Letter(s) Functions and Forms of Letter-Writing in Victorian Art and Literature Edited by Mariaconcetta Costantini Francesco Marroni Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Copyright MMIX ARACNE editrice S.r.l. www.aracneeditrice.it info@aracneeditrice.it via Raffaele Garofalo, 133 a/b 00173 Roma (06) 93781065 ISBN 978-88 548 2624 3 I diritti di traduzione, di memorizzazione elettronica, di riproduzione e di adattamento anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo, sono riservati per tutti i Paesi. Non sono assolutamente consentite le fotocopie senza il permesso scritto dell Editore. I edizione: luglio 2009
Contents Preface 7 Mirella Billi Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read 11 John Woolford Textual Materiality in the Victorian Verse-Letter 21 Biancamaria Rizzardi Perutelli The Influence of Ovid s Heroides on Victorian Love Poetry 39 Alan Shelston Letters as Presence and Absence in Victorian Fiction 49 Allan C. Christensen Not a Love Letter : Epistolary Proposals of Marriage and Narrative Theory in Bleak House and Middlemarch 59 Saverio Tomaiuolo Sensational Letters: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley s Secret and the Doom of Truth 71 Anna Enrichetta Soccio Letters in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Case of Rhoda Broughton 91 Mariaconcetta Costantini Strategies of Letter Manipulation in Wilkie Collins 105 Joseph J. Feeney, S.J. The Playfulness of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Touch of Theory, a Spate of Letters, Two Poems 129
6 Contents Francesca Saggini The Author s Secret. Disguises of Epistolarity in Victorian Mystery Narratives 147 Richard Ambrosini The Man Was at My Mercy (So Far as Any Credit Went) : A Counter-Reading of Mackellar s Narrative in The Master of Ballantrae 175 Elio Di Piazza Haggard and Kronos, a Letter from Beyond the Grave 213 Russell Elliott Murphy W. B. Yeats s A Packet for Ezra Pound : The Personal Correspondence as a Revelatory Public Text 223 Notes on Contributors 235
Preface The nineteenth century was marked by a revisionary attitude regarding the meanings attached to letter-writing. After reaching a vast popularity in the previous century, the epistolary novel was gradually deprived of its traditional characteristics to become a more complex artistic modality which would eventually lead to the psychological novel of James, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce. Victorian writers met the challenge of forging new epistolary models. Their narrative, poetic and nonfictional texts abound in letters which are given a variety of new forms and come to fulfill functions that were growingly perceived as non-canonical. The nineteenth-century interest in epistolarity was not only fostered by a literary tradition dating back to Defoe and Richardson. It also derived from multiple cultural practices that revolved around letters. In the course of the century, there was an unprecedented development in communications. The democratization of letter-writing and -reading promoted by the reform of the British postal system was coupled with technical innovations which accelerated the exchange of missives, such as the evolution of means of transport and the introduction of telegraphic dispatches. Other important changes occurred in the world of lettered professionals. Journalists and writers were increasingly subject to the demands of a commercialized literary market-place, whose products purported to meet the exigencies of a semi-literate audience craving for sensational readings. Epistolary communication was thus perceived as an essential experience which provided opportunities for public connection as well as private release. Rendered in their full textuality, quoted partially or referred to in paraphrases, letters are a regular feature in almost every nineteenth-century novel remove the letters from Middlemarch and this masterpiece becomes strategically, and narratologically, quite another thing. The more a novelist aimed at reproducing commonplace, everyday life, the more he/she would make use of such instruments as letters. For many respects, sensation fiction adopted letters and
8 Preface letter-writing scenes in order to confer verisimilitude to diegesis. The contributors to this volume explore the multiple and shifting meanings that epistolarity acquired in an age that was so deeply characterized by letter production and circulation. A common point of investigation is the experimentation with letter-embedding and letter-interpreting that many Victorian novelists and poets conducted throughout the century. Not only does their fictional and non-fictional employment of epistles provide a wide range of cultural responses to the fastdeveloping communication network; it also testifies to their rethinking of the boundaries of literary forms which, within the larger category of the epistolary genre, were undergoing significant revisions both structurally and ideologically. Most of the contributions were originally given as papers at the Conference Letter(s): Functions and Forms of Letter- Writing in Victorian Art and Literature which was held at G. d Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara in November 2000. A recurrent question raised at the Conference was that of the complex history of Victorian letter-writing, which emerged in the variety of the papers themes and approaches, as well as of related issues posed by the audience. The main scope of the present volume, which includes enlarged versions of the conference papers together with new contributions, is that of offering proof of this variety and suggesting new hermeneutic pathways to explore. Each of the thirteen essays, which are arranged in a loosely chronological order from the early-victorian period to the early-twentieth century, investigates some aspects of the experimentation carried out by single authors. The picture thus conveyed is that of a complex process of cross-fertilization that reshaped the form and functionality of letters. From a generic viewpoint, for example, it is interesting to notice the prevalence of narrative over poetic forms of epistolarity. The latter forms are analyzed in the essays by John Woolford, Biancamaria Rizzardi Perutelli and Joseph Feeney. While considering different branches of the poetic tradition, Woolford and Rizzardi
Preface 9 Perutelli bear evidence of the Victorian poets reinflection of the verse-letter model inherited from their classical, as well as their Romantic, predecessors. Feeney identifies a distinctive feature of Hopkins s poetic language his playfulness consisting of humorous expressions, puns and jokes and analyzes its occurrence both in his verse and in his private letters. A peculiar attention to real correspondence is also given by Russell Murphy, who reads Yeats s personal response to Pound s art and personality as an actual source for his complex construction in A Vision. More numerous and varied are the narrative models and sub-genres examined in the other essays. Three contributors (Saverio Tomaiuolo, Mariaconcetta Costantini, and Anna Enrichetta Soccio) explore the particular use of epistles made by the so-called sensation novelists who, in spite of individual differences, exploited the subversive potential of letters for a common aim: that of unveiling the dangers lurking beneath the apparently safe façade of bourgeois respectability. The Victorians awareness of the risks of letter (mis)interpretation is given particular attention by Allan Christensen and Richard Ambrosini. Christensen provides a comparative analysis of two masterpieces of the nineteenth century Bleak House and Middlemarch from a poststructuralist viewpoint, whereas Ambrosini closely examines a late-century novel by Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae, to give evidence of the textual and metaliterary effects produced by discarded or unread letters. The functionality of letter-embedding in mid- and late- Victorian novels is also explored by Alan Shelston, Elio Di Piazza, and Francesca Saggini. Shelston offers a reading of the presence and absence of letters in the works of three distinguished women writers: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Di Piazza and Saggini examine the reshaping of epistolary forms which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, contributed to defining two popular narrative subgenres: the mystery novel and the adventure novel. What is evident in most essays is the dangerous significance
10 Preface that letters come to play in Victorian texts. As Mirella Billi suggests, the shift from eighteenth- to nineteenth-century letterwriting is marked by the loss of the authenticity of correspondences which are no longer seen as vehicles for expressing immediate feelings and emotions. In her essay, Billi also deals with the gender connotations attached to letter-writing and, like Rizzardi Perutelli, integrates her critical discourse with a reflection on the fertile interplay between literature and visual arts. The Editors
Mirella Billi Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read In the novel Glenarvon, written in 1816, the author, Lady Caroline Lamb, includes a letter, with which the central character dismisses his former mistress: Lady, I am no longer your lover; and since you oblige me to confess it, by this truly unfeminine persecution, learn that I am attached to another; whose name it would of course be dishonourable to mention. I shall ever remember with gratitude the many instances I have received of the predilection you have shown in my favour. I shall ever continue to be your friend, if your ladyship will permit me so to style myself; and, as a first proof of my regard, I offer you this advice: correct your vanity, which is ridiculous; exert your absurd caprices upon others; and leave me in peace. Your most obedient servant, G 1. It is known that Lady Caroline Lamb had become madly infatuated with Byron, and that the above mentioned novel, Glenarvon, was written after Byron had broken his relationship with her (who had even tried to shoot him!) and is actually the story of their affair narrated from Lady Caroline s vindictive perspective. In the novel she casts herself and the marvellous Calantha and Byron as the cruel and fated Glenarvon; the letter just quoted is exactly word by word the one Byron wrote to Lady Caroline, with the help of his new mistress, Lady Oxford. This is perhaps the first private letter that was made outrageously public. Though it was included in a novel, everybody knew that the whole story was no fiction, that it was Caroline Lamb s angry version of what had gone on between Byron and herself, and that the letter was a real one. The novel was, for this reason, a succès de scandale, rather than being appreciated for its actually not outstanding literary merits, and the letter 1 Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon, [1816], New York, AMS Press, 1975.
12 Mirella Billi became a sort of public document often used by contrasting sides to support either the persecuted Byron or the discarded Caroline. What Caroline Lamb had said about Byron: bad, mad, and dangerous to know, can be applied, with slight changes, to this subtly devastating letter, which seems to anticipate or indeed to inaugurate a new destiny for letters in Victorian culture, when, as it has aptly put it, one imagines the post where once where the letters, where one reads the movements of the mail coach, not the vagaries of epistolary sentiment, and where one begs the postman, not the lover, for correspondence 2. Between 1790, after which year no epistolary novel is written, and the 1830s, the letter becomes only the means for political and no longer sentimental expression, and all its disruptive power is used mainly as a weapon in the political struggle. Walter Scott dismisses epistolary narrative in Redgauntlet with these words: the letter does not keep pace in a world concerned with political agitation, war, and reform. The letter gradually becomes lettre perfide, as Baudelaire later defined it, a means for exposing, betraying, and even killing (as Charlotte Corday knew only too well when she wrote one to Marat!) The sentimental tradition connected with the letter is disrupted and even what is left of the private, sentimental letter especially that written by women, expressing and validating female experience and so transforming and disrupting fixed images and narratives becomes a disquieting, transgressive and even revolutionary form. Even female letters, in some cases, become political : Helen Maria Williams s Letters from France, for example, invert the structure of the lettre de cachet, and her letters, and the letters within them, are manipulated in order to expose the operations and constraints of formal institutions in France and England. 2 Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 197.
Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read 13 More and more people have access, through the letters, to what an individual person writes; the postal system is coordinated in order to circulate both private messages and published works; a constant transition takes place between private expression and public property. The new ideology of the letter, that actually came to be identified with the more generalized mail, was clearly expressed by the father of the modern Post Office, Rowland Hill, later appointed Sir, in his pamphlet Post Office Reform; Its Importance and Practicability in 1837. Under his system, all letters are equal and equally subject to the same central authority. The Royal Mail is recognized as the British Post Office, and this levelling transforms the postal service into an ideological vehicle of progress for both political economy, national education, and exchange between the British Empire. Hill s words were echoed by Queen Victoria in her speech to Parliament when the Postal Reform Act was passed in 1839: I trust that the Act [...] will be a relief and encouragement trade; and that, by facilitating intercourse and correspondence, it will be productive of much social advantage and improvement. Hill s report on the Post Office is even more precise on the priorities of correspondence: commerce first; education, science and culture second; affective ties and personal relationships third. In his speech in Parliament, Hill pointed out how various letters in his possession show some important benefit to commerce arising from the facility of communication and easy transmission of [...] light goods; others (equally show) great advantages to literature, science, and friendly union, evinced by the production of works and formation even of larger societies 3. It is only in the last part of his speech that he mentions how the establishment of the penny rate was also an essential condition for other (letters) telling of pains relieved, affections cultivated, and mental efforts encouraged [...] 4. 3 Sir Rowland Hill, Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, London, C. Knight and Co., 1837. 4 Ibid.
14 Mirella Billi The speech expresses concerns and priorities in Victorian culture, where advice on economic success, admonition, and family affections become commodities sold by the Post Office for a mere penny. The postal system seems, moreover, to represent a sort of efficient model for the British Empire itself, by coordinating communication and commercial exchange, e by controlling a huge workforce. The power of letters was, for this reason, used by protesters against the most objectionable and grim aspects of Victorian culture, and particularly against the new social order based on industrial capitalism. Besides the known authors of incendiary letters, anonymous, collective voices from the margin of society fought against the Post Office so-called progressive ideology and broke through the economical definitions of correspondence. However, it was not only the authors of the incendiary letters that reacted against the efficient program of the public service: literati and writers, in different ways, expressed their doubts and worries about the kind of correspondence enhanced by the Post Office. In 1850, Thomas de Quincey s The English Mail Coach, one of his most interesting and intriguing essays, reveals the ambiguity of the age towards the problems concerning correspondence. On one side, De Quincey celebrates the Post Office service as a mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments [...] terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of the Art, veins, and arteries on the other side, the instruments are said to be all disregarding each other, and in danger of discord, and the insistence is on exchanges that progressively prove less political and more private. In the opening session of the essay, The Glory of Motion, there are references to revolution, together with threats to the coach in forms that indicate unrest and trouble. The threats depend not only on class conflicts, but on gender: human contact and love relationships outside the official lines of communication, become suspicious, and De Quincey asserts, at the end of the essay, the superiority of his dreaming over feminized correspondence, felt as dangerous.
Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read 15 Charles Lamb, in his essay Distant Correspondents addressed to a friend in New South Wales, remarks how writing a letter to someone so far away is like writing for posterity. Explicitly referring to the letter, he writes that Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics: news, sentiments, and puns [...], but as far as news is concerned, he observes how even true news can become a lie when it arrives late because of the distance between sender and addressee; sentiments, too, and passions, can be extinguished after months. The vigour of news, sentiments, and even puns, or agreeable levities, he adds, is at the instant of their birth; their expression must be instantaneous, and there must be just a moment s interval for the link to be snapped. Lamb will sadly say that the destruction of the letter is the positive testamentary disposal of a corpse. The idea underlying the eighteenth-century epistolary novel and so firmly and clearly expressed by Samuel Richardson, of the letter writing the present and as expression of immediate feelings and emotions is denied in the nineteenth century, when the privateness of the letter, once it becomes public property, becomes suspect and dangerous. In Glenarvon, together with the real letter, quoted at the beginning, there are others which threaten violence and relate crimes; their couriers are Irish rebels or outcasts; Lady Avondale s love letters are given by Glenarvon to her husband s family and friends as testimonies of her guilt, making her a fallen woman, inevitably doomed to personal ruin. Letters, as dangerous, betraying secrets and crimes, ruining reputations, exposing people, are burned, buried, silenced, destroyed, and just simply thrown away and removed, or sent to relatives, to be submitted as legal evidence in courts of justice, and result in personal catastrophes and punishments. Not only in novels (particularly the ones belonging to the Sensation narrative subgenre), but also in paintings, the letter becomes a dangerous object, bringing bad news, trouble, unpleasant discoveries. The narrative paintings by George Edgard Hicks, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863, and representing the ideal
16 Mirella Billi woman in her perfect (and, it must be added, inescapable) roles as mother, submissive wife and support of (male) old age, according to the model of the angel in the house, show, in the second picture of the triptych, significantly entitled The Companion of Manhood, husband and wife in an immaculate and elegant drawing-room. The man has a letter in his left hand, obviously (it is black-edged) announcing someone s death, probably a close relative s; with his right hand he covers his eyes, in a gesture of sorrow. His wife has a supporting attitude; she is represented delicately touching his arm and looking at him with a sad expression. To be the companion of manhood is not connected to a love letter, or at least to a letter bringing good news, over which to share happiness, but to a mournful message, related to sorrow and death. Joy and pleasure seem inappropriate feelings to be expressed in what has become a public means of communication. Another, quite different, but equally unpleasant letter is the cause of the devastating scene represented in a picture by Augustus Leopold Egg, another narrative painter well-known to the Victorian middle and upper classes. The picture represents a husband who has received, through the mail, a letter apparently revealing his wife s adultery. The crashed letter is in the man s hands; he looks dishevelled, distraught and terribly angry; the woman is lying on the floor (it is not clear if she has been thrown there by her furious husband or if she is imploring a most unlikely gesture of forgiveness from him) and her face is hidden in apparent sorrow and repentance. Her coloured dress and a bracelet in the shape of a snake on her wrist are clear signs of her sin and corruption; French novels, obviously belonging to her, with their highly suspicious contents, support a frame of cards with which her innocent daughters (doomed to corruption themselves, according to the Victorian moral genetics for which a mother s immorality was directly transmitted to her female offspring) are playing; on the walls, a picture represents a shipwreck (a clear allusion to the disrupted marriage), and another the Fall, caused, as everybody knows, by Eve, the fallen woman par excellence.
Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read 17 In the second of Egg s triptych the tragic consequences of the wife s improper behaviour but, actually, of the unfortunate discovery of a letter referring to private matters are represented: vice, shame, the ruin of the family, and death. The love letter, or, as in this case, the letter denouncing an illicit love, no longer private as publicly delivered, has become dangerous and threatening, revealing indecency and immorality, and thus causing personal tragedies and disrupting social values. Letters written by women were particularly suspicious or disquieting in Victorian culture, as they established an upsetting correspondence between the publishing industry and the economy of the Post Office and privacy and self-representation. As the deconstructionists have pointed out, the letter contains both the word and the world, substitutes writing for living, and evokes a mysteriously intimate world, associated with the female body. Epistolary discourse, moreover, is anti-mimetic, subverts conventional dichotomies, explores transgressions and transformations, and is often the repository of feminine desire: all this is opposed and rejected in Victorian culture, as an unbearable and dangerous threat to social values and national morality. Letters written by women, in Maria Edgeworth s Patronage (1814) significantly disappear. There are letters in the novel, but only the ones written by the men of the Percy family, as the answers from their mother and sisters are never provided. Other letters are withhold, the ones concerning secret diplomatic relationships and court intrigue. The plot is activated by forged letters. In the novel, women s letter writing is made equal to dangerous and wicked correspondence, but, at the same time, the disappearance, or rather, the silencing of women s letters causes the fear of treacherous and undomesticated secrets, implying wider and dangerous plots. A woman character in Patronage pronounces a sort of final sentence on women s letters: This is the last confidential letter I shall ever be able to write to you for a married woman s letters become, like all the rest of her property,
18 Mirella Billi subject to her husband. Excepting the secrets of which she was possessed before marriage, which do not go into the common stock, if she be a woman of honour 5. Not only women s letters disappear, but also, as in Elizabeth Gaskell s Cranford (1853), old family letters are destroyed because as the narrator and a character say of the exigency of personal economies. All through tea-times Miss Matty s talk ran upon the days of her childhood and youth. Perhaps this reminded her of the desirableness of looking over all the old family letters, and destroying such as ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of strangers; for she had often spoken of the necessity of this task, but had always shrunk from it, with a timid dread of something painful. To-night, however, she rose up after tea and went for them in the dark [...] many of the letters were addressed to her mother; and many of the letters were addressed to her yellow bundles of love-letters, sixty or seventy years old [...]. Miss Matty undid the packet with a sigh, as if it were hardly right to regret the flight of time, or of life either. We agreed to look them over separately, each taking a different letter out of the same bundle and describing its contents to the other before destroying it 6. Private letters, love letters, letters expressing feelings and emotions, like the ones interchanged between my ever-honoured father and my dearly-beloved mother, prior to their marriage in July 1774, as Miss Matty has ticketed them, full of eager, passionate ardour 7, cannot and must not be preserved any longer, in a time so remote and in a different world, where they have become embarrassing and obsolete: I never knew what sad work the reading of those letters was before that evening, though I could tell hardly why. The letters were as happy as letters could be at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, as if the warm, living 5 Maria Edgeworth, Patronage, [1814], London, Pandora, 1986. 6 Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 42. 7 Ibid., p. 43.
Victorian Letters: Bad, Mad and Dangerous to Read 19 hearts that so expressed themselves could never die [...] I saw the tears stealing down the well-worn furrows of Miss Matty s cheeks, and her spectacles often wanted wiping 8. The life and warmth of the feelings expressed in these letters have to be cancelled, as Miss Matty sadly says: No one will care for them when I am gone 9. The letters cover the period from 1774 to 1824, when extraordinary events took place, such as the American and the French Revolutions, the war with France, the British conquest of India. The history of the Post in England seems to follow these transformations, as alluded by Gaskell s narrator. The family letters represent the intersection between personal and political history, between emotional and economic communication, but they have become old-fashioned, useless and all their emotional power is sacrificed to the flames: One by one (Miss Matty) dropped them into the middle of the fire, watching each blaze up, die out, and rise away, in faint, white, ghostly semblance, up the chimney, before she gave another to the same fate 10. The decline and death of the personal private letter, accompanied by the sense of its loss, reflects a general restructuring of society in the 19th century. Even women writers, confronted with the necessity of negotiation between private and public expression, though not completely moving away from the sentimental tradition, developed an idea of correspondence which redesigned epistolary form and even transformed woman s relationship with her writing and with the society where both her letters and her works were to be read. 8 Ibid., pp. 42-43. 9 Ibid., p. 44. 10 Ibid., 44.