, Said notes that Eliot leverages Zionism to envision “a genuinely hopeful socio-religious project in which individual energies can be merged and identified with a collective national vision, the whole emanating out of Judaism” (18). Crucially, Said notes, “Eliot cannot sustain her admiration of Zionism except by seeing it as a method for transforming the East into the West” (20). Indeed, Said points out, “Eliot was indifferent to races who could not be assimilated to European ideas,” as exemplified by Mordecai’s uncontested representation of Palestinians as “debauched and paupered conquerors” (Said 21; Eliot 451). Building on Said’s critique of the novel, Jacob Press represents another prominent branch of Daniel Deronda criticism when he connects Eliot’s discourse on nationalism to racially Othered gender and nineteenth-century homosocial discourse, contending that 179 “Eliot theorizes (Jewish) nationalism as an intervention in nineteenth-century European political homoerotics, and her novel positions the Zionist movement on the map of Victorian gender ideology with exquisite subtlety and insight” (300). In his reading of the novel, Press argues that Eliot’s Zionist novel “commence[s] with the characterization of [a] Jewish male [protagonist] in [a] state of radical alienation from the modern European imperative of aggressive heterosexual masculinity. Novels tend to end in marriage … Eliot[’s] end[s] in a marriage of men” (301). This reading relies on a now infamous footnote, written by Steven Marcus, which details the fascinating observation of his student: Lennard J. Davis has discovered a detail—or a missing detail—in Daniel Deronda that throws the whole central plot of the novel off kilter. Deronda’s identity is a mystery to himself and always has been….What this has to mean—given the conventions of medical practice at the time, is that he never looked down. In order for the plot of Daniel Deronda [sic] to work, Deronda’s circumcised penis must be invisible, or non-existent. (41) Press notes that, while readings of the novel in light of Deronda’s “invisible, or nonexistent” penis largely rely “on a caricature of George Eliot as the victim of a blinding Victorian priggishness,” it is possible, and important, to read her narrative omission instead as a strategic choice: “Eliot,” he writes, “thematizes Deronda’s shame about his penis / parentage as a metaphor for what she reads as the nonphallic faux masculinity of the man whose consciousness and loyalties are European but who is nonetheless marked in his gender as a Jewish other” (303). 180 For Press, “Eliot … argues that human behavior must be interpreted in relation to a developmental trajectory in which the ‘invisible’ past is always threaded into present behavior” (303). Reading Deronda’s adolescent “discovery” that he was illegitimate as “traumatically discovered and shamefully closeted difference” which leads Deronda to “refuse[] agency,” Press argues that “Deronda’s circumcised phallus refuses insertion / assertion in the world”—Press claims that Deronda is made narratively effeminate (306). Within this context, Press contends, “a movement for the national regeneration of the Jewish people … is the only hope for the normalization of Deronda’s alienated impotence. Daniel Deronda – the assimilated Jew who nonetheless carries the mark of (sexual) difference within him – is saved by his marriage to Mordecai” (306). While I take issue with Press’s unstated assumption that a “feminine” subject position is necessarily passive and unagentive, as well as with the unanalyzed Orientalist linking of racial difference and effeminacy, Press’s point about Deronda’s gender queerness is significant, and worth unpacking within the context of the novel’s deployment of the stereotype process. If we imagine stereotyping as a sort of mirroring process in which one begins with a wrong-reading forme of type,123 presses that forme into a mould which receives it in inverse (right-reading and indented rather than protruding), and ends with a new, wrong reading plate with which to print, we can identify “active,” and “passive,” “assertive” and “receptive” roles which map on to the act of both heterosexual and homosexual penetration. Using printing terminology to move away from heteronormative terms such as “effeminate,” it is possible to read 123. In order to ensure that printed pages were right-reading, or readable “without first being reversed by a mirror,” as the OED clarifies, type itself was wrong-reading (or backwards) (“right, adv.” def. C3). 181 Deronda’s “invisible, or nonexistent” penis not as a sign of his impotence and lack of agency, but rather as indicative of his vital, generative role in the reproductive process of printing. Indeed, Eliot’s own descriptive choices mean that such readings cannot be divorced from their printing and book-historical contexts. When taken to its logical conclusions, Mordecai’s “strange printing” ultimately figures his homoerotic, spiritual marriage with Deronda as a fundamentally procreative one, and enables the novel’s Zionist plot—imagining the progeny of his and Deronda’s stereotyping union as a nation rather than a single child. As noted in the introduction to this dissertation, Said himself argued that “the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other … imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other” (Culture and Imperialism 70-1). Under this rubric, printing is itself an imperialist institution. To say that “Mordecai initiates Deronda into a homosocial brotherhood that reconciles the identity categories of ‘Jew’ and ‘man’” is thus to miss the bigger picture, in which Mordecai and Deronda’s “spiritual marriage” leverages its own queerness to propagate a nation whose type is not that of the “shopkeeping” Jews represented by the pawnbroker, Ezra Cohen, nor solely the scholarly wanderer, “bearing the stamp of his people amid signs of poverty and waning breath” Mordecai describes himself to be, but a supposedly stronger composite of Mordecai and Deronda (336; 399).124 Eliot’s figural 124. In Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2008), Daniel Novak devotes an entire chapter to Daniel Deronda, arguing, in a vein similar to mine, that nineteenth-century technology is essential to a correct reading of Eliot’s use of types and characterization of Jewish characters. Whereas I turn to the stereotyping process, however, Novak looks to a later iteration of technological typography—the 182 use of the stereotype, viewed this way, itself relies upon a recognizable form of the twenty-first century stereotype, sorting Jews into predetermined categories as well as entirely dismissing the Palestinian and Arabic populations of the Middle East. Equally troubling, Mordecai and Deronda’s “spiritual” marriage, founded upon their mutual desire for “the restoration of a Jewish state,” enables the metaphoric mass-production and mass-printing of a spiritually-oriented Jewish nation whose outward appearance is, like Deronda’s, essentially English (Impressions 162).125 Though Eliot does not, as in her oft- quoted epigraph, “turn the bones of [her characters’] father and mother into spoons,” by imagining Mordecai as a sort of book and depicting the corporeal stereotyping of his soul onto Deronda and, thence, a nation, she commits a similarly violent act (Deronda 318). Returning, at last, to the quotation with which I opened this section, I want to reiterate that Eliot’s extended use of the stereotype to imagine the queer marriage and progeny of two Jewish men in Daniel Deronda is not all that different from her likely interest in the “confoundedly prosaic” stereotype Blackwood mentions in his letter composite photograph. He argues that Eliot represents “a photographic embodiment of the aesthetics and ethics of racial difference” in Daniel Deronda and, later, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) (405; 92). Tracing Francis Galton’s production of composite photographs of Jews in the attempt to conceive “‘a pictorial average’ of a group … free of the ‘peculiarities’ of the individual” to Eliot’s work, Novak contends that, “composite photography … helps to produce a mode of typological realism … whose bodiless types pass for embodied individuals, whose subjects at once represent a ‘thing, person, spirit, ghost, idea, [or] type’” (103). While I am indebted to Novak for his discussion of types in late-century England and in Eliot’s last novel, my stereotype-based reading actually comes to the opposite conclusion: rather than arguing that, in Daniel Deronda, as in composite photography, “bodiless types pass for embodied individuals,” I contend that embodied individuals carry types, imprinting them onto other bodies as a means with which to reprint cultural and spiritual heritage onto a new generation and, indeed, nation (Novak 103). 125. This further illustrates how complicated Daniel Deronda’s political subject matter is—while Eliot strives, in K. M. Newton’s words, to create or assist in creating “a material base for Jewish cultural identity” in England and to push against “the anti-Semitism which was … pervasive throughout Europe,” in working toward these goals Eliot produced a novel which was not only “complicit with European imperialism and colonialism” toward Palestine but also perpetuated stereotypes about Jewish people and ultimately envisioned a future in which Jews, like Deronda, must become more English to become a nation (xxvi-ii). 183 (Letters 196). In fact, such stereotyping not only serves as a figure for the reproduction of souls and nations in Daniel Deronda, it describes the methodology with which Eliot affected her realist project. In crafting two of the novel’s major non-English characters, Mordecai Cohen and Herr Klesmer, Eliot drew heavily on the lives of Emanuel Deutsch and Franz Liszt, also drawing on the lives of Anton Rubinstein and Richard Wagner in the case of Klesmer (Newton vii; Reibel 16). As David A. Reibel argues, in Daniel Deronda, “as in all of GE’s writing, the exterior shell of the novelistic structures may have been suggested by or copied from real events, noted and filed away for future reference by her all-encompassing mind” (16). The novel’s realist and political projects, alike, are inseparable from their printing and stereotyping contexts. “Genuinely hopeful” though the novel may be, its interventions into embodied gender identity and nationality constitute a narrative etymology of the word stereotype in its own right, taking us from mid-Victorian usage to a recognizably modern sense of the word. As with the “Stereotype Wom[a]n” discussed at the beginning of the chapter, Eliot’s Jewish characters, and indeed, plot, represent the logical progression of a “phenomenon” whose roots go back to the early-nineteenth-century innovation of printing techniques which ultimately enabled a mass media culture (“Stereotype Women”). While perhaps not as obvious an example as the instances of self-fashioning and body management discussed in Chapters II and III, the figural stereotyping discussed in this chapter speaks to the ubiquity and naturalization of the sorts of attitudes about and strategies surrounding print and print technologies I have attempted to delineate in this dissertation. It also speaks to their scalability. Put differently, by the late-century, the new literacy I identify in the introduction to this dissertation had become almost second- 184 nature, informing language itself as well as cultural productions such as the novels and novellas discussed herein. What’s more, the printing of the Other Victorians had, like other print processes in the nineteenth century, undergone—if not a revolution—then at least a series of innovations and alterations which enabled an unprecedented explosion in the scale of print (re)production. Just as the technological process of stereotyping enabled books to be printed and reprinted with much more accuracy and rapidity than the hand- setting of type alone, the figurative stereotyping of the bodies of Othered Victorians in fiction enabled a sort of mass-reproduction of knowability qua embodied identity, with all of the promise and all of the problems Eliot’s last novel portended—wittingly or not. 185 APPENDIX A PATENT MEDICINE ADVERTISEMENTS Schweitzer’s Cocoatina, Clarke’s Blood Mixture; Belgravia Advertiser, March 1885; Google Books 186 Freeman’s Chlorodyne, Clarke’s Blood Mixture, Dunn & Co, Precipitated Sulphur; The Chemist and Druggist, 15 May 1880; Wellcome Library 187 ‘Invalid Lives’ Life Assurance Policy; Belgravia Advertiser; April 1894; Google Books 188 Frampton’s Pill of Health, Holloway’s Ointment, and Southall’s ‘Sanitary Towels’; Belgravia Advertiser; March 1889; Google Books 189 APPENDIX B TWITTER CORPORA DEVELOPMENT The following table provides the Twitter thread in which I solicited recommendations for the Author Character Corpus, minus my replies to thank those who responded to my query: Handle Tweet Tags Date Time Hi #Victorianist Twitter, I’m compiling a list of C19 novels abt publishing / writing & need help IDing more. So far, I have @cannfloyd Corelli’s The Sorrows of @V21collective 5-Dec-18 1:49 PM Satan, Gissing’s New Grub Street, Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, & Haggard’s Mr Meeson’s Will. Will happily accept short @cannfloyd story / novella 5-Dec-18 1:49 PM recommendations, too! @3VolumeNovel Here’s a list of 83: https://t.co/bfamb9comT 5-Dec-18 1:50 PM There’s Lady Carbury in @RohanMaitzen Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, who is a writer 5-Dec-18 2:04 PM (and has a publisher). @mattkeeley Americans ok? If so, Melville’s Pierre. 5-Dec-18 2:18 PM George Paston’s A Writer @PaulVlitos of Books (1899) is 5-Dec-18 3:08 PM definitely worth a look @nesbitkate Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book! 5-Dec-18 7:31 PM @pgilbert142001 Rhoda Broughton A Beginner 5-Dec-18 7:43 PM Came to say Braddon’s The @Sct__987 Doc’s Wife, but I see it’s 5-Dec-18 8:07 PM on archive list American and not British, @DrRCGreene but Little Women immediately comes to 6-Dec-18 9:18 AM mind. 190 Would Trollope’s short story collection written from the point of view of an editor be of interest or does @pamplemoussepam it have to be novels? An 6-Dec-18 1:13 AM Editor’s Tales is very good - particularly The Spotted Dog (but I’m biased as that one is about drinking) Paul Ferroll s a writer in @ICVWW Caroline Clive’s book of the same name. Also Grant 6-Dec-18 1:28 AM Allen’s Typewriter Girl. The short story ‘the @heatherlouhind panandrum’ - I think it’s by 6-Dec-18 3:20 AM Trollope @EleanorDumbill Do you have the doctors wife and Aurora Floyd? 6-Dec-18 10:01 AM I think it’s either Aurora Floyd or Vizen, there’s the crochety lady who loves on @EleanorDumbill the Isle of White (?) and is writing a Key to all @amb1860 6-Dec-18 10:18 AM Mythologies-esque book ([tag] can you confirm which it is?) If you’ll accept a Victorian- era American novel, Martha Tyler’s "A Book Without a Title: Or, Thrilling Events @factorygothic in the Life of Mira Dana" features Mira Dana writing 6-Dec-18 12:24 PM & publishing a novel about her life, which was very similar to the author’s own. https://t.co/5UQWPNoLAt 191 APPENDIX C ACC SOURCE LIST The titles comprising my Author Character Corpus were drawn from the following list: 192 193 Using the above list, I aggregated the following novels (asterisks denote titles obtained from Internet Archive files. Underlined titles are hyperlinks): 1. Catherine Gore. Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1841.* 2. James Grant. Joseph Jenkins: or, Leaves from the Life of a Literary Man. 3 vol. London: Saunders and Otley, 1843.* 3. George Henry Lewes. Ranthorpe. 1 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1847.* 4. Edward Bulwer Lytton. The Caxtons: A Family Picture. 3 vol. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1849. 5. William Makepeace Thackeray. The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, his Friends and his Greatest Enemy. 2 vol. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1849.* 6. Charles Dickens. David Copperfield. 1 vol. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850. 7. Charles Kingsley. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. 2 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1850. 8. George Borrow. Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gipsy, and the Priest. 3 vol. London: John Murray, 1851. 9. Wilkie Collins. Basil: A Story of Modern Life. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1852. 10. Edward Bulwer Lytton. My Novel: or, Varieties of English Life. 4 vol. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1853. 11. Caroline Clive. Paul Ferroll: A Tale. 1 vol. London: Saunders and Otley, 1855. 12. Edward Bulwer Lytton. What Will He Do with It?: A Novel. 4 vol. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1859. 13. Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The Doctor’s Wife. 3 vol. London: John Maxwell, 1864. 14. Edmund Hodgson Yates. Broken to Harness: A Story of English Domestic Life. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1864.* 15. Charlotte Mary Yonge. The Clever Woman of the Family. 2 vol. London: Macmillan, 1865. 16. Annie Thomas. On Guard: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1865.* 17. Florence Marryat. The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1867.* 18. Ellen Wood. Roland Yorke: A Sequel to "The Channings". 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1869. 19. Anthony Trollope. An Editor’s Tales. 1 vol. London: Alexander Strahan, 1870. 20. Mrs. Alexander Fraser. Not While She Lives: A Novel. 2 vol. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870.* 21. Thomas Hardy. A Pair of Blue Eyes: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1873. 22. Anthony Trollope. The Way We Live Now. 2 vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. 23. Mary Cecil Hay. The Squire’s Legacy. 3 vol. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1875.* 194 24. Thomas Hardy. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. 2 vol. London: Smith, Elder, 1876. 25. James Payn. Fallen Fortunes: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876.* 26. Walter Besant. The Golden Butterfly: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876. 27. Dora Russell. Beneath the Wave: A Novel. 3 vol. London: John Maxwell, 1878.* 28. Rhoda Broughton. Second Thoughts. 2 vol. London: Bentley, 1880.* 29. William Hale White. The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford: Dissenting Minister. 1 vol. London: Trübner, 1881. 30. Walter Besant. All in a Garden Fair. 3 vol. London: Chatto and Windus, 1883.* 31. F. Anstey. The Giant’s Robe. 1 vol. London: Smith, Elder, 1884. 32. Wilkie Collins. The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story. 3 vol. London: Chatto and Windus, 1886. 33. Amy Levy. The Romance of a Shop. 1 vol. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888. 34. George Moore. Confessions of a Young Man. 1 vol. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888. 35. H. Rider Haggard. Mr. Meeson’s Will. 1 vol. London: Spencer Blackett, 1888. 36. Walter Besant. The Bells of St. Paul’s. 3 vol. London: Chatto and Windus, 1889.* 37. Marie Corelli. Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1889. 38. Edna Lyall. Derrick Vaughan, Novelist. 1 vol. London: Methuen, 1889. 39. George Gissing. New Grub Street: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Smith, Elder, 1891. 40. Israel Zangwill. Children of the Ghetto. 3 vol. London: William Heinemann, 1892. 41. Ella Hepworth Dixon. The Story of a Modern Woman. 1 vol. London: William Heinemann, 1894. 42. Sara Jeanette Duncan. A Daughter of To-day. 2 vol. London: Chatto and Windus, 1894. 43. David Christie Murray. A Rising Star: A Novel. 3 vol. London: Hutchinson, 1894.* 44. Rhoda Broughton. A Beginner. 1 vol. London: Bentley, 1894.* 45. Dora Russell. A Great Temptation. 3 vol. London: F. V. White, 1894.* 46. Francis William Lauderdale Adams. A Child of the Age. 1 vol. London: John Lane, 1894.* 47. George Gissing. In the Year of Jubilee. 3 vol. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1894. 48. Marie Corelli. The Sorrows of Satan: or, The Strange Experiences of Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire. A Romance. 1 vol. London: Methuen, 1895. 49. Grant Allen. The Woman Who Did. 1 vol. London: John Lane, 1895. 50. Leonard Merrick. Cynthia: A Daughter of the Philistines. 2 vol. London: Chatto and Windus, 1896. 51. Marie Corelli. The Murder of Delicia. 1 vol. London: Skeffington, 1896. 52. Grant Allen. The Type-writer Girl. 1 vol. London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897. 53. Sarah Grand. The Beth Book: A Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, Woman of Genius. 1 vol. London: William Heinemann, 1897. 54. Mary Cholmondeley. Red Pottage. 1 vol. London: Edward Arnold, 1899. 55. Henry Harland. The Cardinal’s Snuff-Box. 1 vol. London: John Lane, 1900. 195 APPENDIX D VBC SOURCE LIST The VBC was compiled from Philip V. Allingham’s list, “Victorian Bestsellers, 1862- 1901,” on the Victorian Web. Because of its length, it is impractical to include a screencap artifact here. Instead, I have copied and pasted the contents of the list in addition to linking to the original in my list of Works Cited. 1862 • Margaret Oliphant’s The Doctor’s Family • Margaret Oliphant’s The Last of the Mortimers • Henry Kingsley’s Ravenshoe • Ouida’s Held in Bondage • Margaret Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret • Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (serialised in AYR) first-person narrative • Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lord Mayor of London • Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm • Wilkie Collins’s No Name (3 vols). 1863 • Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor • Margaret Oliphant’s Salem Chapel • Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers • George Eliot’s Romola (serialised 1862-1863) • Bulwer-Lytton’s Caxtoniana • Harrison Ainsworth’s Cardinal Pole 1864 • Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford • Harrison Ainsworth’s John Law • Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate • Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? 1865 • Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas • Elizabeth Gaskell’s Lizzie Leigh The Grey Woman and Cousin Phillis (in a single volume) 196 • Harrison Ainsworth’s The Spanish Match and Auriol • James Payn’s Lost Sir Massingerd (serialialised) • James Payn’s Married Beneath Him • James Payn’s Mirk Abbey 1866 • Margaret Oliphant’s Agnes and Miss Marjoribanks • George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical • Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters • Richard Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends • Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lost Tales of Miletus • Harrison Ainsworth’s The Constable de Bourbon • James Payn’s The Clyffards of Clyffe • Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely But Too Well • Wilkie Collins's Armadale 1867 • Ouida’s Under Two Flags • Margaret Oliphant’s Madonna Mary • Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower • Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South • Elizabeth Gaskell’s A Dark Night's Work • Douglas Jerrold’s The Story of a Feather • Harrison Ainsworth’s Old Court • Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset 1868 • Lady Emma Caroline Wood’s Sorrow on the Sea • Harrison Ainsworth’s Myddleton Pomfret • James Payn’s Blondel Parva • Margaret Oliphant’s The Brownlows • Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone 1869 • Mrs. Woolfe’s Guy Vernon • Margaret Oliphant’s The Minister’s Wife • James Payn’s A Perfect Treasure • Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn • Wilkie Collins’s Black and White 197 1870 • Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair • Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (3 vols.) • Harrison Ainsworth’s Hilary St. Ives • Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose is She • James Payn’s Like Father, Like Son • Margaret Oliphant’s The Three Brothers • Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bulhampton 1871 • Margaret Oliphant’s Neighbours on the Green • Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies • William Black’s A Daughter of Heth • Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well • George Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond • Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race • James Payn’s Not Wooed, but Won 1872 • Margaret Oliphant’s At His Gates • Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree • Rhoda Broughton’s Good-bye, Sweetheart! • James Payn’s Gwendoline’s Harvest • Rhoda Broughton’s Goodbye Sweetheart • George Eliot’s Middlemarch (serialised 1871-1872) • Samuel Butler’s Erewhon • Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (3 vols.). 1873 • Margaret Oliphant’s May • Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy • Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (serialised 1872-3) • Bulwer-Lytton’s Kenelm Chillingly: His Adventures and Opinions • James Payn’s Murphy’s Master • Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds • Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen (2 vols.). 1874 • Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June • Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (serialised) • Bulwer-Lytton’s The Parisians (serialised October, 1872-January, 1874). 198 1875 • Helen Mather’s Comin’ thro the Rye • Margaret Oliphant’s White Ladies • Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now • Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady 1876 • Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (serialised 1875-6) • George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (serialised Feb.-Sept., 1876) • Bulwer-Lytton’s Pausanias the Spartan • James Payn’s Fallen Fortunes • Margaret Oliphant’s Carità • Rhoda Broughton’s Joan • Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister • Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies (2 vols.). 1877 • Ouida’s Ariadne • Margaret Oliphant’s Mrs. Arthur and Young Musgrave 1878 • Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (serialised) • James Payn’s By Proxy • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes • Wilkie Collins’s My Lady’s Money: An Episode in the Life of a Young Girl 1879 • Margaret Oliphant’s The Greatest Heiress in England • Wilkie Collins’s A Rogue’s Life: From His Birth to His Marriage 1880 • Henry James’s Washington Square • Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major (serialised) • James Payn’s The Confidential Agent • Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City... • Margaret Oliphant’s That He Will Not When He May • Rhoda Broughton’s Second Thoughts • Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children 199 • George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn • Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter (3 vols.). 1881 • J.H. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant • Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (serialised 1880-1) • Margaret Oliphant’s Harry Joscelyn • Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Wortle’s School • Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe (3 vols.). 1882 • Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower • Margaret Oliphant’s In Trust... • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Merry Men (serialised). 1883 • George Moore’s A Modern Lover • Anthony Trollope’s Mr. Scarborough's Family • Rhoda Broughton’s Belinda • Margaret Oliphant’s The Ladies Lindores • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island • Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (3 vols.). 1884 • Margaret Oliphant’s Sir Tom • George Gissing’s The Unclassed • Wilkie Collins’s I Say No (3 vols.). 1885 • Margaret Oliphant’s Madam • Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King 1886 • Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped • Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (serialised in The Graphic) • Margaret Oliphant’s Effie Ogilvie • Margaret Oliphant’s A House Divided Against Itself • Rhoda Broughton’s Dr. Cupid • Rhoda Broughton’s Betty's Visions 200 • Rhoda Broughton’s Mrs. Smith of Longmains • Samuel Butler’s Luck or Cunning • George Gissing’s Isabel Clarendon and Demos • Wilkie Collins’s The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story (3 vols.) • Wilkie Collins’s The Guilty River 1887 • Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (serialised 1886-7) • Margaret Oliphant’s The Son of His Father • George Gissing’s Thyrza 1888 • Margaret Oliphant’s A Memoir of the Life of John Tulloch • Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow • George Gissing’s A Life’s Morning 1889 • George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson • Margaret Oliphant’s Lady Car • Margaret Oliphant’s The Sequel of a Life • Margaret Oliphant’s A Poor Gentleman • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae • George Gissing’s The Nether World • Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain (3 vols). 1890 • Margaret Oliphant’s Alas! • Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen • George Gissing’s The Emancipated • Wilkie Collins’s Blind Love (3 vols.). 1891 • Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles (serialised 1891) • Margaret Oliphant’s Janet • George Gissing’s New Grub Street 1892 • Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (serialised 1892) • Margaret Oliphant’s The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphantvs The Cuckoo in the Nest 201 • Rhoda Broughton’s Mrs. Bligh • Ford Maddox Ford’s The Shifting of the Fire • George Gissing’s Denzil Quarrier and Born in Exile 1893 • Margaret Oliphant’s Lady William and The Sorceress • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona • George Gissing’s The Odd Women 1894 • George Du Maurier’s Trilby • Margaret Oliphant’s The Prodigals and Their Inheritance • George Gissing’s In the Year of the Jubilee 1895 • Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (serialised 1894-5) • Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly • Margaret Oliphant’s Two Strangers • Rhoda Broughton’s Scylla or Charybdis? • H.G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit • H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine • George Gissing’s Eve’s Ransom • George Gissing’s Sleeping Fires 1896 • Margaret Oliphant’s The Unjust Steward, or The Minister’s Debt • Margaret Oliphant’s Old Mr. Tredgold • Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston • H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau • George Gissing’s The Paying Guest 1897 • Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus • Margaret Oliphant’s The Lady’s Walk • Rhoda Broughton’s Dear Faustina • H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man • Bram Stoker’s Dracula • George Gissing’s The Whirlpool 202 1898 • H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds 1899 • Rhoda Broughton’s The Game and the Candle • H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Awakes 1900 • Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (serialised in Blackwood’s) • Rhoda Broughton’s Foes in Law • H.G. Wells’s Love and Mr. Lewisham 1901 • H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon • Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited • Ford Maddox Ford’s The Inheritors Using this list, I selected novels and novellas published between 1870 and 1901 which were available on Project Gutenberg. The resulting list is as follows: 1870 1. Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair 2. Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife 3. Rhoda Broughton’s Red as a Rose is She 4. James Payn’s Like Father, Like Son 5. Margaret Oliphant’s The Three Brothers 6. Anthony Trollope’s The Vicar of Bulhampton 1871 7. Margaret Oliphant’s Neighbours on the Green 8. Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies 9. George Meredith’s The Adventures of Harry Richmond 10. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race 1872 11. Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree 12. George Eliot’s Middlemarch 13. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon 14. Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch 1873 15. Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy 203 16. Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds 17. Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen 1874 18. Margaret Oliphant’s A Rose in June 19. Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd 20. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Parisians 1875 21. Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now 22. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady 1876 23. George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda 24. Bulwer-Lytton’s Pausanias the Spartan 25. Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux 26. Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister 27. Wilkie Collins’s The Two Destinies 1878 28. Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native 29. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Inland Voyage 30. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 31. Wilkie Collins’s My Lady’s Money: An Episode in the Life of a Young Girl 1879 32. Wilkie Collins’s A Rogue’s Life: From His Birth to His Marriage 1880 33. Henry James’s Washington Square 34. Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet Major 35. Margaret Oliphant’s A Beleaguered City 36. Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children 37. Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter 38. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Wyllard’s Weird 1881 39. J.H. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant 40. Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean 41. Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Wortle’s School 42. Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe 1882 43. Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower 44. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Merry Men 204 1883 45. Anthony Trollope’s Mr. Scarborough’s Family 46. Margaret Oliphant’s The Ladies Lindores 47. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island 48. Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science 1884 49. Margaret Oliphant’s Sir Tom 50. George Gissing’s The Unclassed 51. Wilkie Collins’s I Say No 1886 52. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 53. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped 54. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge 55. Rhoda Broughton’s Dr. Cupid 56. Wilkie Collins’s The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story 57. Wilkie Collins’s The Guilty River 58. Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds 1887 59. Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders 60. George Gissing’s Thyrza 1888 61. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow 62. George Gissing’s A Life’s Morning 1889 63. George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson 64. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae 65. George Gissing’s The Nether World 66. Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain 1890 67. George Gissing’s The Emancipated 68. Wilkie Collins’s Blind Love 1891 69. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles 1892 70. Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved 71. Margaret Oliphant’s The Marriage of Elinor 72. Margaret Oliphant’s The Cuckoo in the Nest 205 1893 73. Margaret Oliphant’s Lady William 74. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona 1894 75. George Du Maurier’s Trilby 76. Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan 1895 77. Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure 78. Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly 79. Margaret Oliphant’s Two Strangers 80. H.G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit 81. H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine 82. George Gissing’s Eve’s Ransom 1896 83. Margaret Oliphant’s The Unjust Steward, or The Minister’s Debt 84. Margaret Oliphant’s Old Mr. Tredgold 85. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston 86. H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau 87. George Gissing’s The Paying Guest 88. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s London Pride 1897 89. H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man 90. Bram Stoker’s Dracula 91. Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 92. George Gissing’s The Whirlpool 1898 93. H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds 1899 94. H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Awakes 1900 95. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim 96. H.G. Wells’s Love and Mr. Lewisham 1901 97. H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon 98. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon Revisited 99. Ford Maddox Ford’s The Inheritors 100. Rudyard Kipling’s Kim 206 REFERENCES CITED Ackroyd, Peter. Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life. Doubleday, 2012. “Advertisements.” The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 19 Oct. 1861, p.7. British Newspaper Archive, British Library Board, 28 Dec. 2012. Allingham, Philip V. “Victorian Best-Sellers, 1862-1901.” The Victorian Web, 25 August 2018, http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/dickens/pva/pva120.html. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 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