Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: 'Our Feverish Contact'

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NINETEENTH-CENTURYNARRATIVES OF CONTAGION Allan Conrad Christensen

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Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our feverish contact’

Allan Conrad Christensen

ISBN 978-0-415-36048-7

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Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our feverish contact’

Always a scourge of the human condition, epidemics of contagious disease, including venereal infections, were a devastating phenomenon that fascinated the imagination of the nineteenth century. While scientists like Pasteur were beginning to understand how microbes operated and the British parliament was enacting the Contagious Diseases Acts, epidemics spread into works of fiction. Besides driving plot lines, they provided an all-pervasive metaphor for the social transmission of ideological and ethical notions and the imposition of various forms of power. The present study examines how the contagion of the historical moment infiltrates human relationships in such activities as military struggles, clothes-making and dressing, medical practice, love affairs, financial transactions and the use of language. The many nineteenth-century texts treated, by both neglected and major writers, include Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Dickens’s Bleak House, Gaskell’s Ruth and Zola’s Le Docteur Pascal. Drawing on recent literary theorists, Christensen suggests the permeability of the boundaries between these texts, which merge into a single narrative or grand récit of history at work. Of interest to students of cultural history, this book explores new ground in the intersections of medicine and literature. Allan Conrad Christensen is Professor of English at John Cabot University in Rome. He is the author of Edward Bulwyer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (1976) and A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini (1996).

Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature

1. Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our feverish contact’ Allan Conrad Christensen

Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion ‘Our feverish contact’

Allan Conrad Christensen

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Allan Conrad Christensen Typeset in Baskerville by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-36048-X

To the memory of Terrance W. Schwab (1940–2004) Since our first encounter in a freshman philosophy course and our years as classmates in Lowell House at Harvard, Terry has remained an admired, inspiring and loyal friend. While living on different continents, we have continued to share, as in the crises and the satisfactions of our youth in Cambridge and New York, the defining intellectual and passionate experiences of life. With regret for the speed with which a lifetime passes, I shall always thank Terry for his enrichment of my existence.

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on citations

viii x

1

History as contagion

1

2

Providence amidst pestilence and fire

37

3

Swordsmen and needlewomen

72

4

Physicians, nurses and patients

113

5

Mothers, daughters and lovers

156

6

Writers and readers

201

7

Speakers, singers and listeners

245

Conclusion: money handlers and bookkeepers

277

Notes Bibliography Index

293 331 343

Acknowledgements

In the ‘Darwinian plot’ to which the second chapter of my book refers, a sense of narrative pattern and coherence is generally perceived or constructed in retrospect. The paradigm raises the temptation to find, in looking back at my professional career, that this work, on which I have been specifically engaged for eight years, has really been in implicit gestation from the beginning. With greater certainty, however, I recognize with gratitude the long-present influence in my career of two particular colleagues in the field of Victorian studies. These intellectual mentors, encouraging advisors and faithful friends are G.B. Tennyson, both during my years in California and thereafter, and Francesco Marroni more recently in Italy. To Edwin M. Eigner, too, I am grateful for his early appreciation, as a fellow Bulwer scholar, of my initial scholarly projects and for his later directing my attention towards the neglected novelist Giovanni Ruffini. Many of the notions developed in this book have been first expounded and usefully nurtured in the context of academic conferences, especially the wonderfully stimulating occasions organized by Peter Vassallo and the Institute of Anglo-Italian Studies at the University of Malta. While devoted more to poetry than to fiction, the conferences arranged by Lilla Maria Crisafulli and the Centro di Studi Romantici at the University of Bologna have provided an additional source of inspiration. Over the years Stuart A. Curran, another close friend in the field of Romantic poetry, has certainly challenged and sharpened my critical thinking as well. For their attentive reading of portions of the manuscript of this book, I am indebted to my cousin William A. Johnsen, an eminent disciple of René Girard, and to Edgar Rosenberg. In a course taught by Rosenberg, nineteenth-century fiction came to fascinate me as an undergraduate, and then after an interval of nearly forty years we met again at a memorable conference on Bulwer Lytton in 2000 at the University of London. Robert Kiely, another of my undergraduate instructors with whom I have recently re-established friendly contact, has become one more trusted advisor.

Acknowledgements

ix

My sincere thanks to Christopher Neenan, the hardworking and academically committed chairman of my department with whom I have collaborated so harmoniously for more than twenty years, to David Miller and to my other supportive colleagues at John Cabot University. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the generous support of the university with research funds and sabbatical leaves.

Note on citations

References to works of fiction are generally given parenthetically in the text and are to numbers of chapters or to numbers of book (or part or volume) and chapter within the particular works. I have preferred to refer to chapters rather than to pages because readers will probably be using a variety of editions of these books. To make evident that the references are not to page numbers, Roman numerals are used.

1

History as contagion

The system of repression that derived from the Congress of Vienna failed to establish an authentic European stability. The restoration of order often seemed more like disorder and naturally it prompted many insurrections. In England the forty years between Waterloo and the outbreak of the Crimean War similarly offered to many observers the sorry spectacle of a peace that was phoney and sickly. At the end of Tennyson’s Maud, the speaker describes ‘a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,/Horrible, hateful, monstrous’, and one of the main characters in Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago asks, ‘“what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been befooled, by forty years of peace”’: ‘“the history of the world has been as yet written in blood. . . . What right have we to suppose that it will be aught else . . . as long as anger and ambition, cupidity and wounded pride, canker the hearts of men?”’ (XXIII). In its written texts the whole nineteenth century seems indeed to represent itself as perpetually embattled despite a contrasting effort to propose myths of peaceful progress, stability and ideological consensus sustained by a bourgeois hegemony. The fierce divisions and antagonisms of the ongoing debates have commonly been referred to such polarities as faith and doubt, religion and science, freedom and necessity, teleology and chance. Related to these is also the polarity of health and disease, in which, as in the pattern just noticed with respect to peace and war, the second term proves not to be entirely negative. As an instance of Bakhtin’s ‘symbolic reversal’, the apparently ‘negative term . . . is invested with positive cultural value’.1 Physical disease and bloodshed may become beneficial when they help to cure the false health that masks the cultural disease ‘canker[ing] the hearts of men’. That cankering cultural disease, to be sure, may remain a negative term that it would be difficult to invest with positive value. Matthew Arnold unambiguously laments the prevalence of the mal de siècle and urges the scholar-gipsy of the healthy seventeenth century to remain distant from ‘this strange disease of modern life’: But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest.

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‘Our feverish contact’

Besides the scholar-gipsy, the Goethe that has suffered from the cultural disease in his youth and has then recovered becomes for Arnold a paradigm of health. As ‘Physician of the iron age’ in ‘Memorial Verses’, he also proffers an escapist remedy to others: ‘Art still has truth, take refuge there!’ The refuge may appeal, however, only to a certain élite, like the poet Elsley Vavasour in Two Years Ago, for whom the Sage of Weimar has become a cult figure: ‘Elsley had a dread more nervous than really coward of infectious diseases: and he had also (and prided himself, too, on having) all Goethe’s dislike of anything terrible or horrible, of sickness, disease, wounds, death, anything which jarred with that “beautiful” which was his idol’ (X). Here then it is not only cultural disease but disease of all kinds that remains an irremediably negative phenomenon. As well as with the ‘beautiful’ Kingsley himself associates the ideal of health with moral virtue and physical strength. Instead of taking aesthetic refuge from ‘infectious diseases’, one should, he believes, fight physically and relentlessly to destroy their capacity for mischief. So the physicianprotagonist of Two Years Ago, Tom Thurnall, differs from Arnold’s notion of the Goethean physician in that he confronts the iron age, as it were, with its own iron weapons. In angrily but also gleefully denouncing the sanitary criminals that have permitted the cholera to spread, he brandishes his own weapons in his own version of a military confrontation: ‘ “I have got – and what greater pleasure? – a good stand-up fight with an old enemy” ’ (XVII). The old enemy, dirt and disease, is further identified as ‘ “my devil” ’ – ‘ “and I can’t help it, for the life of me, going right at his throat, wheresoever I meet him” ’ (XIV). The health for which Kingsley and his protagonists do battle involves a unity of body and mind that they associate with an even earlier period of history than that of the scholar-gipsy. In a lecture entitled ‘The Science of Health’, Kingsley directs attention to ‘the statues of the old Greeks; to their tender grandeur, their chaste healthfulness, their unconscious, because perfect, might; . . . these are tokens to you, and to all generations yet unborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again’.2 Similarly, Allen Fenwick, the physician and narrator of Bulwer’s A Strange Story, refers the condition of ‘perfect health’ to ‘the golden age of the poets, – the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh’. Such ‘health, to the utmost perfection, . . . cannot be enjoyed by those who overwork the brain, or admit the sure wear and tear of the passions’ and so has largely ceased to exist in modern civilization (XXIII). The normal condition of mature men and women, as G.H. Lewes observes at about the same time, is to be more or less ailing: ‘few of us, after thirty, can boast of robust health’.3 Classical images of wholeness and health exert of course an enormous appeal for nineteenth-century civilization, but many Victorians also recognize a possibly perverse beauty or ‘cultural value’ in the enemy of such health. Walter Pater, whose enthusiasm for the Greek ideal is surely unsur-

History as contagion

3

passed by that of any of his contemporaries, thus appreciates the diseased faces of Leonardo too. ‘What may be called the fascination of corruption’, he notes of the Medusa, ‘penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty’. And against the ‘Greek goddesses and beautiful women of antiquity’, he defiantly sets ‘this beauty [of La Gioconda], into which the soul with all its maladies has passed’.4 The decadent strain, if one wishes so to denominate it, runs throughout the century. It may be related to the ‘Worship of Sorrow’ which Carlyle, Pater and others celebrate and to the many passages in literature of the period in which suffering is discovered to have a positive value. As a legacy of Romanticism, sickness becomes in Susan Sontag’s observation ‘a way of making people “interesting” ’.5 One of the most prominent of nineteenth-century invalids, Harriet Martineau, seems in her popular Life in the Sick-Room further to identify sickness rather than health with goodness. As with Pater, then, the apparently negative term is invested with positive value: The sick-room becomes the scene of intense conviction; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil. At times I could almost believe that long sickness or other trouble is ordained to prove to us this very point – a point worth any costliness of proof.6 In revealing the permanence of good and the transience of evil, the experience of illness can offer, according to Bulwer’s essay ‘On Ill Health and Its Consolations’, a Platonic awareness: just as ‘Plato retired to his cave to be wise[,] sickness is often the moral cave, with its quiet, its darkness, and its solitude, to the soul’. Human beings should even consider their earthly condition to be more fundamentally that of the patient than that of the healthy subject: in illness ‘we learn to think, with one of the most august of our moralists, that “earth is an hospital, not an inn – a place to die, not to live in.” Our existence becomes a great preparation for death’.7 Because sickness functions in the framework of natural or providential teleology, the Victorians may not, on the whole, have agreed with Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall who so implacably vilifies disease as the devil himself. Indeed not only physical but also mental disease, as Bruce Haley has further argued in analysing contemporary notions of health, occur as ‘natural phases of a general life-pattern’.8 The sickness of the Zeitgeist too, which Arnold and others diagnose so gloomily, constitutes only a natural phase in a larger historical pattern. Although that pattern remains unclear and the efforts to define health and disease lead to no conclusions, the opposing terms continue in their symbiosis to require one another. As in the memorable line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, they are ‘united in the strife which divided them’.

4

‘Our feverish contact’

Especially through the mechanism of contagion, with which the present study is concerned, diseases were seen as participating with almost military aggressiveness in the ‘strife’. By the same token the non-medical versions of cultural conflict were seen as participating with contagious aggressiveness in their battles. The contagious phenomenon fascinated the imagination of the century to the point that one can discern, according to Athena Vrettos, ‘the ubiquity of contagion as a master narrative in Victorian culture’.9 The obvious material explanation of the fascination with contagion is the dramatic virulence of the series of epidemics during the middle third of the nineteenth century. In England these began in 1831–32 when cholera, as a seemingly new and especially inexplicable disease, struck with terrifying unpredictability and claimed some 52,000 lives. Between 1836 and 1842 there occurred major epidemics of influenza, typhus, smallpox, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever, and between 1846 and 1849 further epidemics of typhus, typhoid and cholera. And the epidemic outbreaks continued while tuberculosis and venereal disease remained a constant cause of mortality as well. On the basis of Edwin Chadwick’s influential Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), one deduces that in a particularly bad year (1839) eight deaths occurred from contagious diseases for every one death from other causes.10 The concern to understand the mechanisms of contagion prompted a widely engrossing debate between the proponents of germs and the infectionists or ‘miasmists’. The traditional, widely-accepted contagionist paradigm lost ground after 1832 to what R.J. Morris calls ‘miasmic thinking’, which attained the ‘high noon’ of its ascendancy in the summer of 1849. It then began to give way to the eventually victorious theories involving germs or bacilli. The debate was not conducted, however, on serenely rational, scientific grounds. The participants, as Morris indicates, could not agree on the nature of the problem and on what might constitute relevant evidence. Social pressures from outside the medical community, related to religious and political beliefs, economic issues, and the social class and gender of the participants, deeply influenced the arguments. The debate thus offers an interesting example of ‘the importance of moral and metaphysical assumptions in response to disease’.11 It also demonstrates the vulnerability of science, in its study of literal contagion, to a metaphorical contagion emanating from other discourses. The phenomenon of metaphorical or moral contagion operated similarly in the bitter public controversy that accompanied the campaigns to enact the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s and later to repeal them. Sexist prejudice, that is, contaminated the arguments urged in support of the acts that provided for the compulsory examination and detention of women presumed to be prostitutes. While less than robust health may have been the normal human condition, this was particularly the case with

History as contagion

5

women. Doctors of the period, according to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, believed that ‘woman’s normal state was to be sick’: ‘this sickness is innate, and stems from the very possession of the uterus and ovaries’.12 The sickness assumed especially virulent, contagious forms in the case of prostitutes, a ‘vicious and profligate sisterhood’. The atmosphere in which the Contagious Diseases Acts were debated naturally informs many literary works of the 1860s and 1870s. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (edition of 1862), which uses imagery of spreading contagion in connection with the disintegration of Arthurian culture, identifies the unchaste Guinevere as the primary source of the infection. In the words of Arthur’s denunciation, ‘Her station, taken everywhere for pure, She like a new disease, unknown to men, Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young.’ (‘Guinevere’, ll. 514–19) Guinevere has taken refuge at this point, however, not amidst a ‘profligate and vicious sisterhood’ but with the holy sisters of Almesbury, where she hopes in nursing the diseases of others to redeem herself – to ‘ “treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own” ’ (l. 680). Another notable example of the masculine ascription of blame to the woman for the moral contagion of the domestic environment is found in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). Although Torvald Helmer does not in this case accuse his wife of adultery, he is convinced that it is primarily a wife’s deviance that pollutes a household: ‘A fog of lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs. . . . Practically all juvenile delinquents come from homes where the mother is dishonest’ (Act I).13 In the realm of fiction, Donald Hall believes, the atmosphere of the Contagious Diseases Acts contaminates Great Expectations (1860–61). The novel seems to associate Miss Havisham and Estella with prostitution and to hint at a venereal infection that emanates from them. Hall also finds here that if the current debate about contagion has contaminated the novel, the novel has in its turn affected or influenced the external ‘social reality’. Dickens’s work not only represented but helped to produce ‘the shifting of blame from women to men that led to repeal of the CDAs’.14 An even more crucial novel with respect to the CDAs is one that figures importantly in this study, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), for it struck Josephine Butler with the force of a revelation. She would go on to become the leader of the Ladies’ National Association (LNA) that united working-class and middle-class members in campaigns against the acts and

6

‘Our feverish contact’

eventually secured their repeal. The controversy, Judith R. Walkowitz suggests, provides an instructive example of how a ‘technology of power’ (as here embodied in the acts) provokes ‘a formidable social and political resistance’ (in Butler’s campaigns).15 The acts themselves, in our own application of the metaphor of contagion, represent the contagious menace against which Butler’s LNA manifests the immune response. As in the case of Great Expectations, the situation also shows, according to Hilary M. Schor, a complex specularity between a fictional text, Ruth, and the historical reality: ‘at the least we can say that the history a text writes is as complicated as the text “history” wrote’.16 Hall’s and Schor’s perceptions of the porosity of the boundary between fiction and history and Morris’s similar observation about the vulnerability of the scientific discourse to other influences characterize recent habits of analysis. But the vision of contagion at work in all areas first emerges as a large-scale, generalized phenomenon in the nineteenth century and comes to constitute one of the salient features of the Zeitgeist. Whereas speculation about all-pervasive energies has in earlier ages been limited to erudite scholarship, the vision of contagion seems at this moment to have begun to fascinate everyone. The attention devoted to contagion is an aspect, Steven Connor believes, of the absorbing interest that characterizes the 1840s and 1850s in all the ‘dynamic processes which relate individual bodies to one another’. In analyses of the movements of wealth and in the new science of thermodynamics too, the age discerns instability, a constant activity of exchange, interchange and transformation, as the normal condition of things. Not just when epidemics and riots break out, individual organisms and social aggregations like the city are ‘always already in metabolic process’.17 The media in which these processes of interchange occur provide models for the moral medium that the age is seeking to imagine. Having begun to doubt the spiritual dimension in which divine grace operates, the age needs to envision a more material mechanism whereby palpable influences, for good or ill, can be communicated among individuals. ‘The process of cultural self-definition’, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has recently shown, involves a persistent endeavour to define a unified field, ‘a shared discourse of influence’ in which all the cultural energies interact. Samuel Smiles describes the field as ‘a system of mutual dependencies’, and the mutual dependencies among individuals is mirrored in the ‘commingling of [the] vocabularies’ of the various disciplines. The term ‘milieu’ is borrowed from the biological discourse and applied, most famously by Hippolyte Taine, in the fields of sociology and fiction. The term ‘atmosphere’ comes for the first time to refer to the prevailing intellectual climate. The literal air becomes a metaphor for the shared air of the moral environment, and metaphors of breath proliferate – a point that will occupy us more fully near the end of this chapter. Although Douglas-Fairhurst concludes that impressions of the common cultural

History as contagion

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medium ‘repeatedly failed to come into clear focus’, the novels of the period do indicate the emergence of its unifying omnipresence.18 The concern of the Victorians to devise the terms for a ‘discourse of influence’ leads them to find in ‘contagion’ one of the most appropriate of those terms. For the purposes of the present study, it may also be more appropriate to refer to a ‘discourse of contagion’ rather than to a ‘discourse of influence’. The inescapably material phenomena of the epidemics of the period has offered precisely the master metaphor that is desired. The fascination with contagion may thus have been caused not just by the actual epidemics but by the longing of the Zeitgeist to discover, for many other reasons, precisely such an agency. One of the other reasons relates to the transition that Michel Foucault in particular has traced from an old to a new way of exercising political and social power. From a regime based on the menace of physical compulsion, there was emerging a more subtly disciplinary social order. The old order, often associated in our novels with swordsmen and military action, is being replaced by more covert forms of repression that are sometimes referred to female arbiters of opinion. For this new social order, the mechanism of contagion, with its subtle and mysterious way of imposing power over those it infects, becomes an effective metaphor. The image of contagion also relates to the mechanisms that regulate human relationships often thought to be non-conflictual like those between lovers or between writers and readers. Everywhere in this field of contagion, the normal state may be that of poise between disease and health as contagious and counter-contagious impulses maintain the perpetual tension of the power relationships. As literal episodes of contagion are metaphorically compared to military aggression and the other power struggles within society are compared to contagion in action, the distinction between literal and metaphorical is blurred. Jean Baudrillard has described this blurring, whereby ‘la possibilité de la metaphore s’évanouit dans tous les domaines’, as itself a process of contagion, ‘un processus de confusion et de contagion . . . viral d’indistinction’: aucun discours ne saurait plus être la métaphore de l’autre, puisque, pour qu’il y ait métaphore, il faut qu’il y ait des champs différentiels et des objets distincts. Or la contamination de toutes les disciplines met fin à cette possibilité. Métonymie totale, virale par définition (ou par indéfinition). Le thème viral n’est pas une transposition du champ biologique, car tout est touché en même temps et au même titre par la virulence, par la réaction en chaîne, la propagation aléatoire et insensée, la métastase.19 The vision of a world in which a contagious principle threatens to reduce all differences and distinctions to a generalized incoherence is sometimes thought to be especially characteristic of Gothic fiction. Along

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with the distinction between literal and metaphorical and between real and fictitious, such narratives collapse, Jerrold E. Hogle believes, all the other binary oppositions of our culture. It expresses with reference to gender differentiation the ‘threat of and longing for the deeply maternal abyss of non-identity’, and the menace goes beyond this: The deep Feminine level, as the Gothic mode has developed, is but one major form of a primordial dissolution that can obscure the boundaries between all western oppositions, not just masculinefeminine. . . . [The] spectral characters, images, and settings harbour the hidden reality that oppositions of all kinds cannot maintain their separations, that each ‘lesser term’ is contained in its counterpart.20 In the present study, however, only one of the principal novels under consideration may be related, and only in part, to Gothic fiction – Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story. Although my discussion does sometimes refer to Gothic romances and science fictions, I have preferred to concentrate upon works that do not collapse all the distinctions to the extent described by Baudrillard and Hogle. Rather than locating themselves in the Gothic atmosphere of timeless, psychological drives – ‘the hidden reality’ – these works attempt to convey an impression of historical reality. What may nevertheless be interesting is the sense in which works related to the tradition of nineteenth-century realism do also hint at ‘the hidden reality’. Since there may be no historical reality in the form of a Kantian Ding an sich, we understand that novels like ours are offering metaphorical accounts of a reality that remains problematic. Yet there may still seem to be some veritable reality, as implied by the undeniable fact of the death that strikes the victims of contagious disease. Seven of the eight principal novels under investigation here have been selected in part because they contain episodes of actual pestilential outbreaks. These permit us to distinguish between the ‘literal’ operation of contagion and the ‘metaphorical’ instances of contagion in other episodes. In the case of the eighth work, the transmission of disease occurs in a somewhat different but analogously literal manner that demonstrates a subtle violence. Contagion may exist therefore in some dimension of literal reality apart from the phenomena constructed by the novelists for which it provides such an appropriate metaphor. Still it proves difficult to maintain the distinction. Of those eight works, to identify them at this point, the majority are English novels, including both canonical works and others that merit rediscovery. Published in the decade 1852–62, they belong to what Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth considers, as we shall see, a moment of critical transition in English fiction. The novels are Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857), Ruffini’s Lavinia (1860) and Bulwer’s A Strange Story (1861–62).

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To this group I have added Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827, revised 1841–42) and Ainsworth’s Old Saint Paul’s (1841), both of which deal with outbreaks of the plague in the seventeenth century (the supposedly healthy century of the scholar-gipsy). While probably the Urtext for subsequent nineteenth-century narratives of contagion, I promessi sposi has also been recently ‘historicized’ as more relevant to the age of its composition than to the vicissitudes of an earlier century.21 Indeed Goethe himself, among the earliest and the most enthusiastic admirers of the novel, believed that it had little finally to do with the seventeenth century.22 His point can characterize Old Saint Paul’s as well, which introduces a Manzonian myth of plague into English literature, although its Restoration local colour obtrudes more disturbingly than do the corresponding elements in Manzoni. To balance, as it were, Manzoni’s early nineteenth-century novel and to give a still greater European resonance to this study, my eighth novel is a French work from the end of the century. Narrating events of the years 1872–74, Zola’s Le Docteur Pascal (1893) seems initially a case apart. Although Pascal has worked energetically as a physician during outbreaks of cholera, no epidemics occur in the diegetic present of the story. The great passion of his life, which occupies much of the plot, nevertheless concerns a phenomenon that we may treat as analogous to contagion. This is the pathology of morbid transmission in the case of the hereditary diseases that so abound in his own family. The clinical history of the Rougon-Macquart family, as traced in the earlier novels of the series too, is offered by both Zola and Pascal as a metaphorical microcosm of French social history. In the present context Zola offers, however, a microcosm not only of French but of European (at least western European) history. His story is also an important portion of the single microcosm of the nineteenthcentury European Zeitgeist that our eight novels may appear, when examined together, to reconstruct. While many other novels could probably have been chosen for a similar study, these eight novels prove, I believe, especially appropriate for the definition of a common field of contagion. On that field, which can be called history as well, compelling influences travel and spread from individual to individual, imposing themselves or meeting with resistance. Individuals are thus overpowered or overpower others in a process that suggests the disciplinary forces that succeed or fail in the maintenance of the social hierarchies. And as the powerful influences, for which contagion is such an effective metaphor, spread among individuals, they may seem to spread among the eight novels as well. The novels themselves become highly permeable and vulnerable to one another in this vision of their intertextuality. As the themes, the characters and the episodes in the various works interpenetrate and overlap, they are discovered to be versions and parts of a single master text. That hypothetical master text – the term, admittedly, may be too grand

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– is not organized in terms of a plot with a beginning, middle and end. Rather than the element of plot in an Aristotelian sense, I wish to focus upon typical situations that reveal the tensions and instabilities of the continuous and never definitively resolved power struggles. To create an impression of the single larger text, my argument also emphasizes the permeability of the individual novels by moving continually back and forth amongst them. The approach, which seeks to construct the larger historical vision of the local struggles, would seem to a New Critic to violate the integrity of the particular texts. There is the possibly arbitrary imposition, another exercise of power, of my view upon the texts. But the danger of imposing a single critical viewpoint inheres in all criticism, including even the New Criticism; indeed, all written representations of reality may violate the suppositional truth of the reality itself. The danger cannot, in any case, be avoided if the reality itself, the Ding an sich, remains elusive and can only be represented or reconstructed in written texts. The present study is thus another reconstruction of history, hopefully carrying reasonable conviction, at an additional synthetic remove from the representations proposed in the eight individual narratives. The significance of the term ‘history’ that my own text proposes is obviously different from that of standard history books. It refers less to particular historical facts and political events (which are only understood to be occurring in the background) than to the climate of the cultural environment. Basing my argument upon the eight novels and a number of other relevant texts, I wish to synthesize their representations of how it felt to be living in a certain nineteenth-century environment. The environment includes philosophical factors such as the prevailing notions about teleology, whether a divine providence operates in the affairs of men and whether events can be understood as the effects of definable causes. It also relates, as I have suggested, to relationships of power, perceived as appropriate or not, between the sexes and the generations and among the social classes and the representatives of various professions and ideological positions. And it refers to weapons, like those of sword, pen and money, that can be employed in the power struggles – or, in the governing metaphor, in the spreading contagion. This contagion is the mysterious energy that inheres in all the material facts and manifestations of an historical period, a hint at least of the invisible cause behind all the visible effects. While the particular manifestations of the contagious phenomena are peculiar to the nineteenth century, it is interesting to speculate that analogous phenomena may long have seemed endemic in the processes of history. The Iliad offers possibly the earliest example. In the endless chain of causes and effects, it would be difficult for Homer to postulate even in the theft of the apple of discord an original or First Cause for the Trojan War. So the poem begins – but not, I believe, arbitrarily – with an outbreak of pestilence. The divinely inflicted pestilence suggests an appropriate metaphorical climate in which preparations for war can develop.

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Angry because of an affront to one of his priests, Apollo shoots contaminated arrows for nine days into the encampment of the Achaians, and the pestilence rages from tent to tent. The god, as in many stories of pestilence, must be placated, but the placating sacrifice arouses further anger and desire for retaliation on behalf of the sacrificial victim. An unstoppable chain reaction of resentment spreads as a metaphorical continuation of the initial pestilence. And that chain reaction continues, we might say, not only into the devastating events of the Trojan War but, through its aftermath, into the rest of history. The association between disease and military strife informs all subsequent narratives of epidemics and all narratives of warfare – as, for example, during what Barbara W. Tuchman has called ‘the calamitous fourteenth century’.23 Amidst the calamities it is often unclear whether the plagues are being represented as the cause or the effect of the wars, and whether they are the primary or the secondary term of a metaphor. One other pre-nineteenth-century example may suffice. In an ‘extensive view’ that elaborates his own master text of history, Samuel Johnson has seen history as motivated by vain human desire, the ‘Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined’.24 At the same time, the poem employs the military metaphor of conquest of territory whereby the military successes of the conqueror inebriate him with a desire to overreach and ensure his eventual defeat. Our own works narrate a similarly organic connection between contagion and warfare in history. In Zola’s narrative, the pathological decay of a family becomes associated with the shedding of blood and other violence that accompanies the beginning and end of the Second Empire.25 In I promessi sposi the plague is associated with the brutal lawlessness of the bravi and the depredations of the soldiers of the Emperor, who bring the plague with them in their invasion of Lombardy.26 The principal instance in the nineteenth century of the cross-referencing of plague and war occurs in the Crimea, when British deaths resulting from infectious disease are ten times as many as deaths in battle.27 Among the novels examined in this study Two Years Ago and Lavinia specifically refer to the Crimean events. The equivalence that narratives necessarily indicate between the plague and phenomena of violence is treated extensively in the work of René Girard. He proposes two sorts of eminently destructive manifestations of the contagious principle, which it is convenient to discuss before considering the more ambiguous manifestations of contagion. Reminding us of the tendencies so starkly evident, according to Hogle, in the Gothic mode, the first involves biological and social processes of disintegration, and the second the disruptive release of libidinal energy. Narratives of the plague, Girard claims with respect to the first, always portray a contagious effect that entails the disintegration of society along with the decay of individual bodies. Anarchy spreads as part of the plague,

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and ‘in a sense, it is even more of a plague than the disease itself’.28 Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) provides notable examples when the plague causes whole populations to revert to barbarism: ‘their lawless spirit instigated them to violence; they took a delight in thrusting the possessors from their houses’. They rage over the countryside like a ‘locust visitation’ or ‘like a conquering army, burning – laying waste – murdering’ (II:ix). Among our principal texts, I promessi sposi and Old Saint Paul’s depict popular tumults and riots in times of plague as instances of hysterical mass contamination. In Syria, Bulwer’s Margrave is similarly menaced both by ‘the Pest of the East’ and by the ‘squalid populace’ that has degenerated into a ‘dastardly rabble’ (LXXIV). Kingsley, who has implied a connection in Alton Locke between the Chartist demonstrations of 1848 and cholera,29 introduces a character in Two Years Ago that makes the same association. In this case the confused Squire Trebooze finds that the danger comes not so much from the cholera as from Tom Thurnall’s campaign for sanitary measures that might debilitate the virulence of the epidemic. The preoccupation with the threat of cholera spreads in itself, Trebooze believes, a political contagion: ‘ “my opinion is, sir, that by what you’re doing up at Pentremochyn, you’re just spreading chartism – chartism, sir!” ’ (XIV). Chartism amounts in his mind to a version of that levelling process whereby, according to Girard, the hierarchies, boundaries and structures of differentiation that constitute a ‘cultural system’ collapse. The process ends in ‘death, which is the supreme undifferentiation’.30 The social or cultural disintegration is precisely what occurs in the narrative of fog and primal ooze in the first chapter of Bleak House, and it receives frequent attention in the novel thereafter. While Mr Turveydrop’s sense that ‘ “we have degenerated” ’ makes him complain that ‘ “a levelling age is not favorable to Deportment” ’ (XIV), Sir Leicester Dedlock broods even more obsessively about the degenerative process. Although possibly unaware of the contagion emanating from Tom-all-alone’s, he discerns signs all around him of a spreading revolutionary energy that is attacking all the structures of civilization: ‘ “upon my honor, upon my life, upon my reputation and principles, the floodgates of society are burst open, and the waters have – a – obliterated the landmarks of the framework of the cohesion by which all things are held together!” ’ (XL).31 Even without the presence of a literal plague or of some other physically infectious disease, the principle of contagion may trigger subtly degenerative processes. Vrettos discusses in this sense the study by Sir James Paget published in 1875 of ‘nervous mimicry’ or ‘neuromimesis’. Patients would involuntarily mimic an organic disease so that the disease would indeed ‘produce palpable effects on the body’. The ‘neurological contagion’ too could cause epidemics, as discerned in ‘the phenomenon of “the crowd” ’, and especially in the urban context one could speak of ‘a moral epidemic’.32 The crowd, increasing in numbers, threatens the constituted social order, as a tendency towards destructive violence spreads

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from individual to individual. Girard analyses such moral contagion as a version of the plague in his reading of a passage from Crime and Punishment: The plague is a transparent metaphor for a certain reciprocal violence that spreads, literally, like the plague. The appropriateness of the metaphor comes, obviously, from this contagious character. . . . Something harmful, which loses none of its virulence . . . is rapidly transmitted from individual to individual. Such, of course, are bacteria in an epidemic; so is violence when it is imitated. . . . Counterviolence turns out to be the same as violence. In cases of massive contamination, the victims are helpless, not necessarily because they remain passive but because whatever they do proves ineffective or makes the situation worse.33 Something like the plague may be manifested not only in episodes that show the disintegration of society but also in more private episodes that imply the disintegration of personality. As Fredric Jameson has noticed, I promessi sposi provides an interesting example of this pathology in the case of Don Rodrigo and Renzo.34 Learning of the threat that Don Rodrigo poses for Lucia, Renzo walks home ‘a passi infuriati . . . senza aver determinato quel che dovesse fare, ma con una smania addosso di far qualcosa di strano e di terribile’. Indeed the hitherto entirely peaceful and benevolent Renzo suddenly succumbs to bloodthirsty impulses, and the narrator reflects upon the double guilt of violent wrong-doers: ‘Sono rei non solo del male che commettono, ma del pervertimento ancora a cui portano gli animi degli offesi’ (II). Manzoni portrays evil as something that radiates outward from individual to individual; more than suffering evil, Jameson concludes, ‘one is contaminated by it’. Involving libidinal energy, the second sort of metaphorical contamination in Girard’s analysis is that whereby individuals come to replicate each other’s ‘desire’: ‘Desire is always an imitation of another desire’, which one seems involuntarily to catch as if it were a fever, and even ‘metaphysical desire is eminently contagious’.35 Girard deals in particular with the desire of two rivals for the same beloved, which tends to make them ‘doubles’ and to unite them in their ‘hallucinatory’ fascination with each other.36 This pattern too operates in many of the novels considered in this study and serves especially to relate Renzo again with Don Rodrigo. The desire that has the hallucinatory effect of cancelling clearcut identities and reducing individuals into mimetic doubles always contains an erotic component. This applies to its functioning not only amidst riotous crowds but in more civilized social contexts, as episodes of dancing sometimes show by making the dance too into an image of the plague. Of course the mimetic, mirroring movements of the dance can also restrain and discipline libidinal energy. An example is offered by the dancing

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school that belongs to Mr Turveydrop’s system in Bleak House for exploiting first his wife and then the son that so resembles her. The young ladies of the dancing class probably mimic, in this system, mechanical movements rather than unleash any desires. But more often dancing becomes associated in the novels with sexual transgressions. Trouble begins at a ball for the humble, Cinderella-like heroine of Ruth as she gazes from the sidelines at the happy middle-class dancers, whose movements evidently infect her with an unavowed longing to join them: ‘Bright colours flashed on the eye and were gone, and succeeded by others as lovely in the rapid movement of the dance. Smiles dimpled every face, and low tones of happiness murmured indistinctly through the room in every pause of the music’ (II). Then during a galop, boundaries of class are effectively defied, when in reaching Ruth at ‘her post in the ante-room’, the dangerously seductive Mr Bellingham erupts indeed into her life.37 On other occasions the mimetic desire released in dancing may pose even more dionysiac threats to civilized hierarchies and categories. In Lavinia desire thus breaks through heterosexual categories during a ball at the Roman palace of Prince Torlonia. Among many women that display a great deal of bare flesh, Lavinia dances with increasing wantonness, and the hero Paolo Mancini is shocked by the evident attraction between her and Juanita, Marchioness Delfuego y Arcos. The two women, who will subsequently have an affair, appear to dance more with one another than with their male partners. ‘Drunk with excitement’, Lavinia strikes the unhappy Paolo as a ‘Bacchante’ (I:xx). In Zola’s novel the unholy dancelike movements of two women suggest witchcraft, ‘un galop de sorcières’ before a blazing funeral pyre (XIII), in a scene that receives fuller treatment in my next chapter. A Strange Story too refers to a witch’s festival in describing an unruly dance. The stranger Margrave arrives at an evening party of Mrs Poyntz, the austere ‘Queen’ and arbitress of the civilized conventions of her provincial town, and initiates a tarantella on the piano. His frenzied performance propagates among the hitherto sedate guests a virulently contagious ‘desire for movement’: All were spellbound; even Mrs. Poyntz paused from her knitting, as the Fates paused from their web at the lyre of Orpheus. To this breathless delight, however, soon succeeded a general desire for movement. To my amazement, I beheld these formal matrons and sober fathers of families forming themselves into a dance, turbulent as a children’s ball at Christmas; and when, suddenly desisting from his music, Margrave started up, caught the skeleton hand of lean Miss Brabazon, and whirled her into the centre of the dance, I could have fancied myself at a witch’s sabbat. My eye turned in scandalized alarm towards Mrs. Poyntz. That great creature seemed as much astounded as myself. Her eyes were fixed on the scene in a stare of positive stupor. For the first time, no doubt, in her life, she was overcome,

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deposed, dethroned. The awe of her presence was literally whirled away. (XXVI) Besides a ‘witch’s sabbat’ the tarantella re-enacts, as the reference to ‘the skeleton hand’ implies, the medieval danse macabre – ‘which, of course, is inspired’, notes Girard, ‘by the plague’. The same dance occurs as a sort of set piece at the height of the plague in Ainsworth’s Old Saint Paul’s. The Earl of Rochester dressed as a skeleton and ‘a party of young gallants’ in costumes that mimic a pope, a cardinal, a monarch and other figures of authority enter the cathedral at midnight to dance ecstatically in the presence of King Charles himself. The ‘sacred building’ is ‘invaded’, as if militarily, and made ‘a scene of noise, riot, and confusion – its vaulted roofs, instead of echoing the voice of prayer, or the choral hymn, resounded with loud laughter, imprecations, and licentious discourse’. Less scandalized, however, than the ‘dethroned’ Mrs Poyntz (the ‘Queen of the Hill’) in Bulwer’s novel, King Charles enjoys the entertainment, which Ainsworth’s scholarly narrator refers to the historical tradition of the ‘Dance of Macabre, or Dance of Death, commonly called the Dance of Paul’s’. Various medieval and renaissance paintings of the dance have prompted Rochester and his friends to repeat the anti-ritual or, as Girard might say, have contaminated them with the desire to imitate sacrilegious acts. According to Ainsworth, the tradition or the contagion has also continued, ‘just as in our own time the lively Parisians made the cholera, while raging in their city, the subject of a carnival pastime’ (III:iii). Published the year after Ainsworth’s novel, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ by E.A. Poe contains, as a brilliant set-piece, one of the most obvious literary examples of the Dance of Death. The thousand guests of the Prince who live in barricaded isolation from the plague raging outside the castle believe that their wild dancing is exorcizing the plague. Ironically the dance instead mimics the spread of the contagion which is present amongst them, until ‘one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall’. As two forms of menace to civilized order, the plague and the ‘carnival pastime’ have frequently seemed to mirror one another.38 Sander L. Gilman has also included mental illness in the category of menacing disease and related it in terms of the carnivalesque to the Feast of Fools, as depicted in a copperplate by Breughel the Elder. The well-known description of Dickens of a dance held on Boxing Day 1851 for the inmates of St Luke’s Hospital for the Insane constitutes for Gilman a Victorian account of such a festival. The Christmas season, as the reference in Bulwer’s novel to a ‘turbulent . . . children’s ball at Christmas’ further suggests, provides an appropriate moment for such revelry in the world outside the madhouse too. Having observed on his way to St Luke’s the riotous behaviour

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of drunken revellers in the streets of Smithfield, Dickens reflects on the collapse of clear boundaries between the regions of sanity and insanity. Such an atmosphere of infectious liberation, Gilman concludes, permits ‘Saturnalian’ exuberance that is ‘felt to be within bounds of Victorian propriety’.39 In this kind of analysis, the apparent breakdown of order becomes a therapeutic activity rather than a symptom of disease. We turn, therefore, from the strictly destructive, degenerative aspects of the plague-like phenomena to their more ambiguous characteristics. What looks like disease to some can by others be ‘invested with positive cultural value’, as Pater implies with his own metaphors of plague and contagion: ‘When the actual relics of the antique were restored to the world’, he observes of the renaissance in the essay on Winckelmann, ‘in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if an ancient plague pit had been opened: all the world took the contagion of the life of nature and of the senses.’40 In Pater’s own view, the contagion may actually tend to cure the Christian of his diseased asceticism. With respect to the release of specifically libidinous energy, medical authorities have also wondered whether the plague might in some sense be repairing its own damage. The distinguished Swedish physician Axel Munthe, who ministered heroically and tirelessly to the victims during many pestilential outbreaks of the 1870s in France and Italy, thus reflected on a surprising episode in Naples. While attending an old Abbess dying of cholera in her convent, an irresistible impulse caused him to act in a most uncharacteristic way, which may recall the scene in Ainsworth’s novel of the profanation of the cathedral. He suddenly embraced the pretty young nun that stood near him: ‘I felt the tumultuous beating of her heart against my heart’. His behaviour, he decided, might illustrate a sort of Darwinian law involving the struggle of the species for survival: The battle is regulated in its minutest details by an immutable law of equilibrium between Life and Death. Wherever this equilibrium is upset by some accidental cause, be it pestilence, earthquake or war, vigilant Nature sets to work at once to readjust the balance, to call forth new beings to take the place of the fallen. Compelled by the irresistible force of a Natural Law, men and women fall in each other’s arms, blindfolded by lust, unaware that it is Death who presides over their mating, his aphrodisiac in one hand, his narcotic in the other. Death, the giver of Life, the slayer of Life, the beginning and the end.41 Spreading with ‘irresistible force’, the same contagion simultaneously propagates fatal disease and the lust that renews life. After the arousal of sexual desire, according to other, less mythically inclined medical authorities, a contagious energy may initiate pregnancy on the strictly cellular level. A contagion that is presumably different from that of the pestilence

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is transmitted by the sperm. ‘The sperm operates by contact, the same as a contagion or decaying body acts’, Rudoph Leuckart states in 1853: ‘Not through intimate relations with the egg, but in this way: that it imparts a certain motion to the molecules of the egg which transmitted from atom to atom produces new arrangements, new forms and new qualities.’42 To become pregnant resembles being smitten by a spreading infection. The analogy between the developing foetus and a ‘decaying body’ may also remind us that philosophers have often contemplated life itself as a contagious disease, a corruption of the original, inanimate purity of things. Regarding the inseparability of life – at least human life – and microbes, Baudrillard has discussed the complexity of their ‘symbiose totale’. The microbe is the Other – ‘l’Autre absolu’ – that man cannot do without and with which man exists in the endless chain of continuing life: ‘ils s’enchaînent, et cet enchaînement est comme prédestiné, personne ne peut le penser autrement, ni l’homme ni le bacille’.43 In an antiseptic world without microbes – a condition, in Baudrillard’s terminology, of utter ‘transparence’ – an immune-deficient life would lose its meaning and capacity to survive. Such immune-deficiency is precisely the condition of the Martians in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), a novel that reflects the awareness in the nineteenth century too of the value of germs.44 In the manner of homeopathic doses of poison, exposure to contagion not only causes disease but triggers the production of healthprotecting antibodies. Humanity thus survives in the novel of Wells because pestilential bacteria have also been decimating it through the ages: ‘By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright on the earth, and it is his against all comers’ (II:viii). (When they invade the earth, the Martians do not bring their atmosphere of germ-free ‘transparence’ with them, and their aggressive tactics include blackening and poisoning the air with ‘a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour’ [I:xv].) Foucault observes the possibility for associating disease with a curative agency in the political sphere, where contagion similarly produces its own antidote. In analysing the disciplinary provisions devised by seventeenthcentury governors of plague-ridden cities, he finds that the plague curiously gives shape to a utopian dream – ‘l’utopie de la cité parfaitement gouvernée’. A symbiosis seems virtually to unite the phenomenon of disintegration with its opposite: La peste comme forme à la fois réelle et imaginaire du désordre a pour corrélatif médical et politique la discipline. Derrière les dispositifs disciplinaires, se lit la hantise des «contagions», de la peste, des révoltes, des crimes, du vagabondage, des désertions, des gens qui apparaissent et disparaissent, vivent et meurent dans le désordre.45 While the governors could derive from the disorder the empowering justification for their imposition of order and discipline, the masses being

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governed might invert the terms of cause and effect. The desire of government to impose discipline might, that is, be the cause rather than the effect of the pestilential outbreak. During the cholera epidemic of 1831–32 the stricken proletariat evidently suspected that the authorities had purposely introduced the contagion into the urban districts in which the poor were too numerous and troublesome.46 Power could be exercised both by fostering disorder and by disciplining it. Discipline and disorder, the apparently contrasting terms also apply to military campaigns and to dancing, which are themselves imitations, or metaphors, of the plague in action. The terms parallel the ‘Life and Death’ proposed in Munthe’s phenomenology of contagion. The process of history too, which is another imitation of, or which is imitated by, the plague in action, exemplifies the same characteristics. While an essentially destructive or deathly process, history also ensures its own continuance by creating ever new material upon which to perform its destruction. But this is somewhat to anticipate the argument of this chapter. In Girard’s conception, the positions of health and disease collapse from structuralist opposition into post-structuralist identity – or into the condition of mimetic doubles. The neutral mechanism of mimesis or contagion, whereby disease can emerge as health or health as disease, thus maintains the dual potentiality of disorder and discipline: ‘mimesis, like all primitive gods, has two “sides,” one that disrupts the community and another one that holds it together’. The challenge is to harness the ‘normal human phenomena’ of mimesis on behalf of creativity, to ‘[turn] the conflictual and destructive mimesis . . . into the nonconflictual mimesis of training and learning, indispensable to the elaboration and perpetuation of human societies’.47 On the microcosmic level of an individual literary work as well, the ‘mimetic scheme’ can function in a destructive or a creative direction. In the first case, the collapse of oppositions into doublings involves an unhealthy ascendancy of insanity – a ‘delirium, in the midst of a catastrophe as definitive for the author as for the work’. In the other case, the mimetic patterns emerge through the author’s strong and illuminating sanity: his ‘progress in perceptiveness . . . casts on mimetic desire and the doubles the best light available. In the first case the obsession masters the works, in the second the work masters the obsession.’48 The impulse to imitate is not necessarily then an ‘irresistible’ obsession, as the contagious force is often thought to be; it can be mastered. The actual mechanisms of ‘delirium’ (Foucault’s ‘disorder’) and ‘sanity’ (‘discipline’) – whereby contagion either masters or is mastered – remain mysterious, and other possible explanations must be considered. In a further effort to explain how contagion or mimesis occurs, Vrettos introduces the Shelleyan term ‘sympathy’, which operates for good or ill in a very broad range of human events.49 All sorts of ‘acts of sympathy’ transmit states of mind and feelings from individual to individual, suggesting that

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‘emotions and impressions as well as diseases [may] be contagious’. Not only in private meetings among friends, but in the theatre, for example, contagious germs are communicated. Actors exercise their power, according to a treatise that Vrettos cites, published by Alexander Bain in 1859, to ‘[manifest] emotion . . . so as to render it infectious to all beholders’.50 When reading, as it is thus reasonable to speculate too, a person can be contaminated by a ‘poisonous’ book like the one mentioned in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Other books can, in contrast, insinuate healing influences. (The point naturally has implications for the very novels that we are considering: Deirdre d’Albertis has considered Ruth, for example, a contagious book.51) Any situation that demonstrates the largely involuntary susceptibility of a human being to influences coming from without may imply the ubiquitous contagious mechanism. Here the term ‘permeability’ that I have used in connection with the boundaries surrounding individual works of fiction comes into play. Vrettos points to the widespread awareness among Victorians of their ‘psychic and somatic permeability’,52 which like the impulses to imitate and to sympathize can function in contradictory ways. As a positive potentiality, the permeability of the boundaries of the body and of the psychic identity permits the contagion of healthy influences. Characters that radiate health, to return to concrete situations in our novels, counteract disorderly contagion like that unleashed in some of the episodes of dancing. In A Strange Story, curiously, the charismatic Margrave who has played the infectious tarantella at Mrs Poyntz’s party can at other times appear as one of these transmitters of health: ‘Never have I seen a human face so radiant’, Fenwick has reflected on an earlier occasion, noticing the ‘expression of contagious animation and joyousness’ which must derive ‘from the contagious vitality of that rarest of all rare gifts in highly-civilized circles, – perfect health’ (XXIII). In the other novels it is often the heroines that communicate an energy of health – moral, physical or both. These include Lucia of I promessi sposi and Grace Harvey of Two Years Ago, who seem even to be vehicles for the transmission, as their names imply, of divine illumination and grace. Also associated in this respect with light, Esther Summerson of Bleak House counteracts by her very presence anywhere the power of disease, as we are given to understand in her influence on Caddy Jellyby: Caddy had a superstition about me, which had been strengthening in her mind ever since that night long ago, when she had lain asleep with her head in my lap. She almost – I think I must say quite – believed that I did her good whenever I was near her. Now, although this was such a fancy of the affectionate girl’s, that I am almost ashamed to mention it, still it might have all the force of a fact when she was really ill. (L)

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The ‘psychic and somatic permeability’ of Caddy here to Esther’s benign influence also involves the permeability of her own mind and body to each other. What she ‘believed’, in her ‘superstition’, affects the physical ‘fact’ of her illness. Indeed in narrating the course of diseases, all the novels imply the inseparability of psychological and physical factors. Even a disease like cholera, which one might suppose to involve a purely physical pathology, appears in Kingsley’s novel to submit to psychological conditioning. As a negative manifestation of this permeability some figures in the story contract the illness and go on to die from it at least in part because of their moral weaknesses and desires. During outbreaks of plague in other stories the psychology of the crowd functions to hasten the spread of contagion and the death toll. As a physical and psychological phenomenon – and a literal and metaphorical phenomenon – the plague is therefore propagated not only through the mechanisms of violence but through imitation, doubling, desire and sympathy. Its assaults are facilitated by the permeability of the individual subjects, who can nevertheless master to some extent its insidious menace and turn it into a benign agency. Its effects include both disintegration (involving disorder and death) and a creative reaction (implying discipline and an effort to reconstitute life). The spread of such contagion implies a conception of history that I wish now to examine in a more explicitly ideological sense. The interpenetration of psychic and somatic components of disease in individual human cases provides a model for the interpenetration of immaterial and material factors in larger historical processes. The psychic or immaterial components may on this more abstract level be referred to imaginative or ideological notions of history as something that happens in invisible dimensions. The somatic or material component refers instead to the actual physical conditions and events that constitute problems for public health authorities. Because of their interpenetration, the imaginative, immaterial, or invisible phenomena cannot be clearly separated from the material, physical facts that embody them. We may notice this inseparability by attempting to deal first with the material component. The cultural disorders that are a central concern of our historical narratives regard precisely the welfare of human bodies, and this physicality of the cultural problem deserves some emphasis. Insistence upon ‘the physical basis of life’, to appropriate the title of Huxley’s essay of 1868, rather than upon some spiritual basis, itself constitutes a significant ideological position in the nineteenth-century debates. Pater thus appreciates the renaissance recovery of the ‘life of the senses’, and Carlyle’s Diogenes Teufelsdröckh concedes, although regretfully, that ‘the diseases of the Liver’ may signify more than ‘the terrors of Conscience’.53 And while Sartor Resartus attends ironically to man as an animal and digestive mechanism designed to produce excrement, so Kingsley’s Two Years Ago considers seriously the relevance of sewers to

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human well-being. Concerns about urban sewage emerge in Bleak House and to a lesser extent the other novels too, as relevant to important public debates about sanitary reforms. The novels do not then present conditions of disease and urban squalor in order to hint more importantly at moral or spiritual conditions. The narratives really do concern literally and materially, as individual and social problems, the epidemics of physical disease that they narrate. Novelists evidently consider themselves as allied with physicians and public health authorities in their solicitude for the physical health and comfort of their society. Indeed, apart from I promessi sposi, physicians figure as protagonists or near protagonists in all of our novels, and their scientific approach to human suffering appears generally to offer more hope than the ministrations of priests. According to Lawrence Rothfield, the ‘realism’ associated with nineteenth-century fiction is precisely that of a ‘medical perspective’, and the novelists that he treats imitate the techniques and respect the values of medical practice: For Balzac, Flaubert, and Eliot, the terms comprehension, concrete, individual, and sincere bear connotations that can be described without exaggeration as medical. Comprehending social totality, in the realistic novel, means defining that totality not only as a milieu (with the biological overtones that word implies), but as a pathological milieu. Capturing the concrete realistically means maintaining faith that details will prove to be ‘both particular and typical’ in the same way that medical diagnosis assumes that signs and symptoms will resolve into cases of disease. The individual, in turn, is defined in realistic fiction as a pathologically embodied person whose limits and potentialities stem from the limits and potentialities – death and growth – imposed by organic finitude. Finally, realism’s sincerity is analogous to the disinterested benevolence claimed by the medical profession.54 Yet the vision of the novelists does not coincide entirely with that of medical practitioners. In some respects its field of ‘comprehension’ is less vast, and in others it exceeds the boundaries of medical and scientific reality. With reference to the contagious phenomena of the ‘pathological milieu’, the novelists may represent only indirectly the sexually transmitted diseases that proliferated so uncontrollably and became the subject of such intense public controversy.55 The fictional plots treated in this study do largely concern transgressive sexual behaviour, as the reference to the lesbian episode in Lavinia has already suggested. Would-be seducers or rapists threaten the heroines of I promessi sposi, Old Saint Paul’s, Ruth, Two Years Ago, Lavinia, and A Strange Story. The heroines of Bleak House and Lavinia are illegitimate, while Gaskell’s Ruth and Zola’s Clotilde themselves produce illegitimate offspring, in Clotilde’s case the result of incest. The phenomena of prostitution and male libertinage figure so

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prominently as to encourage the conclusion that the cultural disorders being examined are largely to be associated with sexual practices. It surprises us therefore that syphilis, which duly appears in eighteenth-century novels and which will occur again in Ibsen’s Ghosts and Zola’s Nana, seems in our particular novels a taboo. Or perhaps the ghostly presence of venereal infection, which Hall has discerned in Great Expectations, is also being intimated in the various outbreaks of the plague, cholera, typhus and possibly smallpox. As Frank Mort has demonstrated, public opinion locates the breeding ground for diseases like cholera and typhus fever especially in areas of urban degradation in which sexual immorality also flourishes.56 So in the confusion of causes and effects, these diseases become at least in part the effect of immorality and themselves a sort of venereal disease. Ruth too hints at the causal connection in that Bellingham is the agent responsible both for the heroine’s illegitimate pregnancy and for her fatal contraction of typhus fever. The fact that the second event occurs some twelve years after the first does not erase the impression that Gaskell may have intended a moral paradigm of cause and effect.57 In only hinting at the venereal infections that strike ‘pathologically embodied persons’, the novelists may seem more limited in their vision than the medical practitioners. But in other respects their vision of the ‘pathological milieu’ is more holistic. The fictional narratives challenge the strictly material and medical analysis by figuring a contagion that is spreading in regions of the imagination or possibly the unconscious. We proceed more specifically here to the sense in which imaginative vision penetrates or interpenetrates the concern with ‘the physical basis of life’ and the debates about sewage and sanitary reforms. The common field of contagion, as I have called it, is adumbrated in these novels with respect to imaginary spatial and temporal coordinates. In terms of space, there is first a horizontal east/west axis, which is related both to real and to imaginary geography. Contagion usually comes from the east – admittedly a commonplace.58 Literally, the plague in London of 1664–65, as the narrator of Old Saint Paul’s reports it, has been imported from the Levant. It has arrived both directly with a certain ship that has sailed from a Levantine port and indirectly with goods coming from the infected cities of Hamburg and Amsterdam. As for the Asiatic cholera, the worst strains have apparently originated in India and spread to Europe and then Great Britain with alarming rapidity in a series of epidemics of the 1820s.59 The geography of London, divided between East End and West End, serves further to identify the east as source of a contagion that threatens the healthier west.60 In the literary imagination, however, the east naturally becomes chiefly a symbolic location, as the eastern fantasies of another London resident may conveniently remind us. De Quincey, that is, finds in the opium imported from the east a catalytic agent that produces his ‘Oriental dreams’ of ‘unimaginable horror’:

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Under the connecting feelings of tropical heat and vertical sun-lights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. . . . I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.61 The burial site seems a particularly lurid version of the ‘ancient plague pit’ of Pater and the pits that Manzoni and Ainsworth so graphically imagine as depositories of unceremoniously piled and rotting corpses. One may recall too the loathsome, overcrowded and rat-infested ‘berryin ground’ to which Lady Dedlock returns to die in Bleak House.62 In contrast with the pestilential east, De Quincey naturally constructs a region of health and sanity in the west, or more precisely north-west (which will actually become for him the Lake District), from which he has been exiled. During his nocturnal wanderings through the labyrinthine alleys of the East End, he fancies himself searching for the way back to this home: ‘[I attempted] to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage.’63 With respect to London geography, Old Saint Paul’s traces the diffusion of not only the plague but the Great Fire of 1666 that begins of course in the east (in Pudding Lane) and then spreads westward. Other versions of the pestilential east include Tom-all-alone’s, in a novel in which the ‘east wind’ (considered as a possible title for the novel)64 always blows ‘an uncomfortable sensation’ into Jarndyce’s consciousness (VI). Lavinia similarly characterizes ‘the haunts of vice and misery’ in the London East End as ‘foul excrescences’ upon the urban body that elsewhere, in the west, possesses a semblance of ‘proud, rich, and prudish’ health (II:vi). A Strange Story moves some of its characters all the way east to a clearly imaginary Syria, where the plague is forever raging, and finally to Australia. Margrave has been contaminated in Syria and has carried an infection from there back to England. The appearance of radiant health, which an eastern elixir has granted him, turns out to be a symptom of a wasting moral disease, as in cases of longevity in novels by Haggard and Stoker.65 In Two Years Ago Tom Thurnall has lived adventurously in foreign parts including China and Australia, where he has twice contracted cholera. Although he is not himself a source of infection now, his arrival in the west of England from Australia coincides with certain signs that enable him to announce an imminent outbreak of cholera. Among the many writers that situate an eastern danger in their international geography,

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there is obviously Henry James. Daisy Miller, for example, moves from the apparent health of an American town to Rome and contracts in the Colosseum the infectious ‘Roman fever’ that is again associated with sexual transgression. More dangerous even than the threat of contagion to physical health and of sexual seduction to individual moral health, the mythical east seems to menace the integrity of an entire national culture. An impressive analysis by David Faulkner of Edwin Drood thus shows that emanations from the Asiatic opium den – wherein sexual and racial boundaries dissolve – implicate various threats of the colonies to the mother country. As structural oppositions between the robust Anglo-Saxon integrity of Crisparkle and the corrupt colonialized deviousness of Jasper also collapse, we perceive the uncanny – and we might say Girardian – identity of the two. Along with many other patterns of doubling and imitation, the effect associates the imperial centre with the imperial periphery: ‘[We] glimpse England itself as a colonizable, indeed a colonized space. English culture appears highly permeable, pieced together from difference and otherness.’66 Besides menacing a permeable western culture with its contagion, the east can, in an instance of ‘symbolic reversal’, serve as a factor of stability that disciplines, in Foucault’s terms, the disorder. For the east is also the ‘Orient’ that Edward Said has studied as the construction by the western imagination of its own ‘Other’ – the label applied, as we have seen, to the second term of Baudrillard’s man/microbe symbiosis. This Other loses its threatening aspect insofar as European culture has ‘gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self’.67 The particular characteristics of the surrogate self differ from one novel to another, but as Said’s point suggests, that other identity always comes from underneath just as much as it comes from the east. To the extent that the contagion coming from below positively liberates a buried or repressed identity, as it does for Esther Summerson, the resulting disease may further individual fulfilment rather than impose a defeat. The distinction that Sontag draws between contagious disease impinging from without as a penalty and illness originating from within as self-expression is partially erased in Esther’s case.68 For her disease comes simultaneously as the contagion from without (from the east) and as the liberation of a buried internal energy. In addition to the horizontal axis of east/west, the field of contagion is therefore defined by a vertical axis of low/high. The coordinates refer, with respect to actual urban topography, to the lower, typically poorer districts and to the higher, typically middle-class districts, of which ‘The Hill’ in A Strange Story provides an excellent example. The sewage, a significant factor in many analyses, flows from high to low into what may be unhealthy open sewers.69 The study by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White of

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various ‘hierarchies of high and low’ relates the topographical lowness to low portions of the human anatomy and to repressed portions of the human identity. Like the Orient, the urban slums with their open sewers and disreputable inhabitants are an exotic site of lowness that becomes the subject of intense and fascinated investigation in the nineteenth century. In the sewers which so engross sanitary reformers the final ‘truth’, after one has torn away the last ‘veil’, comes into view, as Stallybrass and White find elaborated in Les Misérables (to which we may add Our Mutual Friend).70 The truth evidently involves the repulsive but also dangerously attractive physical and psychic drives that respectable bourgeois citizens have to repress in their normal daily life: while forgetting the ‘bodily “low” ’ as ‘unmentionable’, these citizens can make the ‘city’s “low” . . . a site of obsessive preoccupations’.71 So the higher or normal identity constantly finds ways to admit the existence of the lower identity and to define itself, albeit with anxiety, in unstable opposition to it. Such considerations carry the stories of contagion well beyond the purely medical perspective that ought still, I have said, to indicate one of their principal meanings. Without then losing its medical characteristics, the material environment has become an imaginary site of psychic and cultural interactions. The contagion, which there threatens both permeable individuals and permeable cultures, also functions as a magnetic field in which those individuals and those cultures experience self-identifying attractions to versions of an Other. The spatial oppositions – in terms of the axes of east/west and of low/high – can collapse into a recognition of doubling. While operating with respect to those spatial coordinates, the contagion spreads along temporal axes too and relates to a new conception of historical time.72 The novelists imagine not only a new region in space like that associated with a mythical east but also a new temporal medium that derives from a new concept of causality. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth suggests that around 1850 there occurs a shift in the balance of popular consensus regarding ultimate causality – the conception, that is, of what causes events to happen in time. The older conception, over which divine providence or ‘Cause itself’ presides, locates causes in the past and observes human beings bearing the necessary consequences in the present. The newer conception finds such temporal explanations less satisfactory and cannot locate causes so easily. Without ‘Cause itself’, one must remain content, as in the detective story, with ‘particular causes’, the effects of which are diffused only in a particular segment of history: Something happens to narrative in the middle of the nineteenth century, something favourable to the historical aesthetic in which the detective code makes sense, and unfavourable to the kind of providential explanation that operates so prominently in novels before mid-century.73

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‘Our feverish contact’

The older assumption of a ‘purposive’ universe constituted ‘for those who held it’, according to Lionel Trilling, ‘not merely a comfortable idea but nothing less than a category of thought; its extirpation was a psychic catastrophe’.74 As if to forestall such a catastrophe, various characters in the novels maintain the older faith in God’s purposes even amidst pestilential disasters. Indeed they almost take comfort in the outbreak of a plague because rather than threatening the assumption of a providentially purposive universe the event may serve to confirm that assumption. The plague in this sort of reasoning constitutes a divine punishment for sin and proves God’s justice. The First Cause is also the Primal Curse. The ‘Supreme Power’, as the fanatical Solomon Eagle of Old Saint Paul’s refers to it, is not then absent but terribly present in the immense disasters that defy all human powers (V:i).75 The divine power operates precisely as a contagious principle. The pestilences strike indiscriminately, however, killing the just and the unjust alike, and the view that the novels as total fictional structures convey never supports the convictions of Solomon and fanatics like him. From Manzoni onwards, it appears that insofar as the novelists believe in divine providence, their faith relates to a more merciful God, who would not unleash such indiscriminate havoc upon his creatures.76 Not God, but human beings, as Tom Thurnall so passionately argues, cause cholera epidemics to break out because of their ignorance and disrespect for principles of sanitation. Although Tom himself does not believe in God at this point, many sanitary reformers could thus maintain faith, at least, in a benevolent and providential natural order that men and women ignore at their peril. ‘All God’s judgements by fever and cholera’, as F.D. Maurice states in 1853, ‘are judgements for neglect of His physical laws. . . . [Men must feel] that it is their business to care for their fellows and for the earth’.77 The impression that God does not actively punish but regretfully observes human beings that punish themselves informs an important and passionate debate about sewage in the middle decades of the century. Providing another instance of the interpenetration of the immaterial and material dimensions of history, God becomes relevant, as in Sartor Resartus, to man’s production of excrement. The providentialists, whose views Kingsley introduces especially into Yeast, maintain, according to Christopher Hamlin’s useful summary in ‘Providence and Putrefaction’, that the Creator has established laws regarding the natural economy of matter.78 As stewards of Creation, human beings must respect these laws, which involve the recycling of organic wastes. Instead of allowing sewage to accumulate dangerously in cities so as to cause epidemics and instead of expelling sewage wastefully into the sea, the sanitary authorities should remove organic wastes to arable land. Buried in the soil, what had been the cause of disease would be providentially and marvellously transformed into fertilizing agents and blessings for human civilization. A ‘vision of a

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utopia based on sewage recycling’79 thus emerges in the works of Kingsley and others, which implies that disease forms no necessary part of the divinely planned economy. In that economy, it is interesting again to notice that the underground or ‘low’ regions can become sources of health rather than disease, of Life rather than Death. Still the exponents of providence fail to win this debate, and in the novels too the faith in a providential and temporally ordered system of causes and effects gives way to Ermarth’s ‘historical aesthetic’. But before I pursue Ermarth’s analysis of the development, it may be useful to introduce some of Jameson’s terms into the discussion. Like Ermarth, Jameson does not locate historical causes, such as the cause behind the outbreak of contagious phenomena, in an identifiable past. With reference to Louis Althusser, he rejects as uninteresting both Newtonian ‘mechanistic’ causality and Hegelian ‘expressive’ causality that permit the pinpointing of particular causative factors or truths in any historical period. While all powerful, the underlying Necessity of events remains mysterious and is best defined in Spinoza’s phrase ‘absent cause’: History is therefore the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others. Necessity is not in that sense a type of content, but rather the inexorable form of events . . . the formal effects of what Althusser, following Spinoza, calls an ‘absent cause.’ Conceived in this sense, History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. . . . We may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.80 The irresistible ‘Necessity’ that we experience as ‘what hurts’ can in the context of the present discussion be identified, I believe, as an omnipresent contagious principle. It respects no ethical structure, and, although it is not reified, no one can escape its touch. We are the more helpless because the mechanisms of its transmission remain as mysterious as the hypothetical germs or miasmic influences that the medical investigators were seeking in vain to isolate. The effects are terribly visible in diseased bodies, but the causative agency can only be theorized. The effects of history, to distinguish them from the literally diseased bodies, are secondarily discernible in written texts, such as the novels that we are presently studying. Again, the cause itself, which is beyond that of the particular authors of the texts, is forever absent. The written texts, according to Althusser and Jameson, do not themselves paradoxically create that absent cause, as some fashionable theories imply, but they

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rather reflect a ghostly cause that may be present in some other unknown dimension. The unknown or absent region cannot in any case be the dwelling of a benevolent providence since the power that it emanates constantly frustrates our desires. That power may also differ here from Schopenhauer’s tormenting Will in that for Schopenhauer the Will is present in our very condition of desiring and not hostile to that condition. Our pain as creatures in history derives, moreover, less from clashes with a palpably present Necessity than from the baffling absence by which the source of Necessity eludes our efforts to control it. In this view of Necessity, Jameson expresses a pessimism that distinguishes his position from those of Girard, Foucault and Munthe, who believe that contagion may function in two contrasting directions. Girard proposes, we recall, the possibility that contagion or the ‘mimetic scheme’ can function creatively to inspire an author to identify himself as a controlling agent rather than a controlled and obsessed patient. And for Foucault and Munthe the contagion may similarly provoke disciplining reactions or life-giving effects that counteract the tendency towards disorder and death. The difference between Jameson and the others may involve, however, only a difference in emphasis. What seem for the latter to be the more positive manifestations of the phenomenon may indicate only the sinister wiliness – or ‘ruses’ – of contagion. To personify for a moment, as a rhetorical convenience, a phenomenon that has no personal qualities, we might attribute to contagion an instinct for self-preservation. The contagion that makes everything happen does not wish to die out for lack of material on which to impinge. For Jameson contagious Necessity would therefore promote the existence of the very beings that it hurts and perhaps even the desires that it refuses. So too for Girard, Foucault and Munthe would history be continuing stubbornly, in the positive aspect of contagion, to encourage the forms of life on which it can, vampire-like, nourish itself. In this respect Necessity and contagion would be informing both the aggressive and the defensive mechanisms that are locked together symbiotically in the same conflict – ‘united in the strife which divided them’. Terming the wily figure ‘Death’, Munthe makes his conception of the symbiosis particularly explicit in the passage already cited: Death ‘presides’ over the act of ‘mating’ – ‘Death the giver of Life, the slayer of Life’. In his fascination with Death, Munthe also resembles another physician, Kingsley’s Thurnall, who continually desires ‘ “a good stand-up fight with an old enemy” ’, the cholera (and the breeding-grounds of contagion) personified or demonized further as ‘ “my devil” ’. For Munthe the lifelong enemy is a ‘colleague’ as well: ‘I continued to take a keen interest in Death long after I had lost all interest in Life. I could still watch the approach of my grim colleague with the same keenness I used to watch him with when I was a student at the Salle Ste. Claire, hoping against hope to wrench his terrible secret from him’.81

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Yet, unlike Munthe, Jameson does not wish, I believe, to personify Necessity as a wily phenomenon. And the tendency in nineteenth-century teleology may be away from personifying figurations of a causative agency. The enemy or the Other with respect to whom (or to which) human beings must identify themselves is increasingly, as faith in Providence fades too, an impersonal and bafflingly impalpable force. In such impersonal terms, then, the narratives that we are considering debate the issue of causality – appearing both to propose the possibility for causality and to undermine that proposition. The debate may respect categories associated with the Russian formalists, who have defined the terms of récit (belonging to the domain of the narrator) and histoire (pertaining to the inferred author). The narrator constructs in this scheme impressions of coherent causality that are based on the merely raw data of the author.82 The distinction emerges most clearly in I promessi sposi which supposedly derives from the nearly raw data of the histoire written – badly – by an anonymous seventeenth-century author. Besides this document, the narrator has drawn on the accounts of other historians, whose texts are specifically criticized for their incoherence about causes and effects. In constructing his récit, the narrator has therefore attempted especially to focus an impression of coherent causality, employing what Manzoni’s famous letter to M. Chauvet terms ‘une des plus importantes facultés de l’esprit humain’. This is the ability, de saisir, entre les événements, les rapports de cause et d’effet, d’antériorité et de conséquence, qui les lient; de ramener à un point de vue unique, et comme par une seule intuition, plusieurs faits séparés par les conditions du temps et de l’espace, en écartant les autres faits que n’y tiennent que par des coïncidences accidentelles.83 Yet while present in Fermo e Lucia, the first version of the story, that sense of inner necessity and causality becomes attenuated in the subsequent versions.84 Manzoni comes to distrust his intuitions about causes and to believe, according to Massimo Verdicchio, that a ‘novel can be faithful to history only insofar as history itself follows an orderly path’ – as it does not.85 The novel can thus function only as a supplément to history, in the sense of Jacques Derrida that it replaces or supplies an element that history itself lacks.86 Particularly with respect to providence as a causal agent, Manzoni thus indicates, in Franco Triolo’s view, the impossibility of ever perceiving ‘the why, when, how of a specific divine action’.87 Still more specifically, among the other novelists, Zola claims to do without any principle of causality. In applying the experimental method of Claude Bernard, his procedure supposedly ignores the ‘pourquoi des choses’ and limits itself to explaining ‘le comment, pas davantage’.88 The element of histoire would thus prevail entirely over the element of récit in his narratives. In life as in narrative, the absence of providence and any substitute for

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a primary cause has led, according to Ermarth, to the ‘historical aesthetic’ whereby the human community makes do with what is present. Instead of inhabiting a dimension of eternal values, in which the same stories regarding man’s interactions with God, as original First Cause, are forever being repeated, humanity exists chiefly in the painful and elusive moments of historically passing time. The sense of a particular, all-penetrating present moment in history takes on great power as implying an all but palpable medium, if not an explanatory cause, in which all of humanity is simultaneously engaged. Humanity can therein experience at least its community. In earlier centuries each provincial community had focused on its own relationship to Heaven at the expense of an awareness of earthly life going on elsewhere. But now there emerges a consciousness that is even planetary of the unifying present. The consensus that one discerns in narratives of the mid-nineteenth century ‘is not about anything so trivial as good and evil, but about whether or not the world is One’.89 The success of the novelists, Ermarth further argues, lies in their ability to represent the temporal medium wherein that oneness is experienced: The primary ‘object’ represented in historical narrative is, like the space represented by Saenredam, the time that is common and neutral. ‘In’ these media of modernity it becomes possible to make mutually informative measurements between things apparently unrelated to each other, and thus to consider the entire world as a single arena of relationship. What is being represented in nineteenth-century narrative, then, is nothing less than the power of representation itself. The abstraction of history lies, not in the particulars which populate it, but in the temporal medium they occupy; and in the assertion implicit in such media that the world is one system of mutual relevance. To have brought history to this state of importance was the work of centuries, but by 1850 almost all literate people had absorbed it.90 The opposing terms – ‘particulars which populate [history]’ and ‘temporal medium they occupy’ – correspond to Jameson’s distinction between ‘content’ and ‘the inexorable form of events’. The interest is not in the particular details or individuals or in the raw data but in the impression of a context in which everything coexists. The ‘inexorable form’ pulling all together does not derive from a coherent temporal causality imposed by the récit but rather from an inexorable temporal medium that nothing and no one can escape. The third-person narrator of Bleak House represents the medium, ‘the single arena of relationship’, not only through implicit technique but also with explicit comments: ‘What connexion can there have been’, the chapter that connects Lady Dedlock with Jo invites us to ponder, ‘between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from oppos-

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ite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!’ (XVI). Whereas for Samuel Smiles the ‘system of mutual dependencies’ may have seemed beneficial, Lady Dedlock evidently finds in the enforced connexion with Jo the historical Necessity that hurts. Whether one likes it or not, the ‘innumerable histories’ are parts of the single master phenomenon of history. In the first-person narrative of Bleak House, a good example of the representation of this single, contagiously all-pervasive historical or temporal medium occurs in reference to a particular ‘cold, wild’ Saturday night. Esther and her maid Charley are on their way to visit Jenny, the brickmaker’s wife, who has given shelter to the poor sick Jo that again functions as one of the connecting agencies. In an epiphany she suddenly becomes aware of a particular ‘spot and time’ that is also part of a unity involving other spots in both time and space: I had no thought, that night – none, I am quite sure – of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. I have ever since connected the feeling with that spot and time, and with everything associated with that spot and time, to the distant voices in the town, the barking of a dog, and the sound of wheels coming down the miry hill. (XXXI) Among the various simultaneous sights and noises, the ‘sound of wheels’, as we shall discover several hundred pages later in Chapter LVII, comes from the gig of Mr Bucket. He is also in pursuit at that precise instant of the urchin Jo, who is unwittingly carrying the contagion into Esther’s territory. There is suspense (undetected just then but retrieved retrospectively or discovered in re-reading the novel) about whether Bucket will reach Jo before he infects Charley and Esther. The night is meanwhile full of the menacing contagion, as Esther may intuit in stopping ‘to look up at the sky’ and in experiencing ‘for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different’. A similar impression of the omnipresent contagion in action occurs during one particular night in Old Saint Paul’s: Night had fallen upon the city, – a night destined to be more fatal than any that had preceded it; and yet it was so calm, so beautiful, so clear, that it was scarcely possible to imagine that it was unhealthy. The destroying angel was, however, fearfully at work. Hundreds were falling beneath his touch; and as Leonard wondered how many miserable wretches were at that moment released from suffering, it crossed

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‘Our feverish contact’ him like an icy chill that among the number might be Amabel. So forcibly was he impressed by this idea, that he fell on his knees and prayed aloud. (IV:ii)91

In Munthe’s experience of the plague too, the night encourages an especially vivid impression of the unavoidable, ubiquitous, all-penetrating contagion. He ceases to wash before retiring: ‘what was the good of disinfecting myself when everybody and everything around me was infected, the food I ate, the water I drank, the bed I slept in, the very air I breathed! . . . I had to rush out into the street again, to spend the remainder of the night in one of the churches’.92 Recalling the dark underground regions from which noxious influences emanate, the dark sky offers a fitting cover for the work of ‘the destroying angel’, who may remind us of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history.93 Replacing providence, that angel is not a personality but the common contagion that is fearfully present everywhere and simultaneously impinging upon thousands of lives. The narrator of Wells too has a momentary impression ‘that the Angel of Death had slain [the Martians] in the night’, but then he realizes that the destroying agency is simply the germs (II:viii). The angel exists in ‘the very air’ that unites everyone in ‘one system of mutual relevance’. For Jameson and Ermarth the air that figures the medium in which history operates would therefore be even more palpably present than the angel that might signify the absent cause. Nineteenth-century writing frequently refers as explicitly as Munthe does to the omnipresent air that everyone breathes – and here we return to another of Douglas-Fairhurst’s points. The political exile Antonio Gallenga (who as friend of Ruffini, Italian tutor of Dickens, and author of a book approvingly summarized in Kingsley’s novel helps us establish them in ‘one system of mutual relevance’) believes that ‘the spirit of the age is Steam’. With this figure he naturally intends, like many of his contemporaries, not only literal steam but an intellectual principle that somehow has a materially coercive power: it ‘fills our whole atmosphere’ as a felt, inhaled presence.94 But the narrator of Bleak House perceives that Spirit in a less productive or industrially powerful form of water vapour. The fog, namely, which propagates ‘a general infection of ill-temper’ amongst the ‘foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas’ (I), is the all-permeating medium that envelops everyone in that historical moment.95 The narratives of contagion naturally refer often to bad air, filled with nasty smells and ‘effluvia’ that betray the disease-transmitting miasmata. Just after the moment of epiphany cited above, Esther thus notices an unwholesome, suffocating industrial emission into the atmosphere: ‘The kilns were burning, and a stifling vapour set towards us with a pale blue glare’. In such vapours and fogs and other impressions of non-transparent, contagion-filled space, the novels are figuring, according to Ermarth, the

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temporal medium of the present moment in which history aggressively operates. The images of that medium are also representations, she believes, of the novels themselves. The message of this medium is, in part, that neither history nor the novel can offer a coherently focused impression of ultimate causality. Although the fog of Bleak House may lie most thickly around Chancery, there is no particular central point or identifiable eastern location from which it all emanates. Chancery does not cause the fog but rather suffers, like the rest of England, from the effects of a fog that it cannot help but transmit further. This is to say that the fog is simply and inescapably there and everywhere, deriving from an absent cause and pointing to nothing beyond its own presence. As its message or ideological implication, it points to the absence of providence. This is the atmosphere in which nineteenth-century men and women must breathe, the only consolation being that the sickly atmosphere unites them in a common suffocation. While such vapours and contagion suggest the synchronic dimension of an omnipresent historical moment, history still exists of course as a diachronic continuum. The loss of faith in divine providence or ‘Cause itself’ has not, that is, eliminated the impression that relationships of some kind exist between past and present moments. With reference again to Bleak House Ermarth thus notices ‘the two functions of history’, which are ‘divided between two separate narrations’. The function that I would relate primarily to the synchronic dimension is evident in the third-person narrative, ‘with a capacity for oversight but no memory’. The more diachronic orientation of the first-person narrative exemplifies, instead, ‘memory but insufficient oversight’.96 The two dimensions correspond to the horizontal and vertical axes in space that we have noticed, and the vertical spatial axis of low/high is now translated into the diachronic historical direction of past/present. In this dimension, some allusion after all to causality may initially be discerned. The contagion rises from what is dead and buried underground and infects what is living. So Pater, we recall, imagines the influence of the classical age upon the renaissance as the opening of ‘an ancient plague pit’ from which the later age took ‘the contagion of the life of nature and of the senses’. Among the plague pits and other cemeteries in our novels, the ‘berryin ground’, in which Esther Summerson’s father moulders, emits an especially maleficent pollution. Having conducted Lady Dedlock there, Jo points out a repulsive rat, which may remind us of a Freudian case in which a rat is thought to carry a contagion from the dead father.97 More often, though, the novels represent the contagion of the past as an hereditary disease, for which the vehicle of transmission is not infected air or rats but – figuratively, at least – infected blood. There may, as in the case of Sir Leicester Dedlock, even be a satisfaction in such infections, for his hereditary gout is nearly identical with the inherited rank and wealth that constitute practically the entirety of himself:

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‘Our feverish contact’ Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism, or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar; but the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive, even to the levelling process of dying, by dying of their own family gout. It has come down, through the illustrious line, like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. (XVI)

The ‘base contagion’ communicated to other sons through ‘the tainted blood’ of ‘vulgar’ fathers probably refers among other diseases to syphilis. What the historian of the Rougon-Macquart family calls ‘l’exécrable heritage de leur race’ in Le Docteur Pascal is similarly a much less dignified form of hereditary infection and hereditary identity than the Dedlock gout. Among the many victims, the fifteen-year-old Charles dies in an especially emblematic way from a massive haemorrhage. In gazing helplessly at the blood gushing from the boy’s nose, his great-greatgrandmother Tante Dide seems to see the impoverished blood of her race and to recall two previous sanguinary crises in the family: Du sang, toujours, l’avait éclaboussée. Et un troisième choc moral l’achevait, du sang l’éclaboussait, ce sang appauvri de sa race qu’elle venait de voir couler si longuement, et qui était par terre, tandis que le royal enfant blanc, les veines et le cœur vides, dormait. (IX) The shock will cause Tante Dide herself to die the next day, at the age of one hundred and five, from a stroke – ‘une congestion cerebrale’. Corresponding to the diseases transmitted through the air in the synchronic dimension, the infection in the blood and the circulatory disorders spread contagiously, through inheritance, from individual to individual. The phenomenon may be related to the moral sickness diffused throughout the human race that Nietzsche has described as a form of ‘blood-poisoning’ (Blutvergiftung).98 In Zola the hereditary infection in the blood relates not only to precisely circulatory disorders but to mental alienation: ‘l’indéfinissable corruption de toute une race’, which one discerns in the boy’s beautiful face, is really a sign of imbecility.99 Charles has inherited this imbecility from his great-great-grandmother, and just before his fatal haemorrhage the two of them seem dumbly to recognize their kinship in madness. They stare deeply at one another: L’enfant avait levé le regard sur la folle, et tous deux se contemplèrent. A ce moment, leur extraordinaire ressemblance éclata. Leurs yeux surtout, leurs yeux vides et limpides, semblaient se perdre les uns dans les autres, identiques. Puis, c’était la physionomie, les traits usés

History as contagion

35

de la centenaire qui, par-dessus trois générations, sautaient à cette délicate figure d’enfant, comme effacée déjà elle aussi, très vieille et finie par l’usure de la race. Ils ne s’étaient pas souri, ils se regardaient profondément, d’un air d’imbécillité grave. (IX) As the boy sees his own corruption in a woman from whom he is separated in age by ninety years, he seems to be looking back into the previous century. In that intense shock of recognizing ‘leur extraordinaire ressemblance’ and their even identical eyes, there is also a striking occurrence again of Girard’s mimetic doubling. In this case a past and a present moment in history become doubled, as the former contaminates and repeats itself in the latter. Yet the relationship between past and present is not strictly that of cause and effect, and the notion of causality becomes problematic in this diachronic dimension too. In the view of Jameson, it is not the former event that causes the later event but the absent cause existing beyond time that causes both of them, forever repeating its contaminating effects. Or another possibility is that contemplated by Arnold’s quester for the scholar-gipsy. The source of contamination may be located not in an earlier but in a later event. If movement along the diachronic axis of historical time can proceed not only forwards but backwards, something in the present can cause something to happen in the past. In a pattern resembling Bakhtin’s ‘symbolic reversal’, the terms cause and effect exchange places; the effect comes paradoxically to precede the cause. So the poet fears that his effort to recapture the health of an earlier age may instead transmit the contagion of his own Zeitgeist back to the earlier period. But this must not be allowed to happen. The hitherto sought-for scholar-gipsy is ironically urged, in the lines that we have already noticed, to flee his seeker: ‘fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!/For strong the infection of our mental strife . . .’. The scholar-gipsy must not, that is, enter a historical narrative, for then he would no longer be the desired scholargipsy. Since the reality of seventeenth-century history remains elusive and inaccessible to the nineteenth-century historian, he would necessarily reconstruct and represent it in accord with his own all-contaminating vision. So as not to become a narrative of contagion, the history of the scholar-gipsy is best left unwritten. An implication of Jameson’s description of history as ‘what hurts’ is that not only in the nineteenth century but in any century the Zeitgeist must be menacing. To exist in history and to submit to its necessity means to breathe its stifling vapour, which for Jameson too penetrates everywhere. It also means to succumb to the sickness propagated by that vapour: ‘the self’, according to Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘is deeply implicated in [one’s time] as its peculiar sickness’.100 The only hope would be to drop out of history altogether, into the region of myth perhaps with the scholar-gipsy

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or into the aesthetic ‘refuge’ that Arnold associates with Goethe. Yet Jameson finds that such a dropping out offers only a vain and illusory escape: To imagine that, sheltered from the omnipresence of history and the implacable influence of the social, there already exists a realm of freedom – whether it be that of the microscopic experience of words in a text or the ecstasies and intensities of various private religions – is only to strengthen the grip of Necessity over all such blind zones in which the individual subject seeks refuge, in pursuit of a purely individual, a merely psychological, project of salvation.101 In the debate that I shall trace especially in the next chapter, the providential aesthetic seems generally to give way in our novels to this grimmer historical perspective. Or to state the development in equivalent terms, the same plagues that have at first manifested the hand of God now reveal the contaminating, all-permeating, inescapable action of history. There emerges, possibly, the vision of a metaphysical power struggle in which God as First Cause succumbs to history as absent cause. Yet the novels prefer a less abstract conception of the power struggle and naturally embody it in more concrete situations – in terms, that is, of local causes and effects. Ineffable contagion and counter-contagion struggle, reverse their positions, and unite as a single master metaphor within human activities that manifest history in its fairly ordinary effects. The conflicts employ, as subsequent chapters demonstrate, the weapons of military force, the female needle and distaff, the lancet and medicines, and the pen and other linguistic tools. With such instruments, men and women attempt in their microcosms to protect what Jameson considers their precarious realms of freedom or to reduce those of others. The strategies associated with love operate with particularly interesting ambiguity both to transmit contagion and, wherever in part possible, to heal. Implying that resolutions and recoveries can occur only temporarily, the novels bring into focus their visions of men and women caught up in the historical cross-currents that elude all human control. Still the picture is not entirely bleak. The logic of contagion ensures that the sickness saves as well as dooms: ‘Nietzsche discovers’, to take an example from Pearson, ‘that it is in his becoming-sick, in his “blood-poisoning”, that human promise is to be found’.102 As the generic form of the narrative of contagion reflects the ‘inexorable form of events’, history is seen to offer individuals engaged with its inhumanity the chance to manifest their own humanity.

2

Providence amidst pestilence and fire

In the pestilential episodes and in analogous outbreaks of fire, our novels continue to locate traces of an actively providential agency. These traces reflect a human desire to hold onto the comforting view of traditional faith. The desired traces are weakened, however, by the loss of genuine belief in a divine agency that plans and predisposes the future with the welfare of humanity in mind. Suggesting a debate that is never definitively concluded, the novels imply that instead of a pre-existent First Cause human beings must make do with more tentative impressions of a causality recognized in retrospect. Although this retrospective causality may still refer to God, it is connected more immediately with human beings. It relates to the narrators that reconstruct causality in their writing and to the readers that reconstruct it, in their retrospective recognition, at the conclusion of their reading. A contagion previously thought to have emanated from the original divine will is thus redefined as the medium in which all the individual human wills and other local causes are making history happen. Novels that construct this retrospective sense of causality are designed according to what has been called a ‘providential aesthetic’, as opposed to religiously orthodox faith in divine providence. The authors of such novels, as Fielding had indicated in Tom Jones and as Thomas Vargish has observed recently, manage their plotting so that it will seem to imitate a providential pattern. While the plot proceeds with apparent ‘indirection’, discoveries near the end finally reveal ‘the unities’ that have always been operating.1 The pattern underlies what Gillian Beer terms a Darwinian plot as well – and which among our novels she discerns especially in Bleak House. An initial impression, as in Darwinian research, of ‘superfecundity without design’ later leads ‘gradually and retrospectively’ to the perception of a coherent argument.2 Leaving aside briefly the matter of contagion, which does possess relevance to the embattled faith in divine providence, we may first examine in A Strange Story an ambiguous, retrospective discovery of God’s existence. Through most of the story the physician-protagonist Allen Fenwick is looking for evidence not of God but of what he calls ‘the vital principle’ in

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nature. His scientific quest may be compared to that whereby Darwin eventually discerns his principle of natural selection. The satisfied intellectual security deriving from his initial materialism and atheism is, however, slowly eroded, and an impression of spiritual emptiness troubles him. The ‘grand discontent with the limits of the immediate Present’ inevitably arouses ‘that vague desire for the something beyond’. That unhappy impression of a lacking element is then redefined by the wise Haroun of Aleppo as ‘ “the sublime discontent of earth, which is the peculiar attribute of soul” ’ (XXIX, XXXIX). In very long discussions with the older physician Faber, which may test the patience of the modern reader, Fenwick formulates his own version of Browning’s or Ruskin’s doctrine of the imperfect (as in Cleon’s ‘imperfection means perfection hid’). Unlike the theoretical ‘absent cause’ of Spinoza, Althusser and Jameson, the soul somehow proves by its very absence here that it must be a presence elsewhere. There, with God, Fenwick will rejoin it after death. In this logic he can accept the likelihood of the death of the ethereal Lilian, who is now recognized retrospectively to have figured all along his soul. Too pure like Arnold’s scholar-gipsy for secular life, she must be translated to an ‘Hereafter’ that is immune from the contagion and imperfection of history.3 In removing God, along with the soul, from this world, such a logic does also possess the drawback of making it difficult for Him to intervene here in any providential way. Yet Fenwick does appear to believe at the end that his career has always been taking him, though by very indirect paths, towards God. His life story is now dubbed a ‘pilgrimage’. Kingsley discerns a providence that operates more clearly within history. As the most noisily committed Christian among our novelists, he has probably considered this religious discourse to be the most important element in his novels. Although Two Years Ago develops probably too many strands in its complex plotting, the spiritual history of Tom Thurnall seems designed to provide the primary element of focus. Among the many spiritual crises of the story – of the Anglican vicar, the Methodist preacher, the heroine Grace Harvey and others – we observe especially a process that converts Tom away from his cheerful godlessness. Always ‘generous and kind-hearted’, he appears an exemplary citizen from the beginning. But he is as materialist as Bulwer’s Fenwick is at first and does not share the narrator’s sense of the divine providence in human affairs: Of godliness in its true sense – of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life – that it was worth while asking that Being’s advice, or that any advice would be given if asked for; of any practical notion of a Heavenly Father, or a Divine education – Tom was as ignorant as thousands of respectable people who go to church every Sunday, and read good books, and believe firmly that the Pope is Antichrist. He ought to have learnt it,

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no doubt, for his father was a religious man; but he had not learnt it, any more than thousands learn it, who have likewise religious parents. (I) According to Ermarth, as we have seen, this is indeed the moment when thousands are losing the faith of their religious parents in a providential dispensation. Yet Kingsley does not observe the development as an ineluctable historical tendency and so devises Tom’s story as a reversal of that tendency. Tom undergoes his crisis in the Crimea and returns at the end to his father’s faith in a divinely paternal providence. ‘ “I found out” ’, he tells Grace, ‘that I had been trying for years which was the stronger, God or I; I found out I had been trying whether I could not do well enough without Him: and there I found that I could not, Grace. . . . I did not know that I had a Father in heaven, who had been looking after me, when I fancied that I was looking after myself.’ (XXVIII) In retrospect he realizes that the heavenly father has always been providing for him, an application of the ‘providential aesthetic’ to life that we find articulated by a character in Lavinia as well. Always the most saintly figure in Ruffini’s story, Miss Clara has never doubted the working of providence and requires no conversion, but she too can only discern the pattern in retrospect. Although she admits that ‘the ways of Providence are inscrutable’ (II:xviii), she finds it almost possible to scrutinize them when tracing a chain of events that have led to reunion with her long-lost lover. ‘ “Man proposes, God disposes” ’, she observes in a letter, as if to define the coexistence, in Vargish’s terms, of the ‘indirections’ and the ‘unities’: ‘Yes, I hope and believe that I am not indulging in a superstitious feeling, when I allow myself to trace the finger of God in the course of events which have led to this issue. The way in which it has been brought about does seem marvellous when I recall its several steps. Had I not delayed my going to Scutari for two months in deference to your wishes – had I not during that interval met Miss Holywell on her way to my aunt – had it not so happened that my aunt was from home, Miss Schmaltz unusually cross, and Miss Holywell in so sore a puzzle what to do with herself, that she enlisted my sympathies in her behalf, and that I carried her off to Owlscombe, why –’ (II:xx) And she breaks off, as if to admit that her addressees – like Ruffini and his readers too – may not find this chain of desultory events so providentially

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‘Our feverish contact’

‘marvellous’ as she does. In her mind, however, any chain of causes and effects must lead back to the tangible First Cause, ‘the finger of God’. It is possible here to bring the mechanism of contagion back into the discussion. The touch of God’s finger, as in Michelangelo’s representation of the creation, has conveyed the contagion of life to Adam and thereby to all the offspring of Adam. The recent treatise of Jacques Derrida on the literal and metaphorical significance of touching, which is related to contagion, emphasizes the importance, among the five senses, of the tactile quality of life. What is living must be immersed in a tangible context: ‘le toucher signifie l’«être au monde» pour un vivant fini. Il n’y a pas de monde sans toucher’. In the religious context, as Derrida goes on to discuss it, the hand of God – specifically ‘la main misericordieuse du Père’ – and the human soul remain continually, mutually in touch: ‘le contact entre Dieu et l’âme ou l’esprit de l’homme ne peut être, lui, que mutuel’.4 Of course this mutual contact is lost in the dark night of the soul, as so notably when the hands of the poet of In Memoriam grope in vain to encounter the father’s touch. The tangible context that permits a person to exist – ‘l’«être au monde» ’ – becomes the secular milieu of contagion. The other novels contain fewer explicit appeals to observe the tangible operations of divine providence. In I promessi sposi the good characters wish indeed to believe in an immanent providence, but Manzoni often enables the reader to view with bemused affection their naiveté. So during his desperate flight from Milanese territory, Renzo naturally hopes for divine protection to help him reach Bergamo and to gain employment there from his cousin: ‘ “la Provvidenza m’ha aiutato finora; m’aiuterà anche per l’avvenire” ’. But then he takes providence into his own hands. After treating himself to a good meal that restores him both physically and psychologically, he decides to contribute his last few coins to some evidently starving beggars: ‘ “Là c’è la Provvidenza!” ’, he announces magniloquently to the desperate mother with her undernourished baby. The narrator goes on to indicate, however, that his deed may not express pure generosity, for he hopes thereby to gain credit with God. He has made an investment upon which he can draw at future need: La refezione e l’opera buona (giacché siam composti d’anima e di corpo) avevano riconfortati e rallegrati tutti i suoi pensieri. Certo, dall’essersi così spogliato degli ultimi danari, gli era venuto più di confidenza per l’avvenire, che non gliene avrebbe dato il trovarne dieci volte tanti. Perché, se a sostenere in quel giorno que’ poverini che mancavano sulla strada, la Provvidenza aveva tenuti in serbo proprio gli ultimi quattrini d’un estraneo, fuggitivo, incerto anche lui del come vivrebbe; chi poteva credere che volesse poi lasciare in secco colui del quale s’era servita a ciò, e a cui aveva dato un sentimento così vivo di sé stessa, così efficace, così risoluto? (XVII)5

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With more plausible arguments Fra Cristoforo will seek later to educate him towards a more humble faith in providence. Renzo must not suppose that providence can be counted upon to operate predictably in the way that human beings think appropriate. God himself, as recent critics have noticed, remains fundamentally silent and inscrutable in I promessi sposi, and if providence can be discerned at all, it is, again, only in retrospective interpretation.6 A corollary to the faith in God is the belief in an apparently antagonistic supernatural agency – the power, most spectacularly, that causes disasters like the pestilences. And here we return more specifically to the phenomenon of contagion. For the believers in divine providence, the disasters of history permit two principal, alternative explanations. The disaster is either a divine punishment that functions in immediate harmony with providential purpose or an outburst of antagonistic energy, suggesting the devil, whose rebellion God permits to further ultimately divine purposes. In both cases, pre-modern plagues always occur because the guilt of human beings has justly merited the chastisement. The pestilence sent by Apollo at the beginning of The Iliad has already provided us with an example, and we might think of the plagues of the Old Testament too. ‘Beyond demons’, which were perceived according to Barbara Tuchman’s account of the fourteenth-century Black Death as immediate causes, ‘the final hand was God’s’.7 God uses the instrument of contagion for the transmission of his providentially punishing power. The two novels set in the seventeenth century, in particular, contain spokesmen for the view that Providence either directly causes or indirectly permits because it suits His purposes the propagation of plagues. So at the end of I promessi sposi Don Abbondio compares the pestilence to a whip (‘un gran flagello’) and a broom (‘una scopa’) that has swept away certain nasty people: ‘ “se la peste facesse sempre e per tutto le cose in questa maniera, sarebbe proprio peccato il dirne male; quasi quasi ce ne vorrebbe una, ogni generazione” ’ (XXXVIII). In the complacent analysis of Don Abbondio, it is not clear, to be sure, whether God or sheer good luck has provided the punishing and cleansing instrument. The far less cheerful grocer Stephen Bloundel of Old Saint Paul’s has, however, no doubt at first about the direct involvement of the hand of God: leading his family in prayers, ‘he acknowledged that this terrible visitation had been justly brought upon [the city] by the wickedness of its inhabitants; that they deserved their doom, dreadful though it was’ (I:i). The conviction, frequently echoed throughout the novel, regarding the extreme sinfulness of restoration society and the angry justice of God receives its sternest expression in the harangues of the fanatic Solomon Eagle: ‘ “Yon city has sinned so deeply,” ’ he thunders typically, ‘ “that it is the will of Heaven it should be destroyed” ’ (V:i). A famous passage in Bleak House appears similarly to support a view of the pestilence as an appropriate retribution for sin. Although ‘the will of

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Heaven’ receives no direct credit, some moral power is in the contagion, guiding it in the direction (again from east to west and from low to high) of the guilty parties. The part of the city personified as Tom-all-alone’s, so abominably neglected in its squalor, ‘has his revenge’: Even the winds are his messengers, and they serve him in these hours of darkness. There is not a drop of Tom’s corrupted blood but propagates infection and contagion somewhere. It shall pollute, this very night, the choice stream (in which chemists on analysis would find the genuine nobility) of a Norman house, and his Grace shall not be able to say Nay to the infamous alliance. There is not an atom of Tom’s slime, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, not one obscenity or degradation about him, not an ignorance, not a wickedness, not a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high. Verily, what with tainting, plundering, and spoiling, Tom has his revenge. (XLVI) Shelley’s The Last Man similarly includes episodes in which claims are made for the morally retributive purpose of the plague. Along with its destructive force, the plague seems in such episodes to empower, as in the cases of Don Abbondio and Solomon Eagle, a mistaken religious fervour. ‘During the whole progress of the plague’, Shelley’s narrator reports, ‘the teachers of religion were in possession of great power; a power of good, if rightly directed, or of incalculable mischief, if fanaticism or intolerance guided their efforts’ (III:iv). The novel contains instances, chiefly, of the latter, as a certain ‘impostor’ attempts – in vain naturally – to guide the contagion towards his detractors and away from his followers. At what may be the only point in the story in which the contagion takes on a metaphorical meaning, religious fanaticism is seen itself to spread like the plague. The followers of the impostor are said ‘to inhale the pestilential atmosphere which adhered to his demoniac nature’ (III:v). Except in the passage from Bleak House, attempts to read providential significance into the plague are discredited, and most often the pestilence advances without the justifying aura of a moral retribution. God’s power may not be present in the contagion, and the novels contain elements that call the operations of providential justice itself into question. Ainsworth’s god-fearing grocer Bloundel thus comes to doubt his original interpretation of the plague as retribution. He responds uneasily to the assertion of Leonard, his apprentice and the suitor of his daughter Amabel, that God has spared him because of his ‘piety’: ‘I have placed my trust on high,’ rejoined the grocer, ‘and have not been forsaken. And yet many evil doers have escaped. Amongst others –’

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‘I know whom you mean, sir,’ interrupted Leonard, with some fierceness, ‘but a day of retribution will arrive for him.’ (V:ii) In fact, a day of retribution never does arrive within the novel for Amabel Bloundel’s ravisher, the Earl of Rochester. As in the case of ‘Tom’s corrupted blood’ that ‘shall work its retribution, through every order of society’, the avenging force often seems unjustly to strike the innocent and to spare the guilty. In Gaskell’s novel, Thurstan Benson, his sister Faith and their maid Sally discern similarly an implicit lack of justice in Ruth’s death and wonder ‘why they, the infirm and worn-out, were left, while she was taken in her lovely prime’ (XXXVI). The fear of the failure of providence haunts characters in the novels especially with respect to a threat that parallels the menacing contagion – a threat, that is, to the heroine’s virginity. As we have already noticed, the pestilence that breeds in degraded urban districts is frequently associated with an environment of illicit sexuality; the contagion may express itself as rape or seduction, with the possibly additional threat of venereal disease. The desperation of Renzo’s beloved Lucia, when she is kidnapped, leads her to make an extreme promise to the Virgin in return for some providential protection. (Like Renzo she fancies that one can bargain with Providence.) In Old Saint Paul’s the threat that the libertine Earl of Rochester poses for Amabel Bloundel arouses even more constant foreboding. When Rochester abducts her, the faithful Nizza Macascree, who has undergone a similar ordeal, can only utter an anguished hope for the girl ‘in his [Rochester’s] power’: ‘ “the same [higher] power that has watched over me I trust has protected her”, cried Nizza fervently’ (IV:iii). Unfortunately that higher power quite abandons the totally unprotected Ruth in Gaskell’s novel to the unholy power of Bellingham. And in A Strange Story the heroine Lilian is rescued at the last moment from the power of Margrave, but because public opinion believes that she has fallen, she is ostracized from polite society. As providence proves unreliable in such situations of sexual menace, the plague escapes as well from any providential scheme. If there is any ultimately divine purpose, as only the most stubborn providentialists can continue to believe, it remains well hidden. In this context the charisma of supernaturality that the contagious phenomenon retains would appear only to reveal the malice of an infernal agency unrelated to providence. The narrator of Ruth compares the pestilence with its sinister fascination to an infernal fire and to a rough beast. It is ‘a fire which had long smouldered’ and which now ‘burst forth in many places at once’. Like a dragon or serpent it has been biding its time: ‘there came creeping, creeping, in hidden, slimy courses, the terrible fever – that fever which is never utterly banished from the sad haunts of vice and misery, but lives in such darkness, like a wild beast in the recesses of his den’. Once more like the

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Dickensian contagion that begins in ‘Tom’s slime’, it spreads from low ground – ‘the low Irish lodging-houses’ – to higher places ‘among the well-to-do and respectable’ (XXXIII). Kingsley’s narrator dubs the cholera ‘Baalzebub’, and as a monster or dragon he moves about at his will in the chapter called ‘Baalzebub’s Banquet’ (XVII), enjoying one succulent victim after another. His first appearance suggests his unpredictable playfulness: ‘He had come suddenly, capriciously, sportively, as he sometimes comes; as he had come to Newcastle the summer before’. For a time he has remained invisible while ‘wander[ing] all but harmless about the West country . . . as if his maw had been full-glutted. . . . But he was come at last, with appetite more fierce than ever, and had darted aside to seize on Aberalva, and not let it go till he had sucked his fill’.8 In his craftiness he seems to know that people argue about what has caused him, and it delights him to confuse them. Some of his behaviour thus tends to confound Tom Thurnall’s sanitary arguments and to offer support to the providentialists: Up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here, now there; snapping daintily at unexpected victims, as if to make confusion worse confounded, to belie Thurnall’s theories and prognostics, and harden the hearts of fools by fresh excuses for believing that he had nothing to do with drains and water, – that he was ‘only’ – such an only! – ‘the visitation of God.’ (XVII)9 For Ainsworth’s narrator the malevolent ‘visitation’ resembles an irresistible military invasion: For awhile the disease was checked by Fleet Ditch; it then leaped this narrow boundary, and ascending the opposite hill, carried fearful devastation into St. James’s, Clerkenwell. At the same time, it attacked Saint Bride’s; thinned the ranks of the thievish horde haunting Whitefriars, and proceeding in a westerly course, decimated Saint Clement Danes. Hitherto, the city had escaped. The destroyer had not passed Ludgate or Newgate, but environed the walls like a besieging enemy. (I:i) When the great fire breaks out, the besieging enemy advances even more implacably. It is of course the same enemy that has the ability in most of our novels to emerge as either pestilence or fire and to oscillate between the two guises.10 Leonard’s impression of the fiery outbreak recalls other nocturnal visions – the ‘very night’ in which Dickens’s ‘Tom’ propagates contagion up to ‘the highest of the high’ and the night in which Ainsworth’s ‘destroying angel’ is so ‘fearfully at work’.

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Now the invisibly moving contagion has burst into most spectacular visibility as it continues to spread irresistibly from house to house: ‘There lay the vast and populous city before him, which he had once before known to be invaded by an invisible, but exterminating foe, now attacked by a furious and far seen enemy’ (VI:iii). Possessing still the malevolent intelligence of the plague, the fire thwarts the feeble powers that would quench it: the fire, disdaining such puny opposition, and determined to show its giant strength, leaped over all the breaches, drove the water carriers back, compelled them to relinquish their buckets, and to abandon their engines, which it made its prey, and seizing upon the heaps of timber, and other fragments occasioned by the demolition, consumed them, and marched onwards with furious exultation. (VI:v) In the unholy glee of the advancing enemy we recognize it as the foe of Providence rather than an agency of divine retribution. Personified as a ‘skilful besieger’, this ‘irresistible and unrelenting foe’ also finds unexpected ways to entrap and mock the city’s ‘defenders’. In its indomitable, exulting malice, the fire even recalls Milton’s Satan, another energetically rebellious phenomenon of the 1660s that exerted a terrible fascination upon the Romantics during Ainsworth’s youth. Indeed Ainsworth may have bestowed romantically Satanic overtones on the exultant Solomon who virtually identifies himself with the conflagration that he has set: ‘Solomon Eagle, who was mounted upon a heap of ruins, witnessed this scene of destruction, and uttered a laugh of exultation as the flames seized upon their prey’ (VI:vi). Yet while not expressing simply a divine anger, the fire is not purely diabolical either. At one point Leonard’s vision of it fuses the divine and diabolical aspects of its power into a single aesthetic complexity. Having seen the Satanic grandeur of the blaze, he goes on to perceive in it a rainbow that must recall the providential promise to Noah too: ‘The fire seemed to form a vast arch – many-coloured as a rainbow, – reflected in the sky, and re-reflected in all its horrible splendour in the river’. As an aesthetic experience the vision is dissociated from its moral components, and whether one assigns it to a divine or an infernal cause ceases to matter. The beauty overcomes ethical considerations in Leonard’s approach to a Keatsian moment of negative capability: In spite of its terror, the appearance of the fire was at that time beautiful beyond description. Its varying colours – its fanciful forms – now shooting out in a hundred different directions, like lightning flashes, – now drawing itself up, as it were, and soaring aloft, – now splitting into a million tongues of flame, – these aspects so riveted the

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‘Our feverish contact’ attention of Leonard that he almost forgot in the sight the dreadful devastation going forward. (VI:iii)11

Besides the aspects of providential warning and diabolical threat, the fire, shooting in all directions, commands attention as a supreme instance of natural beauty. It is indeed a symbolic revelation of God, Satan and nature at work, and beyond those forces it reveals, as the contagion made visible, history in action. Of course the image, which mingles malignant intelligence with awesome beauty, is probably too romantic to suit the Jamesonian vision of history as implacable but impersonal and uncaused Necessity. The fire is not, indeed, the effect of Jameson’s absent cause, for we know who has ignited it. In the human causes, as in the fiery effects, we also recognize a perverse confusion of divine providence and demonic antagonist, which discredits both while not yet carrying us to Jameson’s stoic historical vision. The clearly wicked causative agents, who spread both the plague and the fire, claim to be collaborating with an angry God. But although their claims win credit in certain circles, they are really usurping the functions of providence and so remain God’s enemies. While the diabolical nurse Judith Malmayns of Ainsworth’s novel thus enjoys the plague as an occasion to plunder, spread the infection and kill, Solomon sees her as fitting into God’s pattern: ‘ “I look upon you as one of the scourges appointed by heaven,” ’ he assures her, to which she agrees, ‘ “it is my mission to destroy and pillage, and I will fulfil it” ’ (II:ix). With his own megalomaniac sense of a divine calling, Solomon further defines himself and his associates as ‘ “the chosen instruments of the divine displeasure” ’ when they set fire to the city (VI:i). Obstinately convinced as he is of God’s omnipotence, even the more humane Bloundel accepts such an interpretation. He attributes the ultimate cause of the conflagration to divine will rather than to freely acting human pyromaniacs: ‘ “Man may have kindled this great fire, but the hand of God is apparent in it” ’ (VI:iv).12 In Le Docteur Pascal the self-‘chosen’ candidate for the providential, incendiary cause is Félicité Rougon, the octogenarian mother of the protagonist. A bigoted Catholic, she wishes to fit the lives of all the members of her family into her own providential, historical scheme. Her vision of a respectable family, to which God, as First Cause, has transmitted from generation to generation a saving grace, conflicts radically with her son’s view of a family riddled with hereditary flaws. On the basis of his experiments and investigations, he has written his own scientific history of the family’s physical and moral contamination in the records preserved in his archives. With stubborn self-righteousness, therefore, Félicité has plotted for thirty years to destroy those archives, as if the destruction of her son’s written history would destroy the pestilential facts recorded as well.

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History is made and unmade, she believes, in the form of its written records. Just after Pascal’s death she succeeds. In yet another association of pestilence and fire, she exclaims that the papers to be burnt themselves amount to the plague and to hell: ‘ «c’est la peste, le déshonneur, et c’est l’enfer à jamais!» ’ And as her fire begins to rage, she eagerly fantasizes its flames as a divine counter-contagion that destroys the contagion breeding in the written documents: ‘ «Au feu! au feu! . . . si nous voulons être sûres de tuer la contagion du mal!» ’ For the next two hours she keeps crying in her exultation, ‘ «Au feu! au feu! . . . Ils brûlent, ils brûlent! . . . Enfin, ils brûlent donc! . . . Ah! quel feu, quel grand feu! . . . Ils brûlent, ils brûlent, c’est si beau!» ’ The conflagration flares so terribly, as she keeps stoking it with more and more papers, that the chimney catches fire and the house itself is in danger. But she would gladly burn many houses if need be to extirpate what the papers represent to her: ‘ «j’aurai brûlé la ville, pour sauver la gloire de notre famille!» ’ (XIII). If not literally, the conflagration becomes the metaphorical funeral pyre of her son, who lies dead in another room. She has intended the pyre as an auto da fé to make reparation for her son’s sins and to save his soul as well as the family reputation. Zola’s reader sees her, however, as a hypocritical perversion of providence and discerns in her fire the raging contagion itself rather than a counter-contagious phenomenon. Far from ensuring her son’s salvation, she has destroyed the work that he has considered the immortal part of himself and that would have secured his posthumous reputation on earth. Her fire has made her son into a martyr who will never receive the reward or the crown traditionally promised to martyrs hereafter. The blaze therefore casts a lurid glare upon the flushed and dishevelled Félicité and Martine, the servant assisting her, who resemble hags performing another ‘witch’s sabbat’ or danse macabre: ‘C’était un galop de sorcières, activant un bûcher diabolique, pour quelque abomination, le martyre d’un saint, la pensée écrite brûlée en place publique, tout un monde de vérité e d’espérance détruit’ (XIII).13 Ainsworth’s novel too concludes with a particular pyre to which conflicting interpretations apply – the purificatory burning of a heretic and the martyrdom of a saint. The great fire that Solomon has ignited culminates in the destruction of St Paul’s Cathedral, the core in his view of a heretical culture and a contagion to which his fire is a counter-contagion. The magnificently burning cathedral thus signifies for him at once the providential punishment of sin and his own martyrdom; he has precisely arranged this splendid selfimmolation for himself. It is his long-prophesied moment of triumph: the flames, which had long been burning in secret [within the cathedral], burst through the roof at the other end of the choir, and instantaneously spread over the whole expanse. At this juncture, [Solomon’s] cry of wild exultation was heard in the great northern

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As with Félicité Rougon’s exultant cry, ‘Ils brûlent, ils brûlent, c’est si beau!’, we do not share the sense of triumph. Félicité who would have burnt the entire city if necessary and Solomon who has burnt London are not saints, martyrs or knights of faith that have dared all on behalf of God. Solomon’s words have not really ‘come to pass’ in the sense of being ratified by some superior power. Nor are Solomon and Félicité finally recognized as romantically Satanic figures with a supernatural charisma. They are only unfortunately obsessed and dangerous human beings, whose actions reveal no powers at work superior to their own. Although their individual human power can apparently make a spectacular dent on history, they will ultimately be dishonoured and their ultimate intentions thwarted. The ‘ruses’ of history, as Jameson believes, turn the results of such actions ‘into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention’. Like the plagues, the fires do not therefore convince us that they are the direct effect of supernatural providence – or the indirect effect, as it operates through a permitted antagonistic agency. There remains, however, the possibility that in the operations of nature another form of providence, unconsciously friendly to humanity, may be at work. In their eagerness to see an ethical principle embodied in nature, our narratives support the theory of Andrew Blake that science never replaces religion in the nineteenth-century context: ‘Both continue to exist side by side in the press and in the whole culture’.14 Existing side by side, the discourses also contaminate one another – as, in this case, the providential principle seeps from the religious sphere into the biological sphere. In Darwinian terms, it becomes possible for observers like Tennyson to interpret an evolving nature not as ‘red in tooth and claw’ but as tending towards ever improved forms of life. Kingsley too, as an enthusiastic Darwinian, is able to fit ‘evolutionary theory into theology’: he makes ‘natural selection itself an agent of divine power’.15 In the person of his protagonist in Le Docteur Pascal, Zola takes the further step of locating the benign divinity entirely within the biological processes, inseparable from its agents. In forever multiplying vitality there exists his ‘God’, something like Wordsworth’s ‘joy’.16 Relating his theories to those of Darwin, Haeckel, Galton and Weismann, he has developed a magnificent faith in a deity that would not at first seem to possess intelligent consciousness: Le docteur Pascal n’avait qu’une croyance, la croyance à la vie. La vie était l’unique manifestation divine. La vie, c’était Dieu, le grand moteur, l’âme de l’univers. Et la vie n’avait d’autre instrument que l’hérédité, l’hérédité faisait le monde. (II)

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The instrument whereby God, Life, the local cause of everything, propagates itself is the ‘heredity’ that we have also seen as analogous in its selfreplicating function to contagion. Later biologists would discern the role not only of genetic but of other contagious mechanisms in the apparently unerring instincts that enable life to explore ever new ways to transmit and reinvigorate itself.17 The more specifically providential quality of the unselfconscious instincts becomes clear in Pascal’s efforts to explain life to his mother: ‘ «Je crois à la vie qui élimine sans cesse les corps nuisibles, qui refait de la chair pour boucher les blessures, qui marche quand même à la santé, au renouvellement continu, parmi les impuretés et la mort» ’ (IV). The healing energy of life is ever struggling within all the cells of the body to repair the damage and expel the noxious germs of the malignant contagion. In a sort of battle for territory it gains further strength when it emerges from the unconscious domain and enters the realm of human consciousness. This entrance occurs when it is recognized like other forms of providence retrospectively – as in the pattern of a Darwinian plot. As science slowly and patiently recognizes the life-truths, the human race will learn to cooperate consciously with them. Associated now with human rather than divine intelligence, la vie will, Pascal assures Clotilde (echoing Ernest Renan), progress beyond conflicts towards a utopian peace: «Je crois que la poursuite de la vérité par la science est l’idéal divin que l’homme doit se proposer. Je crois que tout est illusion et vanité, en dehors du trésor des vérités lentement acquises et qui ne se perdront jamais plus. Je crois que la somme de ces vérités, augmentées toujours, finira par donner à l’homme un pouvoir incalculable, et la sérénité, sinon le bonheur . . . Oui, je crois au triomphe final de la vie.» (II)18 In contrast with the vision of Munthe, Life thus triumphs over Death. But the triumph is also that of the providential principle perceived to be in the natural world rather than in the supernatural dimension. In the scientific perception of it, human beings also gain their ‘incalculable power’ to wrest from the gods the control of their destinies. The slow process of acquiring ever more truth and power, as Pascal describes it, is indeed the human task foreseen in the last act of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: We will take our plan From the new world of man And our work shall be called the Promethean. (IV:156–8) The Promethean citation recalls the importance of the imagery of fire in the novels. The spectacular fires that have suggested to some observers

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the manifestation of retributive divine justice become representations at other points of the vital energy that Pascal sees in natural organisms. But before examining these other fires in our texts, I wish to suggest a philosophical context in which the divine fire may be said to become domesticated or humanized. Associated most readily perhaps with Heraclitus, the impression of a fire that burns everywhere emerges very frequently in classical writing. Bishop Berkeley, whose treatment of the fire provides an especially pertinent example for our purposes, refers the notion to Plato, the Stoics, Cicero and Diogenes Laertes. An ‘æther or pure invisible fire . . . seems to pervade and expand itself throughout the universe[;] . . . equally fitted to produce and to destroy, . . . [it] keeps up the perpetual round of generations and corruptions, pregnant with forms which it constantly sends forth and reabsorbs’. Within man ‘the vital flame’ is also called the ‘calidum innatum’ while the fire raging throughout ‘the whole system of the world’ suggests how that system ‘is held together and informed by one presiding mind’.19 Presumably expressing the mind of God, the all-presiding fire would suggest the immanence of divine providence in history. In the fire of Prometheus Unbound, we may then discern the historical transition that we have been considering. The faith in divine providence (or more precisely, in Shelley, divine tyranny) gives way to the ability of humanity to locate a providential factor in nature. The ‘vaporous fire’ or ‘liquid light’ felt in Act IV to be active everywhere is, as Stuart Curran has shown, the fire that Prometheus has given to man. No longer expressive of the divine will, as during the tyranny of Jupiter in Act I, the fire expresses in Act IV the energies of ‘a creative anarchy’. The universe exemplifies ‘millions of magnetic fields harmoniously interacting’, a fiery medium in which human beings freed to love have substituted the power of their love for the divine force. The fire manifests still the ‘Necessity’ of natural law, associated with Demogorgon, but a necessity that is now freedom as well20 – a benign, humanized version, we might add, of Jameson’s historical Necessity. In a discussion of Jean-Louis Chrétien, Derrida considers a similarly ideal fire in which Chrétien first of all figures not human but divine love. It is unmotivated love that bursts out spontaneously and then seems, as one of Derrida’s examples of tangibility and contagion, to set the world ablaze – . . . une flamme qui enflamme . . . (transitivement) mais parce que d’abord elle s’enflamme elle-même. . . . Devenir-amour du désir aristotélien (orexis), parce qu’elle touche et affecte, la flamme signifie d’abord la spontanéité d’une causa sui la flamme s’enflamme d’elle-même, elle semble en tout cas prendre feu sans cause extérieure. En quoi elle est divine. Comme le Premier Moteur ou l’Acte pur, . . . le Dieu désirable qui se meut de lui-même et inspire le désir.21

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The First Cause is, however, again transformed into local causes. In Chrétien’s elaboration of it, the divine phenomenon becomes, as in the transition from Berkeley to Shelley, a humanized phenomenon. Without confessing it, Chrétien seems to Derrida to substitute the inflammatory hand of man for the hand of God: ‘La Passion du Fils, l’Incarnation, le Logos, la Transsubstantion, la Passion sont des substitutions appelant à la Substitution où à l’Imitation’. In this process – ‘un processus d’hominisation’ – the divine element, to be sure, remains: ‘c’est finalement et toujours déjà l’hominisation de Dieu, le don d’un Dieu qui se fait Homme. . . . Elle passe par cette «mort de Dieu» très chrétienne’. But Derrida admits his own temptation to view the humanizing process as completed, ‘une substitution sans sacrifice’.22 To proceed to the other fires in our novels, it is interesting to see them as humanized or, more exactly, naturalized versions of the earlier fires that have expressed possibly divine purposes. Unlike the Promethean fires or the fires of Chrétien, these naturalized fires do not, to be sure, express precisely the energy of love. Yet they do not lack, as instances of the plague do, a discernibly moral meaning and purpose. They possess even a non-divine providentiality that enables us to comprehend their operation and to learn ethical lessons from them. They show that nature upholds, even if unconsciously, its principles and punishes those that offend them. ‘ “Nature never forgives!” ’ exclaims Hippias, who memorably laments his dyspepsia in Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The alcoholics of our novels, who abuse their digestive systems, will suffer exemplary punishment. Without crafty and malicious forethought, like that of the pyromaniacs, nature observes its laws and responds to offences automatically. The ‘spontaneity’ (in the term of Derrida) of the fires that destroy the alcoholics should be understood in this sense. They are nature’s version of the spontaneous combustion originally seen as the prerogative of the divine First Cause. Despite their apparent spontaneity and their moral significance, the fires derive as natural events from material causes. These causes do not involve incendiary agents but are nevertheless considered explicable in scientific terms. Our novels suggest this surprising causality in three instances of spontaneous combustion – the cases not only of the alcoholics, Dickens’s Krook and Zola’s Antoine Macquart, but also of the Australian bush in A Strange Story. ‘A fire which had long smouldered’, in Gaskell’s phrase, and ‘flames, which had long been burning in secret’, in Ainsworth’s reference to St Paul’s, suddenly ‘burst forth’ to incinerate the two alcohol-soaked men and the Australian wilderness. In the aesthetic economy of the novels, spontaneous combustion possesses not only a punishing moral significance but a poetic resonance. The doomed individual, in the first two cases, functions as a microcosm of a larger contagious pattern. While contagion in literal and other senses is being diffused through all the ranks of society, the smouldering internal

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fire is spreading from cell to cell within the individual organism. The process attacks and undermines the health of organ after organ, suggesting a metastasis, whereby in a Girardian sense the disease continually replicates itself. At length no healthy tissue is left to resist the sudden kindling of the long incipient blaze, and the entire physical body disintegrates into its few essential contaminated and contaminating components. The individual disintegration corresponds to the collapse on the social level of hierarchies and systems of identifying difference that occur during grand episodes of pestilence.23 The essential components that result from the disintegration belong to the three states – gas, liquid, solid – of matter. So as Weevle awaits ‘the appointed time’ to meet Krook in Bleak House, he first becomes aware of the gaseous element suggested by some of the most fetid smells in the novel. During a discussion with Snagsby, the latter pauses ‘to sniff and taste the air’ and they agree about the ‘queer kind of flavor in the place to-night’ and the ‘tainting sort of weather’. Later the phenomenon becomes not only olfactory but visual and tactile as Guppy touches a liquid substance on the walls: ‘A thick, yellow liquor defiles [his fingers], which is offensive to the touch and sight, and more offensive to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil, with some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder’. The liquid and gaseous contagion emanates of course from the room downstairs, where there is a further ‘smouldering suffocating vapour . . . and a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling’. Finally they discover all that is left in solid form of Krook: ‘is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? O Horror, he is here!’ (XXXII). In Le Docteur Pascal Félicité Rougon witnesses the beginning of the combustion of her drunken brother-in-law, Antoine Macquart. Not quite spontaneous perhaps, the process has required a spark from the pipe that he is smoking, and soon afterwards Félicité finds him in a visibly smouldering state: la graisse suintait par les gerçures de la peau, activant la flamme qui gagnait le ventre. Et Félicité comprit que l’oncle s’allumait là, comme une éponge, imbibée d’eau-de-vie. Lui-même en était saturé depuis des ans, de la plus forte, de la plus inflammable. Il flamberait sans doute toute à l’heure, des pieds à la tête. Deciding in her disgust not to save him, Félicité escapes before the blaze fully bursts out, and on the next day her son arrives to discover a situation entirely similar to that in Bleak House.24 The entire uncle has been reduced to nauseating smells, grease and a few cinders: dès qu’il eut poussé, à gauche, la porte de la cuisine, une odeur affreuse s’en échappa, une insupportable odeur d’os et de chair

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tombés sur un brasier. Dans la pièce, il put à peine respirer, étouffé, aveuglé par une sorte d’épaisse vapeur, une nuée stagnante et nauséabonde. . . . Qu’était devenu l’oncle? Où donc pouvait-il être passé? Et, devant la chaise, il n’y avait, sur le carreau, taché d’une mare de graisse, qu’un petit tas de cendre, à côté duquel gisait la pipe, une pipe noire, qui ne s’était pas même cassée en tombant. Tout l’oncle était là, dans cette poignée de cendre fine, et il était aussi dans la nuée rousse qui s’en allait par la fenêtre ouverte, dans la couche de suie qui avait tapissé la cuisine entière, un horrible suint de chair envolée, enveloppant tout, gras et infect sous le doigt. C’était le plus beau cas de combustion spontanée qu’un médecin eût jamais observé. (IX) The physician Allen Fenwick observes an equally strange case, but his account of it is probably designed in Bulwer’s intention as an allegorical portrayal of man versus nature rather than as clinically accurate fact. In this case, the plague-stricken and dying Margrave requires a particular ‘elixir of life’ in order to counteract the contagion that is consuming all the cells of his body. The elixir, which derives from the essential vital energy or primary cause that propagates all forms of life, must be distilled, as it were, from the bowels of nature itself. To tear this essential element loose from the natural substances that contain it is to perpetrate a dangerous sort of violence against nature, which, in the terms of Meredith, nature may not forgive. Yet Margrave persuades Fenwick to take the risk, and they proceed one night to a cavern in the Australian bush that houses primitive forms of matter useful for their purpose. After six tense hours of labouring in some kind of alchemical process to extract and brew their elixir, Fenwick becomes aware of resisting and rebellious forces. These smouldering energies finally burst into visibility in a form, Fenwick recalls, that ‘daunted my eye and quickened with terror the pulse of my heart’: The Bush-land beyond was on fire. From the background of the forest rose the flame and the smoke, – the smoke, there, still half smothering the flame. But along the width of the grasses and herbage, between the verge of the forest and the bed of the water-creek just below the raised platform from which I beheld the conflagration, the fire was advancing, – wave upon wave, clear and red against the columns of rock behind, – as the rush of a flood through the mists of some Alp crowned with lightnings. (LXXXVII) The conflagration is spontaneous, I believe, in that while no particular spark ignites it a whole forest is suddenly ablaze. Still, it remains a natural

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phenomenon that is far from uncaused or arbitrary. The forced liberation by Fenwick and Margrave of a certain natural energy has induced a violent reaction like the explosion that results, as we know, from releasing the energy that holds atoms together. By a chain reaction, indeed, the violence is also propagated to the animal inhabitants of the forest so that birds, snakes and larger beasts seek in frenzy to escape. At first Margrave does not care about the explosively spreading, contagious havoc, hoping only to save himself. With a hubris like Solomon Eagle’s exultation in the destruction of London, he cries, ‘ “Let the world be one funeral pyre! What to me is the world?” ’ He cannot, however, avoid the implications of belonging to this world, and the ferociously stampeding herds knock him, Fenwick and their precious elixir to the ground: Suddenly, unawares, from behind, I was stricken down. Over me, as I lay, swept a whirlwind of trampling hoofs and glancing horns. The herds, in their flight from the burning pastures, had rushed over the bed of the watercourse, scaled the slopes of the banks. Snorting and bellowing, they plunged their blind way to the mountains. One cry alone, more wild than their own savage blare, pierced the reek through which the Brute Hurricane swept. At that cry of wrath and despair I struggled to rise, again dashed to earth by the hoofs and the horns. But was it the dream-like deceit of my reeling senses, or did I see that giant Foot stride past through the close-serried ranks of the maddening herds? (LXXXVII) Although that mysterious Foot suggests a supernatural agency, it too symbolizes, probably, some aspect of the usually invisible forces of nature. Neither divine anger nor diabolical malevolence participates in the natural reaction that frustrates human attempts to defeat disease and mortality. The spilt elixir seeps back into the soil, into the blind and unconscious dimension of the operations of nature, and Fenwick recognizes the ineluctable claims of mortality. Shortly thereafter Margrave dies in the due pathological course of his disease. In both their surprising spectacularity and in their normal guise, natural occurrences have served to enforce the necessary limitations of the human condition. The emphasis upon inescapable mortality seems to contrast with Pascal’s insistence upon the irrepressible triumph of life. But in Bulwer’s novel too, it may be something like la vie that triumphs. Life defeats the attempt to reduce it into a reified elixir that human beings can then manipulate for their own selfish purposes. In this sense, the Australian fire also differs from the spontaneous combustion of Krook and Macquart. Whereas the combustion of the latter has suggested the flaring into visibility of the long smouldering disease, the bush fire implies the outburst of the hitherto invisible energy of healthy life. Or else, and more probably,

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the fires typify a natural energy that is involved in both death and life, disease and health, contagion and counter-contagion.25 The triumphant energy that burns – in general invisibly – in nature may not evince, however, the providential friendliness towards humanity that Pascal has apparently discerned in it. Since nature pursues in its unconscious operations no prefixed design beyond the blind instinct to perpetuate and replicate its own forms, our retrospective attribution of a benign causality reflects simply our own wishes. It is the same wishfulfilling tendency that has doubtless informed our recognitions of providence in the supernatural dimension. Still, while we must do without supernatural or natural forms of providence, the novels do not discredit the human desire to create ethically meaningful patterns in their retrospective writing of history. The narratives define areas in which human freedom and moral responsibility can respond to the historical disasters, in terms suggestive of Jameson’s own way of mitigating his pessimism. Narrating episodes of ‘a single and great collective story’, the stories develop what Jameson calls ‘a single fundamental theme’ – ‘the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity’. This great historical narrative, which evidently relates to Lyotard’s ‘récit de l’émancipation’ as well, lends a human dignity to the perceived effects of history. Although Necessity must continue to triumph, humanity can redefine, interpret – indeed humanize – its triumphs with some degree of creative freedom.26 Although the struggle for liberation is collective, a few individuals may take a particular responsibility for leading it in quiet, unassuming ways. With none of the power of divine providence, they still exercise an imperfectly providential function by rescuing others, wherever possible, from conditions of captivity. I promessi sposi assigns such a function especially to Fra Cristoforo and the Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. They obviously enact the providential role more effectively than poor Renzo does in his almsgiving. In Ruth too, a clerical figure, Thurstan Benson, performs the providential task in rescuing the heroine and helping her wisely – and sometimes unwisely – at every step thereafter in her career of self-redemption. Bleak House may provide, however, the most interesting version of an imperfectly human providence in John Jarndyce. As in the case of the ‘providential aesthetic’, his benevolence operates usually in concealment, and only in retrospect do Esther and others come to recognize the many instances of its constant propagation. At one point, in a remark that we may come to distrust, he also refers to a higher providence than his own: ‘ “Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts” ’, he advises Richard: ‘ “Never separate the two” ’ (XIII). But the novel otherwise casts doubt upon the reliability of that ‘Providence’. One must not, at least, rely irresponsibly upon a rescuing figure, as the selfishly passive Skimpole always does, just as one should place no hope in chance or Chancery. The providential power associated even with Jarndyce encounters continual

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challenges and checks. This ‘grim’ novel manifests, as Vargish concludes, an unresolved ‘tension between cosmic absurdity and providential order’, and it is the Dickensian novel ‘in which the threats to divine order are most radically posed’.27 Certainly with particular respect to the plagues men and women must cease to expect any signs of a divine order. The collective struggle for liberation entails here the precise denial of causality in terms of the will of God. If the plagues also represent the ‘realm of Necessity’, a certain freedom may be wrested from that Necessity by asserting a human share in the responsibility for the pestilential outbreaks. So Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall opposes, with his sanitary projects, the proponents of providence, who consider his reforms impious and vain attempts to obstruct the divinely-willed cholera. According to old Dr Heale, the cholera is ‘ “jidgment, sir, a jidgment of God, and we can’t escape His holy will, and that’s the plain truth of it” ’. It transpires, however, that the providentialists do not themselves nourish any great respect for ‘His holy will’ as transmitted in the pestilence; their respect conceals a more fundamental economic motive. The powerful families of the town own cottages and do not wish to be put to the expense of draining them and instituting other hygienic reforms. In alienating those families and the local health authorities, Thurnall seems incidentally to resemble Edwin Chadwick, upon whom Kingsley may have based him in these episodes.28 Heale will not, in any case, offend the local powers that be by supporting Tom’s proposals before the Board of Guardians: ‘And what be you thinking of, sir, to expect me to offend all my best patients? and not one of ’em but rents some two cottages, some a dozen. And what’ll they say to me if I go a routing and rookling in their drains, like an old sow by the wayside, beside putting ’em to all manner of expense? And all on the chance of this cholera coming, which I have no faith in, nor in this new-fangled sanitary reform neither, which is all a dodge for a lot of young Government puppies to fill their pockets, and rule and ride over us.’ (XIV) Hypocritically selfish interests involving money and class status have already undermined any genuine respect for divine providence, and Tom realizes again the desirability of redefining conceptions of justice, sin and guilt. Like others engaged in the struggle, he substitutes for outworn appeals to God, as the provider of authority for human actions, an assertion of human freedom to reformulate moral principles. But while eliminating the God in whom he does not at this point believe, his new moral imperatives still saves, curiously, a place for the devil – a devil nevertheless reduced to a human scale. With an incongruous remnant of Calvinist fervour, he explains to the Anglican vicar, in a passage already quoted in part, what his ethical system condemns:

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‘You hate sin, you know. Well, I hate disease. Moral evil is your devil, and physical evil is mine. I hate it, little or big; I hate to see a fellow sick; I hate to see a child rickety and pale; I hate to see a speck of dirt in the street; I hate to see a woman’s gown torn; I hate to see her stockings down at heel; I hate to see anything wasted, anything awry, anything going wrong; I hate to see water-power wasted, manure wasted, land wasted, muscle wasted, pluck wasted, brains wasted; I hate neglect, incapacity, idleness, ignorance, and all the disease and misery which spring out of that. There’s my devil; and I can’t help it, for the life of me, going right at his throat, wheresoever I meet him!’ (XIV) The devil is involved in the contagion of waste, the proliferating breakdown of purposeful order, the tendency towards entropy, metastasis and undifferentiation. In the secularized, nineteenth-century version of a providential vision, as Peter Baldwin notices, ‘filth’ substitutes for ‘sin’ and ‘sewerage’ replaces ‘atonement’.29 For Tom the ‘sanitary sinners’ emerge as an even worse category of felons than offenders against the Ten Commandments. As responsible for the environment in which pestilence thrives, they bear a more fundamental guilt than that of the obvious criminals that later take advantage of the epidemic to plunder and kill. Against such sinners, the moral battle for a realm of Freedom may employ the collectors of waste products, the builders of sewers and the recyclers of manure.30 Bleak House too ascribes a special wickedness to the authorities responsible for public health. Resembling Tom Thurnall’s anger, the controlled rage of Dickens’s narrator thus echoes biblical denunciation in insisting that ‘Verily . . . Tom has his revenge’ against the great of the land. Similarly the direct apostrophe, echoing a passage in Bulwer’s Lucretia, to the authorities of church and state when Jo dies denounces them as hypocrites that precisely lack ‘Heavenly compassion in your hearts’ (XLVII).31 The human or local cause of the waste, dirt, ignorance, disease and misery that Jo embodies is located, among established institutions, in Chancery, which like Kingsley’s cottage-owners fails to administer responsibly its decaying properties. Referring ironically to ‘Chancery’s transcendent wickedness’, Jarndyce thus implies his own version of a moral system in which the old devil’s ‘transcendence’ is actually reduced to immanence within sanitary and other human ‘wickedness’. Behind the objectively deplorable sanitary conditions that cause diseases lies a still more fundamental subjective cause, the devil that exists within human desires and motivations. That devil is, in a sense, a debased and corrupt version of the old providence. Whereas believers used to trust in the justice of a transcendent providence, they now trust in the mock justice of a Chancery that will fulfil their greedy desires for inherited and unearned wealth. Chancery has become a system, like a lottery or other

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game of chance, that offers hopes of gain to those that invest in it. (It recalls the provvidenza of Renzo’s naïve faith when he contributes his last coins to the beggars.) In actuality the final justice, the Day of Judgement which Miss Flite awaits, will never arrive. Chancery, as Esther and honest people ‘all over England’ know, meanwhile enriches lawyers and other members of a mafia that perform mutual favours and breeds the qualities that Tom Thurnall so hates. Attending one of its sessions, Esther experiences a sense of vertigo, ‘to see all that full dress and ceremony, and to think of the waste, and want, and beggared misery it represented; to consider that, while the sickness of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts, this polite show went calmly on from day to day, and year to year’ (XXIV). The ‘full dress and ceremony’ and the ‘polite show’ ‘while the sickness . . . was raging’ recalls indeed the episodes of dancing that we have seen as paralleling the spreading contagion. Among the principal victims of Chancery, Richard falls literally ill from the ‘subtle poison’ by which, says Jarndyce, ‘his blood is infected’ (XXXV). Instead of advising Richard to trust ‘in Providence and your own efforts’, he should perhaps have reduced the admonishment to trusting simply in ‘your own efforts’. A lesson is surely that human beings should free themselves of superstitious and paralysing dependence upon forms of providence and take responsible control of themselves and their environment. In doing so, they may at least diminish the ravages of the physical and moral pestilence and liberate territory for a realm of Freedom. To exercise human responsibility in times of pestilence involves not only combating particular types of sin and wickedness but also practising particular virtues. The plague that offers an occasion for rapacity, cowardice and arrogant auto-celebration like Solomon Eagle’s offers as well an opportunity for generosity, bravery and humility. In this sense, as Francesco Di Ciaccia argues with reference to I promessi sposi, the plague resembles any other historical event. While carrying no divine message and no moral meaning in itself, it becomes a field upon which men and women can respond with free and morally meaningful action.32 Like all assertions of existential freedom, these actions may constitute challenges to the traditional, theologically defined virtues. So the response of the dedicated scientist Dr Pascal Rougon to an epidemic of cholera may even arouse suspicion of his lack of human compassion. The cholera has offered him a quantity of cadavers of pregnant women to dissect.33 Because of this opportunity he has been able to study the human embryo and the development of the foetus at almost each day of its growth. His observations have contributed importantly to his theorizing about the genetic principles that regulate the transmission of characteristics from one generation to the next (II). Similarly he treats himself during the last painful day of his life as a medical specimen to be observed as dispassionately and clinically as possible. In the course of a series of heart attacks, his minute descriptions of particular sensations and symp-

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toms are to be recorded exactly by the attending physician for the sake of their scientific interest. The moral virtue of such a clinical response to disease derives from the benevolence of Pascal’s goals. The scientific task to which his life and his death are devoted will serve the cause of freedom by liberating other human beings from needless suffering and constraint. In the other novels the pestilence provides chances for less surprising forms of generous altruism. The heroine of Lavinia, who fears that her life has lacked any moral significance, blesses the moment that inspires her to become a nurse – ‘the very day, indeed, on which I learned what an amount of misery there was in the world’. The Crimean situation offers her ‘a still wider sphere of usefulness and self-sacrifice’ than she would have ‘in the hospitals of London’ (II:xviii), and so she embarks with many other women for the East. These women may succumb, to admit possible suspicions again about the motivations, to a sort of phenomenon of mass moral contagion. Or it may be mass counter-contagion in that they propose to combat the cholera and other medical emergencies in the Crimea. The narrator observes that ‘all female England would have gone en masse, if allowed’ (II:xix), and other sources too indicate the delirious desire of the moment to imitate Florence Nightingale.34 Still the novels evidently intend to portray the many physicians and nurses that accept the opportunity for generous humanitarian service as heroically free actors rather than victims of mass hysteria. Besides self-sacrificing altruism, the pestilence can bring out an instinct of bravery – as well, of course, as the more normal instinct of cowardice. These instincts too can be transmitted contagiously from individual to individual. It turns out that such psychological contagion influences the course of the disease itself, which is not therefore a purely determinist natural phenomenon. So in Two Years Ago the terrified or cowardly and conscience-stricken inhabitants of Aberalva die more quickly and surely than do the other more psychologically hardened members of the community. The Methodist preacher’s hell-fire sermon frightens many of his auditors literally into dying, and when he is made to feel remorse, his own guilt hastens his own end. We find according to the preacher Benson in Ruth too that ‘ “tremulous passion will predispose you to take the fever” ’, and before deciding to become a nurse, Ruth examines her own degree of tremulousness: ‘ “I believe that I have no fear. That is a great preservative, they say. At any rate, if I have a little natural shrinking, it is quite gone when I remember that I am in God’s hands!” ’ Unfortunately, in the present context, the appeal to the providential hands may not bode well, and despite her entirely virtuous bravery Ruth will, alas, die. She contracts the fever, however, after the period of her service in the hospital during the worst phase of the epidemic. In that period her bravery also proves infectious in helping others to avoid the dangerous ‘tremulous passion’: ‘to her it was owing that the overwrought fear of the town was subdued; it was she who had gone voluntarily, and, with no thought of

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greed or gain, right into the very jaws of the fierce disease’ (XXXIII). As a heroine of freedom she has confronted the dragon in his own den and freed some of his captives. A last example of a virtue that the pestilential environment may call forth is resignation. Resembling the Goethean Entsagen that appeals to so many moralists of the nineteenth century, it involves none of the defiance that bearding the dragon in his den may entail. When Renzo learns that the plague has struck Lucia, his anxiety about her fate leads Fra Cristoforo, at one of the most morally significant moments of the story, to reprove him. Renzo must prepare himself serenely to accept any fate at all, and ‘ “a lodar Dio, qualunque sia l’esito delle tue ricerche” ’ (XXXV). Whatever happens, he should, that is, praise a God that no longer has the characteristics of a humanly coherent or comprehensible Providence. One must not hope or pray for any particular rewards from such a God, whose possible interventions in human affairs may be presumed but never precisely detected. As Bulwer’s Fenwick realizes too, in the precisely similar circumstance of not knowing whether his beloved and stricken Lilian will live or die, only a single sort of prayer is admissible: ‘I prayed that my soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain’ (LXXXIX). If one still believes in that Maker, one must not only bear submissively but, according to Fra Cristoforo, humbly praise him amidst natural disasters and in any circumstances at all. Far from jubilant, such praise amounts to an internal quietude wherein, beyond just enduring, one lives freed of anxiety, hope and desire. Wrested from the Necessity of the plague, this quietude too belongs to a realm of Freedom to which most of the protagonists accede in one way or another.35 Although Renzo and Fenwick will find just after these moments that their beloved wives have recovered, the moment of resignation in the other stories occurs more often in connection with deathbeds. In the realm of Freedom, which has here become a purely private mental state, the Maker to whom Renzo and Fenwick submit exercises scarcely any divinely teleological function. Nothing indicates that this Maker, who eludes our understanding, is making or ordaining anything with any purposeful forethought. Rather than intelligent determination, his ordination is apparently to be identified with that of mysterious, uncaused Necessity or random, uncaused chance. He may equally well and indifferently ordain life as death, either of which must be accepted, almost without preference, by the human subject that is here reduced to an equally passive indifference. As implied in Fenwick’s version of a doctrine of the imperfect, God may in such a guise have effectively withdrawn from history, even if Fenwick as scientist perceives teleology in nature. Recognizing God’s absence ‘here’, Fenwick simply longs to find him in the ‘Hereafter’. It has become therefore inaccurate to attribute the term Maker to such a God.

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More importantly creative than such a Maker, are then the human makers that can make their own peace independently of God. From the materials, the Necessity of histoire, such makers construct, always narrating in retrospect, the récit that belongs to Jameson’s ‘great collective story’ or Lyotard’s ‘récit de l’émancipation’. The récit defines the more or less probable and local human causes and responsibilities – for the outbreaks of cholera, for example – that are otherwise absent from the histoire. Here Jameson might also distinguish the récit of the ‘great collective story’ from the merely private récit of a wife’s death or recovery. The latter may refer to what Jameson considers ‘a purely individual, a merely psychological project of salvation’ and so not belong to the more ‘political’ realm of Freedom that chiefly interests him. While our novels concern, as we have seen, both private and collective projects, the last part of this chapter will consider an especially important instance of the collective type. In this episode of the pestilence, all eight novels narrate an implicitly political account of the succumbing of Providence to the local causes of history. *

*

*

The stricken community seeks in this collective episode to heal itself by performing a placating or reparative gesture towards Providence. But the community has lost touch with the tradition in which such ritual gestures were once efficaciously performed. The ritual is thus enacted as a result of some subliminal, misunderstood compulsion and celebrated without conviction and in a fragmentary manner. Without leading to a collective healing, the episode reveals chiefly that the community no longer believes in the Providence that once possessed the power to respond to such gestures. The placating or reparative acts belong again to a pattern that Girard has noticed. The ‘mythical plague is never present alone’ but triggers both the process of disintegration and reparative rituals that counteract it: there is always ‘a thematic cluster that includes various forms of undifferentiation and transgression, the mimetic doubles, and a sacrificial theme that may take the form of a scapegoat process’.36 It is then in this sacrificial scapegoat process that the community gestures towards the absent Providence. To free itself, it associates the plague with a guilt that is loaded onto the goat expelled into the wilderness. Although the guilt may not derive from offences against divine law, the sacrifice expresses an obscure hope of appeasing some divinity. The sacrificial victim, according to Girard, cannot validly be reproached for any particular individual guilt, and he or she may be chosen at random. For the ritual to have effect, however, the community must believe in the guilt of the victim, whose sacrifice will then serve as a catharsis. The accounts of mob violence during the seventeenth-century plagues recall the more primitive versions of the superstitious search for scapegoats. The episodes also happen to include the marking of house-fronts, as if in allusion to the passover ceremony of marking houses with the

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blood of lambs or goats during one of the Egyptian plagues.37 In Ainsworth the mob foolishly directs its fury against the authorities that have marked and shut up houses in which the plague has broken out. In Manzoni too the targets of popular wrath are the markers of house-fronts, but of another sort – the sinister untori that spread a greasy substance thought to propagate the contagion. During the mad ‘delirio’ of seeking the guilty hand behind the nocturnal applications of that mysterious grease, the most surprising names come up – Don Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordova, Cardinal Richelieu, the Count of Collalto, Wallenstein. The anxiety to pinpoint and punish the guilty becomes itself contagious: ‘la frenesia s’era propagata come il contagio’: Il viandante che fosse incontrato da de’ contadini, fuor della strada maestra, o che in quella si dondolasse a guardar in qua e in là, o si buttasse giù per riposarsi; lo sconosciuto a cui si trovasse qualcosa di strano, di sospetto nel volto, nel vestito, erano untori: al primo avviso di chi si fosse, gl’infelici eran tempestati di pietre, o, presi, venivan menati, a furia di popolo, in prigione. (XXXII) The narrator points out that this phenomenon of stoning and otherwise punishing scapegoats, as he evidently takes them to be, has occurred in all the plagues of history, of which he lists many examples.38 Not simply the victims of mob fury, the victims now undergo legally inflicted punishments too: ‘furon processati e condannati a supplizi, per lo più atrocissimi’ (XXXII). Sadly, for the narrator, the otherwise enlightened Cardinal Federigo shares the popular superstition that guilty untori are to blame. The cardinal believes, however, that the poor wretches actually punished are only innocent scapegoats and that the truly guilty parties have not been captured. Among the many innocent sufferers for the wickedness of Chancery, we find in the crossing-sweeper Jo of Bleak House a more poignantly narrated individual case. Constantly urged by the intimidating police to ‘move on’, he has embodied guilt and infection and been a candidate for lamb-like sacrifice or goat-like exile for his entire brief existence. (It seems reasonable here to associate sacrificed lambs with the figure of the scapegoat.) When Bucket and Snagsby seek him out in Tom-all-alone’s, they find in Jo’s habitat a contagion made apparent to all five senses. Their impression of the crowded slum may illustrate what Marshall considers a contemporary tendency to see ‘working class [crowds] as rampantly procreating bacilli’.39 The infernal journey carries them past the ‘fever-houses’ containing the ‘dead and dying “like sheep with rot” ’, and they draw back at one point as a corpse is carried by: ‘ “Here’s the fever coming up the street!” ’ cries Bucket. At length they manage to take custody of Jo who stands ‘trembling to think that he has offended against the law in not

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having moved on far enough’. Although inexplicably let off this time, after being forcibly conducted in Bucket’s ‘professional hold’ to Tulkinghorn’s ‘usual room’ for interrogation (XXII), he falls even more terrifyingly into the hands of the preacher Chadband. An imprecise premonition warns him that he will, sheep-like, undergo literal shearing or worse. As Chadband considers where ‘to station’ the victim ‘ “delivered over untoe me” ’, Jo is ‘not at all clear but that something practical and painful is going to be done to him’. Chadband threatens obscurely to ‘ “employ this instrument” ’, whereupon ‘Jo, apparently possessed by an impression that the reverend gentleman wants to cut his hair, shields his head with both arms, and is got into the required position with great difficulty’ (XXV). Later Bucket and Skimpole will expel him as if he were the fever itself or a ‘sheep with rot’ from the haven of Bleak House. Even the humane Woodcourt ‘shrinks back from him with a sudden horror’ in recalling that Jo has contaminated Esther with his fever. And when he is taken to the shooting gallery to die, both Woodcourt and Mr George recoil from him as an agent, like Manzoni’s untori, of contagion: [They] have an inclination to shrink from him, partly for what he is, and partly for what he has caused. He, too, shrinks from them. He is not of the same order of things, not of the same place in creation. He is of no order and no place; neither of the beasts, nor of humanity. (XLVII) His position beyond the pale of civilized and animal hierarchies makes him an especially appropriate scapegoat whose sacrifice can help restore the components of a diseased society to their own appropriate orders and places. In uniting to brand Jo with guilt, the rest of society may overcome what Girard calls ‘the epidemic of reciprocal violence’, whereby each individual anarchically brands everyone else as guilty.40 So the sacrifice of Jo can become a factor of social cohesion, and Jo cooperates in the operation by assuming the guilt, expressing penitence for it, and begging forgiveness. He asks to have written in very large letters in his will ‘ “that I wos wery truly hearty sorry that I done it and that I never went fur to do it; and that though I didn’t know nothink at all, I knowd as Mr Woodcot once cried over it and wos allus grieved over it, and that I hoped as he’d be able to forgiv me in his mind” ’ (XLVII). Unfortunately, the sacrifice of the scapegoat is not fully effective. When Jo dies, the narrator, as we have seen, reacts with a denunciation of the authorities in high places that are far more guilty than Jo. So the guilt is not removed, and as in Ainsworth and Manzoni too, the plague continues. Although far more dumb in all senses than the curiously eloquent Jo, the adolescent Charles in Le Docteur Pascal functions as a similar scapegoat. He is an unwanted illegitimate child, the result of the seventeen-year-old Maxime Rougon’s seduction of his stepmother’s femme de chambre. A

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decent marriage is arranged for her with a saddler, who cannot, however, abide his wife’s bastard son, and the awkward child is thereafter shunted about from relative to relative. Instead of gaining in wisdom as he matures, he falls back further and further into imbecility. His uncanny physical resemblance, as we have already observed, to the ancestral Tante Dide encourages tendencies to identify him as an embodiment too of the moral and mental degeneracy with which she has infected her race. Sent off to a college, he is euphemistically accused of unmentionable practices (‘vices inavouables’) and expelled after six months (III). Yet he possesses a dazzling angelic beauty and seems a personification of meek innocence too. His richly abundant bright hair suggests associations with lamb’s wool and also strikes the narrator as a royal attribute. Reminding us of poor Jo’s particularly felt need to protect his hair, Charles’s locks tend, indeed, to fascinate everyone, as when his aunt strokes them in a train compartment: Clotilde s’amusa à lui enlever sa toque, pour lustrer ses admirables cheveux blonds, sa royale chevelure dont les boucles lui tombaient sur les épaules. Mais elle portait une bague, et lui ayant passé la main sur la nuque, elle resta saisie de voir que sa caresse laissait une trace sanglante. (IX) The other principal characteristic of his body, besides his hair, is that tendency to bleed at the slightest touch: ‘On ne pouvait le toucher, sans que la rosée rouge perlât à sa peau: c’était un relâchement des tissus, si aggravé par la dégénérescence, que le moindre froissement déterminait une hémorragie’. In addition to a scapegoat he appears a dumb and still unshorn lamb ready to shed his blood. As we have seen in the first chapter, no external hand is required to shed that blood, for it flows forth, like the combustion of his great-grand-uncle Antoine, spontaneously. With scarcely a word or sign of protest – recalling the Biblical reference to Jesus and the dumbness of the sheep before her shearers41 – he seems like Dickens’s Jo quietly to accept his sacrifice. The ritual is performed, as it were, in a surreal silence that lasts for the many long minutes required for all his blood to be spilt. Although he and his great-great-grandmother have been left alone, a scream from one or the other would have procured immediate help. Yet neither stirs, as she watches in paralysed fascination the sacrifice that she has in some obscure way ordained. Too late, she cries out at last, and it appears that in her confused mind the bloodshed has been re-enacting the more noisily bloody slaughters of her lover Macquart and her grandson Silvère. That revolutionary grandson too has died as ‘la victime des haines et des luttes sanglantes de la famille’ (IX). We identify Charles then as the innocent scapegoat who is made to bear the guilt of all the generations of Rougon-Macquart and whose elimination may heal the epidemic of hatred and violence. But of course the

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family rancours continue. Although the death of the embarrassing Charles particularly relieves Félicité, the event does not placate the bitter antagonism between her and her son Pascal. In Lavinia the young mother of the protagonist Paolo Mancini has resembled ‘an early Christian virgin-martyr’ (I:iii) and has died as a result of enmities within a family every bit as wicked as the RougonMacquart. Her death a few months after Paolo’s birth has occurred, however, long before the beginning of the story, which does not really contain other innocent victims. Still something of the scapegoat pattern may exist in an association of Paolo with the biblical Samson, who was shorn, blinded and sacrificed in the epidemic of reciprocal violence between the Israelites and Philistines. The Israelites, we recall, wished to deliver their awkward hero over to the Philistines, as a sacrifice to end further bloodshed. At the end Samson cooperates in a perverse way to make a sacrifice of himself that will, at least according to Milton’s Samson Agonistes, produce a general catharsis – leaving everyone, in the final line of the chorus, ‘calm of mind, all passions spent’. With respect more specifically to Paolo, his misadventures involve betrayals at the hands of various Delilahs, including Lavinia herself who views him for much of the story as an enemy. When she breaks an engagement to meet him and attends instead an imperial ball at the Parisian Hôtel de Ville, his rage makes him notice that ‘a new-born power swells his heart, hardens his muscles, a power boundless for mischief. Oh! that this world were built on pillars, that he might drag them down, and bury all mankind under the ruins’ (I:xxvii). The police naturally prevent the wild-looking youth from rushing into the ballroom to pull it down in the manner of Samson in the Temple of Dagon. He collapses instead with a dangerous fever thought at first to be cholera. Making him a sort of Samson, duped by the triumphant Delilah, the attending physician bleeds him copiously and, as our first literally shorn victim, cuts off ‘all his fine hair’ (I:xxviii).42 There remain, as possible sacrificial victims, four of the heroines of our novels, but while they possess many of the requisites, their sacrifices are never quite efficacious. In a passage that compares Manzoni’s Lucia to a dumbly slaughtered sheep, the guilt-ridden Gertrude may imitate a scapegoat ritual, purging her convent by sending Lucia out to become herself a fallen woman. With her Judas-like kisses, Gertrude betrays, however, a guilt that is only increased and not expiated by her delivery of Lucia into the power of the ‘butcher’. No guilt can be attached to the victim, and Gertrude’s treachery can only parody a ritual sacrifice: Gertrude ritirata con Lucia nel suo parlatorio privato, le faceva più carezze dell’ordinario, e Lucia le riceveva e le contraccambiava con tenerezza crescente: come la pecora, tremolando senza timore sotto la mano del pastore, che la palpa e la strascina mollemente, si volta a

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Bulwer’s heroine Lilian Ashleigh comes closer to fulfilling the function of the scapegoat. She possesses the requisite innocence and yet comes unintentionally to bear, like the harmless Jo and Charles, some of the guilt of her environment too. The moral contamination, which most obsesses the ruler of that environment, Mrs Poyntz, emanates especially from the fallen woman and the libertine. She has plotted, for example, to prevent Lady Sarah Bellasis, ‘of the best manners and of the worst morals’, from settling on the Hill. But the undercurrents of guilty eroticism that are already subverting Mrs Poyntz’s proprieties come sometimes to the surface, as when Margrave plays the wild tarantella. Mrs Poyntz herself entertains a partially acknowledged, illicit love for Fenwick, and we learn that Miss Brabazon, whom Margrave has led into the dance, desires Fenwick too. When it transpires that Lilian has apparently eloped with Margrave, Mrs Poyntz decrees her banishment. Entirely innocent, but thought to be guilty, Lilian loses her reason upon receipt of an accusatory letter from the jealous Miss Brabazon, and Fenwick conducts her into a quite literal wilderness in Australia. But the expulsion of Lilian, as scapegoat, does not serve, of course, to restore any genuine health to Mrs Poyntz’s realm. While Lucia and Lilian certainly have no desire to suffer their sacrifices, Grace Harvey of Two Years Ago possesses a genuine vocation for martyrdom. Kingsley’s narrator, who despite his defence of the woman’s right to enjoy a passionate sexuality often betrays a certain chauvinism, refers to ‘that strange woman’s pleasure in martyrdom, the secret pride of suffering unjustly’. Grace’s favourite volume is the Book of Martyrs, which offers her ‘strange enjoyment, for she soon found that her intense imagination enabled her to re-enact those sad and glorious stories in her own person’: Many a night, after extinguishing the light, and closing her eyes, she would lie motionless for hours on her little bed, not to sleep, but to feel with Perpetua the wild bull’s horns, to hang with St Maura on the cross, or lie with Julitta on the rack, or see with triumphant smile, by Anne Askew’s side, the fire flare up around her at the Smithfield stake, or to promise, with dying Dorothea, celestial roses to the mocking youth, whose face too often took the form of Thurnall’s; till every nerve quivered responsive to her fancy in agonies of actual pain. (X) Tom in particular offers her an opportunity for imaginative indulgence of the eros of physical agony. Knowing that Tom suspects her, unjustly, of having stolen his fifteen hundred pounds (for once the woman’s sup-

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posed crime is not sexual) she wishes herself back in the good old days: ‘ “then I should have been tortured, and have confessed it, true or false, in the agony, and have been hanged” ’ (XIV). But even before Tom’s advent, a persuasion of her own Christ-like mission has also convinced the townspeople to relate her to this most efficacious of all biblical scapegoats.43 They recognize both her charismatic power over others and her submission to the force of other personalities, whereby she identifies with sinners in clear instances of mimetic doubling: ‘Her deep melancholy was believed to be caused by some dark fate – by some agonizing sympathy with evil-doers; and it was sometimes said in Aberalva – “Don’t do that, for poor Grace’s sake. She bears the sins of all the parish” ’ (II). She comes especially to feel an ‘agonizing sympathy’ for her wicked mother and to bear her sins. The discovery that her mother has stolen the money from Tom provokes in her a flood of painful compassion like nothing that she has experienced before: Amid the most torturing horror and disgust of the great sin, rose up in her the divinest love for the sinner; she felt – strange paradox – that she had never loved her mother as she did at that moment. ‘Oh, that it had been I who had done it, and not she!’ And her mother’s sin was to her her own sin, her mother’s shame her shame, till all sense of her mother’s guilt vanished in the light of her divine love. ‘Oh, that I could take her up tenderly, tell her that all is forgiven by man and God! – serve her as I have never served her yet! – nurse her to sleep on my bosom, and then go forth and bear her punishment, even if need be on the gallows-tree!’ (XXVI) The fantasy of bearing the sins of another and being crucified for her sake continues as, barefoot, she carries her fainting mother over rocks towards their home and mentally enacts a Via Crucis: ‘slowly she bore her homeward, with aching knees and bleeding feet; while before her eyes hung the picture of Him who bore His cross up Calvary’ (XXVI). Her persuasion that she is soon, like Christ, to die echoes that of Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who indeed actually dies, as Vrettos believes, in ‘an imitation of Christ’s own neuromimetic sacrifice’.44 Despite her passionate desire for martyrdom, however, that fate eludes Grace, and the passage goes on to narrate instead the death of the terrified and evidently consciencestricken mother. Although the epidemic of cholera has almost ended, the mother suddenly shows all the symptoms and dies within forty-eight hours as the last victim – creating thereby a certain logical confusion. While the death may be read as the sacrifice that brings the epidemic to an end, the mother has not possessed the innocence required to grant the scapegoat its efficacy. The wrong woman has died. In Ruth Mr Benson appears, when the illegitimacy of Leonard becomes

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public knowledge, to propose the boy for the role of Christian scapegoat. Mentioning again the detail of the ‘bleeding feet’, he urges Ruth to encourage her son to follow Christ along the Via Crucis: ‘ “Tell him of the hard and thorny path which was trodden once by the bleeding feet of One” ’ (XXVII). The pattern receives its most significantly large application, however, in the heroine herself, who is both essentially innocent and technically fallen. Like Paolo Mancini’s mother and Grace Harvey, Ruth is associated from the beginning, I believe, with ‘an early Christian virginmartyr’ – namely, St Agnes in her incarnation as Keats’s Madeline. We notice on the third page of the story, for example, Gaskell’s version of the effect of the cold January moonlight as it passes through an old stained glass window and illuminates the virgin. There is ‘a grand carved oaken staircase, lighted by a window of stained glass, storied all over with armorial bearings’: ‘Up such a stair – past such a window (through which the moonlight fell on her with a glory of many colours) – Ruth Hilton passed wearily one January night, now many years ago.’45 Meeting her future lover while a ball is in progress, she will also come that night specifically to dream of him, and later they will elope. In Gaskell’s version of the Keatsian story Porphyro thus becomes a vile seducer while the betrayed Madeline preserves a kind of spiritual virginity. Despite that innocence, Ruth is banished by Mrs Mason and ostracized at the inn in Wales from which she must flee with Benson to Eccleston.46 There in the shearing of her ‘fine long curls’, which remind us of the magnificent hair of Charles and Paolo, she also becomes like one of the shorn lambs offered to St Agnes.47 The shearer is the servant Sally, who thus prepares the victim’s head (in an action that contrasts with Bellingham’s crowning of Ruth with water-lilies) for a widow’s cap: Sally produced the formidable pair of scissors that always hung at her side, and began to cut in a merciless manner. She expected some remonstrance or some opposition, and had a torrent of words ready to flow forth at the least sign of rebellion; but Ruth was still and silent, with meekly-bowed head, under the strange hands that were shearing her beautiful hair into the clipped shortness of a boy’s. . . . [Sally] gazed into the countenance, expecting to read some anger there, though it had not come out in words; but she only met the large, quiet eyes, that looked at her with sad gentleness out of their finelyhollowed orbits. Ruth’s soft, yet dignified submission, touched Sally with compunction. (XIII)48 This lamb or scapegoat thus freely accepts her guilt and her sacrifice. With what Francesco Marroni considers her vocation for martyrdom, she also continues, repeatedly and coherently, to enact the role of the innocent victim.49 The most harrowing repetition will occur when she becomes

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governess of the younger daughters in the Bradshaw household. Learning to his amazement of her fallen condition, Mr Bradshaw believes that the most infamous possible contagion has entered his home and pronounces a terrible sentence of expulsion: ‘He held the street door open wide; and said, between his teeth, “If ever you, or your bastard, darken this door again, I will have you both turned out by the police” ’ (XXVI). Like Jo, Ruth ‘is of no order and no place’ in the hierarchies of civilization, and she must accomplish her exile to its ultimate degree. An exile more grim, that is, awaits her than that of the unfortunate girl Pasley, upon whom Gaskell based Ruth’s story, who emigrated, like Bulwer’s Lilian, to Australia. She becomes a nurse to the outcasts of the fever ward and finally decides to tend the stricken Bellingham, who had first communicated to her, along with her pregnancy, the supposed moral contagion. This time his contamination produces the fatal typhus, of which she becomes the last victim. She dies without complaint, ‘display[ing] no outrage or discord even in her delirium’, the innocent sacrifice whose death may be supposed to appease the mysterious gods. Her death does help restore peace to the community. Humbled by the discovery of his own son’s criminality, the stern Bradshaw repents, rejoins Benson’s congregation, and seeks to make reparation to Ruth’s son. Yet all is not well in terms of the Girardian pattern. Whereas the community should believe in the guilt of the expelled goat, absolutely no one now considers Ruth sinful. Rather than being removed, a heavy sense of guilt weighs upon the surviving community. Remorse haunts not only Bradshaw but others for the wrongs done to Ruth, which they recognize too late, and the physician Mr Davis, in particular, confesses his own guilty responsibility: ‘ “Don’t add to my self-reproach” ’, he begs Benson; ‘ “I have killed her. I was a cruel fool to let her go” ’ (XXXV). They can only hope that the wrongfully slaughtered lamb will forgive and bless them, a hope to which the verses from Revelations that Benson reads at the funeral may give oblique expression: ‘ “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. . . . The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” ’ (XXXVI). The sacrificed Lamb is not only Jesus, who will comfort Ruth, but also Ruth herself, who will comfort and lead others to God. An impression lingers, however, that her death has insufficient inner logic; it has been a gratuitous punishment that has not been required for healing the wounds of the community. Indeed according to the well-known opinion of W.R. Greg in 1859 and often repeated since then, Ruth has been made to atone not for others’ sins but for her own non-existent sin.50 The thrust of the story has emphasized the absence of genuine guilt in her original, ignorant fall and the fullness with which she has long since made reparation for the supposed guilt.

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In all eight novels, the ‘scapegoat process’ or pattern of the lamb’s sacrifice occurs in defective ways and fails to produce a catharsis. While some compulsion prompts repeated enactment of the ancient blood sacrifices that secure the benevolence of Providence, the intuitive logic of those rituals has lost its power to convince and has broken down. The inefficacy of the ritual gestures betrays, I believe, mainly the absence of the Providence to which they ought to refer. The situation provides an instance of the nineteenth-century split between conscious belief and unconscious intuition, which receives famous expression in Tennyson’s opposition of ‘freezing reason’ to ‘a warmth within the breast’. Our novels appear, however, to reverse the Tennysonian pattern by locating the ‘freezing’ voice of denial not in the conscious mind but in the intuitive dimension. On the intentional and conscious level the stories profess faith, sometimes with noisy rhetoric, in the providential aesthetic, but on a subterranean level, a conflicting intuition undermines that faith. Exemplifying one of its typical ‘ruses’, history is here producing an effect that is the reverse of what the actors intended to cause. From our own retrospective view, at least, the subversive intuition triumphs: there is, it announces, no God to be offended, no God to send pestilential retribution, and no God to be ritually appeased. Or if such a God exists, he lies concealed and silent behind the many possibilities for interpreting the contagious presence in the historical moment. Although Girard affirms the inevitability of the instinct to sacrifice scapegoats in narratives of contagion, its persistence also indicates an anachronistic element in the nineteenth-century moral context.51 In the case of Ruth, as we have seen, its presence in the story may constitute an aesthetic blunder as well. To redeem the absurdity of chance, or of uncaused history, a new moral view is replacing the providential faith in the efficacy of ritual sacrifice. The sins that abound in the world are no longer those that outrage divinity but sanitary sins and other affronts to the environment and to human solidarity. The collective narrative of liberation must therefore bring out the patterns whereby human beings unaided by Providence have been able to transmit generous and brave impulses to one another within the pestilential conditions. The pestilence will continue, but as Girard also suggests, it is possible to harness the good aspects of the contagious or mimetic principle in the service of social integration rather than disgregation. Fortunately, in their retrospective making of history, our novels do realize this creative possibility. In many of their episodes human beings choose not simply to load guilt onto one another but to assume individual and collective responsibilities for the painfulness of Necessity. The ‘great collective story’ or ‘récit de l’émancipation’ to which these episodes pertain may also be the grand meta-narrative that Arthur Schnitzler has described. ‘Il est peut-être permis’, says Schnitzler in a passage from Beziehungen und Einsamkeiten that Baudrillard cites in French,

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‘d’interpréter l’histoire de l’humanité comme un éternel combat contre le divin qui, en dépit de sa résistance, est peu à peu, et par nécessité, détruit par l’humain.’52 Again and again, this narrative reveals the interesting ambiguity of history: while Promethean humanity slowly liberates territory from the divine tyranny, it is always ‘nécessité’ that presides over the process.

3

Swordsmen and needlewomen

As portions of a collective narrative, the novels aspire at some points to a lofty overview of humanity suffering in the vast, unbounded expanse of an historical moment. The expanse is especially, in the thesis of this study, a field of contagion as when Ainsworth’s Leonard looks out at that night in London: ‘a night . . . so calm, so beautiful, so clear, that it was scarcely possible to imagine that it was unhealthy. The destroying angel was, however, fearfully at work’. Sometimes, as we have noticed, the vision surveys not only a field of contagion but a battlefield on which struggles are underway to wrest areas of Freedom from Necessity. And other metaphorical terms help as well to convey an impression of the large historical forces. Elaine Scarry translates the contagious process that Girard sees as social disintegration and reintegration into the universal activity of ‘unmaking’ and ‘making’. The redemptive or ‘making’ power, which we have already associated primarily with the human maker, is pre-eminently, for Scarry, the capacity of ‘imagination’. In Scarry’s overview of the unmaking/ making process the historical expanse also ceases to appear unbounded. The imagination works precisely to maintain protective barriers for beleaguered humanity – ‘not here and there, now on, now off, but massive, continuous, ongoing, like a watchman patrolling the dikes of culture by day and night’. The vision of the cultural dikes curiously echoes Sir Leicester Dedlock’s fear that ‘ “the floodgates of society are burst open” ’, but Scarry’s presiding watchman remains constantly vigilant to prevent such a catastrophe. He is himself invisible, for the ‘imagination is self-effacing and often completes its work by disguising its own activity’. The watchman can only be intuited retrospectively, as in the versions of providence that we have noticed in the previous chapter. He is an absent cause, a mythical figure that is imagined to be coordinating the activities of the many individual imaginations, or minor watchmen, each at work to patrol a section of the dikes.1 The figure of the invisible watchman inevitably recalls Foucault’s Surveiller et punir, which documents the emergence in the late eighteenth century of a new vehicle for the exercise of social control. Instead of exerting physical compulsion to enforce social discipline, society learns to

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apply the policing power of watching. The members of society come to believe that they are being forever watched by an unseen eye, like the prisoners in Bentham’s Panopticon. In general that impression of being under observation, which also encourages self-observation, proves sufficient to discourage antisocial transgression.2 Existing nowhere and everywhere throughout the social fabric, this fictitious eye disciplines with an all-permeating power. It operates as an irresistible contagion or, more precisely, counter-contagion, enforcing tendencies towards order and integration in ‘une société toute traversée et pénétrée de mécanismes disciplinaires’.3 On the metaphorical field of penetrating visionary forces, which is a version of the field of contagion, the imagination that ‘makes’ naturally encounters the vision that ‘unmakes’ and opens gaps in the dikes. In correspondence to the unseen, disciplining eye of the Panopticon, there are eyes that are hostile to culture and imagination. Such eyes resemble those of Keats’s ‘philosophical’ Apollonius, whose gaze sees through imaginative creations and annihilates what it looks at.4 In Bleak House we find ‘the gaunt eyes in the shutters staring down upon the bed’ of the dead Nemo (X) that suggest, according to Jeremy Tambling, the eye sockets of a death’s head.5 Nothing in themselves and staring at ‘No one’ (XI) – indeed like Esther’s doll ‘staring . . . at nothing’ (III) – they remind us of the nullity of human life, which the plague too reduces to its final undifferentiation. The threat of dissolution also comes in the form of eyes to haunt Bulwer’s Fenwick. Just before the spontaneous conflagration that we have observed, during the night in which he and Margrave seek to brew the elixir, glaring eyes initiate the incineration: About this time I saw distinctly in the distance a vast Eye! It drew nearer and nearer, seeming to move from the ground at the height of some lofty giant. Its gaze riveted mine; my blood curdled in the blaze from its angry ball; and now as it advanced larger and larger, other Eyes, as if of giants in its train, grew out from the space in its rear; numbers on numbers, like the spear-heads of some Eastern army, seen afar by pale warders of battlements doomed to the dust. (LXXXVI) These ocular ‘spear-heads’ resemble the eye of Apollonius – ‘the sophist’s eye’ in Keats’s poem that, ‘like a sharp spear, went through [Lamia] utterly’. But whereas the threat to Lamia’s reality may be metaphysical, Bulwer’s simile implies a cultural peril: an army of oriental visual energies may dissolve to dust the cultural vision of the ‘pale warders’ of the west. From the orient, as we have seen, comes the contagion against which the west must defend itself and also in opposition to which define itself. The weapons employed, it is now clear, must include not only sanitary measures and military force (spears) but vigilant eyes. The ‘pale

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warders of the battlements’ and vigilant defenders of the ‘dikes of culture’ may be further identified in this period with what D.A. Miller labels, in an all-purpose term, ‘the police’.6 The police are known especially for their eyes, as in the case of Detective Bucket in Bleak House. With his ‘most attentive eyes’ Bucket becomes especially similar to the hidden watchman in the tower of the Panopticon when he secretly surveys the crowd at Tulkinghorn’s funeral: Quiet among the undertakers and the equipages, and the calves of so many legs all steeped in grief, Mr Bucket sits concealed in one of the inconsolable carriages, and at his ease surveys the crowd through the lattice blinds. He has a keen eye for a crowd – as for what not? – and looking here and there, now from this side of the carriage, now from the other, now up at the house windows, now along the people’s heads, nothing escapes him. (LIII) Not knowing which carriages are empty and which contain an observer, Hortense would do well to watch her step. She comes under the surveillance, moreover, not only of Bucket but – as the observer observes another observer in action – of his wife. The visionary task is occurring with varying degrees of effectiveness, indeed, through many eyes at once. Diffused throughout society, the policing agents belong not only to the ranks of the official enforcers of law. On the ocular field the skirmishes are often gendered. As the reference to Keats’s Apollonius suggests, the male gaze seems readily to abash the female power of vision. Hall, who emphasizes the dynamism of ‘looking’ and ‘staring’ in Victorian texts, notices that women like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott and Browning’s Duchess suffer punishment for daring to look about themselves too freely. In patriarchal regimes women are evidently to be seen rather than to see. Frequently represented as the object of the male gaze, the female becomes, in the analysis of Simone de Beauvoir, a commodity. And for Luce Irigaray the ‘knowing, fixing’ male gaze functions as a ‘deeply entrenched, normatized mechanism for the exercise of patriarchal power’.7 It is nevertheless possible, as will be discussed later in the chapter, that the most powerful observers are watchwomen rather than watchmen. Such women may release one another from the imprisoning patriarchal vision, as happens, Hall believes, when Miss Wade wins Tattycoram over to her view of things in Little Dorrit: ‘the spread of ocular disease between women’ leads to their spurning of male authority.8 The disease also spreads to men insofar as they must respect the arbitresses of society. Usually armed with their sewing needles, vigilant women spot danger signs and collaborate to make and impose the system of cultural proprieties and values of what is called the ‘world’. But to leave aside, for the moment, the ocular dimension of the

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disease, the first part of this chapter returns to the military domain, where the aggressively spreading contagion is associated with the sword. By containing episodes of swordsmanship, our novels continue to propose what Foucault and Miller consider the older regime of social control – physical compulsion rather than the subtler compulsion of watching. The tendency within the novels supports, to be sure, the newer regime because the proponents of physical force, the swordsmen, are most often discredited as valid makers or upholders of the cultural order. Still, as the two parts of this chapter devoted to swordsmen and to needlewomen will show, the unmaking/making functions can neither be fully disentangled nor be referred neatly to gender roles. And here too, as we have seen in the conceptions of providence, the newer regime does not completely replace the older one. Initially the swordsmen appear more often to unmake than to make. In I promessi sposi it is the army of the emperor, we recall, that diffuses the plague in its invasion and plundering of Lombardy. But the country has already been infested for many generations by the armed bands of bravos that figure so prominently right from the opening episode in Manzoni’s story. They are an endemic social pestilence, resembling ‘malattie ostinate’ resistant to all the antidotes applied by helpless legal authority in ever increasing doses (I). In similar association with the outbreak of the plague, Old Saint Paul’s portrays lawless conditions that permit swordplay to abound even more spectacularly than in I promessi sposi. The principal swordsmen, belonging to the band of the young Earl of Rochester, recognize no legitimate restraints to their libidinous desires. Authority breaks down elsewhere too as the spread of the plague seems to permit outlaws to reinforce their claim to uninhabited territory: ‘a band of highwaymen, by whom [Hounslow] heath was infested, had become more than usually daring since the outbreak of the pestilence, and claimed a heavy tax from all travellers’ (III:vii). The lawless violence of the swordsmen and the inroads of the plague stem from the same pathological syndrome. The unmaking swordsmen are spreading in their own way the wasting desolation of the plague. On the moral level, the syndrome informs the contagious process whereby the bravo mentality corrupts hitherto law-respecting mentalities. Before the opening of Manzoni’s story, the man that becomes Fra Cristoforo has thus picked up the virus of thinking and then acting in violent terms. And within the story the same infection begins to spread, as Jameson has pointed out, from Don Rodrigo to Renzo. Other youths too, like Leonard in Old Saint Paul’s, despair before the growing impotence of legal authority and are tempted to become violently anarchic themselves. In the case of Manzoni’s Don Abbondio and evidently of most other timid figures, the corruption leads not to violent defiance but, which is even worse, to a servile capitulation to illegal power. The legal structures and social hierarchies threaten, as Girard has observed of situations of plague, to collapse altogether.

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In spreading contagious impulses towards social collapse, the heirs of the unmaking swordsmen will, to anticipate briefly, become the unarmed members of the legal profession itself. The corruption of legal practitioners already begins in the stories set in the seventeenth century, and in passing to the eighteenth century, we may cite the supposed lawyer Scout of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews: ‘ “the utmost that was in the power of a lawyer, was to prevent the law’s taking effect” ’ – a power that lawyers seem frequently to have practised. But men like Scout, says the narrator, are not genuine lawyers: ‘They are the pests of society, and a scandal to a profession, to which indeed they do not belong; and which owes to such kind of rascallions the ill-will which weak persons bear towards it’ (IV:iii). In the nineteenth century, however, the genuine lawyers have become precisely like Scout and really are ‘the pests of society’ – precisely the heirs of Manzoni’s bravos. Such pests include Vholes in Bleak House, a novel in which the legal atmosphere of Chancery, far from debilitating the pestilence, enables it actually to flourish. The lawyers properly belong, though, to a later phase of our argument, and the present chapter concerns the swordsmen, the armed social pests that continue indeed to thrive in all of our novels. Besides their other predatory actions, they wreak their havoc through two types of campaigns in particular. The first involves plots to take captives, often innocent virgins, with the intent sometimes of violating them. The motif, which the previous chapter has mentioned in the providential context, is also related to the Gothic trope of the female held captive in a castle-like fortress.9 In the second type of campaign the swordsmen do not defend the fortresses containing their female captives but rather besiege and break into other fortresses. The besiegers may desire simply to despoil or gain possession of other treasures. The parallel between the assaults of the swordsmen and the assaults of the plague, both directed against the healthy integrity of individuals and of legal institutions, often remains merely implicit. Yet I trust that in the ensuing discussion the parallel will always be intuited. The swordsmen of the novels set in the seventeenth century naturally require more literal and old-fashioned prisons for their captives than prisons like the Panopticon that feature a regime of watching. In I promessi sposi the plot of Don Rodrigo and his band to capture Lucia results in her incarceration in the most impregnable of the fortresses in the novels, the castle of the innominato. In Old Saint Paul’s the scheme to secure possession of the desirable Amabel requires the swordsman first to penetrate her home. Feigning a sword wound upon his first appearance in the story, Rochester manages to require the medical help that will gain his admittance to the house. Later Amabel is held prisoner in a fortress that is impervious even to royal authority. One of her jailers, Sir Paul Parravicin laughs, ‘drawing his sword’, at Leonard’s ‘ “I command you, in the King’s name, to deliver up this girl” ’: ‘ “The King has no authority here,” he said’ (IV:iii).10

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Against the aggressive, unmaking swordsmen that recognize no higher authority, morally ‘making’ forces, as we may consider them, sometimes defend the oppressed victims. These defenders include Fra Cristoforo, who in his own violent youth has formed a band of bravos to protect the weak and downtrodden. Provoked once into a sword fight over a futile question of precedence on a public path, he has found himself constrained to slay a rival captain of bravos. Since then, however, the horror of himself as a murderer has prompted him to give up the sword and to take holy orders. His imaginative vigilance now guards persecuted innocence, in accord with what Foucault considers the new regime, in invisible ways. With other cappuccini he has established an intricate, secret network of intelligence and mutual loyalties that functions as a nonviolent and generally effective counter-mafia. So when he plots to save Lucia from the band of Don Rodrigo, his success should not surprise readers: ‘Chi domandasse come Cristoforo avesse così subito a sua disposizione que’ mezzi di trasporto, per acqua e per terra, farebbe vedere di non conoscere qual fosse il potere d’un cappuccino tenuto in concetto di santo’ (VIII). In a far less admirable and far more visible version of a counter-mafia, Ainsworth’s Solomon Eagle claims arrogantly that Heaven has armed him and his band to combat God’s enemies. Discovering Rochester and Etherege with the captured Amabel in St Paul’s, Solomon rushes against them and ‘hurl[s] them backwards with almost supernatural force’: ‘When they arose, and menaced him with their swords, he laughed loudly and contemptuously, crying, “Advance, if ye dare! And try your strength against one armed by Heaven, and ye will find how far it will avail” ’ (II:vii). On another occasion, which recalls Fra Cristoforo’s quarrel about precedence on a public thoroughfare, Solomon plants himself in the middle of the road down which two horsemen are galloping in pursuit of Amabel: ‘Seeing . . . that he did not offer to move, they opened on either side of him, and were passing swiftly by, when, with infinite dexterity, he caught hold of the bridle of Rochester’s steed, and checking him, seized the Earl by the leg, and threw him to the ground’. The same fate overtakes the other rider, Parravicin, who has drawn his sword. Solomon ‘nothing daunted . . . uttered a loud cry, which so startled the knight’s high-spirited horse, that it reared and flung him’ (III:vi). The result is once more to establish his superiority to the swordsmen and to rescue Amabel. Tom Thurnall’s turbulent past has involved him too in many violent scuffles and hairbreadth escapes in areas of the world ruled, in the nineteenth century now, by the lawless sword. In America, such adventures have occurred not only in the Wild West but in the southern slave-holding states. He has helped the beautiful young slave Marie to escape to freedom in Canada. In connection with Marie, indeed, the novel devotes much angry attention to the violence of institutionalized slavery. Episodes like those involving the captivity of Lucia, Amabel and Marie

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continue to occur even in the stories set in nineteenth-century Europe, under the new regime of supposedly subtler forms of compulsion. In A Strange Story the menaced virgin is the heroine Lilian. The intricate conspiracy of Margrave to capture her involves first the preventative neutralization of Fenwick by securing his wrongful arrest for murder. While languishing in an official prison, Fenwick understands that his secret jailer is Margrave to whom he must give certain assurances before being released. Later a peculiarly mysterious version of a sword is produced that will allow Margrave to gain possession of Lilian herself. He handles, that is, a wand that along with phallic implications functions as an instrument of psychic violence. When pointed in Lilian’s direction, it permits the concentrated power of Margrave’s will to suppress hers and to attract her even across many miles towards him. To release her, Fenwick must fight, in this case physically, for possession of that wand, which he can then use against Margrave.11 Beginning with Skimpole’s arrest for debt at the hand of ‘Coavinses’, Bleak House contains episodes involving both the literal and the metaphorical taking of captives. In that first episode the literal prisoner is Skimpole, who makes such inauthentic claims about his own childlike innocence, but Esther recalls ‘that Richard and I seemed to retain the transferred impression of having been arrested since dinner’ (VI). Esther is arrested, however, not only by Coavinses but, according to Alison Milbank who discerns Gothic patterns here, by patriarchal authority and held in a house ‘itself Gothically imprisoned in the grip of the past’.12 Subsequently, Lady Dedlock comes to feel that she is virtually the prisoner of Tulkinghorn, in a form of captivity that also involves, as in the other novels, a sexual threat. In a scene that Kucich characterizes as ‘psychological rape’, Tulkinghorn seems sadistically to exult in his power over her, a sadism that she describes to him in her own question: ‘ “I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?” ’ (XLI).13 With even more explicit reference to imprisonment, Tulkinghorn establishes a similar power over Hortense by repeatedly brandishing the key that comes, as an instrument of phallic hostility, to resemble Margrave’s sword-like wand. ‘ “Look, mistress,” ’ he finally states, ‘ “this is the key of my wine-cellar. It is a large key, but the keys of prisons are larger” ’, and he gloatingly holds out the prospect of her ‘ “being locked up in jail” ’ (XLII). To escape the power of that key, she uses an arm supplied in a sense by the old soldier George, in whose gallery she has apparently learned to shoot. Among the many virgins threatened with sexual violence, she thus becomes the only one to react with a corresponding violence against her captor. (Like Hortense, however, Ruffini’s Lavinia also enjoys shooting during the lesbian phase of her life at the villa of the Marchesa Juanita, becoming thereby not only a needlewoman but a sort of swordswoman.) Besides ‘Coavinses’ and Tulkinghorn, the arresting officers include

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Detective Bucket, who takes George Rouncewell into custody in an incident that emblematically indicates the wily detective police superseding the bluff old-fashioned swordsman. He arrests George not because he believes him guilty but because his imprisonment may further the discovery of the true assassin of Tulkinghorn. As in the case of Fenwick’s arrest in A Strange Story, the opportunistic capture of the man is a first step towards the capture of a woman (Hortense), who is the principal object of Bucket’s interest. The events leading to the arrest of Hortense thus associate her curiously with innocent virgin-victims of kidnappings while they associate Bucket with the villainous bravos. Hortense believes herself of course to be badly used, first by Tulkinghorn and then by Bucket when he at last arrests her. She must submit to Bucket in another scene that suggests, according to John Kucich, the man’s assertion of an unwanted sexual intimacy.14 He enjoys locking her wrists, first one and then the other, as a definitive act of possession: ‘Now, my dear, put your arm a little further through mine, and hold it steady, and I sha’n’t hurt you!’ In a trice Mr Bucket snaps a handcuff on her wrist. ‘That’s one,’ says Mr Bucket. ‘Now the other, darling. Two, and all told!’ (LIV) The reference to ‘one’ and ‘two’ and Hortense’s subsequent mention of Lady Dedlock (‘ “Can you make a honorable lady of Her?” ’) may remind us that Hortense (two) is repeating the dishonouring experience of Lady Dedlock (one). Having been sadistically humiliated, these doubled women both take their place among the many female victims that unscrupulous armed men have trapped. But in another part of the house – for Alison Milbank one more version of the Gothic castle15 – Lady Dedlock is determining to escape apparently imminent arrest for the murder of her persecutor. So Bucket will soon be commissioned to pursue her as well, and his ‘Two, and all told!’ proves premature as an indication of the final count. A count of the casualties among the participants in the various campaigns to capture women reveals about seven deaths. Three are among the ranks of the male persecutors – Don Rodrigo and Margrave, who both die later of the pestilence, and Tulkinghorn, who dies, as it were, in action. The plague kills Don Rodrigo’s opponent, Fra Cristoforo, too. As for the female losses, the pestilence claims Amabel (who dies in captivity) and Ruth (who has been Bellingham’s prey) while Lady Dedlock evidently perishes from exhaustion or contagion emanating from her lover’s grave. Hortense, who will remain a captive, may also be referred to the casualties. In contrast to these victims, four of the women who have been captured manage to escape or to be released. These are Lucia, Nizza, Marie and Lilian, who are living happily in freedom at the end of their stories. As a

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whole, then, the outcome of these campaigns does not indicate a clearcut victory for one side or the other. In addition to the capturing of prisoners, the novels show the swordsmen involved in another unmaking type of campaign. This operation, which may also tend to end without a clearcut victory, is the storming of fortresses. Although these strongholds sometimes resemble the imprisoning structures that we have been noticing, they may also be enclaves of freedom or pockets of health in a plague-ridden world. Some of them may amount to small sections of Scarry’s ‘dikes of culture’. The imagination must guard these structures tirelessly by day and by night because they are as permeable as the individual human beings threatened in the first type of military operation. While not figuring in our principal texts, the most paradigmatic of these fortified pockets of health is the ‘castellated abbey’ of Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. Prince Prospero and his guests seek protection in ‘this . . . extensive and magnificent structure’ from the pestilence that is ravishing his dominions: A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress. . . . The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. Yet contagion in the impalpable shape that is an emptiness beneath its ghastly costume does penetrate the stronghold. The sword comes into play here in the form of the dagger with which the prince attacks the spectre: ‘There was a sharp cry – and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero’. (One recalls the death of Wilde’s Dorian Gray that results from his stabbing of the portrait.) A parallel is implied between the contagion and the drawn dagger as weapons used in a duel. But the contagion that kills the besieged chatelain and his guests is stronger than any sword. The same pattern emerges in Ainsworth when the grocer Bloundel shuts himself and his family up in their spacious house as a way to avoid exposure to the raging contagion. He lays in ample provisions, blocks up all the windows and locks all the doors. Like the godly Noah, he hopes to ride out the flood that may destroy the wicked world, and in fact the sign that has hung above his shop has featured the Old Testament ark.16 But the enemy begins in many guises to menace his house. A stricken neighbour breaks out of the house to which the authorities have confined him and attacks with his sword the watchman employed by Bloundel. Without a watchman to guard the house, it becomes more vulnerable to Rochester and his cohorts who make repeated stealthy attempts to break in. When

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two of them actually batter the barricaded shop door, the apprentice Leonard has himself let down in a basket from an upper-storey window so that he can repel them. This action unfortunately exiles him henceforth from the fortified house because Bloundel applies the iron rule that nothing and no one from the outside can now enter or re-enter the premises. Amabel becomes the next casualty of the siege conditions. Although the plague has not yet touched her, she has been contaminated by her illicit infatuation with Rochester, which is frequently likened to the plague itself. So she pines away in her captivity, causing her family to fear that she is dying. Since her health clearly requires fresh air and a change of scene, her parents send her too into exile in the country. Thus she becomes susceptible again to the unscrupulous Rochester and to the pestilential infection. The ark continues to protect the rest of the family and servants, and Bloundel’s desperate experiment may appear a partial success when after six months of imprisonment he re-opens the house.17 But although the plague has now abated, the prisoners recover their freedom in a sadly changed and depopulated city. The loss of Amabel too naturally mitigates their satisfaction, and in the following year the fortress that has resisted the plague and armed attacks will be reduced to cinders in the fire. In this particular case, the fiery agency is not the great conflagration but an individual fire kindled by Rochester’s underling, Pillichody, whom a servant promptly shoots to death. Pillichody’s fire has probably only anticipated by a few hours, though, the arrival of the large conflagration, which possesses all the cunning of ‘a skilful besieger’ (VI:vi). The besieging force thus combines the crafty powers of the plague, the fire and the human swordsmen in an unholy alliance against which no fortress can hold out indefinitely. George’s Shooting Gallery in Bleak House is another site of battle and a fortified refuge like the ark of Bloundel. As a battleground, it may provide opportunities chiefly for toy skirmishes. The retired soldier who no longer fights real battles has created there a field on which frustrated victims of the Chancery contagion like Gridley can vent their anger in harmless firing. While aiming at inanimate targets, Gridley pretends to be attacking the Lord Chancellor and a whole impalpable army of injustice, and he achieves possibly therapeutic victories. There Richard Carstone in his futile military phase takes lessons and pretends to be improving as a swordsman and marksman. Yet it is more than a toy battleground too in that the murderous Hortense, as we have seen, may actually have learned there to shoot effectively, and other victims really do die there. Recognizing the subversive health of the shooting gallery (amidst the Chancery contagion), Bucket indeed lays siege to it while in pursuit of Gridley. In contrast with the situation in Ainsworth, the swordsman is now inside the fortress, where he must defend his beleaguered companions from a new sort of attack that does not employ traditional weapons. The

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modern detective Bucket makes use, that is, of a disguise whereby he conceals his violent intentions behind the peaceful appearance of the physician.18 His penetration of George’s defences occurs too late to allow him to arrest Gridley but in time to witness his death. When the pursued Jo ‘moves on’ for the last time, he arrives as well at the gallery and falls there as another victim of the superior force of Chancery. Finally George himself is captured the day after Jo’s death – not in his own gallery but just after visiting the domestic fortress of Bagnet, another retired swordsman whose honourable intentions are irrelevant to modern times. Bagnet’s fortress falls too, as it were, when infiltrated by the ubiquitous Bucket disguised this time – the contagion can take many forms – as the purchaser of a ‘ “second-hand wiolinceller” ’ (XLIX). The angry or noble dreams of obtaining justice or reparation for wrongs that the shooting gallery has encouraged dissolve before the irreducible, all-penetrating contagion of Chancery. The gallery is shut up, and the sword, wielded now not by bravos but by decent soldiers, proves impotent before a symbolic weapon – the jewelled mace of the Lord Chancellor. In the perception of Miss Flite, however, ‘ “the Mace and Seal upon the table” ’, are ‘ “cold and glittering devils” ’ that do not assault fortresses or propagate contagion in the usual way. The new regime that disdains physical compulsion has found in the glittering mace an unmaking weapon that may be likened to the psychically potent wand of Margrave. Instead of being brandished in an attack, it remains fixed and attracts the prey to itself. Its contagion operates in reverse – not, that is, by imposing sickness upon the victims but by draining out, in a vampiric process, their health.19 The mace and seal have, Miss Flite tells Esther, a power to ‘draw’: ‘ “Draw people on, my dear. Draw peace out of them. Sense out of them. Good looks out of them. Good qualities out of them. I have felt them even drawing my rest away in the night” ’. The house of the Flites has fallen too in this strange assault: ‘ “First, our father was drawn – slowly. Home was drawn with him” ’ (XXXV). Then her brother, her sister and finally Miss Flite herself have been drawn. Another sort of fortress, Bleak House in its original and reproduced versions, may offer greater protection than the shooting gallery or the home of the Flites. Richard Carstone, whose military career has failed like his other careers, and who has contracted the Chancery contagion in its worst form, yet believes that the new Bleak House may save him: ‘ “If I could be moved there when I begin to recover my strength” ’, he wistfully tells Jarndyce, ‘ “I feel as if I should get well there, sooner than anywhere” ’ (LXV). Presided over by Esther, the household strikes everyone as a haven of order, compassion and health. Esther emerges as a far stronger presence in the house than Milbank’s comparison of her to the female captive within a Gothic castle has implied. What has often puzzled readers, however, is the degree to which Esther, like Tulkinghorn, is always the

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wielder of keys. Liking to jangle them to remind herself of her grateful duties, she evidently rules a household in which many items are, like Tulkinghorn’s wines, kept under lock and key. The extreme order of the house partakes of the carceral, and it probably reflects the repression and secretiveness that Esther imposes upon herself. Still, as Kucich maintains, such stern repression and ‘self-fortification’ should not be interpreted in entirely negative terms. Amidst the complexity of the psychological factors, repression becomes ‘a sign of superior inward libidinal depth’ and of a passionately intense and rich inner life – analogous again to the wines that Tulkinghorn savours in privacy. Certainly Esther’s repression offers her, as it does Tulkinghorn, a means to gain knowledge of others and power over them. The power struggle in Bleak House ‘consists entirely’, according to Kucich, ‘in the ability to invade the privacy of others, and to protect one’s own privacy’.20 In this pseudo-military action, therefore, Esther emerges with her keys as possibly the strongest figure of the novel and Bleak House, of which she is chatelaine, as the strongest fortress. The enemy can nevertheless penetrate the defences of Bleak House too. Jarndyce feels even there the east wind, and ‘Coavinses’, as Skimpole calls him, can manage to invade its privacies to capture his man. The pestilence itself intrudes as in Poe’s story, and both Esther and Richard sicken while living under its roof. His case is so bad that not even a move to the new Bleak House could have saved him. But if not Richard, the home that belongs to the physician Woodcourt as well as to the housekeeper with her keys will save many others. Besides a fortress that resists invasions and sustains casualties, it remains a centre from which successful rescue operations set forth. Le Docteur Pascal contains an interesting sort of fortress in miniature that is at the centre of never-ending attacks, defences, falls and recoveries. But before looking at the particular episodes that trace its fortunes, we should observe the larger mythic pattern to which these episodes relate. The vision of perpetual cycles, which informs the novel as a fundamental structuring principle, refers specifically to archetypes of death and re-birth – or unmaking and making – that go back to Adam and Eve. The first fortress to fall has evidently been Eden itself, besieged by the original tempter. So the story includes an Edenic allusion in Paradou (presumably an echo of paradis), the site of an idyllic love affair between the innocent Albine and Pascal’s nephew, the priest Serge Mouret. There, as Pascal now describes the idyll to Clotilde, Mouret ‘ «recommençait l’aventure adamique, dans le Paradou légendaire» ’ (V). Condemned by the Church, the affair has naturally ended unhappily with Albine’s abandonment and death, and the paradise now lies ruined and sacked. Still it will one day become the site of a renewed cycle of fertility: «Le Paradou n’est plus, ils l’ont saccagé, sali, détruit; mais, qu’importe! des vignes seront plantées, du blé grandira, toute une poussée de récoltes nouvelles; et l’on s’aimera encore, aux jours lointains de

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‘Our feverish contact’ vendange de moisson. . . . La vie est éternelle, elle ne fait jamais que recommencer et s’accroître.» (II)

In his own life too, Pascal discerns the pattern of the eternal return associated with the annual cycle of nature. After a long illness, in which he fears himself to be falling victim to the family curse (recalling also the Adamic curse), the discovery that Clotilde loves him restores him to health. Their love-making rejuvenates him as if to echo the return of a spring, in which April is precisely not a cruel month: La nuit entière fut une béatitude, dans la chambre heureuse, embaumée de jeunesse et de passion. Quand le petit jour parut, ils ouvrirent toutes grandes les fenêtres pour que le printemps entrât. Le soleil fécondant d’avril se levait dans un ciel immense, d’une pureté sans tache, et la terre, soulevée par le frisson des germes, chantait gaiement les noces. (VII) The night filled with the beatific energy of ‘making’ (here, of course, making love) contrasts powerfully with Leonard’s vision, cited at the beginning of this chapter, of the beautiful night of the ‘unmaking’, destroying contagion. Perhaps they are really the same night of history in action, but what must never fail, Pascal believes in such moments, is ‘ «la foi en la vie, en la santé, en la force, à l’éternel recommencement» ’ (VIII). And this turns out to be the principle that his scientific research forever rediscovers in the history of the family. Although cursed with hereditary degeneracy that takes many forms, the family never dies out. It takes in new vitality through marriages, and new branches continually form and thrive. The metaphor is frequently that of the tree because Pascal continually sums up his findings by designing, redesigning and annotating on paper the genealogical tree of the generations of the Rougon-Macquart.21 Representing the truth about the family, which indeed includes both a curse and a blessing, the tree naturally suggests the knowledge of good and evil offered by the fruit of the Edenic tree. Pascal detects a worm in the tree, like the serpent hidden amidst the foliage of Eden, but assures Clotilde that families, like humanity itself, will flourish forever: «Le ver était dans le tronc, il est à présent dans le fruit et le dévore . . . Mais il ne faut jamais désespérer, les familles sont l’éternel devenir. Elles plongent, au delà de l’ancêtre commun, à travers les couches insondables des races qui ont vécu, jusqu’au premier être; et elles pousseront sans fin, elles s’étaleront, se ramifieront à l’infini, au fond des âges futurs.» (V)

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While the worm attacks the tree, which yet manages to survive into infinite ramifications, the more specifically threatened fortress is Pascal’s locked armoire. His mother keeps plotting, as a sort of swordswoman that corresponds, in part, to the worm, to break into this stronghold. If miniature with respect to other fortresses, the armoire is also sufficiently massive to house the abundant archives that contain the truth of the entire family. For the mother Félicité the closeted truths are her family’s skeletons simply to be wiped out. For Pascal the truth involves both the contagious physiological taints (‘les tares physiologiques’) and the germs, inseparable from them, of a new vitality. Destruction of the archives would signify for Pascal a reactionary stifling of change, a cutting off of the possibilities that he has been nurturing for cyclical renewal. In the siege of the armoire, which has been underway for thirty years, possession of the key constitutes as in Bleak House an important motif. Catherine Toubin and Yves Malinas relate the key as an instrument of power not only to the forbidden fruit of Eden, to which I have just alluded, but to the Promethean fire.22 The key permits its possessor to control the contents of the armoire, which like the contents of the strongbox of Bulwer’s Derval, to be considered later, implies the secrets of science or nature. The plots of Félicité and her granddaughter Clotilde to gain the key thus implicate threats to Pascal’s god-like authority over his own creation. They menace his virility as well, for the key resembles in its phallic associations the sword-like wand that Margrave points at Lilian and that Fenwick manages to wrest from him. In this context the armoire, into which the key fits, eventually becomes, as Toubin and Malinas indicate, not just the repository of Pascal’s science but a symbol for the womb of Clotilde.23 It is the site in which the potentiality of the family for renewal, suggested by the archives, can be realized. At the end, in fact, the armoire serves as a wardrobe for the infant son of Pascal and Clotilde. The siege of the armoire unfolds in five phases involving five significant openings of the doors. In the first phase Félicité urges upon her twentyfour-year-old granddaughter that God’s will requires them to attack the armoire and destroy its contents. ‘ «Ah! moi, à votre place, je fendrais plutôt cette armoire à coups de hache» ’, exclaims Félicité with the menace of an accomplished housebreaker or, in the narrator’s simile, an assaulter of castles: ‘Elle s’était plantée devant l’immense armoire, elle la mesurait de son regard de feu, comme pour la prendre d’assaut, la saccager, l’anéantir, malgré la maigreur desséchée de ses quatre-vingts ans’ (I). Unhappily convinced, Clotilde who knows the location of the key gives it to her grandmother, and the latter opens the armoire and climbs onto a chair to reach its top shelves. Pascal’s unexpected entrance then blocks his mother’s assaulting manoeuvre and, deeply disappointed in Clotilde, he resolves henceforth to keep the key in his own pocket. Forgetting one warm evening, though, to remove the key from the pocket of a coat that he takes off, he retires to his bedroom without

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carrying the key with him. In this second important episode he awakens in the middle of the night to find himself without the key and rushes to the room that contains the armoire. The half-dressed Clotilde has already unlocked the doors and is evidently about to remove the contents when he attacks her in a scene of greater violence than that of the first episode. In his awareness of her semi-nudity and his apparent pleasure in wounding her, the struggle also acquires more explicitly sadistic, erotic overtones than the conflict in Dickens between Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock: Ils se battirent. Il l’avait empoignée, dans sa nudité, il la maltraitait. . . . . . . Il la gardait, liée à lui, d’une étreinte si rude, qu’elle ne respirait plus. «Quand une enfant vole, on la châtie!» Quelques gouttes de sang avaient paru, près de l’aisselle, le long de son épaule rond, dont une meurtrissure entamait la délicate peau de soie. Et, un instant, il la sentit si haletante, si divine dans l’allongement fin de son corps de vierge, avec ses jambes fuselées, ses bras souples, son torse mince à la gorge menue et dure, qu’il la lâcha. D’un dernier effort, il lui avait arraché le dossier. (IV) The third phase is that in which a loss of nerve makes him fear that he may be succumbing to the family curse and losing his reason. He opens the armoire secretly, unaware that Clotilde is spying on him. Anxiously examining folders relating to various members of the family, he looks for the ancestor that may be most responsible for his own hereditary destiny. ‘ «Est-ce toi? . . . Est-ce toi? . . . Est-ce toi?» ’ is the obsessive question repeated to each of the personified folders (VI).24 Falling seriously ill, he still takes pains to keep the key about him, until once again it happens to be mislaid. When Clotilde finds the key this time, however, she humbly returns it to him instead of using it to open the armoire. The gesture indicates that she belongs henceforth to him rather than to Félicité, and the joyful discovery leads to his recovery and to their so-called nuptials. Events naturally carry them in the fourth phase into another negative moment of the cycle. Public opinion in the form of insulting remarks in the streets of the town, like those that have wounded Gaskell’s Ruth in Wales, now threatens the serenity of their incestuous love. The pressure of Félicité and of financial reverses causes Pascal to send Clotilde away to care for her sick brother (the father of Charles) in Paris, and matters precipitate towards the principal crisis of the story. The stronghold being attacked is no longer just the armoire but the entire house and property called ‘la Souleiade’, which may need to be sold. Recalling a motif in Bleak House – ‘even the winds are [Tom’s] messengers’ as they carry the contagion everywhere – the wind becomes in this novel too a version of the assaulting agencies. In this particular year the mistral blows more violently than usual: ‘il y eut des orages terribles qui

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ravagèrent la contrée, un mur de la Souleiade fut renversé, qu’on ne put remettre debout, tout un écroulement dont la brèche resta béante’. In concomitance especially with the departure of Clotilde from what she terms ‘ «cette maison de vérité et de bonté» ’, the wind seems angrily to besiege the fortress, causing noises that sound like canon shots: C’était une rage, une trombe furieuse, continue, qui flagellait la maison, l’ébranlait des caves aux greniers, pendant des jours, pendant des nuits, sans un arrêt. Les tuiles volaient, les ferrures des fenêtres étaient arrachées; tandis que, par les fentes, à l’intérieur, le vent pénétrait, en un ronflement éperdu de plainte, et que les portes, au moindre oubli, se refermaient avec des retentissements de canon. On aurait dit tout un siège à soutenir, au milieu du vacarme et de l’angoisse. (XI) In response to the siege, Pascal barricades himself inside, refusing to see almost everyone and giving most stern orders to deny admittance to his mother, who makes repeated efforts to approach him. As a series of heart attacks force him to face imminent death, he can do no more than hope to consign the precious key to Clotilde, whom he now recalls by telegraph from Paris. In expectation of her return, he keeps the key under his pillow desperately fighting to remain alive for the necessary hours. But he expires forty-five minutes before her arrival, murmuring to the attending physician in his last words: ‘ «Ça marche trop vite . . . Ne me quittez pas, la clef est sous l’oreiller . . . Clotilde, Clotilde . . .» ’ (XII). Fortunately the physician Ramond will defend the key during the brief interval, keeping it especially from the invasive Félicité who soon arrives herself. As it happens Félicité will lack the nerve to steal the key from under the dead man’s pillow, even when the freshly arrived but exhausted Clotilde falls into a doze that night beside him. Instead Félicité attacks the armoire with a gimlet, her version of the sword, and after forcing the lock ignites the funeral pyre and performs with Martine the auto da fé that we have witnessed. A more hopeful fifth phase nonetheless ensues in accord with Pascal’s faith ‘en la vie, en la santé, en la force, à l’éternel recommencement’. Clotilde will bear their child, a new ramification of the family’s genealogical tree and an expression of her own renewed faith in life. In the following growing season, she opens the armoire that has lost its archives and makes it a wardrobe for the precious baby: C’était dans cette armoire, si pleine autrefois des manuscrits du docteur, et vide aujourd’hui, qu’elle avait rangé la layette de l’enfant. Elle semblait sans fond, immense, béante; et, sur les planches nues et vastes, il n’y avait plus que les langes délicats, les petites brassières, les

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‘Our feverish contact’ petits bonnets, les petits chaussons, les tas de couches, toute cette lingerie fine, cette plume légère d’oiseau encore au nid. Ou tant d’idées avaient dormi en tas, ou s’était accumulé pendant trente années l’obstiné labeur d’un homme, dans un débordement de paperasses, il ne restait que le lin d’un petit être. . . . L’immensité de l’antique armoire en paraissait égayée et toute rafraîchie. (XIV)

Like an immense nest, the massive oaken armoire will thus guard the frail, evanescent elements that offer a temporary protection to future life instead of the ponderous written records of the past. Meanwhile the unrepentant Félicité is participating at this very moment in a ceremony to inaugurate another fortress designed to endure through time as a monument to the glory of the family. Having endowed with her fortune a projected Asile Rougon to house old people, she is employing another symbolic instrument, a silver trowel, to lay the cornerstone. One may therefore intuit that the foundation and the storming of strongholds will continue through the cycles to come. The armoire with its presently frail contents of hope will need to resist the established arrogance and hypocrisy of the old generations entrenched in the Asile. Probably, given the stubbornness of the forms of life, it will hold out, to offer a refuge to ever new and unorthodox ramifications of the Rougon-Macquart. The myth of renewal exerts a stronger power than that of the unmaking sword. Ruth also happens, albeit less significantly, to contain a locked piece of furniture, belonging again to a son, that falls to his parent’s armed attack. In this case, which represents an exception amongst the episodes of the stormed fortress, the stronghold does not contain a precious, lifeenhancing treasure, and we do not sympathize with the defending party. Suspecting that the desk of his ‘pattern son’ hoards evidence of the youth’s criminal swindling and forgery, Bradshaw must at any cost discover the truth: ‘with the determination which overlooks the means to get at the end, he had first tried all his own keys on the complicated lock, and then broken it open with two decided blows of a poker, the instrument nearest at hand’ (XXX). What he finds inside is so bad that, although he has been the attacker, the fall of the desk entails his own moral collapse. His pitiable situation resembles that in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854, the year after Ruth) when Thomas Gradgrind learns of his model son’s criminality.25 The prerogative of the self-righteous Bradshaw to exercise authority in his own house is challenged, and after some blustering attempts to bully his wife, he must eventually humble himself before her. The fortress that has fallen is finally that of a whole bourgeois cultural system erected upon a foundation of hypocrisy, arrogance and injustice. An association between the contents of the miniature besieged fortress and a secret aspect of its owner’s identity emerges in A Strange Story too.

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Sir Philip Derval establishes an analogy, that is, between the steel casket, to which I have alluded as containing the secrets of nature, and his own impregnability. While the chemicals lodged within the strongbox are ‘ “the keys to masked doors in the ramparts of Nature” ’, the keys to those keys are safely secreted within himself: ‘ “The powers [the chemicals] confer are secrets locked in my breast, to be lost in my grave; as the casket which lies on my breast shall not be transferred to the hands of another, till all the rest of my earthly possessions pass away with my last breath” ’ (XXXIV). Margrave, who menaces the integrity of Lilian, also poses the principal threat to the keys that Derval, like Pascal, does indeed protect until his last breath. Hitherto fought with invisible weapons, the battle underway between them for many years now concludes with the capture of the casket during a literal assault upon Derval’s breast. ‘He was lying on his back’, when Fenwick discovers the body, ‘the countenance upturned, a dark stream oozing from the breast, – murdered by two ghastly wounds’ (XXXV). But since the weapon that penetrates the breast cannot discover the secrets locked therein, the contents of the casket do not empower Margrave to proceed to take ‘the ramparts of Nature’ by storm. Although cultural citadels may collapse, the fortress of Nature and the faith in everreturning life contained in Pascal’s stronghold will never fall. The episodes involving the storming of fortresses demonstrate the permeability and vulnerability of such structures but also suggest that the attacking and unmaking swordsmen do not achieve final victories. As happens with the plague itself, all the unmaking elements are drawn into a teleological pattern in which the combatants are ‘united in the strife which divided them’. In the old religious view the divine and diabolical agencies could be united in a pattern associated with providence, and the structuralist pattern remains even when faith in supernatural providence is lost. Now it is the human makers and unmakers that are enabling history to move on. Among these human historical agents, as history moves on in our novels, the swordsmen seem to be falling into disrepute. Especially at the end of Bleak House and Le Docteur Pascal, the dominating maternal figures appear to have domesticated the military discourse appropriate to invasions, sieges, captures and rescues. A similar motif emerges after the brewing of the elixir in A Strange Story when the besieger Margrave himself falls during his final desperate assault upon the ramparts defended by their invisible ‘armies’. Fenwick confronts another ‘face upturned’ in death, Margrave’s, and then the veiled woman who may be his mother reclaims the fallen figure for herself: ‘Ayesha tenderly, silently, drew the young head to her lap, and it vanished from my sight behind her black veil’ (LXXXVIII). It is not only the nasty, unmaking swordsmen that are discredited. The novels set in the mid-nineteenth century imply that even what might be considered the making actions of soldiers belong to the more heroic but

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superseded culture of the past. In Lavinia a moment of the past in which soldiers have bravely fought for a good cause has actually occurred rather recently, in the defence of the Roman Republic in 1849. In that action Paolo and his artist friends have exchanged their painting brushes for muskets and joined Manara in the impossible battle with the French. Now those muskets have been put away again, and the atmosphere of those days has the nostalgic charm, in Lavinia’s reaction to the story, of remoteness – ‘ “a perfume of old chivalrous times” ’ (I:x). From its somewhat later perspective, Le Docteur Pascal as well situates military activity in the recent but also oddly remote past. In 1851 Pascal had witnessed fighting and tended the wounded at Plassans, where his family still lives. But after the debacle of Sedan and the fall of the Parisian Commune, the France of the Third Republic, which Félicité scorns for its evidently unchivalrous democracy, no longer requires soldiers. Most of the professional swordsmen in the stories are now in retirement like George Rouncewell and Matthew Bagnet in Bleak House, Colonel Poyntz in A Strange Story, and several veterans of fighting in India in Two Years Ago. George Rouncewell, who has recycled himself as the proprietor of the shooting gallery, is interesting for his sense of having been defeated in life. After the closing of his gallery and his release from prison, he arrives under the name of Mr Steel in the iron country of the north where he seeks to negotiate the terms of a capitulation. The soldier will transfer his birthright to the new version of a military commander, the captain of industry. That captain, his own brother, nevertheless refuses the surrender of the steel weapon, and George finishes as the guardian of the partially paralysed feudal ruler, Sir Leicester Dedlock. The toy battles then resume as George seconds Sir Leicester’s claims in the futile, irresolvable quarrel with Boythorn – regarding, as in the episodes in Manzoni and Ainsworth, a right of way. The sword may no longer constitute, therefore, a seriously useful weapon in a world that has come according to Foucault to employ more subtle instruments to enforce social and political discipline. Yet as in the other great historical tendencies that we have been tracing – and as in the trivial quarrel between Sir Leicester and Boythorn – there is no definitive defeat or victory. The sword is not definitively sheathed as anachronistic and allowed to rust in its scabbard. Near the end of Two Years Ago and Lavinia, indeed, the sword is perhaps unexpectedly brandished in the service of masculine heroic ideals, which go beyond the succour of individual damsels in distress. In Kingsley’s novel, the slave Marie that Tom Thurnall has helped to escape pleads with passionate eloquence for the use of physical force against all tyrants like the American slave-holders. Other characters of the novel make the same plea for wars of liberation in Italy, and in the last chapters five of the main characters decide to go to the Crimea. Marie’s lover Stangrave provides the justification for aggressive military action:

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‘Yes, Marie was right.’ . . . . . . ‘What if the most necessary human art, next to the art of agriculture, be, after all, the art of war? It has been so in all ages. What if I have been befooled – what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been befooled, by forty years of peace? We have forgotten that the history of the world has been as yet written in blood; that the history of the human race is the story of its heroes and its martyrs – the slayers and the slain. . . . What right have we to suppose that it will be aught else, as long as there are wrongs unredressed on earth; as long as anger and ambition, cupidity and wounded pride, canker the hearts of men?’ (XXIII) In the struggle to cure the cankering ills of the nineteenth century, the literal field of battle remains, even forty years after Waterloo, an important site of making, not just of unmaking. Kingsley, as Laura Fasick also maintains, believes that God ‘placed men in the world in order to be fighters’, and this in a literal rather than imaginative and invisible sense.26 Whereas Scarry considers the cultural imagination ‘self-effacing’ as it ‘disguis[es] its own activity’, Stangrave’s ‘art of war’ translates the activity of cultural patrol back into noisy visibility. Paolo Mancini reaches the same heroic conclusion in Lavinia, although subtler considerations of Realpolitik also influence his reasoning. The heroic ideal in his case is the making of a unified Italian republic, but to achieve that end it will be useful to fight first in the army of the Piedmontese monarchy. In this regard, the old Venetian patriot Daniele Manin, whom Paolo visits in Paris, offers convincing advice: ‘To be either a republic or a monarchy, Italy must first exist as a nation – that is, be independent – and form one body. Every act which tends towards that end – to make a united Italy, I mean – deserves the support of all patriots, whatever their creed. . . . Those who go to fight under the three colours of Italian redemption, are not the soldiers of the Piedmontese State, but the soldiers of Italy.’ (II:xxii) The liberation of Italy requires not only that one first fight for the monarchy but, as it transpires, that one fight in support of Turkey against Russia. To Paolo’s instinctive objection that the Crimean war has little to do with Italian matters, Manin’s strong imagination, like that of ‘a watchman patrolling the dikes of culture’, counterclaims the visionary wisdom of Cavour. The Piedmontese military policy demonstrates a genial, prophetic insight, ‘ “inasmuch as it widens her circle of influence in Europe, and strengthens her hands for good, inasmuch as it places her in manifest antagonism with Austria, inasmuch as it furnishes a precious

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occasion to add to the prestige of Italian arms” ’. The Crimea is recognized in the present moment as the most appropriate site for practising heroism, a microcosm of the larger historical conflict: ‘ “That is the spot where a man may live or die with credit” ’. So without any animosity towards the Russians, Paolo and his friend Salvator will travel far afield to give them battle, viewing ‘ “Sebastopol [as] the first stage of the journey to Milan” ’. As once before in defending the Roman Republic, Paolo exchanges his paint brush for an instrument appropriate to the ‘art of war’. After drilling then in Turin, more seriously than Richard Carstone has done in George’s gallery, he finds that the Crimean atmosphere is not so heroic as Manin had seemed to prophesy. Salvator sickens with the fever and sees no action although, unlike a soldier in Ruffini’s Vincenzo that the Crimean cholera kills, he survives. The behaviour of Paolo in the battle in which he is wounded indicates the degree to which a modern swordsman can still emerge, in an unromantic way, as a hero: This battle of the Tchernaya, according to competent judges, sealed the fate of Sebastopol. Paolo had the good luck to be one of the division Trotti, which was engaged in the action; nay, to belong to the very battalion which was sent to harass the retreat of the enemy. Mancini did not at one stroke run his lance through half-a-dozen Russians – by-the-bye, he had no lance – nor did he achieve any other supernatural feat in the knight-errantry line; but his behaviour throughout was steady and resolute enough to be noticed by the men and officers of the company. The greater their pity when they saw him stagger, reel, and fall to the ground. It was the last discharge but one of the retreating artillery which had done the deed. (II:xxiii) Paolo loses, in fact, his left arm, which permits him, after resigning whatever version of a lance he has held, to pick up his artist’s brush once more with his right arm. So he will return to a less visible and more purely imaginative battlefield. The novel of Ruffini conveys far less enthusiasm for the ‘art of war’ than that implied by Kingsley’s novel. But the victory of Tchernaya to which Paolo has contributed has played at least a part in the long, indirect campaign to liberate Milan and to make Italy. It is just as well that swordsmen in our novels have continued to practise their ‘art’. In certain circumstances the sword maintains its value as an instrument that can help not only to guard the cultural dikes but to carve out a new realm of Freedom. *

*

*

Besides on battlefields, the collective struggle for emancipation goes on, from a visionary perspective, in the places in which clothing is made. As Carlyle, in particular, shows in Sartor Resartus, the activity of tailoring and re-tailoring provides a supremely effective symbol for the fundamental,

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ubiquitous process that is forever making and unmaking, in Scarry’s terms, the cosmos. As their most glorious possibility, garments can offer to their makers and to their wearers a kind of salvation and power. The narrator of Lavinia develops the point in an ironic mode. The most powerful dressmaker of the day is ‘that famous French artist of European celebrity, Madame Lamy Housset, of the Rue de la Paix’, whose ministrations may save both body and soul: ‘Let the uninitiated be informed that out of the pale of Madame Lamy Housset there is no possible salvation for an English lady’. Not only Lavinia, but Lady Dedlock, one presumes, must know her establishment, unless the latter lady of fashion happens to favour the rival religion: ‘there was a lively opposition in favour of Madame Zenobia – no, Palmyra – the association of ideas mislead[s] me – and the Palmyrites turned up their noses very high at the Lamy Houssetites’ (I:xix). Women like Lavinia and Lady Dedlock owe their triumphs to the gowns with which these establishments arm them. When a shipment from Paris does not arrive, Lavinia therefore contemplates with horror an impending defeat at the Roman ball of Prince Torlonia. In a less ironic view than Ruffini’s of such matters, Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850) shows a respect for clothes that draws more directly on the Carlylean symbol. The novel mentions Carlyle seventeen times, if my count is accurate, and further represents the Scottish writer in the bookseller Mackaye.27 While omnipresent in the novel, however, the imagery of clothing does not possess the infinite, imaginative ramifications, as in Carlyle, of invisible energy becoming visible in material forms. Alton limits himself to seeing clothing as ‘ “a sure sign of the wearer’s character” ’: ‘ “Dress is a sort of sacrament . . .; according as any one is orderly, or modest, or tasteful, or joyous, or brilliant . . . those excellences, or the want of them, are sure to show themselves, in the colours they choose, and the cut of their garments” ’.28 There exists the contrasting possibility that garments may offer not power or liberating opportunities for self-expression but varieties of bondage and disease. Alton Locke characterizes the tailoring shops with their long hours and starvation wages as belonging indeed to the worst possible system of exploitation and slavery. The unventilated sweat-shops are hotbeds of disease as well, in which the overworked tailors contract the consumption and typhus that kill them and their families off in what ought to be their prime. The novel therefore concords with many other documents of the period in identifying the clothing industry as a social scandal – a site of the contagion of the historical moment at its most unjust. Like the Dickensian winds that carry the contagion from Tom-allalone’s up to the highest ranks of society, infected clothes may become an agency of grim social retribution. This happens when an elegant but disease-bearing coat kills Alton’s respectably bourgeois cousin. According to Stallybrass and White, middle class people learned, presumably from

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such incidents, to avoid touching not only the bodies but the garments of the poor.29 Of course the impression that clothing could convey contagion pre-dates the period that Stallybrass and White are investigating. Epidemics often broke out in a city, according to an old suspicion, because of the importation of tainted garments. In a Roman epidemic of 1656 the guilty items were pinpointed as ‘feminine ornaments’ and, in particular, ‘silk ribbons’, thus associating female frivolity with the contagion.30 In Ainsworth’s novel, the discovery of a pile of elegant, apparently masculine clothing – ‘ “fit to furnish wardrobes for a dozen court gallants” ’ – arouses a similar suspicion of their contagious properties: ‘ “The most daring robber would be afraid” ’, one character observes to Leonard, ‘ “to touch infected money or clothes. . . . There is contagion enough in those clothes to infect a whole city, . . . [and] rich as the stuffs are, I would not put the best of them on for all the wealth of London” ’ (IV:iii).31 Spotting swords amidst the heaped garments, Leonard wonders whether such objects too may spread contagion. He may have recalled the precedent of the pestilence-bearing arrows of Apollo at the beginning of the Iliad. And we may recall the uncanny, corrupting power of the Mace of the Lord Chancellor in the Court of Chancery. An analogy between garments and swords in their association with contagion remains, and when Leonard ventures to appropriate a sword, his companion warns him at least ‘ “to throw away that velvet scabbard. It is a certain harbour for infection” ’. Like other infected and infecting objects, all the cloth items may merit burning. Although not feasible at the moment, ‘ “it were a good deed” ’, Leonard and his companion agree, ‘ “to set fire to them” ’ (IV:iii). Clothes may not only acquire a physical contagion but also carry a moral taint already from their origin because of the exploitative means used to produce the raw materials. The cotton-growing industry partially depends upon institutionalized slavery in the southern American states. So besides the sweat shops of Alton Locke, Kingsley denounces American slavery, as we have observed, in his presentation of Marie in Two Years Ago. And Bleak House as well reminds us of Dickens’s detestation of slavery when Harold Skimpole perversely takes satisfaction in his fantasy of slaves picking cotton on an American plantation: ‘Take the case of the Slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don’t altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence. I am very sensible of it, if it be, and I shouldn’t wonder if it were!’ (XVIII) In the references to shearing that we have noticed, the novels may allude to another raw material for textiles, and here with respect to wool

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too sacrificial overtones accompany the process of production. But the production of textiles may not always have involved slavery, alienated labour and sacrificial exploitation for the pleasure of social parasites like Skimpole. In I promessi sposi Renzo and Lucia earn their living in a reasonably satisfactory way as spinners of silk. Although sometimes compelled by the decline of the Lombardian silk industry to supplement wages with other activities, Renzo in particular takes pride in his work and has no sense of being ill-used. When he must escape to Bergamo, his skills in the silk business enable him readily to find appreciated and satisfactorily compensated employment there too.32 In turning to the needlewomen that concern this last part of the chapter, we observe that the wage earners amongst them are more likely to share the slave’s condition than Renzo’s good fortune. But along with the economic and Marxist issues involved in the production of clothing, the Carlylean aspects of clothes-making acquire symbolic force with regard to the female condition. In the case of the swordsmen, we have seen the episodes of taking prisoners and laying sieges as microcosmic hints of the larger, aggressive forces of history that permeate everywhere. For the needlewomen, the activity of sewing shows them not only interacting with history but also expressing, in particular, their female identity in history. Women are the chief makers in the novels of the ‘Living Garment’ that is one of Carlyle’s figures for the visible stuff or texture of history. In the association of women with materiality and material production, they are largely responsible for the cultural furniture, the decor, the physical environment in which history is lived and fought. The expression of their femininity in the making of history leads either to their defeat or to their victory. The defeat occurs when their making of the historical clothing entails the paradoxical unmaking of themselves. They become chained or enmeshed in what may seem the trivialities of a task that begins to control them and to reduce them to cogs in a larger mechanism. The force that reduces them is also manifested in the literal contagion of the workplace and the moral contagion that turns many needlewomen, as material commodities themselves, into prostitutes. Others of them nevertheless manage to take control of the weaving process and to make its strands into emanations of their own imaginative authority. These latter are the victorious watchwomen whose strong vision, in the metaphor of Scarry, constructs and maintains the cultural dikes. Often, however, the outcome is an ambiguous combination of defeat and victory – whereby, sometimes, physical bondage is made an eloquent communication of moral superiority. Before consideration of the process that exploits many women and gives power to a few, it is worth remarking the frequent neutrality of needlework as simply a sign of female identity. As a matter of course, or of the Necessity that determines (and even over-determines) the female condition, practically all women are occupied with needlework. So Zola’s

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servant Martine always appears ‘avec l’éternel bas qu’elle tricotait même en marchant, quand la maison ne l’occupait pas’ (II). And Dickens’s Mrs Bagnet ‘busies herself with her needlework’ whenever she is not occupied with ‘washing greens’, the principal task of her existence (XXVII). Lucia, who comes to miss her winding reel (‘aspo’) in the silk-spinning mill, must find a new form of handwork in the convent, since only continual busy work (‘nel lavorar di continuo’) can comfort her. In the visits to Gertrude she carries with her the sewing that constitutes a new sort of activity for her: ‘anche nel parlatorio, portava sempre qualche lavoro da tener le mani in esercizio: ma, come i pensieri dolorosi si caccian per tutto! cucendo, cucendo . . . le veniva ogni poco in mente il suo aspo; e dietro all’aspo, quante cose!’ (XVIII). Such women need always to be active both to avoid the sin of idleness and to escape, apparently, a recognition of the present void, which may come just the same. Not quite neutral, then, their needlework accomplishes minor projects while also erasing, but only in part, consciousness of what is not being accomplished. What is not being accomplished is a scheme of life that would employ fully and validly the woman’s capacities and energies for doing more than merely busy work – more than merely material production. ‘ “Men have left us women nothing in the way of work” ’, exclaims Lavinia with some bitterness, ‘ “but the honour of mending our husband’s and children’s stockings” ’ (I:xxiii). In fairness to the men, one observes that Lavinia has collaborated in her degradation by dedicating herself so wholeheartedly to the religion of clothes furnished by Madame Lamy Housset. But apart from the question of the degrees of guilt to be distributed between men and women, the latter have cleverly turned their degradation into a form of power too. As an example of wresting victory from defeat, they have learned, according to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘both to defend themselves and silently to speak of themselves’ in the sewing of veils. Alluding to the tradition of Ariadne, Penelope and Philomela, the veils serve both to protect women that have been violated or otherwise exploited and silenced and to imply protesting signs of their condition. The veils propagate their silent message, on the model of the other garments that transmit infection and of the winds that are the ‘messengers’ of Tom-all-alone’s, as a contagious phenomenon. For want of a better way to understand how such transmissions work, it may, that is, be referred to the ubiquity of the contagious field. In this field many messages are passing between the culture as a whole and its individual components. And amongst these communications the ones that express the female condition are especially poignant. From woman to woman the responses are replicated in a process that betrays both the weakness and the strength of the disease of being female. One of the most obvious instances of the woman whose veil thus protects and thus protests is Manzoni’s rebellious Suor Gertrude, compelled by her father to take the veil of holy orders. More mysteriously, there is

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the ‘Veiled Woman’ who appears with Margrave in Australia and who turns out to be Ayesha, the long-suffering former slave. Having first passionately loved and nursed Louis Grayle, she now loves Margrave, who may be either the rejuvenated Grayle or his son (and therefore her son too). Although mistreated and repudiated, she veils her anguish and returns faithfully at the end, the sublimity of her love intact, to succour the ungrateful Margrave. Beyond the protection and the mute protest, the sewing of the veil may further aspire, according to Gilbert and Gubar, to repair damage, ‘to heal the wounds inflicted by history’ and to convey a utopian vision: ‘sewing both conceals and reveals a vision of a world in which such defensive sewing would not be necessary.’33 Among the wronged needlewomen of our novels, such an impulse to defend herself, to speak, and to imagine a happier world seems to motivate the stitching even of the childish Esther. As recalled in the first paragraph of her narrative, I used to say to my doll, when we were alone together, ‘Now, Dolly, I am not clever, you know very well, and you must be patient with me, like a dear!’ And so she used to sit propped up in a great arm-chair, with her beautiful complexion and rosy lips, staring at me – or not so much at me, I think, as at nothing – while I busily stitched away, and told her every one of my secrets. (III)34 The comforting activity of sewing accompanies the telling of evidently unhappy secrets to an auditor that will never reveal them. The secrets (or the ‘tale-telling’ that some critics have associated with ‘tailoring’) are shared as a unifying bond amongst women, who understand the silent language of embroidery and other products of women’s work.35 Women possess chiefly clothing, observes Margaret Homans, as something of value that they can produce and pass on to one another.36 So we observe in Bleak House the items of clothing that are borrowed or passed on among the reduplicated figures – Esther, Lady Dedlock, Hortense, Jenny. While greatly confusing Jo and other males, the women who share their identity, as Cynthia Malone finds that they do, may know what they are up to. The protective veil indicates them as hidden but together, ‘inhabiting’, in the description of Gilbert and Gubar of the veiled condition, even within ‘patriarchal society, . . . a private sphere invisible to public view’.37 Esther’s handkerchief too functions as a common garment that furthers their wordless communication, an example, permitted by the Latin texere, of a woven item that is also a text.38 Offered first in compassion to Jenny to veil her dead child, it appears later in the hand of Lady Dedlock, whose silent gesture lifts the veil as she recognizes her own living child.39 The act of unveiling becomes as eloquent indeed as the assumption of the veil – just as the work of unravelling figures as importantly in

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Penelope’s scheme as the knitting task.40 Esther’s illness serves to lift from her, as if it had been a veil, the semblance of her beautiful mother, granting her thereafter the freedom to appear as herself. At first she dares not exercise that freedom and continues to talk to Ada, for example, ‘from behind the window-curtain’, but slowly mustering courage, she unveils herself successively to Ada, Richard, Guppy, Woodcourt and others. In the biblical trope, as Ragussis points out, the lifting of the veil represents ‘the hermeneutical act’, and Esther thus offers a new definition of herself.41 She removes the veil from an especially intimate phase of her identity when her early convalescence prompts an admission that recalls her childish confessions to her doll: ‘And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr Woodcourt loved me . . .’ (XXXV). In parting with that one little secret, however, she may deceive herself anew into believing that she is quite resigned to the loss of Woodcourt; a veil continues to obscure her inward vision. As she also returns to her needlework, it seems again a secretly defensive art while it is meant to express her industrious, cheerful and submissive devotion to others. After the brief illness following the death of her mother, she takes up her duties as soon as possible with renewed firmness: ‘I resumed my work, and my chair beside his’ (LX). That work, of course, can only be the sewing that goes on every evening as she sits near Jarndyce. And it goes on as she sits with Ada and sews something for her, as on the memorable evening in which Woodcourt will tell her of his love. She has expected Jarndyce to accompany her home, but apparently because of her slight delay Woodcourt accompanies her instead: One evening, [Jarndyce] had arranged to meet me at eight o’clock. I could not leave, as I usually did, quite punctually to the time, for I was working for my dear girl, and had a few stitches more to do, to finish what I was about; but it was within a few minutes of the hour, when I bundled up my little work-basket gave my darling my last kiss for the night, and hurried down-stairs. Mr Woodcourt went with me, as it was dusk. (LXI) When Woodcourt then takes advantage of circumstances later that evening to confess his love, he may break more or less violently into the comfortable routine represented by her constant stitching. Yet she has secretly wanted him to break into that protecting and self-repressive routine. We wonder, indeed, if her lack of punctuality on this occasion has been not an accident but part of an unconscious scheme. In missing the appointment with Jarndyce, she has offered Woodcourt an opportunity for ‘the first walk we had ever taken together’ (LXI). Reminding us that ‘sewing both conceals and reveals’, Esther has characteristically managed

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with her ‘few stitches more to do’ both to repress and to communicate her desire. Functioning less ambiguously in the other novels, needlework often means just one thing for the sewers – either it enslaves them or it empowers them to control others. With respect to the first possibility, Ruth and Lavinia deal most fully and realistically with the plight of women forced to sew in order to earn enough money just to survive. The other novels also contain hints of an apparently generalized conviction in the period that to be forced to sew for a living constitutes one of the worst of female destinies. To the defenders of Chancery, who think it would be wicked to put men like Vholes out of business, the narrator of Bleak House attributes the perfidious question: ‘And . . . Vholes’s daughters? Are they to be shirtmakers, or governesses?’ (XXXIX). Almost no one, it appears, believes that shirt-making can offer any financial independence or psychological benefit to women. As an unmitigated disaster, ‘the work which takes [women] from home and family’, assert Helsinger, Sheets and Veeder with particular reference to sewing, ‘is one of the evils inflicted on them by poverty’.42 Widely discussed in the press, the working conditions for seamstresses are as deplorable as the situation in tailoring shops that Kingsley denounces in Alton Locke and ‘Cheap Clothes and Nasty’.43 An impression may have prevailed too of the particular cruelty of making women sew items for the market place. Although originally forced by their female condition to sew as a mechanical task, many women had attempted to respond creatively to Necessity. They had learned to take pride in their handiwork, of the sort that Ruskin attributes to medieval craftsmen. In particular, as we have seen, their work could express secretive aspects of their female being. Besides the psychological energies that informed it, the handiwork could function as what men considered an arcane system of communication among women. To bring such products to the male-dominated market place and subject them to the laws of supply and demand therefore implied a kind of violation of the seamstresses themselves. The work that had customarily belonged to the sphere of unalienated domestic labour now became alienated labour. As Gerhard Joseph suggests in analysing ‘The Lady of Shalott’, the weaver’s labour is cursed into something different from the weaver, and the reification of the product makes the Lady too a commodity.44 For other reasons as well the seamstress became closely associated with the prostitute, the female commodity in its most obvious form. Chancery is to blame in the case of Miss Flite’s sister who first earned her living by ‘tambour work’ (embroidery) and then fell, as we suppose, into prostitution: ‘ “My sister was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what!” ’ (XXXV). Within the social environment typified by Chancery, the wicked milieu of dressmaking and millinery establishments acquired particular notoriety as a hotbed of moral contagion.45 The inadequacy of the wages might also force a woman into prostitution as the only means for supplementing

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them. And then the very elegance of the dresses that the seamstress made for women of a higher social class could corrupt her with a desire for ‘finery’ that she could only satisfy by selling herself.46 In the conclusion of Judd, the occupation of the seamstress ‘not only represents the helplessness and exploitation of the working-class woman, but sewing itself becomes a metonymy for all morally dangerous forms of female labor’.47 Ruth demonstrates precisely the cruelty of Mrs Mason’s establishment as it operates to turn the heroine into a commodity. Naturally an imaginative and affectionate girl, the young seamstress finds that the weariness of the long hours of work prevents her from developing the finer aspects of her personality. The girls sometimes attempt to articulate a certain emotional solidarity amongst themselves, but Mrs Mason encourages a spirit of rivalry, and the working conditions do not permit much confidentiality. The pressure to produce makes it impossible to sew with any of the love of the Ruskinian artisan. Although Ruth appreciates beauty in nature and in human artefacts, any aesthetic consideration is irrelevant to her own mechanical task. The relentless, repetitive, clock-work ticking of her steady sewing so horrifies her late one night that she breaks down before the consumptive Jenny, who is herself dying in the bad air: ‘Oh! how shall I get through five years of these terrible nights! in that close room! and in that oppressive stillness! which lets every sound of the thread be heard as it goes eternally backwards and forwards,’ sobbed out Ruth, as she threw herself on her bed, without even undressing herself. (I) For Mrs Mason, Ruth’s particular value resides not, obviously, in her imaginative strength and not even in her technical skill as a needlewoman, but rather in her physical beauty. So in the episode of the ball at the shire-hall, she appoints Ruth for this last reason to be one of her representatives at the ball, to mend if necessary ladies’ ballgowns. Although she pretends to choose Ruth as a reward for her industriousness, Ruth knows that this is not the case. The sense of being appraised only as a beautiful object that will reflect lustre on the dressmaking establishment humiliates her. In Mrs Mason’s further wish to procure without expense to herself a finer gown to frame Ruth’s charms, the poor girl finds gowns and her own body serving again as functions of purely materialistic calculations. The ballroom dancing represents, as always, the stylized propagation of contagion, occurring here within the elegantly fashionable milieu created by women, and so functions as a microcosm of material history in action. In the perspective of Carlyle or Scarry, the duty to mend tears in ballgowns would be making Ruth participate, within this microcosm, in the universal process of weaving reality or of repairing cultural dikes. But the

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contagion of the atmosphere comes instead to infect and unmake her. Mr Bellingham recognizes her worth as a beautiful commodity and probably assumes that as a seamstress she is available for purchase. In her inexperience Ruth falls into his banal trap, and the hypocritical or comfortably self-deceived Mrs Mason will be so shocked that she expels Ruth from her respectable establishment. In Lavinia too, the ever incumbent danger in the heroine’s sewing phase is that of falling into prostitution. The phase begins, in fact, when she learns that her long-dead mother has been a prostitute, living at the time of Lavinia’s conception, interestingly, with ‘a Spitalfields weaver, who was not her husband’ (II:vi). Then the guardian, with whom she has grown up and whom she has wrongly thought to be her uncle, makes sexual advances, and she must flee his house. The plot evidently punishes her now for her heedless insensitivity to human misery in the days of her glory, when she has also flirted so irresponsibly with men and women. As if in penitence for her wanton behaviour and the extreme décolleté of her ballgowns, she takes to dressing modestly and to wearing, like the women in Bleak House, a veil. Almost penniless, she consults the practical landlady of her London lodging house about possibilities for employment, but Mrs Tamplin responds gloomily that the market for female workers is glutted: ‘That’s why so many young women starve or do worse. There’s such a competition, you see. The men, though, God knows, often badly off enough, have more ways than one of turning an honest penny; while a woman has but one, you know – her needle; and the consequence is, that there are more needles than work for them. A firm in the city, I miss the name now, advertised the other day for fifty hand – guess how many applied? Seven hundred, my dear young lady, seven hundred, fourteen times as many as were wanted.’ (II:xi) To avoid starving or worse, Lavinia nevertheless enters the market place, working in the lodging house since the chances of employment in firms are so slim. The constant sexual threat to working women emerges again in her efforts to sell her embroidery to shopkeepers in Camden Town. A man in one shop eyes her appraisingly, more interested in her than in her embroidered shirt: he ‘noticed the small gloved fingers, took in at a glance the fine proportions of her figure, and conveyed the satisfactory impression he had received from the tout ensemble, by a wink and a grin full of meaning to some one standing behind the lady’. The head clerk attempts to ‘peep under her veil’ and then pretends to measure the sleeves of the shirt offered for sale against Lavinia’s wrist, ‘and in so doing, managed, with malice prepense, to touch the fair hand and arm more than necessary’. Finally the men propose the necessity, before they purchase anything, of her unveiling ‘just for an instant’ so that in any eventual

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dispute they will be able to recognize the maker of the item. Realizing that they are mocking her, Lavinia leaves the shop in tears, and Mrs Tamplin later comments without surprise that it is indeed ‘ “a wicked world. . . . All the effect of competition, that’s what it is” ’ (II:xiii). Lavinia does manage to sell embroidery, but her work involves frequent humiliations and ‘slaving from early dawn till late at night’. Attempts to find other employment repeatedly fail, and in walking even to a West End address in response to a newspaper advertisement, she notices that men ‘peered curiously through her veil’: Some, to do so more conscientiously, leant forwards, or raised their eye-glass. Five out of ten who were going down the street in the same direction with her, would linger, by her side, stare at her over their shoulders, and when they had passed on, turn their heads again and again. In spite of her thick veil, and her eyes on the ground, Lavinia could not help being aware of these manœuvres. (II:xi) Apparently a female worker cannot escape the fate of being treated as a sexual commodity, as this phase of her story emphasizes especially in its last episode. Mr Duncan, a hitherto respectable surgeon and friend of Mrs Tamplin, offers her a job as his housekeeper, and to her astonished, ‘ “But you are a single gentleman, sir” ’, he responds: ‘ “Yes, thank God, I am – reason the more for you to come; you will have everything your own way, don’t you see? – eh? – plenty of the best that’s to be got to eat, and to drink – plenty of fine clothes – plenty of money” ’ (II:xiii). As the uniform of the kept woman, fine clothes again suggest a form of slavery that nineteenth-century morality considers worse than that of Skimpole’s picturesque American pickers of cotton. Mr Duncan’s relish of the prospect of subjugating Lavinia also recalls Tulkinghorn’s subtler enjoyment of power over Lady Dedlock, an upper-class wearer of finery. A common system of slavery may unite many women, both the exploited producers of clothes and the fine women who have marketed themselves in order to wear those clothes. Or rather than uniting these women, the system may diffuse amongst them a contagious virus of alienation, as in Joseph’s analysis of the alienating ‘curse [that] is come upon’ the Lady of Shalott. The needlewoman who seems, albeit somewhat deceptively, to dominate the system rather than to suffer capture in its woven meshes is Mrs Poyntz of A Strange Story.48 She also constitutes the most striking instance of the possibility implied by this chapter that the needlewoman may be taking over the power of the swordsman. The sword is beaten, that is, not into ploughshares but, in her case, into knitting needles. Preferring to style herself Mrs Colonel Poyntz, she has taken over command from her husband, the affable, retired colonel whose battles now proceed endlessly

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but harmlessly at the card table. She reminds us of Mrs Major O’Dowd in Vanity Fair, of whom George Osborne remarks to Amelia, ‘ “O’Dowd goes in command of the regiment, and Peggy goes in command of O’Dowd” ’ (XXVII). And in Bleak House there is of course Mrs Bagnet, whose commanding role her retired soldier-husband will not own explicitly because ‘ “discipline must be maintained” ’. Known as the Queen of the Hill, in reference to the fashionable part of town, Bulwer’s Mrs Colonel is not a ‘constitutional sovereign; her monarchy was absolute’ (VII). She delights in her exercise of a masculine authority, believing that ‘ “All women would be men if they could” ’ (VI). Her authority secures, in her own mind, the well-being of her subjects by banning, as we have seen, fallen women from her kingdom and opposing the libidinous energy of Margrave. Since she is nevertheless a woman, her knitting needles function as the symbol of her power in action, as Allen Fenwick observes during his first commanded attendance at her Wednesday ‘at home’: There she sat knitting, rapidly, firmly; a woman somewhat on the other side of forty, complexion a bronze paleness, hair a bronze brown, in strong ringlets cropped short behind, – handsome hair for a man; lips that, when closed, showed inflexible decision . . .; . . . observing, piercing, dauntless eyes; altogether a fine countenance, – would have been a very fine countenance in a man; profile sharp, straight, clear-cut, with an expression, when in repose, like that of a sphinx. . . . There she sat knitting, knitting, and I by her side, gazing now on herself, now on her work, with a vague idea that the threads in the skein of my own web of love or of life were passing quick through those noiseless fingers. (VI) The ‘observing, piercing, dauntless eyes’ identify her as a watchwoman. Nothing escapes the all-penetrating gaze whereby she exerts as an agent of the imaginary invisible watchman her authority. She and other agents like her are observing, imagining and enforcing the laws that regulate and protect the cultural system. Styled ‘one of the Parcæ’ – we may think here of Dickens’s Mme Defarge and Eliot’s scheming Rosamund Vincy too – she also conveys not just a symbolic but an almost physical power through her knitting. Like the glittering Mace of the Lord Chancellor for Miss Flite, that knitting possesses a visually hypnotic fascination that seems to Fenwick to be ensnaring him in his destiny: ‘ “the weird web . . . springs under your hand in meshes that bewilder the gaze and snare the attention” ’. She understands even before he does that he is in love with someone, but her knitting expresses an uncertainty about whether to encourage or to hinder the affair. Not knowing yet who the woman may be, she ‘paused, while I spoke, from her knitting, and now resumed it very

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slowly and very carefully, as if her mind and her knitting worked in unison together’. Stitch by stitch, as the situation comes into focus in her imagination, intricate adjustments are being meditated in particular aspects of the historical circumstances that impinge upon him. Then she comes to a decision and tells him that ‘ “the time has come in your life and your career when you would do well to marry” ’; and ‘the knitting here went on more decidedly, more quickly’. What eventually emerges, however, is that while she recognizes the advisability of his marrying someone, her scheme requires that he remain primarily devoted in a more or less platonic sense to herself. Her loyalty is not, that is, only to supreme cultural values but also to her own comfort. The desired marriage must not be to her daughter, since it would be awkward for her to become her own daughter’s rival. So she admonishes him, in case his hopes are set in that direction: ‘ “I have settled Jane’s lot in my own mind”, resumed Mrs Poyntz, striking firm into another row of knitting’ (VII). While settling Jane’s lot, she is also scheming on her own behalf to gain an appropriate son-in-law. The desirable man is Ashleigh Sumner, for whom Mrs Poyntz predicts an interesting political future. Her ambitions include becoming the clever mentor behind the career of a Member of Parliament since she cannot go into Parliament herself. Lilian constitutes, however, an obstacle to this project because Sumner seems to love Lilian rather than Jane. So to remove that obstacle, Mrs Poyntz will promote the engagement of Lilian and Fenwick, which duly occurs, although it remains secret for a time. When Sumner, not yet aware of the development, proposes to Lilian, she refuses, and in hurt anger he transfers his affections forthwith to Jane, just as Mrs Poyntz has foreseen. Delighted by the new confirmation of Lilian’s love for him, Fenwick rushes to tell the good news to Mrs Poyntz, who appears unsurprised that matters have been settling into place according to her own scheme: She was still at work on the everlasting knitting, her firm fingers linking mesh into mesh as she listened; and when I had done, she laid her skein deliberately down, and said, in her favourite characteristic formula, – ‘So at last? – that is settled!’ (XXX) Not until much later will Fenwick understand the degree to which she has been settling his own lot: ‘How skilfully this woman had knitted me into her work with the noiseless turn of her white hands!’ (LVII). At this point her scheme is operating to separate him from Lilian, who now represents only an obstacle to her desire for an intense ‘intellectual’ friendship with him. While she can vicariously enjoy through her son-in-law the challenges of a political career, Fenwick can offer, with his scientific brilliance, an additional stimulation in her life.

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Zola’s apparently submissive Clotilde emerges as another strong woman who will live vicariously through the careers of men. One of those men is only an infant at the end of the story, the son whose baby clothes, now stored in Pascal’s armoire, she has evidently sewn. In taking control of the armoire with the products of her needle, she has already signalled in the opinion of Malinas her ‘conquête de Pascal’. All along she has been the ‘maîtresse’ of the man that she has always called ‘Maître’.49 As she sits beside the armoire nursing their son in the final paragraphs of the novel, she indulges a prophetic fantasy that he, once grown, will set forth from this base upon a messianic career. Just possibly he will become [le] messie que le prochain siècle attendait, qui tirerait les peuples de leur doute et de leur souffrance! Puisque la nation était à refaire, celui-ci ne venait-il pas pour cette besogne? Il reprendrait l’expérience, relèverait les murs, rendrait une certitude aux hommes tâtonnants, bâtirait la cité de justice, où l’unique loi du travail assurerait le bonheur. (XIV) Like Mrs Poyntz with respect to the career of her son-in-law, Clotilde will stand behind her son’s mission to re-make the nation, to construct the just city, to raise again the walls or the dikes of culture. Her imaginative construction of the future makes her, however improbably, the invisible watchwoman behind the watchman that her son will become. The future that she foresees does not involve irresponsibly utopian castles in the air since the happiness of a culture must involve the discipline of the ‘loi du travail’. And the imaginative vision of most of the watching agents includes a strong element of discipline. It is interesting to return in this context to Esther Summerson – another ‘self-effacing’, in the term of Scarry, but strong watchwoman. She and Bucket, who are companions in the harrowing pursuit of Lady Dedlock, may represent the principal disciplining powers of nineteenth-century society. With respect to Jacques Donzelot’s specification of the two regimes of discipline, the needlewoman typifies that of le contrat (voluntary self-discipline) and the detective, as successor to the swordsman, that of la tutelle (externally imposed enforcement). The needlewoman Esther disciplines, that is, not only herself but convinces others to discipline – as if voluntarily – themselves. So her subtle authority comes to resemble the unseen surveillance that controls prisoners in the famous Panopticon. A powerful observer, as suggested in her understatement, ‘I had always a rather noticing way’ (III), she controls people and events through her vision and her written representation of them. She exercises, Elizabeth Langland believes, ‘an all-seeing but unseen surveillance’,50 as to some extent, in the implication of Gilbert and Gubar,

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do the other veiled women ‘invisible to public view’ in their watchtower.51 These watchwomen come possibly to outnumber the watchmen in their patrolling of cultural dikes and in their control of a social space – the ‘ “panoptic” space’ that is, says Ermarth, more than a prison. The space is ‘the neutral medium that . . . makes possible the definition of society as . . . a system managed by people . . . and not a series of ledges in a Christian God’s cosmos’.52 Even without a veil another woman in Bleak House also manages to become one of the powerful and invisible watchwomen. In her case, however, the impression of a warden controlling a carceral space would seem to apply. Mrs Bucket, namely, fulfils to her husband’s entire satisfaction his challenging charge to incriminate and capture Hortense with her implacable, but unnoticed gaze: ‘My dear, can you throw her off continually . . .? Can you do without rest, and keep watch upon her, night and day? Can you undertake to say, She shall do nothing without my knowledge, she shall be my prisoner without suspecting it, she shall no more escape from me than from death, and her life shall be my life, and her soul my soul, till I have got her, if she did this murder?’ (LIV) In employing the eyes so aggressively, spying possesses an affinity with needlework, as a comparison in Ruth of eyes and needles (recalling the eyes and ‘spear-heads’ of A Strange Story) makes explicit: ‘Mrs Mason had clearly seen, with her sharp, needle-like eyes, the attitude in which Ruth had stood with the young man who had just quitted her’ (IV). Such heavy use of the eyes fatigues them, and the novels contain many references to the tired eyes of needlewomen – as when, at the very beginning of the story, ‘Ruth pressed her hot forehead against the cold glass, and strained her aching eyes in gazing out on the lovely sky’ (I). More powerful in one episode than Mrs Mason herself, however, is the needlewoman that watches Ruth just as intently as Mrs Bucket watches Hortense. Jemima Bradshaw, that is, takes to observing Ruth constantly, in an effort to detect signs of sexual wantonness and therefore guilt.53 Often Jemima seeks to conceal her surveillance behind a pretended interest in her sewing: ‘but whether she sewed, or wrote, or read, Ruth felt that she was always watching – watching’. Unlike Hortense and the panoptic prisoners, Ruth recognizes her jailer, who exhibits ‘the calm implacability of some severe judge. The watching, which Ruth felt was ever upon her, made her unconsciously shiver. . . . Her very being shrivelled and parched up in Jemima’s presence, as if blown upon by a bitter, keen, [and as in Bleak House] east wind’ (XXVI). The shrivelling sickness derives from the power of the all-seeing jailer to expose the prisoner to general opprobrium. To be exhibited in public

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– to be, in effect, unmade – represents the worst of punishments in the disciplinary regime based on watching. Those possessed of the power to inflict such punishment may, like the fundamentally gentle Jemima, well hesitate to use it: ‘Ruth was in her power. And, strange to say, this last certainty gave Jemima a kind of protecting, almost pitying, feeling for Ruth’ (XXV). The same compunction may trouble the watching men who find themselves in a position to exert a blackmailing power over fellow sinners. So although Donne (Bellingham) has tried to repossess Ruth by reminding her ‘ “how much you are in my power” ’ (XXIV), he does not finally carry through on the threat to disclose her past to the general public. In Two Years Ago similarly, while Tom Thurnall makes clear to both Vavasour and Trebooze his ‘power’ to expose them to their wives, the menace again remains idle. It is interesting meanwhile that despite the supposed inferiority of women the husbands may especially fear the judgement of their wives. In the case of Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock, however, the threat of public exposure operates with devastating effectiveness. With respect to Bucket and the allegorical Roman on Tulkinghorn’s ceiling, Bleak House also features the related motif of the pointed finger. Like those pointed against the untori in Manzoni, the fingers seem among their other meanings to be indicating prospective victims for public disgrace.54 The ‘power of public opinion’ to despise and undo individuals, as Alexander Welsh observes, will become a particularly lethal weapon in a rash of novels of the 1860s that narrate episodes of blackmail.55 As the situation in Two Years Ago suggests, the terrifying power of the ‘world’ or of public opinion is often associated more particularly with authoritative women than with men. The logic of power, which we have observed to make some potential blackmailers fearful of their own power, seems to require patriarchy to cede certain privileges to women. Besides humiliated and veiled creatures, the female category includes social queens like Mrs Poyntz, Félicité Rougon and, before her dethronement and in her non-veiled appearances, Lady Dedlock. Still the power of these queens is never absolute. The power of Lady Dedlock is that of a leader of ‘fashion’, which means that she participates in a particular system of contagion. In the novel, being ‘In Fashion’ is made parallel to being ‘In Chancery’ (the titles of the first two chapters), which may further constitute for us two ways of being in history. As a system of contagion, fashion also possesses its own particular characteristics that have defied, according to Baudrillard, the analytic efforts of sociologists and aestheticians. Baudrillard’s own description may help, however, to point out if not to unravel some of the complexity of the interactions of power in the phenomena of fashion. He begins with the observation of the coexistence of phenomena of chain reactions, suggesting Girardian imitation, and of contrasting impulses to affirm distinctions and differences:

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Other power struggles occur on actual fields of battle, on the biological level of invasive diseases, on the level of rational debate, in the law courts and financial markets and so forth. But the contagion of fashion ravages primarily the imagination, where it is apparently cut off from much of reality and where it blinds the watchmen and watchwoman of the cultural dikes. The displays of power would seem here to have nothing to do with making but only with unmaking – immense cost and waste (‘gaspillage’) in both financial and moral terms. Still we love, says Baudrillard, the rapidity with which the contamination of fashion possesses us and, like a poisonous drug, obliterates rational consideration. It also appears then that there is little difference between the operations of contagion on the biological and on the imaginative levels. We seem to accept the principle that life is most truly and importantly being lived in the insensate dimension of viral infections rather than in the sensate dimension of rational projects: Notre merveilleux social est celui de cette surface ultra-rapide de circulation des signes (et non celle ultra-lente de circulation du sens). Nous adorons être immédiatement contaminés, sans réfléchir. Cette virulence est aussi néfaste que celle de la peste, mais aucune sociologie morale, aucune raison philosophique n’en viendra à bout. La mode est un phénomène irréductible parce qu’elle participe de ce mode de communication insensé, viral, immédiatique, qui ne circule aussi vite que parce qu’il ne passe pas par la médiation du sens.57 In this sphere of quickly circulating viral infections, the leader of fashion may not possess many advantages over her followers. Indeed Lady Dedlock is more a victim than a sovereign. Her rule extends over a ‘world’ of merely ephemeral splendour, and whereas Baudrillard treats fashion as a generalized contamination, Lady Dedlock’s realm occupies only a negligible space in the territory of historical Necessity. This small compartment also possesses, in the description of Dickens’s narrator, the claustrophobic characteristics of a prison: The world of fashion is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it, and are come to the brink of the void

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beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air. (II) In its ‘unhealthy . . . want of air’ this world reminds us oddly of the ‘close room’ with its ‘oppressive stillness’ in which Ruth and the other seamstresses of Mrs Mason’s establishment languish. As they wearily produce gowns for bored, fashionable ladies, both they and those ladies submit to a similar contaminating, wasting oppression. The other two social queens, Mrs Poyntz and Félicité Rougon, reign more fully in the context of ‘the rushing of the larger worlds’. Here they recall us from the dimension that Baudrillard describes of insensate viral activity to the more conscious making and unmaking projects of history. But here too the queenly power proves limited and much less ‘absolute’ than Bulwer’s narrator Fenwick has at first believed. It cannot set fashions capriciously. For unlike the contagion of the Roman plague that stemmed from particular ‘silk ribbons’, associated with female frivolity, the reigning power does not emanate from any single source. Beyond the queens there exist the larger, invisible forces of history, which the queens must translate into the language of their decrees. While Mrs Poyntz remains, to be sure, self-gratifying in her ruthlessness, her power over Fenwick depends upon his persuasion that she speaks on behalf of a higher authority. He can ignore that authority only at his peril when she warns him for his own good against marriage to the dishonoured Lilian: ‘Look where I stand, I am the WORLD! The World, not as satirists depreciate, or as optimists extol its immutable properties, its allpersuasive authority. I am the World! And my voice is the World’s voice when it thus warns you. Should you make this marriage, your dignity of character and position would be gone. . . . You have the pride, as well as the birth of a gentleman, and the wounds to that pride will be hourly chafed and never healed. Your strong breast of man has no shelter to the frail name of woman. The World, in its health, will look down on your wife, though its sick may look up to you.’ (LVIII) Yet the World does not of course evince ‘health’. Fenwick rejects the awful threat of Mrs Poyntz, and to protect the maligned Lilian from the spreading disease of the World’s fashionable opinion, he will later emigrate with her to Australia. Having lost Fenwick, Mrs Poyntz will move on to new conquests in London, where, she says, ‘ “in Jane’s beauty and

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Ashleigh’s fortune I have materials for the woof of ambition” ’. In her last meeting with Fenwick, she makes one more attempt to convince him to follow her: ‘ “Allen Fenwick, do as I do. Be world with the world, and it will only be in moments of spleen and chagrin that you will sigh to think that the heart may be void when the mind is full. Confess that you envy me while you listen” ’ (LXVII). But he does not envy her, and the reference to the void heart makes us wonder if her own worldly victories are not very hollow. In the terrible Félicité Rougon, Zola’s novel contains a remarkably similar woman. Considering herself ‘une des reines du second Empire’, she has reigned, like Bulwer’s Queen of the Hill, over her town of Plassons for eighteen years. There in 1851 she has saved local civilization from anarchy, ‘en y faisant triompher le coup d’Etat du 2 décembre’. In concomitance with the reign of Napoléon III, her provincial world has obediently looked up to her for the setting of its tone and the definitions of its fashions. Like Mrs Poyntz, moreover, she claims not to be exercising a selfish or arbitrary power but to represent the force of ‘l’opinion publique’ (I). The advent of the Third Republic then constitutes a defeat, and as even members of her family begin to support the new political order, she finds her power eroded. Still in the ceremony of laying the cornerstone for the Asile Rougon, she intuits a new investiture of authority and reason for pride – ‘d’avoir vaincu la jeune République, en l’obligeant, dans la personne du sous-préfet, à la venir saluer et remercier’ (XIV). Her face-saving impression of making the personified young Republic bow to her authority indicates, of course, a foolish failure of imagination, for she is actually compromising with the new regime. The power of the world disciplines the very queens that are its interpreters or arbiters. If they interpret it imperfectly as Félicité does here, their own authority fails, and even Mrs Poyntz confesses her own subjection to ‘ “the social laws that I myself have set in my petty kingdom” ’ (LVII). The power, which is ‘always of the feminine gender’ according to The Mill on the Floss (VII:ii), resides therefore in the female collectivity, as Two Years Ago also implies with respect to the tireless female ‘gossips of Aberalva’ (VIII). Ultimately it may derive from something even larger than a purely female collectivity. The disciplining power, in Ermarth’s analysis, is another way of naming the contagion of history, which permeates the broad, panoptic perspective of the novels: The voice of ‘public’ opinion is much, much more than the Voice of Mrs Grundy, or of evangelical righteousness. It is the ineffable voice of social self-awareness, the Nobody narrative function . . ., the narrative voice of an emerging social entity. The special, particular narrative awareness that materializes in the narrative language of historical novels, and that broods over the narrative world in Gaskell, late

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Dickens, Trollope, Meredith or George Eliot, is like the voice of society, speaking to itself.58 In ‘speaking to itself’, the voice of the world carries on a sort of dialogue with itself, as may become interestingly evident in Ruth. The ‘world’ or ‘public opinion’ figures in the novel, Bonaparte believes, as a ‘palpable presence . . . almost a character’: Gaskell uses the term ‘ “the world” . . . as though it were a name’.59 One can then engage in an argument with this ‘palpable presence’ although Gaskell’s Bradshaw does not at first recognize this possibility. After learning the truth about Ruth, he simply repeats to Benson that one cannot safely challenge the world: ‘ “The world has decided how such women are to be treated; and . . . there is so much practical wisdom in the world that its way of acting is right in the long run, and . . . no one can fly in its face with impunity” ’. Benson, of course, opposes such moral timidity: ‘ “I take my stand with Christ against the world” ’ (XXVII). In Esther’s reading of the Gospel to her godmother, Bleak House too alludes to Christ’s stand against the world’s attitude to the fallen woman: ‘our Saviour stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him’ (III). In the context of the motif of the pointed finger, the passage indicates that Christ, precisely, does not point his finger against the sinful woman.60 The world may well learn from Christ, and indeed Ruth goes on to suggest that it does. In the debate about his mother that Leonard witnesses outside the hospital, the gossip reported by one person – ‘ “They say she has been a great sinner” ’ – is decisively contradicted by another: ‘ “Such a one as her has never been a great sinner” ’ (XXXIII). And this moment in which public opinion shifts constitutes what a recent student of the phenomenon of ‘thought contagion’ would consider a ‘tipping point’.61 Far from condemning Ruth, the world – and Bradshaw with it – has now clearly come round to considering her a saint. In representing the effects of history, the novels prosecute in their microcosms the dialogue about whether the impalpable, invisible world controls individuals or individuals influence and make the world. Given the opportunities for dialogue and for tipping public opinion, the watchwomen who imagine and repair the cultural dikes and who observe and speak for the world possess a certain latitude. They can, even if hindered by their own imperfections and selfishness, sometimes make the social Panopticon a less carceral and more humane space. While under constant siege, the fortified domestic hearth can similarly resist and become in some instances a centre from which a beneficially colonizing impulse emanates. In contrast to the evidently spurious missions of Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle, the charitable projects of Esther liberate generous energies and promote creative versions of discipline. Instructing Caddy and others in needlework and in her housekeeping methods, Esther emerges, in the opinion of Langland, as ‘the Florence Nightingale of bourgeois

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housekeepers’ who is extending her method ‘across the face of England’. Somewhat like la Souleiade in the fantasy of Clotilde, the new Bleak House therefore figures as a source of commanding healthy energy that is at least as powerful as the contagious wickedness of Chancery.62 Or, in this new version of imperialism, the instruments of the often exploited needlewoman prove their superiority after all to the brutality of the sword. In Jameson’s perspective of Necessity, the power for good of the individual needlewoman admittedly remains limited. While industriously weaving her webs and concealing her watchful diligence behind veils, she is executing, with more or less resistance, invisible orders. Her handiwork, as Heidegger suggests with respect to the ‘mesh’ (Geflecht) of language, is not something that she weaves but rather an unauthorized text that weaves itself through her.63 While the sword, in the logic of our metaphors, may tear the meshes and the needle may repair them, the fabric of history continues to impose upon the fabricators its own unifying patterns. The debate regarding the degree to which individual imaginations and local causes may influence or even, taken together, be that mysterious Necessity is not concluded. The novels seem on the whole to propose with respect to the clothes-making process the hopeful interpretation of Sartor Resartus. Carlyle’s Editor finds ‘many a little loophole’ opening for him ‘into the internal world of Teufelsdröckh’ which offers a view of history as life and freedom. Instead of the ‘dead, immeasurable Steam-engine . . . and Mill of Death’, he discerns ‘the roaring Loom of Time’ that figures in Goethe’s Faust: ‘all Nature and Life are but one Garment, a “Living Garment,” woven and ever a-weaving in the “Loom of Time” ’.64 With respect to our particular needlewomen, Ruth especially has progressed, in her later years, from mechanical, captivated stitching to creative and living work. Her busy sewing for her son, the Bensons and needy parishioners may suggest continuing submission to the woman’s overdetermined cultural role. Yet she performs such tasks with love and inventiveness, and her re-making – re-tailoring in the Carlylean sense – from old materials of a carpet for the vital, domestic hearth is emblematic: ‘in the final and unmendable wearing-out of the parlour carpet, which there was no spare money to replace . . . they cheerfully supplied its want by a large hearth-rug that Ruth made out of ends of list’ (XXIX). So against the Necessity of financial contingency, she forges – as in a very different medium Wagner’s Siegfried re-forges the pieces of his father’s sword Nothung – a new possibility for Freedom. With her invisible arms, Ruth will also confront like Siegfried her particular dragon, the typhus that we have seen, in his lair. Although she will finally succumb to the disease, her patient heroism has by then forced an originally hostile public opinion to come around to her fervent support. As opposed to the garments that spread contagion, the products of her imaginative making will continue to warm and protect the community in the years to come.

4

Physicians, nurses and patients

In the agonistic rhetoric that frequently characterizes treatments of disease, the combat engages not only swordsmen but also unarmed fighters. Health, as Vrettos observes, may entail ‘a form of internal combat – not just the absence of sickness, but the ability to conquer disease, to wrestle with it biologically and throw it to the ground’.1 In this internal struggle patients may sometimes have the external help of physicians like Tom Thurnall who similarly approach their task as if it were a row with a nasty bully. Tom goes ‘ “right at [the] throat” ’ of his antagonist, as we have seen, ‘ “wheresoever I meet him” ’ (XIV), and he enjoys the muscular sensations of fighting: ‘ “I have got – and what greater pleasure? – a good stand-up fight with an old enemy; and be sure I shall keep myself in condition for it” ’ (XVII). Usually less blatantly pugnacious than Tom, physicians had been engaged for at least a century in more subtle and possibly unconscious battles too. Besides fighting disease and bureaucracies, they had been campaigning to assert the authority of medicine against the religious establishment, which had traditionally exercised jurisdiction in matters relating to health as well as to morality. With particular respect to sexual practices, medical practitioners came now to take over from priests the power to define and enforce both sanitary and moral principles. ‘The secularization of society, which damaged the prestige of the clergy’, according to Helsinger, Sheets and Veeder, ‘had made physicians the new law-givers’. Or in the similar terms of Foucault and Donzelot, the ‘medicalization’ of culture had made physicians the new ‘police’ of families.2 Unfortunately, from the feminist perspective, the new medical police of families maintained the discriminatory policies against women characteristic of the old priestly police. Physicians based their claim to authority naturally upon science, a branch of learning widely considered too taxing for the female brain and so removed from the sphere in which women could protect themselves.3 In the power struggles that continue within the medicalization of culture, the priestly as well as the military models of authority still operate as challenges to the purely scientific model. The compassionate,

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Christ-like, healing priest and the pugnacious fighter like Tom Thurnall exert their fascination upon the medical practitioners. But whatever the model for medical practice, the principal antagonists remain the disorder and disease that propagate themselves in terms of contagious mechanisms. The medical police must thus devise effective strategies of countercontagion. What is called ‘the medical gaze’ provides an obvious example of the physician’s ability to exert a withering energy, as an anti-contagious influence, against patients. The gaze – more pugnacious than Christ-like – is a particular version of the disciplining stare of the watchmen and watchwomen considered in the previous chapter. While taking in information, it seems to take possession of the patient, as if to substitute the physician’s power for that of the disease. Recalling the patriarchal gaze that turns women into commodities, this far from compassionate gaze serves according to Epstein to objectify the suffering subject: ‘As Michel Foucault would have it, . . . a ‘medical gaze’ . . . alienates the body from the subjective person . . . [and] creates, in other words, the ‘patient’ as a special type of person’. In a possible further step the ‘process’ ‘convert[s] patient into case’.4 Besides this alienating tendency there is, in the analysis of Vrettos, ‘an erotics of clinical vision’ whereby the physician fascinates, intimidates and controls especially his female patient. Some physicians may virtually have conspired to create a mystique about their eyes: ‘the clinical gaze became a contested symbolic maneuver through which the Victorian medical profession attempted to define, and sometimes mystify, the basis of its authority’.5 In addition to disciplining, the ‘transgressive’ gaze can ‘dissect’ its object almost as efficiently, and as palpably, as a scalpel6 – the instrument that may incidentally relate the physician to the swordsman. An explicit association between the gaze and the scalpel occurs, as Rothfield points out, in the case of Flaubert’s Dr Larivière, the disciple of Xavier Bichat in Madame Bovary: ‘Son regard, plus tranchant que ses bistouris, vous descendait droit dans l’âme et désarticulait tout mensonge à travers les allégations et les pudeurs’.7 Like ‘the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase’ in Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, that disarticulating gaze has to do less with healing than with ‘murder[ing] to dissect’. In revealing truth, the gaze inspired by Bichat also operates as destructively as the transgressive contagion of the plague. It counteracts at its worst not only proliferating contagion but life itself. In the view of the medical gazer the body of the patient is already a corpse ready to be dissected. In death when the complexities of the vital processes have ceased, the pathological truth about the body finally emerges in its fixed condition. For Foucault death constitutes ‘the great analyst’, reducing an organism, in Tambling’s phrase, to ‘its most exact state’.8 Tambling associates the menacing eye not only with the dissecting scalpel but with the pointing, accusing finger that figures so prominently

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in Bleak House. Without even encountering its object, the finger seems to make its withering touch palpable. It may thus appear, when Tulkinghorn’s death is discovered, that the Roman pointing at him from the ceiling has been the cause of his reduction into a cadaver. Related to the medical gaze and the pointing finger is the force of mesmerism, which often plays a part in nineteenth-century medical practice.9 The physician needs strong powers of will, according to Sir James Paget, to counteract psychic or physical contagion emanating from his patient, and supremely so in the treatment of nervous disorders. ‘A battle of wills’, as Vrettos summarizes a treatise by Silas Weir Mitchell, ‘lay at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship in all cases of nervous disease’.10 In the practice between 1830 and 1860 of ‘heroic’ medicine, such mental coercion might also be reinforced by more literally invasive counterparts of that violence. Physicians employed acid and white-hot irons in an attempt to ‘cauterize’ both physical and nervous disorders. Especially noted for his forcible tactics, Mitchell successfully cured a woman of her hysterical seizures by threatening the re-insertion of uncomfortable and humiliating rectal tubes.11 While employing women as nurses, the medical regime sought to subordinate them too, along with female patients, to male practice. From the start, as Poovey observes, Florence Nightingale proclaimed – even ‘proudly’ – her subservience to the male medical profession. In terms of their actual power, however, nurses became more than the victims of medical practice and joined physicians in the ranks of policing agents. Bailin refers to ‘the policing aspect of the nurse-patient relationship’, especially in the many Victorian ‘narratives of women nursing disabled men’. Reminding us of the ‘needle-like eyes’ of some needlewomen, the nurse might also practice her own version of the medical gaze. In many narratives, according to Judd, the ‘controlling eye’ of the nurse reveals her as superior to physicians in her watchful, disciplining power. Florence Nightingale herself insisted upon vigilant control in her hospitals over everyone’s movements, while ‘martial tropes’ punctuate the reports of admirers to indicate the ‘aggressive’ nature of her tactics upon ‘woman’s battle field’.12 The military rhetoric used to characterize the campaigns and the policing functions of doctors and nurses suits the view of epidemic disease as a dragon to be challenged and forcibly slain. The violence of the disease is contagiously mimicked, as Girard would observe, in the counter-violence of the medical police. The result seems sometimes to ally the physician or nurse with the disease in their mutual hostility to the patient. Some physicians do, however, seek to practice a medicine that avoids coercion and the violence of dissection and invasive treatments and that allies itself with the patient’s body in more gentle treatments. As early as 1849, according to Epstein, the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow had intuited ‘that it is the body’s response to the disease, not the disease itself, that most affects

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individuals’.13 Rather than because of the mysterious phenomenon called cholera, theorized as an external contagion, disease occurs as a dysfunction of the body’s delicate internal processes and immune responses. Science should therefore find ways to reinforce these biological processes instead of conducting a frontal assault upon the supposed contagion coming from without. In this development the theories of Bichat, particularly with regard to the interrelationship of the organic and animal lives, evidently exercised considerable and productive influence. While implicitly relevant to many novels such as Le Docteur Pascal, Bichat receives explicit credit in discussions that popularize his theories within A Strange Story and, of course, Middlemarch. To gain the power of public support, medical science must indeed associate itself as it does in these works with the discourse of narrative. The relationship between medicine and narrative constitutes an instance of what Lyotard defines as a necessity recognized by all forms of knowledge (savoir) to communicate meanings in the guise of narratives (récits). Scientists thereby legitimize their research and explain their discoveries to the public: ‘Le savoir scientifique ne peut savoir et faire savoir qu’il est le vrai savoir sans recourir à l’autre savoir, le récit’.14 In theory, to be sure, the scientific discourse aspires to the rational condition in which ideas pass from mind to mind in accord with conscious reflection. But in practice it depends upon narratives that persuade in more intricately rhetorical and contagious ways too.15 The example of a medical researcher and writer in Ruffini’s novel also suggests a sense in which his work not only persuades readers but originates in an atmosphere of benign contagion. As ‘a devotee of science’ Mr Boniface breathes, in ‘the world of intelligence’, a rarefied air like that of the cloister: ‘The cell of an anchorite, as far as silence and retirement go, could alone stand a comparison with his little study. Not the faintest echo of the noisy world without found a way to it, and within, no sound but that of the scraping of a pen against paper’ (II:viii). But despite the silence and closure to external influences, such a cell is the site of intensely active vitality. In the case of the anchorite wrestling in prayer, the cell is flooded with a spiritual contagion – effluvia of grace or inspiration emanating from God and the saints. The solitary scientist holds within his ‘world of intelligence’ a similar intercourse with mental impulses referable to the past, present and future. The scientific discourse, as Lyotard emphasizes, depends upon the scientist’s awareness of his relationship to an ongoing process. The ‘intellectual pioneer’, which Mr Boniface is said to be, must be susceptible to the theories of his predecessors, and he must foresee the students to whom his own theories can be destined. In his research and his ‘scraping of pen against paper’, he thus furthers the continuity of the grand récit of science that also empowers his own work.16 His ‘tranquil, unremitting race after knowledge’ (II:viii) engages him, even in his apparent retirement, in what Lyotard considers an especially

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important instance of the historical power struggle. More than other discourses, science involves the desire to ‘know’, which is a way of taking possession of what is known and succeeding in the international competition for power. But science does not properly seek knowledge in order to impose mastery, as a contagious infection might do, over competitors. The récit of science must legitimize itself as a récit spéculatif or a récit de l’émancipation that coincides with the health-giving release of an energetic justice in political and moral life.17 The narratives that physicians compose are not only communications regarding their research or episodes of the grand récit directed towards other scientists and the public. They are also the case histories of individual patients and so derive from relationships of power between physicians and those patients. Epstein has interestingly traced this type of narrative back to the very earliest medical records in the third millennium BC. Based on the patient’s subjective account, which has always been regarded as just as important as any objective, external signs of disease, these histories narrate a truth originating within the body. That primary truth, the knowledge coming ‘from the body’, signifies more indeed than the scientific knowledge that the physician applies secondarily in treatments aimed ‘at the body’.18 The case history should therefore remain as faithful as possible to the sufferer’s own account. But because pain and illness, as Scarry emphasizes, resist translation into words, the physician must also interpret the patient’s words and the objective signs.19 Such narratives of illness serve a therapeutic purpose for the particular patient. While especially complex in psychoanalysis,20 the collaboration between patient and physician in physical illnesses as well involves the patient’s contribution of raw data that threatens, with its contagion, the coherence of the narrative. The physician must struggle with this material ‘to rebuild narrative “speakability” ’ and ‘to reembody the body in language’. As informed by ‘clinical thinking’ and ‘diagnostic reasoning’, the narrative becomes a coherent, chronologically ordered account that can ‘restrain the anarchic potential of the human body’. Like other stories, the narrative protectively re-establishes or re-defines the boundaries that have been transgressed: ‘Stories . . . draw lines and limits around the human body with their narrative authority and with their beginnings, middles and ends’. The production of a narrative coherence and understanding contributes in itself to the healing process.21 Even if the patient should die, he or she can at least be restored to some integrity in the narrative reembodiment of the original body wasted by disease. While the primary material coming from the patient is said to possess greater significance than its secondary, written elaboration, the written narrative does tend to replace the reality that it reports. Even the contagious phenomenon may seem to exist, and to be mastered, more in its textually narrated form than in its real activity. An impression is gaining ground, as Charles Rosenberg has phrased it, that cholera ‘is no absolute

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physical entity but a complex intellectual construct’.22 So the contagion operates less in the real body than in its theorized form as a narrative construction. Medical narratives, which construct like other narratives the sense of causality missing in reality, postulate the causative agent as transgressive contagion; then they control that contagion by reaffirming the boundaries transgressed. The physician as objective narrator would seem to triumph in a power struggle with the patient as subjective teller of his or her own story. (As we shall nevertheless observe, our actual physiciannarrators exemplify finally a certain humility and do not triumph in this respect.) If physicians become narrators, literary narrators must evidently become physicians, in the generalized permeability of the boundaries between the two discourses that mutually empowers them. A tendency to relate the narrators of fiction to physicians, according to Rothfield, characterizes the ‘realism’ of this period: ‘a mode of writing [emerges] in which the real has become medical, in which the relation between author and text is modeled on medical precepts, with the author viewing characters and situations as a doctor views patients and cases’. There is, furthermore, the likelihood that whenever physicians ‘appear in realistic and quasi-realistic novels, they . . . act as surrogates for the novelist’.23 With respect to medical contamination of the field of fiction, Zola may be the principal theorist. His manifesto Le Roman expérimental of 1880 advances the analogy between realistic fiction and medicine with particularly bald insistence. In rewriting the physiological treatise of Claude Bernard, he finds it possible simply to substitute the term romancier for Bernard’s médecin and to change very little else of the original text.24 So the novel becomes in Zola’s thinking about his craft, a laboratory in which to design and conduct his experiments, and the image suggests another analogy with the Panopticon too. The Panopticon could serve, according to Foucault, as a ‘laboratoire de pouvoir’ that was particularly wellconceived and equipped for the purpose of experimenting with human beings in an enormous variety of ways.25 In the Panopticon the experimenter remains all-seeing but invisible, and in this aspect of his power he reminds us of Flaubert’s description of the novelist in a letter to Louise Colet. A consideration of the overtly moralizing presence of the author in Uncle Tom’s Cabin leads to the proposition that the narrrative mode should approach the condition of drama as exemplified by Shakespeare: ‘la forme dramatique a cela de bon, elle annule l’auteur. . . . L’auteur dans son œuvre, doit être comme Dieu dans l’univers, présent partout, et visible nulle part’.26 Omnipresent and yet visibly absent, such an experimental author resembles somewhat ominously the all-penetrating but imponderable contagion of history that has replaced the old-fashioned God or First Cause. The omnipresent authorial gaze, like the medical gaze, diffuses a menacing energy, which makes the narrative less attractive than that of Lyotard’s grand récit of liberation.

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Besides as a laboratory or a Panopticon, the novel may be fitted up as a hospital or lazaretto to represent a site of the contagion. The latter architectural structures figure prominently too within some of the novels. If the world itself, in the passage quoted in Bulwer’s essay, is ‘an Hospital . . . a place . . . to dye in’, the novelist can naturally liken himself to the physician making the rounds of its wards. In the course of his rounds he observes, grimly, the stages by which the patients experimentally subjected to the contagious menace of the authorial gaze are dying. Or to judge from Sainte-Beuve’s famous description of Flaubert’s pen, the scientific novelist may practise his invasive craft especially in the operating room. While the disarticulating medical gaze of Dr Larivière, we recall, is ‘plus tranchant que ses bistouris’, Flaubert is simultaneously wielding his pen with all the deftness of a surgeon employing a scalpel.27 Such analogies tend again to associate the narrator-physician, as a source of hostile power, with disease rather than with the energies of health. As a corrective tendency, however, other scientific narrators practice their craft in more healthily serene environments than those of the hospital or prison. In Ruffini’s novel, as we have seen, Mr Boniface’s ‘scraping of a pen against paper’ occurs in a study – and not a laboratory – that resembles ‘the cell of an anchorite’. The reference to the religious institution reminds us indeed that medical science continues to possess analogies with the older religious regime against which it has been struggling for independence. The older vision contaminates, as it probably does in most cultural struggles, the emerging system. The contamination here involves presumably health-giving influences. In most of our novels the non-scientific Jesus retains his mild authority as archetypal healer, and the physician’s eyes do not always fix the patient with a hostile medical gaze. The glance may express the consolation of the compassionate priest rather than the medical objectivity of the scientist and may tend to diffuse the ‘grace’ that repairs the dysfunction of the soul. The medical finger too may not only accuse sufferers but gently touch to restore them to health. Instances of the healing touch, which also typifies impalpable and, as it were, benignly contagious power, concern nurses more often than physicians in our stories. Ruth in particular, as we shall observe, possesses the communicative fingers that can tenderly soothe her patients. (They seem precisely to contrast with the unfeeling, ‘firm fingers’ of Mrs Poyntz – a needlewoman and not a nurse – whose dexterity in ‘linking mesh into mesh’ exercises a military tyranny.) So the older, priestly style of physicians also provide a model – as do the newer style of scientific physicians that we have been considering – for the authorial task. When there is such a priestly physician within the story, his relationship to the other characters is likely to figure the author’s relationship not only to his text but to his readers. As Ruffini implies with respect to I promessi sposi, the patients subjected to medical and priestly ministrations within the story resemble the readers, outside the story, that

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Manzoni’s novel tends to ‘relieve’, ‘soothe’, ‘cheer’.28 And Edmondo De Amicis has implied the same analogy between the patients within the story and the readers of Ruffini’s own novels. The works of Ruffini comforted De Amicis during a long phase of convalescence and restored him to a calm faith in life.29 Ruffini proves himself, in the phrase that Dario Carraroli repeats, a ‘physician of souls’: Il De Amicis disse che il Ruffini è un medico di anime e ha detto benissimo. Egli è uno di quegli scrittori al quale dobbiamo ricorrere quando ci assale la importuna sfiducia di noi e della vita; quando stanchi da affanni morali o avviliti da miseri fastidi, abbiamo bisogno di una parola amica che ci consoli, ci ritempri e ci tolga dalla nostra prostrazione.30 It is the same underlying sickness that manifests itself in both the physical and moral symptoms. But in the role of physician, novelists like Manzoni and Ruffini treat less the physical symptoms than the moral disorder and spiritual contagion of the century. Their therapy is directed against the epidemics of ‘importunate doubts’ deriving from ideological crises and the ‘moral anxieties’ stemming from syndromes of existential guilt. In the diseased cultural context, the energetic human compassion of a priestly physician or novelist relieves at least the psychological symptoms even if it does not remove the ideological causes. The practitioner’s ability to offer that relief seems as valuable as any objectively scientific skill. The medical practitioners who appear in our novels contain traces, then, of the sometimes invisible author as well as signs of the historical struggle or interplay between the priestly and scientific models. Great hopes are placed in these men and women that may, with their special attributes, rise above the contagious condition of sickness and diffuse restorative, liberating impulses to the age. Yet as most of them become patients in their turn, it is clear that historical necessity conditions their actions too. We may examine the pattern with respect first to the physicians, who are always men, and then to the nurses, who in our novels are almost invariably women.31 *

*

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The first type of male practitioner, still closely associated with the priest who diffuses compassion and consolation, is naturally most prominent in Manzoni’s novel. The afflicted inmates of the lazarettos must even do without trained physicians and rest content with the ministrations of priests,32 who have followed the urgent advice of their archbishop: ‘ “andate con amore incontro alla peste, come a un premio, come a una vita, quando ci sia da guadagnare un’anima a Cristo” ’. As they go forth to ‘gain’ souls for Christ, their spiritual campaign curiously allies them with the campaign of the plague to gain the victims’ bodies. In the dynamics of profitable exchanges the priests readily assign the body to the plague for

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the sake of acquiring a greater value or ‘recompense’, the soul. The medium or currency in which the transactions are effected is that of contagion. While contagion in the form of disease is acquiring bodies, the priests are recycling its energy in the form of love that secures souls. The archbishop Federigo Borromei willingly participates in the transaction – the ‘giving in exchange’ – with his own body and soul. Risking death, he offers consolation in exchange for despair: Visitava i lazzeretti, per dar consolazione agl’infermi, e per animare i serventi; scorreva la città, portando soccorsi ai poveri sequestrati nelle case, fermandosi agli usci, sotto le finestre, ad ascoltare i loro lamenti, a dare in cambio parole di consolazione e di coraggio. Si cacciò in somma e visse nel mezzo della pestilenza, maravigliato anche lui alla fine, d’esserne uscito illeso. (XXXII) The value of the priestly practice derives from the self-identification with the victims whose death the archbishop expects, as a patient in his turn, to share. Something is gained for the price paid. The plague that rages in accord with its own implacable principles provides a model for his more positive employment of contagion. Rather than medical therapies, he offers a consoling redefinition of what is happening: souls are being acquired. So too may the novelist’s narrative reconstruct the implications of the historical facts that themselves remain inalterable. Plato had similarly considered the desirability of the physician’s experiencing illnesses in his own body, but less for the purpose of redefining the illnesses than as a way of learning how to cure them. Since Plato many cultural traditions have recognized, Cecil Helman maintains, the value of the physician’s knowing subjectively and not only objectively the experience of illness: ‘the healer accepts being ill as part of his identity and a necessary precondition to being a healer’. With particular reference to Franz Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt’ (1916), Helman notes the permeability of ‘the boundaries between doctor and patient’ with the implication that healing involves an interaction rather than a ‘one-way’ transfer of power.33 While something of the patient’s disease infects the physician and the physician’s curative influence pervades the patient, the boundary between disease and health too loses its clarity. Besides the physicians of Plato, Kafka and many others, the most paradigmatic of such healers is of course Jesus, who took upon himself the sufferings of the world. The novels often refer to him as the archetypal healer of both souls and bodies. The emphasis often remains, however, upon the soulful dimension of the healing art, as when Dickens’s Charley narrates the gospel stories of healing miracles in order simply ‘to comfort’ her dying father (XXXI). The ability of the principal physician of Bleak House to cure the ailments

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of the body may seem especially modest in contrast with his other qualities. Upon his arrival as a ‘dark young man’ in the chamber of Nemo, it is already too late for that patient. He can only project amidst the opium fumes a pity that associates him with the victim. His pity reveals his spiritual superiority to the Scottish ‘medical man’, who wishes merely to abandon the repulsive spectacle and return to his interrupted dinner. Musing about the years of suffering of the man who has now found ‘a happy release’, the dark physician imagines him as a promising youth. He speaks ‘not unfeelingly, while sitting on the bedstead’s edge, with his face towards that other face, and his hand upon the region of the heart’. The narrator observes the distinction between ‘the young surgeon’s professional interest in death’ and ‘his remarks on the deceased as an individual’ (XI). In the effort to imagine the case history of a once promising youth now become an anonymous corpse we also intuit the physician’s function as a representative for the authorial imagination. The still unnamed physician begins himself to become an individual identity for us as he struggles to identify Nemo. As we come thereafter to know Woodcourt, his humane concern for individuals will emerge as an ever more important element of his character than his ‘professional’ qualities. His strength depends upon his humanity, which so attracts some of his admirers that they consider it almost divine. But as with the other physicians his power falls short of the ability to perform miracles. Miracles do not occur, probably, in reality but only as narrative constructions, and our particular narrators do not wish by the construction of miracles to violate the impression of reality. It is interesting, indeed, that he is constructed as a sort of divine miracleworker only in the inserted narrative of the unreliable Miss Flite, as she reports the episode of the shipwreck: ‘An awful scene. Death in all shapes. Hundreds of dead and dying. Fire, storm, and darkness. Numbers of the drowning thrown upon a rock. There, and through it all, my dear physician was a hero. Calm and brave, through everything. Saved many lives, never complained in hunger and thirst, wrapped naked people in his spare clothes, took the lead, showed them what to do, governed them, tended the sick, buried the dead, and brought the poor survivors safely off at last! My dear, the poor emaciated creatures all but worshipped him. They fell down at his feet, when they got to land, and blessed him. The whole country rings with it.’ (XXXV)34 The physician-hero that ought in Miss Flite’s opinion ‘to have a Title bestowed upon him’ continues his ministry in less spectacular fashion upon his return to England. His treatment of the pestilence-stricken Jo cannot save physical life but may relieve the boy’s syndrome of guilt as he

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and Jo repeat together the prayer that Jesus has taught his disciples. His simple touch cannot, like that of Jesus, convey a healing impulse but may at least comfort: ‘He knows that by touching [Jenny] with his skilful and accustomed hand, he can soothe her’ (XLVI). With her and other patients such as Richard, his mere presence soothes the mind and spirit and appears the most important component of his medical effectiveness. Ada observes that ‘ “Richard is never so well, and I am never so easy about him, as when he is with Allan Woodcourt” ’ (LX). But Richard constitutes one of his most difficult and intractable cases, for Richard’s primarily moral disease derives from the Chancery contagion at its most malignant. The infection has sapped Richard’s capacity for any disciplined, responsible commitment, as exemplified in the failures of his various professional careers. The contrast between the moral power of Woodcourt and the moral weakness of Richard has emerged from the start in the medical context. Mrs Badger has observed to Esther the great difference between Woodcourt’s commitment in body and spirit to his ‘vocation’ and Richard’s ‘languid’ feeling ‘about the [medical] profession’ (XVII). Since one-way transfers of power cannot be expected, no blame attaches to Woodcourt for his inability to infuse into Richard a quantity of his own moral force sufficient to save him. Moral infections are always among the most intractable versions of contagion in these novels, as we shall observe further in Bulwer, Ruffini and Zola. Woodcourt can at best attenuate the torments of Miss Flite and Richard. Still, if he is not a divine healer, it is no wonder that in Esther’s summary on the last page we learn that every day ‘the people bless him’. In the course of every passing day ‘his patient ministration’ ‘has alleviated pain, and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need’. His charismatic power over patients derives somewhat parodoxically from his humble and indeed ‘patient’ sense of being a ‘fellowcreature’. And balsamic results, in the unending human struggle, are the most that one should expect from the priestly physician – and perhaps the novelist – dedicated to his vocation. Dr Hodges, an historical figure whom Bell considers in actuality ‘one of the few heroes of the plague’,35 appears in Old Saint Paul’s similarly to owe his power more to charisma than to scientific abilities. Like Woodcourt, Dr Hodges does prescribe for his patients certain medical treatments – various unremarkable draughts and powders and mild therapies such as rest. Sometimes his treatments also involve sterner measures like bleeding and cauterizing. But the particular factors that make him the only physician in London who can successfully treat victims of the plague remain undisclosed. In contrast to the many ‘quacks’, he appears modest about his abilities. He knows from the start, when confronted with a new case, whether the patient can be saved, and in fact a larger number than we would expect do recover. Among the main characters, Leonard’s cure results, according to the humble physician, from ‘ “a violent effort of

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nature, which has accomplished more than science or skill could do” ’ (II:ix). And although he cannot cure Amabel, at whose death he weeps, he can hope to save Nizza ‘ “if she herself would second me” ’ – by wanting, that is, to recover (III:iv). His therapies and the power radiating from his ‘humanity’, which is manifested in his tireless availability at all hours and in his tears, are not enough. They must be seconded by a resistance to the contagion that occurs within the patient, either as a conscious volition or as the unconscious response of biological mechanisms. Volitional or biological resistance, of which Ainsworth’s narrative offers our first examples, can therefore function as a therapy against the inroads of contagion. But whatever healing power stems from Hodges himself seems to depend upon his subjection rather than resistance to the menace. When he walks with Leonard and Nizza by ‘infected dwellings’ with ‘sick persons stretched on the steps’, he unlike the others accepts contact with them: In order to avoid coming in contact with these miserable creatures the party, with the exception of Doctor Hodges, kept in the middle of the road. Attracted by the piteous exclamations of the sufferers, Doctor Hodges, ever and anon, humanely paused to speak to them; and he promised one poor woman, who was suckling an infant, to visit her on his return. ‘I have no hopes of saving her,’ he observed to Leonard, ‘but I may preserve her child.’ (III:vi) Such humane physicians appear with most frequency and prominence in the novels of Ruffini – his way of celebrating over and over again, probably, the figure of his medically trained and martyred brother Jacopo.36 With the exception of the surgeon who makes the indecent proposal to Lavinia, Ruffinian physicians also possess closer affinities with an ancient tradition of priesthood than do those of the other novels. Their therapies constantly involve, that is, the shedding of blood and prescriptions of baths that suggest cleansing rituals. While decreasingly performed as a common practice in this period, bleeding remains Ruffini’s normal treatment for many pathologies, as we have noticed in the case of Paolo Mancini. The practice implies a felt need for atonement and unconsciously alludes, perhaps, to Jacopo’s self-sacrifice on behalf of his country; he opened a vein and bled to death. Although limited to Parisian steam baths in Paolo’s case, hydropathy of a sometimes very strenuous sort is also prescribed. With such constant insistence upon bloodshed and other sometimes sternly painful treatments, the kindly physician expresses a priestly concern to heal the guilty souls of his patients too. In Lavinia, as we shall nevertheless have occasion to notice, the most interesting medical authority is Dr Ternel, whose scientific rigour may preponderate over his priestly practices.

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With its mingling of compassion and sternness, the charisma of the priestly physicians sometimes acquires overtones of mesmerism. In a highly charged encounter, the usually mild cardinal-archbishop Federigo thus seeks, albeit unsuccessfully, to overpower with his psychic energy the selfish Don Abbondio. The latter needs to be brought to confess his guilt so that it can be forgiven. But more commonly, as we have seen, the dynamics of the relationship of power between physician and patient involves the physician’s humble identification with the patient. While the physician encourages patients to purge themselves or resist the contagion, he himself accepts contact with the contagion and becomes a potential patient. For the novelist, the implication is that he or she too accepts immersion in the historical contagion. The novel itself will be filled in some sense with the infectious odours of the lazarettos and the opium fumes of Nemo’s den. Rather than offering an escape, it will plunge the reader as well into the all-penetrating moral disorder of the times. Yet it may also help the reader to resist the moral corruption. Amidst the desolation, the priestly physician and novelist will maintain the value of love for our fallen humanity. The novel will inculcate a vision both of our fellowship in the common menace and of the worth, despite the decomposition of corpses in the plague pits, of our individual souls. The novelist’s awareness dispenses a balsamic contagion that makes the historical condition bearable. Besides the priestly physicians, however, there are the more coldly professional and scientific physicians of a newer school. Not so humbly conscious of their common humanity, they evince a certain egoism in their efforts to control their patients. If they too function, as in the guise of Flaubert’s Dr Larivière, as surrogate novelists, the implication is that novelists must be especially concerned to maintain objective technical control of their texts. In the stories of Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall and Bulwer’s Allen Fenwick, a dialectical tension between the two schools of physicians is felt. Both protagonists begin as the newer type of scientific physician and end by repenting that attitude. Although that repentance may seem surprising from our own later perspective, it is clear that the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist did not yet diffuse compelling certainties about the wave of the future in medical practice. While Thurnall has likened his strength in fighting the cholera to that of the boxer or wrestler, the power of the new scientific physician really comes, he believes, from a modern kind of knowledge. Kingsley has probably based him in part on another Tom – Thomas Wakley, who in angry impatience with the medical establishment founded the radical medical journal Lancet.37 Expressing an especially aggressive hostility to the religious mentality, Thurnall proclaims proudly that his knowledge derives empirically from experience rather than from superstition. To an officer who apparently expects him to have some sense of the miraculousness of

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his rescue as the sole survivor of the shipwreck, he responds matter-offactly: ‘ “We doctors, you see, get into the way of looking at things as men of science; and the ground of science is experience; and, to judge from experience, it takes more to kill me than I have yet met with” ’ (IV). Besides being ‘men of science’, he observes on another occasion, ‘ “we doctors are men of the world” ’, which signifies his tolerance of much human sinfulness – although certainly not sanitary sinfulness (VIII). His particular impatience with clerical thinking comes from his conviction that priests relate sin too entirely to the sphere of soul and neglect sanitary matters relating concretely to bodily health. His use of the microscope to view ‘little zoophytes’ also shows him the irrelevance of ethical considerations of sin in the biological context. These micro-organisms obey the ‘rules concerning life and death’, as do the agents that cause cholera, and have as much right as any other organisms to participate in the struggle for survival. When Vavasour finds his attitude ‘ “coldhearted” ’, he answers in effect that science supplants ethical sympathies with a recognition that the strong must win out over the weak. And against Vavasour’s belief that doctors should be ‘ “men with human sympathy and compassion” ’, he proposes the physician as ‘ “a man with human strength” ’: ‘My dear sir, one may be too busy, and at doing good too (though that is not my line, save professionally, because it is my only way of earning money); but one may be too busy at doing good to have time for compassion. If while I was cutting a man’s leg off I thought of the pain which he was suffering –’ (X) While Tom cares less about financial compensation than the designedly provocative parenthesis implies, his impatient, brusque ‘cutting’ through to the material core of matters irritates clerical mentalities and earns him enemies. These enemies include the alcoholic Squire Trebooze whose resentful feelings Tom insists upon ignoring in order to treat only the medical problem that the squire himself does not wish to acknowledge. When the squire absurdly sends the young Mr Creed to challenge Tom to a duel, the latter simply fixes his medical gaze upon Creed and reduces him as well to a pathological case: ‘I wish – to speak to you, sir – ahem!’ – went on Mr. Creed; being gradually but surely discomfited by Tom’s steady gaze. ‘Don’t trouble youself, sir; I see your case in your face. A slight nervous affection – will pass as the digestion improves. I will make you up a set of pills for the night; but I should advise a little ammonia and valerian at once.’ (XIV)

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While Tom employs it insincerely and sadistically here, the ‘medical gaze’ and the reference to the specific chemical remedies indicates his coolly scientific bias. In A Strange Story too, the newly arrived physician with his scientific attitude offends the conservative moralists of the provincial town of L—, and he quickly becomes the contested rival of old Dr Lloyd. A strong vocational commitment nevertheless continues to motivate this modern physician. So without concern for the collection of his fees, Allen Fenwick will give the benefit of his professional knowledge to all who need it. At one of Mrs Colonel Poyntz’s receptions, the hesitant approach of a man in pain who evidently ‘could not afford a fee for a physician’s advice’ stirs only a professional impulse to be of service. Although he perceives at once that the man is ‘considering how to take a surreptitious advantage of social intercourse’, his response encourages the sufferer: ‘his eyes met mine with wistful mute entreaty. The instinct of my profession seized me at once. I could never behold suffering without forgetting all else in the desire to relieve it’ (VIII). Expressing at first an awareness that the two share, the eye contact comes then to suggest something different from the compassion that suffering has called forth in the more priestly physicians. The ‘medical gaze’ now creates, more appropriately than it has in the case of Tom and Mr Creed, the patient that the man has desired to become. The process occurs again a few pages later when Fenwick is called to the sickbed of Lilian, with whom he has fallen in love. The ‘glance of his science’ converts even his beloved into his patient or his case: To the true physician there is an inexpressible sanctity in the sick chamber. At its threshold the more human passions quit their hold on his heart. Love there would be profanation; even the grief permitted to others he must put aside. He must enter that room – a calm intelligence. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the keen quiet glance of his science. Age or youth, beauty or deformity, innocence or guilt, merge their distinctions in one common attribute, – human suffering appealing to human skill. (X) In contrast with the priestly phase in the dialectic, the power of the physician now depends, as it has for Tom Thurnall too, precisely upon the suppression of any compassionate sense of identity with human suffering. Beyond the ‘threshold’ that he crosses, lies a region of ‘calm intelligence’. While calm and shielded from the noise of traffic, this region is not located, however, outside of history and its contagion. For like Ruffini’s Mr Boniface in his anchorite’s cell, Fenwick returns to this region especially in his library where his scholarship puts him at the centre of contemporary intellectual currents. Among other treatises, he has published a much-acclaimed work, ‘The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply’,

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and during the years narrated in the novel his more ambitious ‘Inquiry into Organic Life’ is in progress. The scholarly task offers a refuge from the cares and, when Lilian is gone, from ‘the aching sense of void and loss’ of his daily existence (XX). He works on it especially at night, putting all else out of mind, and often writes ‘till the lights waned in the gray of dawn’. These nights provide occasions of exaltation in which he believes himself to be creating a structure that will far outlast the fleeting present. ‘ “I have written” ’, he reflects as one such dawn breaks, ‘ “that which will found a school, form disciples; and race after race of those who cultivate truth through pure reason shall accept my bases if they enlarge my building” ’ (XX). His endeavour thus corresponds to Lyotard’s description of the continuity of the scientific discourse. Based on the theories of his predecessors – Condillac, Broussais, Bichat, Maine de Biran among many others that are mentioned38 – Fenwick’s argument is destined for his disciples and posterity. The manuscript naturally accompanies him to Australia where it again permits him to enter the dimension of scholarly intelligence in which his own truest life and identity are experienced: My Work, my Philosophical Work . . . how eagerly I returned to it again! Far away from my household grief, far away from my haggard perplexities – neither a Lilian nor a Margrave there! . . . The Work was I myself! – I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, before the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as testimonies against science? No; in returning to my Book, I returned to my former Me! . . . Here . . . was a monument of my rational thoughtful Me, – of my individualized identity in multiform creation. And my mind, in the noon of its force, would shed its light on the earth when my form was resolved to its elements. (LXXIV) In his nocturnal activity he inhabits a tower from which the light of knowledge will pour some day into the dark places of superstition and ignorance – including the miasmic breeding grounds, we might say, of contagion. He is not, however, a humbly self-sacrificing benefactor of the race like the priestly physicians, for his task affirms his own enduring identity and exerts egoistic power over others. His lighthouse-like ‘monument’ resembles the ‘monuments of unageing intellect’ that Yeats creates at night in Byzantium. Like Yeats’s golden bird, Fenwick’s book is also – in its intellectual aspect – a work of supreme craftsmanship: ‘I clamped and soldered dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page, to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation of his material senses’ (XX). Through the clamping and soldering of its logic, the work constructs, as narratives do, a system of causality.

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And the fact that the book possesses a human protagonist, the ‘Intellectual Man’ that grows from its page, suggests an analogy not only with the art of Yeats but with that of the narrator of fiction. Producing in some sense an auto-immortalizing autobiography, Fenwick becomes here too a surrogate for the novelist. The narrative that symbolizes and immortalizes Fenwick’s own identity also provides an instance of the narrative mode whereby science, according to Lyotard, necessarily communicates its knowledge. At the heart of this particular narrative, as of Fenwick himself, is a ‘creed . . . of stern materialism’ (I). The materialism refers in theory to some objective truth beyond the constructive or deconstructive power of an individual narrator. But in his narrative Fenwick has brought to bear the sternness of his own commitment to a creed, and so a subjective element helps to empower the implacable logic. Chiefly because of this element, perhaps, his ‘complacent eye’ approves the result. In the sequel he will come to realize that this bias has distorted his work and prevented it from conforming to his own paradigm of the scientific communication. Meanwhile, his creed may interest us as an example of how contemporary science conceives power to be operating at the biological level. In the biological functioning of life, as in the arena of historical Necessity, something like a contagious principle is discerned. It works within the ‘pabulum’ as Fenwick terms, with reference to Bichat, the fundamental substance of life in both its ‘animal and organic’ aspects. This substance is, we may imagine, a version of the ‘protoplasm’ that composes all living cells according to Huxley’s popular lecture of 1868, ‘On the Physical Basis of Life’. As its all-important property the pabulum exemplifies ‘the vital principle itself’, an ‘energy’ that Bichat terms the force vitale or élan, which provides for ‘the re-invigoration of the human system by principles similar to those which Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted soil’ (XX).39 The similarity of the vital principle to a contagious mechanism exists in its stimulation of chain reactions within the cells and tissues of the body. As its vital energy interacts with the material components of cells, it stimulates them into the activity of growth and self-replication. For the condition of health, however, it should not provoke hyperactivity in any one region of the body because other regions would thereby sink into underactivity. This effect follows from the limitations in the sources of pabulum, the living substance of the cells that they must burn or consume in order simultaneously to maintain themselves in life. Generally the vital principle seems healthily to regulate its own workings not only in individual cells and tissues but on the level of the entire body. But disease may result either from its generalized depletion or from a faulty distribution of its energies. The importance of distribution reflects the widespread impression of the period of the biological ‘system’ – ‘the human body as a system of dynamic exchange’. And while health involves especially an equilibrium between resources devoted to ‘mental and bodily functions’,40 the case of

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Fenwick’s wife Lilian demonstrates an exemplary situation of disequilibrium. We find, in moving from material specifically contained within Fenwick’s scientific text to the background elements of his Strange Story, that too much of the vital principle goes into Lilian’s dreaming brain. The rest of her body becomes weak, and the various parts of her constitution fail to ‘blend in that felicitous union which constitutes the perfection of woman’ (XVI). Women, it would indeed appear, are especially liable to such imbalances,41 which pose for the physician the challenge of helping nature to restore appropriate blends and proportions. As Margrave summarizes Fenwick’s own theory, ‘ “the best cure of disease is less to deal with the disease itself than to support and stimulate the whole system, so as to enable Nature to cure the disease and restore the impaired equilibrium by her own agencies” ’ (XXIV). The vital principle transmits its self-regulating impulses in the human body as if through a medium that resembles a magnetic field. That field exists outside the living organism too as a medium for the transmission of volitional pulsations. Fenwick discovers in experiments with Margrave that the ‘human Will’ generates something like an ‘electric current’ that a ‘galvanometre’ can measure and materially quantify. Operating in elusive analogy with ‘the Newtonian law of gravitation’, such ‘organic electricity’ can establish connections between individuals across great distances. The medium retains its similarity therefore to the one, being investigated in these years by Louis Pasteur, through which the impulses of diseasecausing contagion are transmitted.42 Possessed of strong mesmerizing powers, Margrave’s own particular will is especially capable of sending its contagion through space to others. For what are at first mysterious reasons, his will subjugates a certain madman and causes him to commit a murder for which Fenwick will be arrested. He then terrorizes Fenwick in ghostly apparitions and forces Fenwick’s beloved Lilian to flee from her home and come to him. His will operates here to undermine both her will and her health, which are nearly identified, because his own well-being depends upon this undermining of hers. Besides imposing his volitional power upon hers, he vampirically absorbs – as in Miss Flite’s impression of the Lord Chancellor’s mace – a power from her. The contagious principle thus involves not just the communication of maleficent energy (‘something . . . hostile, overpowering’ in the atmosphere [XXXII]) but the subtraction of beneficent vitality, the élan, from a hitherto healthy body. As Fenwick’s alter-ego, Margrave too desires immortality. But rather than creating an enduring book, a monument to his unageing intellect, he wants to live on literally through the centuries as a healthy, unageing animal. This thirst for youthful life means that he will engross as much of the vital principle as he can within himself, accordingly depleting it for others. His supply must continually be replenished, and he aspires to drink vitality in its purest, liquid form, as distilled by Haroun of Aleppo.

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(After the plague, as an anti-vital principle has depleted the élan in its Syrian victims, only the elixir of Haroun has been able to replenish that force and save them.) To learn the formula of the elixir, Margrave has arranged for the murder of its possessor, and to distil it, he requires the help of Fenwick’s science. He becomes Fenwick’s patient, but a patient who would entirely control his physician and his own case history. The connection with Margrave therefore leads Fenwick into dangerous speculations that subvert his prized region of ‘calm intelligence’. The narrative enters ‘a true border-land between natural science and imaginative speculation’ (XXXIX), where paranormal events, previously ruled out of existence by Fenwick’s scientific intelligence, occur. The fault is not only Margrave’s but that of materialistic science itself, which could not offer a secure stronghold against paranormality.43 Losing confidence in the insights of his intellect, Fenwick finds his own life force sapped. It must be replenished, as he comes to understand, not by something like Haroun’s elixir, but by the therapy of a higher, more spiritual sort of medicine. The more priestlike physician, Dr Faber, who had been his predecessor in L—, returns to town, and an instinct causes Fenwick to invite him to stay: ‘ “Willingly,” said Faber, looking at me more intently than he had done before, and with the true eye of the practised Healer, at once soft and penetrating’ (XLV). The medical gaze transforms Fenwick himself at this point from physician into patient. His narrative becomes his own case history. A series of events constitute assaults upon Fenwick’s scientific materialism, based as it is upon Bichat’s reduction of life to the two material classes of ‘animal and organic’. There is evidently the third class of the ‘soul’ for which Fenwick’s dream of immortality in a material dimension has not provided. The ailing Lilian, now in a cataleptic state, typifies his sick soul, for whose recovery the case history expresses anxiety. To the ‘physician’s eye’ of Dr Faber it is clear that the recovery requires humble faith and prayer rather than other medical remedies. Hope, says Faber, must now be based ‘ “not [on] my skill as physician, but [on] my inward belief as a Christian” ’ (LXXIX). So Fenwick himself renounces the desire for power associated with knowledge and the arrogance of defining his immortal superiority as a ‘rational thoughtful Me’: Know thyself! Is that maxim wise? If so, know thy soul. But never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of soul but what he acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer. . . . I prayed, – all my soul seemed one prayer. All my past, with its pride and presumption and folly, grew distinct as the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon before setting forth on the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. (LXXXIX) In the medium of prayer, through which he confesses his weakness, the powerful contagion of God flows into him as the true version of the ‘vital

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principle’ that the scientist has sought in vain. Rather than in the form of unageing intellect or unageing body, immortality belongs to the soul that is saved outside the historical dimension. Although Jameson would find such salvation illusory, Fenwick joins the priestly or Christ-like physicians of the older school, the physicians of the soul whose weakness is their strength. The scientific ‘Inquiry into Organic Life’ is abandoned as his private case history concludes successfully. In the intricacies of this case, the soul is saved not only outside the historical dimension but within it because Lilian, whom Bulwer had originally intended to die, recovers. The moment of her recovery coincides with the death of Margrave, who has always represented a menace to Lilian. As a possibly single event, that is, there are the death of one patient, suggestive of the physician’s worst self, and the recovery of the other patient, suggestive of his best self. We may also find in the relationship between Fenwick and Lilian an instance of the physician and patient who heal one another, his being a spiritual and hers a physical healing. Bulwer has also modelled Fenwick’s case history, as Marie Roberts maintains, upon the moral and intellectual development of Maine de Biran. The career of Biran and of Fenwick seems to have developed in three stages. In Bulwer’s impression these stages – ‘the three lives of Man’ – also correspond to the evolution of European thought in the nineteenth century. The first stage shows the influence of the Enlightenment and the mechanical materialism of Condillac and relates to the animal or instinctive aspect of the human being associated with Margrave. The second stage leads to a more vitalistic impression – Fenwick’s ‘Vital Principle’ – and is characterized by Fenwick’s self-conscious identification of himself as the founder of an ambitious new scientific philosophy. In the third stage, related to the life of the soul typified by Lilian, wisdom is likened to a child-like faith in God, as a truth that transcends rational understanding.44 We may of course doubt that European thought really entered this third phase, as Derrida implies that Biran himself doubted it.45 But it is interesting, as I have suggested, that men like Bulwer, living in that historical moment, could foresee a European evolution towards a new culture of faith. Kingsley discerned signs of such an evolution as well, to judge from his depiction of a similar defeat of the materialistic scientist. The process begins in Two Years Ago when Tom’s recognition of the inability of his science to heal the presumably spiritual disease of Mrs Vavasour takes him to the Anglican vicar: ‘ “I cannot cure her; so I come to you, as soul-doctor, to do what I, the body-doctor, cannot” ’ (X). By the end of the novel he has lost faith in himself entirely, and what he now sees as a long power struggle between himself and God finishes with his capitulation: ‘ “I had been trying for years which was the stronger, God or I; I found out I had been trying whether I could not do well enough without Him: and there I found that I could not” ’. Reduced to humility, he becomes himself the

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patient and begs Grace to ‘ “teach me, about this Father in heaven” ’ (XXVIII). The antagonists of the scientific physician turn out to be not only biological principles of degeneration and maleficent contagion but God himself. With Ruffini’s Dr Ternel, we come at last to a scientist who is not defeated by the proponents of Christian faith. The latter do not need, that is, to defeat him, for his science does not pose a threat to religion. He has managed, at the point of his career in which we meet him, to integrate with apparent success the religious and scientific components of his practice. Since that practice, in the field of mental alienation, often involves patients suffering from obsessions of guilt, he necessarily deals with what is considered the dimension of ‘soul’. He also possesses like the priestly physicians of our first phase an impression of his divine vocation. ‘ “Thank God” ’, he exclaims to Lavinia and Clara when they first call upon him, that amidst ‘ “many failures” ’ his career has included a ‘ “few successes” ’ in the great work – ‘ “to call up harmony from chaos, to rescue a noble mind from the worst of bondages, to new create a man, as it were, in God’s image. Really, it is a task almost divine” ’ (II:xix). In performing this divine mission, he frequently demonstrates the compassion that Thurnall and Fenwick had at first considered inappropriate in the scientist, and he can even be moved, like Hodges, to tears. ‘By turns physician and comforter’, the narrator remarks, ‘[he] wrestled valiantly with both bodily and mental sufferings’ (II:xxv). Among our medical practitioners, he exemplifies the most holistic approach. The gentler and the more authoritarian components of his behaviour towards patients also blend in the ‘paternal role’ that is considered appropriate for the psychiatric physician.46 Like children, his patients require both love and discipline, and sometimes punishment, and he will humour their whimsical nonsense only to a limited degree. Besides a paternally ruled home, the asylum naturally resembles a well-governed prison, a prison designed not only to keep the inmates confined but, as a refuge, to keep certain dangers out. Current theory regarding treatment of the insane patient, according to Rothfield, recommended internment in a structure that would ‘isolate him or her from possibly harmful environmental influences’: ‘alienists invented a new social space, an artificially created therapeutic milieu purified of all the temptations of the social maelstrom’47 – and protected, in our terms, from the historical contagion. Like other sick-rooms that we shall notice, indeed, the asylum seems with ‘its utopian quality’ to exist outside history. But given the essential turbulence and contagious irrationality of mental disease, an atmosphere of utopian calm cannot easily prevail there. Its order must often be firmly imposed and carceral. Evidently run on excellent principles, the Parisian asylum of Dr Ternel near the Invalides is probably based on an institution that Ruffini knew well in Ivry, in which Donizetti had been interned in 1846–47.48 Its

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patients receive treatment, certainly, that strikes us as in more verisimilar accord with enlightened contemporary practice than the therapies applied to Bulwer’s deranged Lilian.49 To this institution come, then, Lavinia and Clara in their search for the latter’s fiancé, who has been missing for nine years. After being guided through the extensive and wellguarded grounds to the doctor’s study, the women find in him ‘a general expression of good nature’. But the narrator indicates his vigilance too, as if Ternel suspects the motives of these ‘possibly harmful’ intruders from the external environment: a keener observer than our English ladies could be at the moment, might have noticed in his looks, and in the whole carriage of his person, something collected and guarded, something like an armed neutrality, the result most likely of a long experience of the often dangerous customers with whom he consorted, and of more than one narrow escape. (II:xix) Always on his guard, Ternel watches often from concealed positions as in a Panopticon for minimal signs of danger that most eyes would overlook.50 His ‘penetration’ enables him to recognize in the veiled Clara now, before her own admission, the woman that Mortimer Thornton believes himself to have murdered. The medical gaze makes her too into a patient that he will henceforth control in the great task – ‘to rescue a noble mind . . . to new create a man’. The task involves a plot that has analogies with the plotting of the author of fiction, who new creates, in his own medium, human identities. In this case, the psychiatrist also strikingly resembles, as authorial surrogate, the protagonist of Balzac’s Adieu, which Peter Brook has discussed in terms of the parallels between psychoanalysis and the narrative art.51 Such plotters, with whom we may associate the Jarndyce who creates another Bleak House to surprise Esther into a shock of recognition, devise fictions within the fiction. Ternel’s plot is, however, improvised as he must try out strategies, operating in this respect as the experimental scientist and author. He stages over the ensuing months various situations that may trigger the salutary shock that will startle Thornton back to health. Several setbacks discourage the authorial physician, who remains in hiding in his Panopticon like Flaubert’s God in his universe, and Clara, who lends herself to his schemes and acts the parts assigned her. As always in nervous disease, according to S.W. Mitchell, a power struggle is underway between the wily scientific intelligence and the wily insanity of a patient possessed like Margrave of a strongly hostile will.52 The patient enacts in this case his own fictional plots and positively resists being cured. His disease – an obsession with his guilt as murderer, whose hand like Lady Macbeth’s will never come clean – has become precious to him.

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The salutary shock at last occurs with enormous violence. Just when Thornton appears in holding Clara’s hand about to recognize her, a recollection of the blood upon his own hand and a terror of the ‘avenger’ cause him to leap out the window. Genuine blood gushes from a wound as he lies unconscious on the ground with a broken thigh. The situation calls for the remedies of heroic medicine: ‘under [Ternel’s] own superintendence, every known remedy was unflinchingly persevered in; not a moment’s rest did he take, only leaving Thornton’s sick bed to bring words of encouragement to Miss Clara, lying in a feverish state in the room of one of the needlewomen of the establishment’. Finally after ‘a twenty hours’ application of the strongest stimulants’, Thornton revives, restored to sanity (II:xxv). The combination of the humane physician’s commitment to a divine task and his unflinchingly harsh application of strong scientific remedies has secured the desired result. Although the physician seems to emerge in this episode as a controlling figure, he knows that his control has always been precarious and that his failures outnumber his successes. No final victory will crown the unending task. For the fictional author the episode implies the difficulty of wrestling with intractable material and conducting the story to a plausibly happy denouement. The force of history and its contagion, or the force of the real environment, cannot finally be excluded from the fictional plots. Neither the good novel nor the good asylum can fulfil the alienist’s dream of constructing an ideally protected ‘space free of social pressure’.53 Ruffini’s narrator seems to confess the point as he indicates that Ternel’s asylum near the Champ de Mars, housed in the former summer residence of the governor of the Invalides, has now disappeared. It has fallen like many other citadels, ‘engulfed’ by history in the form of Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris: Even that tranquil and out-of-the-way corner, with its shady walks and centenary cedars of Lebanon, has been engulfed and swept away by the successive encroachments of the pickaxe, which have so completely transformed the face of Paris within the last few years. (II:xix) The modernization of Paris, which Dickens’s Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock seem to be observing at the same moment (XII),54 has also swept away one of the sites representing Paolo’s past identity. Beginning to recover from his own state of mental alienation and seeking as a clue to himself the house in which he has dwelt, he finds it gone: ‘the Rue de Rohan no longer existed; all its buildings had been demolished a month previous’ (II:ii). Zola’s work too deals with the Second Empire, like much of Lavinia, and narrates in the subsequent convulsions the collapse of intellectual and other strongholds. We have observed the capture in particular of Dr

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Pascal’s armoire with the precious archives that represent the scientific achievement of his lifetime. Those archives, to which Pascal sometimes talks in identifying the individual files with the persons to whom they refer, concern many cases of hereditary madness. So they make up a sort of miniature version of Dr Ternel’s insane asylum, a version that will in its turn be demolished. But of course the life itself that engrosses Pascal so passionately will not be swept away with the particular container or laboratory in which he has been able to examine it. Even more clearly than is the case of Dr Ternel and the other physicians, Pascal serves as a surrogate within the work for the author. Zola had originally intended to model his protagonist upon Claude Bernard, whose experimental theories he had appropriated in Le Roman expérimental, but the final decision was to model Pascal upon himself.55 In compiling his archives of the Rougon-Macquart, Pascal has therefore created his own version of the precise contents of the twenty novels that make up Zola’s canon. The disorderly family also constitutes for both Pascal and Zola a social microcosm. In investigating its members, they both seek to trace the scientific principles and contagious and hereditary mechanisms that regulate human evolution in a social milieu. The story again concerns a physician who seeks to impose control upon his milieu but finally becomes a patient himself, recognizing a strength in his weakness. The initial power drive is the Faustian thirst to know, which ideally compels all scientific endeavour.56 That drive struggles once more against the religious mentality, embodied here in Pascal’s mother and his virginal niece Clotilde, who believe that God has forbidden certain areas of knowledge. With respect to Clotilde, the scientist triumphs, in contrast to the defeat, in Bulwer and Kingsley, of the physician-lover at the hands of the religiously-enraptured heroine. Pascal converts Clotilde, indeed, into his disciple. That the desire to penetrate into forbidden areas of knowledge possesses a strongly erotic component becomes clear at the moment in which Pascal fires Clotilde with the contagion of his scientific ‘passion’. After catching her, scantily clad, in an attempt to destroy his papers, he wounds her to the point of bleeding and insists on making her know the contents of his archives. He must illuminate her: ‘Un besoin de grande clarté l’avait pris, il aurait voulu l’aveuglante lumière du soleil’. Since the sun is unavailable, he lights all the candles that he can collect, and their long night of clarity begins: ‘Deux heures venaient de sonner, et ni l’un ni l’autre n’avait conscience de l’heure: ils allaient passer la nuit dans cette passion de savoir, sans besoin de sommeil, en dehors du temps et des lieux’ (V). In the shared ‘passion to know’, they inhabit a watchtower similar to the lighthouse of the exalted Fenwick. The hours of the spreading illumination constitute a positive counterpart to the hours of the spreading conflagration in which Félicité will destroy (or, in Scarry’s term, unmake) the very archives that Pascal and

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Clotilde are now contemplating. Unaware of the coming disaster, the scientist and his beloved disciple are bathed in the light of a truth and love that may remind us again of Derrida’s discussion of Chrétien. Not just a figure for love, the light deriving from the divine self-inflammation transcends all figuration: ce qui est donc plus qu’une figure, c’est la lumière. . . . Vérité d’une lumière sans idole et sans icône, lumière iconoclaste qui, de sa flamme, spontanément brûle les effigies. C’est pourquoi, disionsnous, c’est «plus qu’une figure», plutôt une transfiguration de la figuralité même. . . . «Présence sans image et sans représentation», dira Chrétien de cette luminosité.57 Yet despite the ecstasy of the moment of enlightenment for Pascal and Clotilde, their truth is communicated in language – in terms, that is, of figuration and representation. Scientific knowledge, more specifically, is again conveyed in the form of a narrative as Pascal reviews the entire history of the family, the case histories of all the inmates of his Panopticon or asylum. The next twenty pages offer an interesting, if breathless, condensation of all twenty novels. Here, naturally, Clotilde functions not only as the disciple of the scientist, himself a surrogate for the author, but as a representative within the text of the reader, who is similarly being enlightened. And the erotic component of the illumination emerges further in Pascal’s and Clotilde’s sharing of something like the forbidden fruit of the Edenic Tree of Knowledge. The information of the archives or of the twenty novels has been emblematically condensed in the genealogical tree that Pascal has designed and that is spread out now between them.58 From the religious perspective of Pascal’s mother, the knowledge that they are enjoying together is of course sinful. They are repeating the original sin and incurring the contagion of the original guilt. What Pascal has come to know derives of course not only from the collection of material regarding the family but from other sources. He has used the dissecting scalpel, for example, when the cholera epidemic has provided him with so many cadavers,59 and he has studied all the great medical texts. The immense research has permitted him to formulate the laws, which Kingsley was incidentally hoping at that time might be understood within ‘a generation or two’, whereby life regulates its own ongoing dynamism.60 Reflecting again, as for Bulwer’s Fenwick, the principles of Bichat, those laws refer to an organism powered by a vital energy that must be correctly distributed among the parts. Health consists in ‘le fonctionnement équilibré de tous les organes’. A perfect balance must exist between fuel taken in and work performed, as Zola himself had learned from conversations with Dr Maurice de Fleury.61 The vision of a body in balanced, unceasing movement – with energy perpetually being transformed and flowing among the parts and between outside and inside –

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suggests an image of world salvation as well: ‘[Pascal] voyait de nouveau le monde sauvé dans cet équilibre parfait, autant de travail rendu que de sensation reçue, le branle du monde rétabli dans son labeur éternel’ (XII). As the religious observer might note with dismay, there is no place for God in this salvational vision of the world at work. At most God might be identified as the clock-maker who set the original pendulum, the ‘branle du monde’, going. Yet since the image of the ebbing and flowing energies of health is less mechanical than that of clockwork, God might also be identified with the original breath of life. In this case the model of contagion serves again to suggest how life propagates itself. Emanating from what is alive, its energy continually quickens dead matter into the imitation of life, ‘to new create’, in Dr Ternel’s phrase, each new individual ‘in God’s image’. What spreads and expands, as if contagiously, in the story of Pascal is not only life itself but a conscious knowledge about life. First observed in the private medium of Pascal’s case histories, life as a system of dynamic exchanges is now seen to be at work in a vaster space. The illumination that has begun with the lighting of all the candles in a single room spreads out and imposes its own new order everywhere. That diffusion of light suggests the power of the scientific narrative to transmit its knowledge. Rather than ‘consequitive reasoning’, in the Keatsian phrase, it is the infectious beauty of Pascal’s narrative construction that immediately impresses us with its truth. Having seduced Clotilde and coursed through Zola’s text, the vision of life at work and a whole ‘monde sauvé’ may now dazzle the reader. Here the scientist seems, as the narrator of a text, successfully to bring into existence what he sees and knows. The illuminating, self-regulating principle, whereby life continues to spread and replicate itself in terms of ordered and balanced exchanges, may break down. A destructive principle may tend in the vital medium to produce points of contagious imbalance, chain reactions whereby some parts of the human body begin to work too much and others too little. The physician must then apply therapeutic impulses from outside the body that will depress the overworked parts and stimulate the underworked ones into action: ‘il était nécessaire que, si l’équilibre se rompait, si les excitations venues du dehors cessaient d’être suffisantes, la thérapeutique en créât d’artificielles, du façon à rétablir la tonicité, qui est l’état de santé parfaite’ (XII). Here Pascal’s search for ‘une médication nouvelle’ enlists another sort of knowledge. In terms of the distinction between primary knowledge coming from the body and secondary knowledge aimed at the body,62 he must proceed to give practical, secondary application to what he knows. This involves in its most utopian form the quest for an ultimate ‘panacea’ that can compensate for the diffusion in the vital medium of unbalancing factors. The other novels have generally conveyed scepticism about the possibil-

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ity for a panacea, an antidote to all destructive forms of contagion, as we may observe briefly before returning to Pascal’s experimentation in this regard. In Old Saint Paul’s vinegar gains a certain popularity among the many quack remedies, and the Earl of Rochester, disguised as a physician, urges it especially upon the gullible Blaize: ‘ “It is the grand specific, not merely against the plague, but against all disorders. . . . It is like the sword which is worn, not merely for ornament, but for defence. . . . I have cured a thousand patients with it, and hope to cure a thousand more” ’. He describes its usefulness, taken in various ways, in dealing with lack of appetite, a ‘throat ulcerated’, ‘phlegmatic humours’, a ‘brain laden with vapours’, ‘the headache’, and concludes: ‘ “It is the grand panacea; and may be termed the elixir of long life” ’ (II:iii).63 Less innocent drugs figure in Two Years Ago. As a young chemist’s assistant, John Briggs (who will later call himself Elsley Vavasour) is too distracted by thoughts of poetry to mix chemicals appropriately, and he nearly poisons patients. Eventually he will become addicted to the opium that De Quincey and other contemporaries hoped might be a panacea, and he will die of an overdose. The same fate strikes Nemo of course in Bleak House, to whom Woodcourt has been supplying the drug for a year and a half. The Faustian desire to isolate the vital principle causes Fenwick, as we have seen, to accept Margrave’s temptation to distil ‘the elixir of life’.64 The latter claims further that it can do more than simply restore youth and health: ‘ “He who once quaffs that elixir, obtains in his very veins the bright fluid by which he transmits the force of his will to agencies dormant in nature” ’ (LXXXII). But this elixir actually provokes the spontaneous combustion that produces far more destructive than health-giving consequences. Naturally undeterred by such examples, Pascal has longed as well to administer some version of the life ‘force’ and ‘will’ to his patients: ‘Donner de la force, tout le problème était là; et donner de la force, c’était aussi donner de la volonté, élargir le cerveau en consolidant les autres organes’. Since the brain functions as an especially important seat of power and will, he distils cerebral material taken from healthy animals and injects it with a hypodermic needle into feeble human beings. After a period of trying various dosages, the experiments become increasingly successful, and he wonders exultantly if he has not found the panacea: il croyait avoir découvert la panacée universelle, la liqueur de vie destinée à combattre la débilité humaine, seule cause réelle de tous les maux, une véritable et scientifique fontaine de Jouvence, qui, en donnant de la force, de la santé et de la volonté, referait une humanité toute neuve et supérieure. (II) The ‘serotherapy’ seems in the light of contemporary and even subsequent scientific developments to possess a certain plausibility.65 But Zola

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implies an element of infatuation when, coming to cast himself in a priestly role like the physicians of our first phase, Pascal imagines himself to be offering more than physical salvation. He lifts the phial with his precious liquid like the priestly celebrant at the moment of the elevation, ‘comme s’il avait tenu le sang régénérateur et sauveur du monde’. Here, he assures the still religious Clotilde, is the salvational substance ‘de quoi faire des miracles’ (II). She will learn indeed to believe in his injections while he meditates the possibility even of curing with their administration the madness of his grandmother and of the young Charles. Miracles do not, as we have speculated, occur in reality but only as narrative constructions. The protagonists of realistic novels must discover that the ‘vital principle’ is only a conveniently invented phrase that does not refer to a contagious substance with an objective existence. So Pascal’s faith in the efficacy of his therapy slowly abates when he finds that injections of distilled water work just as well. Still if the water produces a mildly healing effect, his medical career has not been in vain. He can take humble satisfaction in his ability to shed comfort upon patients for whom he no longer dreams of performing miracles. As in the other novels, his science comes to be supported by ministrations to something like the soul of his patients. Although involving no religious conception of the soul, his continuing faith in life retains, after all, a mythic dimension.66 For if not miracles, a realistic narrative can construct a vision that possesses the overtones of myth. And to Pascal’s faith in life, thanks to Clotilde’s devotion, is added a faith in love. She takes to accompanying him in sick calls that associate the powers of medicine and love: Jamais le docteur n’avait goûté une joie si grande, lorsqu’il réussissait, d’une piqûre, à calmer une crise, à voir le malade hurlant s’apaiser e s’endormir. Elle, au retour, l’adorait, très fière, comme si leur amour était le soulagement qu’ils portaient en viatique au pauvre monde. (IX) ‘Leur amour’ evidently refers not to love for their patients but to love for each other. Interestingly, this love somehow radiates outward a healing contagion, ‘une contagion enchantée de tendresse’ (VIII), perhaps because it is a Girardian model that provokes imitation. Besides the effect upon patients, however, Pascal desires a child as a still more tangible sign of the validity of his faith in life and love. If only Clotilde became pregnant, he would find that the life force was ratifying the incestuous love that religion condemned. When the months then pass without any indication of pregnancy, a deepening despair leads him to acknowledge defeat and eventually to send Clotilde away for her own supposed good. He succumbs to the sick guilt with which religion has identified the forbidden knowledge of the scientist. But this crisis passes with the unexpected announcement of Clotilde’s

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pregnancy. Although he will die without seeing her again, his scientific faith in life, as his substitute for God, is restored, and the manner of his death becomes emblematic of the ongoing scientific endeavour. He will convey his identity, in the sense prescribed by Lyotard, not only to his physical offspring but to a scientific posterity. Even if reduced like Fenwick to the status of patient, he remains the physician who can instruct his disciple and now attending physician Ramond. His own dying body is offered, in a possibly scientific version of the heroic death of Socrates, as a case history that can supply data that will be statistically useful to the new generations.67 As his injections are administered with decreasing effectiveness, he insists that Ramond register the timing, dosages and quantifiable vital signs that, even without the aid of electrocardiograms, strike contemporary science as clinically accurate.68 Had he been dying in our day, he would surely have authorized the donation of his organs, as a practice possibly prefigured in his own experiments with the transferral of cerebral material. To Ramond he bequeaths all the fruits of his scientific research in the conviction of their value to an enterprise – the grand récit – that will forever continue its beneficent course. Zola is also solemnly dictating, in the interpretation of Renée Ternois, his own ‘testament philosophique’, involving an inheritance of which the specifically scientific value remains the subject of intense debate.69 While Pascal’s own mind admits doubts that a panacea for human suffering will ever be found, a mildly utopian hope for humanity and a faith in love finally accompany him as a viaticum in death. During the last hour of his life, he has also managed to write the final entries and annotations on his genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart. He enters the dates of his own death and, prophetically, of the birth of his son in the next year. So in addition to the scientist, the authorial identity as narrator of the family history emerges once more in his actions. The narrative that points to the continuation of life in the next generation may seem, moreover, to possess greater lasting value than the scientific achievements. For while the funeral pyre reduces virtually all the scientific records to ashes, setting that field of science back for twenty years in Ramond’s estimation, the genealogical tree is spared. The vital force and will of the family that flow with positive contagion into a fresh branch continues to thrive in Zola’s narrative. One last consideration may enable us, perhaps without great conviction, to see the funeral pyre itself as not entirely negative. That conflagration of the archives has seemed, in my suggestion, to constitute the unmaking or deconstruction of the earlier moment, in the presence of the archives, of the intensifying illumination of Pascal and Clotilde. But the conflagration may also strangely fulfil Derrida’s description of the ‘lumière’ that incinerates all icons, effigies and figurations of truth. That self-generated light exceeds and consumes the efforts to represent it – even or especially in language, as in the written texts of Pascal’s archives.

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Still such an ideal consideration probably cannot make the pyromaniac Félicité anything less than perverse in our view. Her fiery light is not, after all, self-generated within the materials themselves and has to do with rampant, malignant contagion rather than with the divinely contagious love that covers a multitude of sins. *

*

*

The last chapter of Le Docteur Pascal belongs to Clotilde, who after nursing her brother in Paris and returning too late to nurse Pascal sits finally in a prophetic reverie suckling their child. Breast-feeding becomes associated with other sorts of nursing activities as Vrettos also finds in Charlotte Brontë, who ‘makes nursing and maternity interchangeable occupations’.70 In accord too with Florence Nightingale’s impression that all women are fundamentally nurses, the inclination to nurse constitutes as essential a component of the female identity as the maternal instinct.71 While other versions of femininity, such as the fallen woman, have received appropriate attention in the nineteenth-century context, it is now necessary, Judd maintains, to recognize the ‘similar cultural resonance’ of the nurse.72 The identification of every woman as a nurse nevertheless refers to a recent cultural development. Nightingale clearly thinks of the ‘new-style’ nurse that she has done so much to create rather than what is now rejected as the ‘old-style’ nurse.73 Not to be confused with the distinction that I have made between the older and newer styles of physicians, the distinction in the case of nurses is basically between bad and good. Of the venial, untrained old-style nurse, of whom Sairey Gamp serves as the bestknown literary example, Ainsworth offers an especially hideous, but nearly mythic version in Judith Malmayns. She works with omnipresent, unstinting energy during the plague of 1665 but ‘not to render aid’: She administered no medicine, dressed no tumours, and did not contribute in the slightest degree to the comfort of the miserable wretches committed to her charge. All she desired was to obtain whatever valuables they possessed, or to wring from them any secret that might afterwards be turned to account. . . . Her marvellous preservation throughout all the dangers to which she was exposed seemed almost to warrant the supposition that she had entered into a compact with the pestilence, to extend its ravages by every means in her power, on the condition of being spared herself. (III:iii) Whereas the Faustian scientist may strike a pact with some version of the devil to gain a healing panacea, she gains as an anti-Faustus the power to afflict humanity. Like the untori in Manzoni, she finds mysterious ways to propagate the contagion and precisely counteracts the work of Dr Hodges.74 Because women like her did in fact perform their tasks in such sinister fashion, their patients often feared the nurses more than the

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plague of 1665 itself.75 In the end, however, Judith pays for the use that she has made of her immunity to the pestilence, for a poetic justice (what Hodges would consider ‘Divine Vengeance’)76 condemns her and her cohort Chowles to a gruesome death. In trying to save their hoards, they linger too long in the burning St Paul’s, and a torrent of molten lead engulfs them and ‘their ill-gotten gains’ in the crypt. With respect to the common association of nuns and nurses, Manzoni’s unholy Sister Gertrude deserves similarly to be categorized with the oldstyle nurses. She would like indeed to help the suffering Lucia to whom she has granted comfort and ‘ricovero’ – the term also for hospitalization – in her convent. The impression at certain moments of performing healing actions salves her conscience: ‘ “A questa fo del bene”. Ed era vero; perché oltre il ricovero, que’ discorsi, quelle carezze famigliari erano di non poco conforto a Lucia’ (XVIII). But cowardly concern for her own material security, by now become an unbreakable habit, forces her to betray the virgin committed to her charge. She cannot avoid ‘il sagrifizio dell’innocente che aveva in custodia’ (XX). Even against her will, according to her own self-deceptive reasoning, she must represent the ‘transgressive sexuality’ considered normal among old-style nurses.77 Her treachery reinforces in the medical economy of the novel the cause of disease against that of health. The old-style nurse continues to mistreat and betray patients until well into the nineteenth century. The case of Sairey Gamp evidently reflects a social reality, as we may gather from Henry Gaulter’s description of medical assistance during a cholera epidemic of 1833 in Manchester. Not only neglected amidst filthy conditions in the ‘cholera vans’ and hospitals, patients are actively terrorized, until ‘terror was found to work as might be anticipated a change for the worse’.78 The nurse thus joins forces with the contagion and is instrumental in elevating the toll of mortality. In contrast, the new-style nurse does not expect material gain and sacrifices herself in ministering to her patients. She also places herself at the service of the physician, in accord with Nightingale’s ‘proud’ proclamation, as has been mentioned, of the subordination of the nursing profession to male medical authority.79 The recognition of subordination evidently helps to meet possible male objections to the emergence of women into a more public sphere. Yet historians like Judd also discern an increasing rivalry between physicians and nurses, expressed sometimes in odd ways. As ‘a competing model’ to the physician’s ‘medical gaze’, there is – rather puzzlingly – ‘the scrutiny of disciplinary individualism embodied in the eye of the nurse’. The ‘ability to control through surveillance’ is, especially in Charlotte Brontë’s treatment of the matter, the ‘particularly feminine attribute’ of the nurse’s ‘controlling eye’.80 In another aspect of the rivalry, nurses become associated with infectionist or miasmic theories of the propagation of disease whereas physicians favour contagionist theories involving germs. This means that while

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physicians – myopically, in the nurses’ view – treat only sick bodies, nurses show concern for the whole environment and seek to prevent disease.81 Physicians also apply unnecessarily harsh and invasive therapies that betray their own selfish callousness and incompetence, as opposed to the nurse’s disinterested and empathetic concern for suffering. In respects such as these, Judd even finds that Esther Summerson embodies ‘a more powerful moral force’ than Woodcourt.82 The public consciousness comes, as a result, to perceive the appropriately ‘primary care-giver’ as the nurse rather than the physician.83 The moral victory, from the feminist viewpoint, of the nurses in this rivalry may also emerge implicitly in published accounts of the deeds of nurses in the Crimea. The narratives introduce a Homeric dimension, appropriate to that part of the world, and Florence Nightingale exerts a nearly mythic fascination.84 The aura of heroism appears at home in England too, before the actual Crimean events, in the impression of Ruth’s town that she, rather than any physician, has slain the local monster: ‘it was she who had gone voluntarily, and, with no thought of greed or gain, right into the very jaws of the fierce disease’ (XXXIII). The principal physicians of the novels treated here do, however, hold their own in any possible rivalry, and it would be inaccurate to judge the nurses as the morally superior medical agents. The novels ascribe, in fact, the same moral elevation to both the physicians and the nurses that participate in the ‘divine’ work of healing and so come to resemble Christ.85 The allusion to the divine healer that occurs in connection with Woodcourt, Ternel and even Pascal (when he elevates the phial) also figures with respect to Grace and Ruth. In the case of the latter heroines, we have already observed messianic allusions in their connection with the scapegoat that bears the sins of the whole society. Esther’s maid Charley may join the Christ-like company too. We recall her comforting narration to her sick father of Gospel stories about healing miracles and Esther’s comment that ‘the little creature [was] sent into the world, surely, to minister to the weak and sick’ (XXXV). A distinction between the Christ-like aspects of physicians and nurses does nevertheless emerge in the stories of their behaviour in the environment of contagion. Motivated by both benevolence and thirst for scientific truth, the physician appears to begin from a situation of secure strength and later to learn compassionately to identify with the weakness of his patients. With some exceptions, the nurse begins, instead, in a compassionate identity with weakness and suffering, from which she later proceeds towards her commanding strength. If, in contrast with Dr Pascal’s vision of life triumphantly at work, the world is seen as Thomas Browne’s vast ‘Hospital . . . a place not to live, but to dye in’, nurses are quite naturally at home there. The immediate sympathy of the nurse with her patients derives, in the explanation of Gilbert and Gubar, from the century’s having already reduced its female subjects

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to the status of patients: ‘nineteenth-century culture seems to have actually admonished women to be ill’. Besides the other forms of pestilence, there raged a ‘socially conditioned epidemic of female illness’ involving nervous symptoms and breakdowns of many sorts.86 One may liken the process of becoming a woman to the disaster of being stricken by a contagious disease for which no ultimate cure exists. Unsurprisingly then, Bailin has found that ‘nurse and patient are two sides of the same self’ and that the roles often become exchanged in narratives of the period.87 The situation of Charley and Esther, who do precisely invert these roles in the chapter entitled ‘Nurse and Patient’ (XXXI), offers the most ready example. As a general rule too, nurses fall ill and become patients more frequently than do physicians. The decision of Gaskell’s Ruth to become a nurse seems effectively to illustrate the woman’s tendency to find herself at home with sickness. ‘ “I like being about sick and helpless people” ’, she tells Jemima, who has expressed reservation about Ruth’s vocation: ‘ “I always feel so sorry for them; and then I think I have the gift of a very delicate touch, which is such a comfort in many cases. And I should try to be very watchful and patient” ’. Her feeling sorry evidently implies no sense of superiority, and while the sick and helpless are her patients in one sense, she is ‘patient’ in another. Her strong sympathy for the helpless condition empowers her somehow to help – and in imagination to help herself too. When Jemima wonders if a less gentle and more clearly active, helpful sort of woman may not make a better nurse, Ruth urges Jemima to imagine herself as the patient: ‘ “Would you not rather be nursed by a person who spoke gently and moved quietly about than by a loud bustling woman?” ’ (XXIX). Of course Jemima would, which shows Ruth’s ability to see herself through the eyes of the patient who is her other self. The chapter ends with Jemima’s wistful fantasy of becoming ill herself so that Ruth could come to nurse her, a fantasy with which Ruth confesses her sympathy. While Mr Bradshaw’s edict presently bans her from visiting Jemima, she could in the guise of a nurse break that ban. The situation of the sickroom would permit patient and nurse to share again the loving interchange that had previously united them as needlewomen.88 Besides a tendency to identify with physical illness, the nurse is, as a woman, sometimes motivated by an impression of her moral illness. Among the heroines Ruth may suffer the most painful affliction of guilt. ‘ “I have gone about with a stain on my hidden soul” ’, she tells Bellingham when he reappears in her life after many years, ‘ “a stain which made me loathe myself, and envy those who stood spotless and undefiled” ’ (XXIV). In learning of that stain, Bradshaw sees it indeed as both a loathsome and a contagious menace for his young daughters. Yet Ruth is not, of course, an old-style nurse who spreads contagion, and she seems to turn to nursing precisely as a way of cleansing the moral stain. Because currently viewed ‘as humbling, humiliating labor’,89 the nursing profession could

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offer an opportunity for penance and self-redemption. At a later phase, when she decides to serve in the fever ward during the typhus epidemic, her penitential self-discipline becomes publicly known: ‘ “They say she has been a great sinner, and that this is her penance” ’, remarks a man in a scene that we have already noticed. The other man, to be sure, immediately challenges such an interpretation: ‘ “Such a one as her has never been a great sinner; nor does she do her work as a penance, but for the love of God, and of the blessed Jesus” ’ (XXXIII). Although Gaskell would presumably have us accept the latter version of Ruth’s motivation, the impression that the heroine suffers from the need to atone for guilt remains. ‘The punitive image of nursing is further evoked’, as Judd maintains, ‘through the taint associated with working in the hospitals themselves.’90 In the case of Lavinia, similarly, one intuits mixed motives in the decision ‘ “to go to the East” ’ in order ‘ “to serve as a nurse in one or other of the hospitals there” ’. In one respect a pure altruism may prompt the vocation. It dates, Lavinia claims, ‘ “from the very day, indeed, on which I learned what an amount of misery there was in the world – I was ignorant of it once and so thoughtless” ’ (II:xviii). Now she simply prays ‘ “that I might not die without having been of some use” ’. So besides the altruism there is anxiety to give value to her own hitherto wasted life and repentance for a guilty ignorance and thoughtlessness. She especially blames herself, as we come to learn, for her frivolous mistreatment of Paolo. While her hostesses in Dorsetshire have wished simply to ‘ “detain [Lavinia] at Owlscombe, as a most skilful needlewoman” ’, they will now encourage her new vocation. Clara, who possesses ‘a considerable smattering of medicine’, makes Lavinia her ‘pupil’ and takes her along on her visits of charity. The case of Clara herself seems initially to contrast with those of Ruth and Lavinia in that, as the most saintly and committed Christian of the story, she expresses a straightforward and uncomplicated goodness. Such, at least, is the impression conveyed in the effusion of Clara’s sister to Lavinia: Clara was an angel, Mrs. Aveling averred. She had refused every proposal of marriage in order to stay with her brother and sister, and do good. Doing good was Clara’s passion. Her life was an uninterrupted succession of errands of charity. No needy or afflicted ones, within a circuit of ten miles, but she carried comfort and assistance to. The sick were pre-eminently her favourites. Just at this time she was the centre and soul of a movement throughout the county, for collecting funds and clothes for our soldiers in the Crimea. (II:xviii) Mrs Aveling goes on to mention, however, ‘the severe headaches, from which [Clara] suffered so constantly’ and of her constant dissatisfaction

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with herself as she ‘yearned for a wider field of usefulness and selfimmolation’. So Clara too punishes herself for some guilt, which we come to realize resembles Lavinia’s in that it involves past frivolity and betrayal of a lover. In the background of all three nurses lurks a sin associated with their sexuality. The sexual sinfulness applies quite obviously in the case of Zola’s Clotilde although she does not reproach herself for the sin. Society or the ‘world’ in the form of her grandmother harshly condemns her sinful cohabitation with her uncle. Her duty clearly requires her to leave Pascal and to go to Paris where her brother supposedly has desperate need of her as his nurse. She accepts the punishment only when Pascal too becomes convinced of its appropriateness and sends her away. Since her detestable brother then makes the life of his nurse miserable, her undeserved penance becomes even harsher than those freely welcomed by the other nurses. Nursing offers an appropriate form of penance for sexual sins, it appears too, because in its new-style version it ‘erases female sexuality’.91 By characteristically taking on a chaste, asexual identity, like that of the nun, the nurse redeems the woman. The nurse does penance, in such a view, not only for particular acts of sexual misbehaviour but for her gender itself. Or the woman with her physically and morally contaminated nature may even be said to die when she dons the uniform of the nurse. Yet the woman who has been essentially sick and a patient in the Hospital of this world does not, of course, die all at once when she dons the nurse’s uniform. Besides ending, stories can begin in the fever wards, as we may recall from Axel Munthe’s realization during the Neapolitan plague that the little nun beside him was still a woman. The contagion that kills diffuses as well a lust that produces new life. It transpires that, while seeming to erase female sexuality, nursing can provide opportunities for erotic fantasies. Florence Nightingale apparently recognized as a ‘danger’ the nurse’s ‘spiritual flirtation with the [male] patients’, for, according to Judd, ‘ “respectable” women could indulge [as nurses] in prostitution fantasies without overstepping the bounds of propriety’.92 Nursing might also permit the sublimated enactment of a sexual fantasy about a particular man that the nurse had known before his illness. Accommodating ‘desires not legitimated by society at large’, the sickroom could bring together, Bailin suggests, a ‘patient and nurse . . . [as] wouldbe lovers whose union outside the sickroom has been prevented’.93 The environment of sickness does seem to encourage the erotic fantasy of some of our nurses. We recall that Clotilde, before leaving Pascal, experiences her accompaniment of the physician in his sick calls as an expression of their love. Clara, who does not manage to reach the Crimea, stops instead in Paris to nurse the former lover that she has discovered in Ternel’s asylum. Of course she still loves Thornton for whose condition she feels guiltily responsible. So besides the altruistic impulse, her eagerness to help

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restore him to health derives from the sexual longing to gain him for her husband. Although she pretends to be convinced by the physician to become Thornton’s ‘guardian angel’ and only just possibly his eventual wife, she really foresees that latter outcome from the start: ‘ “the situation of a wife-nurse to a man, whom of all men I respect” ’, she writes to her sister, ‘ “has nothing in it that repels me – quite the contrary” ’. She goes on to give a business-like interpretation to their possible marriage as ‘ “a sort of jointstock association, to do a little good in this world” ’ (II:xx). But their marriage will happily prove to have a validly sexual basis that contradicts its description as the pooling of resources in a joint-stock charity. The erotic element in Ruth’s decision at the end to nurse Bellingham (now called Mr Donne) is similarly unadmitted, and indeed some readers perceive no eros at all in Ruth. To Nina Auerbach she ‘seems oblivious of any sexuality’ and her story suggests ‘an allegory’ in which ‘spirit’ triumphs over ‘life’.94 During her period of intense watching or reading of Ruth, Jemima too has apparently looked in vain for the slightest betrayal of sexual awareness. Yet Jenny Uglow argues more convincingly for the sexuality of Ruth that is usually associated with her impressions of strong currents of water and fierce winds. During the stormy night after seeing Bellingham again, she cries out: ‘ “Oh, my God! I do believe Leonard’s father is a bad man, and yet, oh! pitiful God, I love him; I cannot forget – I cannot!” ’ (XXIII). She leans out the window to expose herself to the gusts and the beating rain, hearing what Uglow terms ‘the call of the dark side of herself’.95 Although in her response to his marriage proposal the love becomes something of the past – ‘ “I do not love you. I did once” ’ – we may doubt that formulation (XXIV). She must simply not confess a love that her sense of religious and moral duty forbids. But then her lover’s illness alters the situation. Just as Jemima’s falling ill would have permitted Ruth to go to her, the illness of Bellingham allows Ruth to join him in the guise of nurse rather than wife. Somewhat like Clara’s disguising of marriage as a ‘joint-stock’ charitable association, Ruth can conceal her sexual motive behind the performance of a good deed for Leonard’s sake. To the question of Mr Davis, the physician, about whether she loves Bellingham, she now answers: ‘I have been thinking – but I do not know – I cannot tell – I don’t think I should love him, if he were well and happy – but you said he was ill – and alone – how can I help caring for him? – how can I help caring for him?’ repeated she, covering her face with her hands, and the quick hot tears stealing through her fingers. ‘He is Leonard’s father,’ continued she, looking up at Mr Davis suddenly. (XXXIV) However unadmitted and disguised, the love for an undeserving man still exists, and his illness offers her a final opportunity as nurse to indulge

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it.96 The nursing task, originally imposed as a cultural penance for her sexuality, now permits her to reaffirm her sexual identity. The sickroom functions not just as a microcosm for the world helplessly infested by the contagion of history but as a site of opening possibilities for the nurse. She makes of it, in Bailin’s echo of Jameson, ‘a [woman’s] realm of freedom, fashioned from the materials of restriction’.97 What she fashions is also a narrative. As ‘primary care-giver’, the nurse presides over the case history of the patient and so corresponds to the physician of other stories as the representative of the author. She even more than the fictional physician, in Judd’s opinion, resembles the ‘earnest Victorian writer’ in his or her guise of ‘social healer’ or ‘healing writer’.98 Her male patient, who figures, within the text, the reader as recipient of her healing influence, needs to have her primarily female virtues reinforced in him. The experience of sickness should serve valuably, according to Bulwer’s essay ‘On Ill Health’, to bring out certain feminine qualities. The ‘harsher [male] sex’ is moulded into closer resemblance to the ‘susceptible frame’ of the woman that permits ‘each more kindly and generous feeling to vibrate more powerfully’. Illness precisely encourages ‘our sympathies with others’ and instils ‘delicacy of mind’.99 So the narrative tells not only of suffering, penitence and confinement but of feminization as exemplified most fully perhaps in Martineau’s Life in the Sick-Room. The sadness of the last illness of Nemo in Bleak House derives precisely from the absence of any nurse to take narrative charge of him. While probably a ‘happy release’, the death of this patient concludes no narrative or case history at all. Watched only by the blank eyes in the shutters, he ‘lies there, with no more track behind him, that any one can trace, than a deserted infant’. There is only the anonymous third-person narrator to wonder about the missing nursing figures in his life – ‘the mother at whose breast he nestled, a little child’ or some other ‘woman who held him in her heart’. But ‘where is she, while these ashes are lying above the ground!’ (XI).100 The exclamation alludes of course to poor Lady Dedlock who was never able to enact, with respect to her lover and to her child, the nursing identity of womanhood. Most of our other patients are more fortunate in that their case histories are narrated. The challenge for the narrator, whether physician or nurse, is to repeat some version of the master narrative or what Ternel considers the ‘divine’ task: ‘to call up harmony from chaos . . . to new create a man, as it were, in God’s image’. The typical pattern involves first a crisis that reduces not only the body but the personality of the patient to a chaotic state. Then during a slow recovery, as in an inconclusive Bildungsroman, he or she tends to become, especially under the care of the nurse, a better or new person. The episode of psychic chaos in our stories is frequently the feverish delirium or mental breakdown that inevitably accompanies the plague.

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The pestilence not only attacks the body but disintegrates the sufferer’s very sense of identity, and the story of healing must narrate the very slow re-creation of psychic order. The delirious fever serves with greatest frequency in the novels of Dickens, as Bailin has shown, to represent the larger narrative of human salvation in a compressed space.101 The obsessive Dickensian search for the self occurs over and over as a ‘feverish wandering journey’ – either literally as in Esther’s nocturnal pursuit of her mother with Bucket, or metaphorically as in the delirium of her fever. The distinction between literal and metaphorical can itself break down, for as Esther recalls her setting forth with Bucket: ‘I was far from sure that I was not in a dream’ (LVII). That dream has begun during her illness when she finds herself ‘to have crossed a dark lake, and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore’ (XXXV). Perhaps she and Charley as the interchangeable ‘Nurse and Patient’ make that crossing together during those weeks in which they share the isolation of the sick-room. The ordeal, as Esther recalls its details, involves collapse into a temporal and spatial chaos that Tambling describes as ‘without origins, beginning or end’ and relates to the visions of Piranesi and De Quincey.102 Then while Charley capably arranges everything for her physical comfort, a psychic and narrative order is slowly reasserted. The Dickensian story could also end happily, as Bailin indicates with respect not only to Esther’s case, at the convalescent stage rather than with the full recovery and return to the world outside: ‘In the sickroom, the fierce appetites that plague those outside its walls are moderated or made benign by the physical depletion of illness and appeased by the simple diet of the invalid.’103 To leave the sick-room is to return to the sphere of restlessness, fever and wandering. Ruffini’s Paolo Mancini undergoes a very similar experience of dangerously feverish delirium and comfortingly gradual recovery. After his apparent betrayal at the hands of Lavinia, we recall, he collapses near the Hôtel de Ville and is rescued by strangers who despite their fear of cholera nurse him tenderly. When the vital principle begins after some months to recruit its strength in him, its entire force is devoted to the physical rather than mental portion of him. As in the Dickensian sick-room, a nearly idyllic period of non-desiring passivity and thoughtless contentment ensues: Life was certainly fast regaining its hold of him, but animal life alone; the sentient being, the Psyche, lay still asleep. He would sit up on his bed, and for hours stare vacantly at the wall, chequered by some stray sunbeam, or play with the children, as thoughtless and unconcerned as a child himself. Whenever Prudence, Prosper, Benoît, or Mr. Perrin came into his room, he always smiled good-naturedly, but never spoke unless first spoken to, and then only in monosyllables, never asked questions, never evinced the least sign of surprise or curiosity at the

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strangeness of the place he was in. The only occurrences which appeared to arouse his interest, were his meals, which he ate with great relish. When able to leave his bed, he would sit for half the day in an arm-chair at the window of the back room, and watch with the same mute delight the manœuvres of a sparrow, or the movements of Benoît. (II:ii) His nurse is especially the indulgent Mme Prudence who allows him all the sweet galette he wishes and seems sympathetically to share in his ‘mute delight’. Eventually she must expose him to the stimulation that will help him to remember who he is and, as he begins again to speak, to reconnect the narrative threads of his story. But because of her patience the process of arousing the sleeping Psyche remains slow and essentially gentle. The parallel episode of Thornton’s breakdown contains in Clara a more complex and energetic version of the nurse. For in this episode the reconstruction of Thornton’s identity involves the struggle of the nurse for her own identity too. Thornton believes that he has killed her and goes about with a spade, insisting over and over that he must dig her grave. Her vain efforts to make him recognize her as a living woman suggest her own struggle to come back into life. The psychic battle may, as its outcome, reduce the nurse to madness rather than recall the patient to sanity. It comes at last, in contrast to the therapy practised on Paolo, to involve a physical battle, in the violent scene that I have already considered as an instance of heroic medicine. When she believes that he may be about to recognize her, she grips his hand with immense force – a parody of the gently healing touch – while he tries brutally to disengage himself: Just as, in the pitiable contest, they had unwittingly got near to the open window, a man dashed noisily into the room. This proved more than sufficient to heighten Thornton’s excitement into positive madness. ‘The avenger, the avenger!’ he shouted, and, shaking off Miss Clara violently, in another moment he had flung himself out of the window. A double scream rent the air; she looked out, saw a motionless form lying on the ground; saw a red stream flow from under it, and fell back senseless. (II:xxv) Blaming herself for his being wounded, she absorbs some of his guilt and in her own episode of delirium is hospitalized in another part of the asylum: she ‘[lies] in a feverish state in the room of one of the needlewomen of the establishment’, as if to indicate the continuity of this nurse too with that needlewoman aspect of the female condition. The crisis passes, and three days later the recovered Clara joins the now sane and

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convalescent Thornton in his room: ‘installed in the sick room, with a female attendant as chaperone, Clara proved herself the most intelligent, tender, and devoted of nurses’ (II:xxv). Meanwhile Lavinia, who has arrived in Scutari, also goes through the three stages of nursing others, contracting disease herself (cholera in this case) and recovering her health, but like Esther with her beauty impaired. The episode of Ruth’s nursing of Bellingham in Eccleston again emphasizes the value of the sick-room as an idyllic location, but in this case more for the nurse than for the patient. The nurse foresees no advantage for herself in the recovery of her patient, and the idyll, once concluded, will have no implications for a future existence beyond the sick-room. In contrast with Clara’s desire to force her patient to recognize her (and her desire to become his wife), Ruth wishes precisely to avoid Bellingham’s recognition. She must nurse him in secret: ‘ “He need not know – he shall not – that I have ever been near him. If he is like the others, he must be delirious – I will leave him before he comes to himself” ’. And she repeats to Mr Davis, ‘ “I will leave him before he recognizes me” ’. Only so long as his helpless and wandering state lasts will she be able to exercise a beautiful power over him. Her ability to exercise a powerful authority over her patient at first surprises the physician with its superiority to his own: ‘She had gone up to the wild, raging figure, and with soft authority had made him lie down’ (XXXIV). Thereafter she applies not just a ‘soft’ charisma but the ‘very delicate touch’ of which she had boasted to Jemima. This touch, we may recall, had first proved effective with Bellingham during his illness in Wales: ‘ “Let me put my cool hands on your forehead,” she [had] begged; “that used to do mamma good” ’ (VI). And now she repeats the healing touch: ‘placing a basin of cold water by the bedside, she had dipped in it her pretty hands, and was laying their cool dampness on his hot brow, speaking in a low soothing voice all the time, in a way that acted like a charm’ (XXXIV). The struggle is occurring mainly in his head and so may be susceptible to that touch. His recovery will proceed slowly, she probably hopes, so as to prolong the secret delight of her tender manipulations upon his unconscious helplessness. A contest of wills begins, however, between her wish to mould him as the subject of her own secret narrative, and his emergence into more conscious control of their story. There is a contagious transfer between them, which occurs, interestingly, in terms of exchanged gazes. When his fever breaks, he recovers powers of recognition while his disease causes her sense of a rational identity to disintegrate. Ruth’s ocular power, as she encounters the gaze of her patient, is mastered by his: ‘her looks were riveted on his softly-unclosing eyes, which met hers as they opened languidly. She could not stir or speak. She was held fast by that gaze of his, in which a faint recognition dawned, and grew to strength’. He murmurs questions that regard Ruth’s own head: ‘ “Where are the

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water-lilies? Where are the lilies in her hair?” ’ Ruth understands the reference to her earlier self, whose beauty, observed reflected in the Welsh pond, had so pleased her lover. And she regresses, helpless herself now before his gaze, to the Welsh phase of her existence. For we have been told on the occasion of her last night in Wales that the sounds of that moment would haunt her in death: ‘The sound of running waters she heard that quiet evening, was in her ears as she lay on her death-bed; so well had she learnt their tune’ (XII). She seems, as Uglow points out, to float like Ophelia towards death:104 ‘Gazing at vacancy . . . her open, unconscious eyes’ convey only ‘a sweet, childlike insanity within’ while ‘she sang continually, very soft and low. She went from one childish ditty to another without let or pause, keeping a strange sort of time with her pretty fingers, as they closed and unclosed themselves upon the counterpane’ (XXXV). Like the eyes that gaze now on vacancy, the fingers may be feeling in vain for the patient that their touch has soothed. Unable to avoid Bellingham’s recognition, she has been forced to cede to him the authorship of the tale in which she dies as the mindless beauty of his desire.105 And in that tale, controlled by himself, Bellingham’s recovery does not entail the conversion that ought to be the outcome for the redeemed hero of the Bildungsroman. He remains the egoist that he has always been. Apparently defeated as a narrator by her last patient, Ruth has seemed to many troubled readers, as we have observed, to suffer a fate that she does not deserve. Such readers have blamed the actual author, who has caused Bellingham to function as the proximate cause, for inflicting the undeserved punishment. Yet her death may not constitute the gratuitous punishment of a sin for which ample atonement has long been made. ‘The manner of Ruth’s death’, in the shrewd observation of Uglow, ‘subtly suggests that she does not perish because of her sin but because of her forbidden love, which could have no place in the Victorian world’.106 Rather than for her past she suffers for choosing to indulge in the present a love that could exist only within the confines of the sick-room. Perhaps it has also been her choice not to leave but to remain in the sick-room beyond the terms that she had originally established as safe for herself. If so, she has remained responsible for her story. Indeed her intention to remain, like Flaubert’s author, the secret narrative agent – invisible to, or at least unrecognized by, the patient in the sick-room – may not have been entirely defeated. She has secretly plotted, in the opinion of Terence Wright, the precise denouement whereby she obtains a secret victory over Bellingham as well. She has sacrificed herself for him in a way that he does not deserve, and no repayment is possible, as the vanity of his subsequent attempts at financial compensation demonstrate. Or one might say that in the transaction between them she has repaid him for the typhus loaded upon her by loading upon him an incurable guilt. He must live hereafter with his guilt, acknowledging at

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some level his moral subjection to Ruth. Gaskell thus gives Ruth like some of her other characters the ‘chance to re-write their lives’ and to get even with the men like Bellingham that have abandoned them. The dead, including Ruth, come to possess an even vampiristic power over the living that they will not let go.107 Whatever one makes of Wright’s analysis, Ruth remains in her mingling of vulnerability and strength the most effective of our nurses. The inhabitants of the town idolize her as the martyr that so many readers as well continue to discern in her. Mr Davis stresses her success as ‘ “out and out the best nurse I ever met with” ’. He has also proposed to take over the education of Leonard, whose ‘ “great recommendation” ’ is ‘ “his being your son” ’, in order to prepare his succession as ‘ “the first surgeon in Eccleston” ’ (XXXIV). In uniting the nursing heritage of his mother and the scientific training of the great physician, Leonard may emerge some day as a sort of super-medical personality. In the meanwhile most of the medical personalities in the novels overcome any initial reservations in the public mind about their methods and earn the admiration of the community. Instead of seeking like Judith Malmayns or the scientific adventurer Margrave to derive personal profit from episodes of pestilence, they dedicate themselves altruistically to the cause of communal health. In this respect they correspond to the impression of Daniel M. Fox that in the actual plagues of history most physicians, if not the old-style nurses, performed their tasks conscientiously: ‘on balance, most accounts describe members of the medical profession as dutiful despite personal risks.’108 What may interest us more, however, in many of the medical episodes of our novels is their articulation of a vision of life as an ongoing system of dynamic exchanges. These exchanges occur within a medium that permits propagation of many sorts of energy. Although disease may seem a dysfunction in this system, it is also likely that the contagion that produces disease and death plays, like more benign forms of contagion, its necessary part. Far from static, life is the burning of resources. Energies must be not only propagated but depleted so that they can be resupplied from the waste products. In demonstrating the interacting forces of life at work, the medical episodes emphasize contradictory tendencies within the physicians and nurses too. The effectively priestly or scientific medical figure is not proposed as a stalwart tower of pure strength, but always as a human combination of strong and weak qualities. On the strong side, the physician and the nurse propagate charismatic or mesmerizing power and impose control over people and events, sometimes with their eyes. As scientists, they aspire to know the truth and to clean up the messiness not only of sewage but of sloppy or superstitious thinking. In their laboratories and libraries they master the past episodes of the grand récit of science and compose the episodes to be transmitted to posterity. As narrating agents in the hospital, asylum and sick-room, they plot strategies that will guide

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individual patients from initial disorder towards integrity and coherence. As for the qualities that suggest their weakness, these do not include moral failings, and they may even amount to hidden strengths. There emerges the admirable tendency to identify with the condition of helplessness and suffering and to expose oneself to the contagious diseases. The patients have their dignity and should not simply be healed and made ruthlessly over into the image of the strong. God’s image includes, indeed, humility and weakness, and perhaps the physician or nurse should not hope to do more than offer balsamic comfort to such weakness. Through their strengths and weaknesses, the physicians, nurses and patients participate in the historical struggles for power, which involve the competition at this point between religious and scientific conceptions of medicine. In our novels that competition does not usually achieve resolution in a dialectical synthesis. Only in the figures of Ruffini’s Dr Ternel and Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall does it seem possible for the man of God to coincide in the end with the scientist. In the case of the converted Tom, however, we cannot be sure that he will go on like Dr Ternel to practise an holistic medicine that cares for both body and soul. With respect to ideological and psychological power struggles, the novels imply that participation in a battle that unites all of the combatants is more important than the achievement of a victory. Especially in the field of medicine, it is the sense of one’s common humanity – of being caught up in the dynamic exchanges of life or immersed with others in history – that redeems. That commonality of the human condition is particularly shown in our stories by recognition of the identity between the medical practitioner and the patient. The sick-room is finally an ambiguous location. While strong healing energies can be projected and strenuous disciplines enforced there, it also offers the satisfactions of helplessness and lassitude. It can become an enclave of possibly subversive freedom in which one escapes rather than struggles amidst the contagion of historical necessity. Ruth’s fantasy of a love forbidden by her culture may, as we have seen, flourish in the sickroom in which she, our quietly strongest nurse, becomes a patient. Her death then releases her even further from the arena of power that is the world outside the sick-room. But the sick-room of Dr Pascal, our most daring medical pioneer, is located very much within the historical arena. As he has done before as a physician, he continues as a dying patient to wrest, from his own body now, empowering evidence to be wielded in the contemporary struggle between science and religion.

5

Mothers, daughters and lovers

In addition to the sick-room, which can sometimes offer a reprieve from the feverish restlessness of existence, the novels occasionally allude to the nursery as an idyllic location. As a particularly privileged version of the nurse–patient relationship, the nursing mother and child enjoy in isolation from the world a moment of integrity and fulfilment nearly unmarred by desire. Although utopian fantasies carry her into a vague future, Clotilde is enjoying just such a moment, as we have seen, with her infant son when Zola’s novel ends. Still more significant in our novels than the mother–son relationship, however, is that between mother and daughter. Several instances of it substantiate the observation of Nancy Chodorow that the mother experiences ‘a daughter as an extension or double of . . . herself’, an impression that the daughter also reflects in reverse.1 As a moment of primal unity, it may exist more in myth than in actuality, and its communications employ ‘a non-symbolic mother– daughter language’ involving no verbal signs. This condition ends, often calamitously, when the daughter finds her maternal double to be effectively silenced, murdered or otherwise removed, and she enters what Lacan calls the ‘Law of the Father’.2 The second stage of the love story is set in the historical arena ruled by patriarchal values, of which the goblin market place of Christina Rossetti’s poem may incidentally offer a complex symbolic image.3 The daughter becomes here the prey of destructive contagion. As the object of male desire, she is contaminated with desire herself since, in the Girardian view, desires are always contagious, self-replicating phenomena. Erotic desire, which we have noticed as flourishing in the context of the plague, seems in many literary works to be indistinguishable from the plague itself. In Ruth, for example, Bonaparte finds that frustrated passion causes fever, and after invading the heroine, the passion ‘is so intense . . . that it brings on an epidemic in the entire town of Eccleston’.4 The identification of love as a contagious disease – as if already in itself a venereal infection – is especially explicit in Old Saint Paul’s. As she loses her daughter to the powers of patriarchy, Mrs Bloundel associates Amabel’s vulnerability to eros with the threat of the plague. She warns her daughter about ‘ “the

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moral contagion by which you are threatened” ’ (I:ix) and confesses: ‘ “I am not half so much afraid of the plague as I am of the Earl of Rochester” ’ who is so seriously undermining the girl’s moral integrity (I:x). Of course the men who contend in the patriarchal regime for possession of the women are also being ruined morally. In their rivalries they too imitate the desires of one another in a process that suggests the disintegration of social order. The women hasten that disintegration in acts that retort the contagion of which they have been victims back against the men. Mary Shelley has imagined in The Last Man an interestingly conscious instance of such retortion when the betrayed Evadne revenges herself by directing the plague against the perfidious Lord Raymond (based on Byron). She claims her own propriety over the plague, as an extension of her love that has now become implacable enmity. And her propriety extends not only to the plague but to the fire of Constantinople and to the military siege that are all raging simultaneously: ‘O Raymond, . . . I expire, thy victim! – By my death I purchase thee – lo! the instruments of war, fire, the plague are my servitors. I dared, I conquered them all, till now! I have sold myself to death, with the sole condition that thou shouldst follow me – Fire, and war, and plague, unite for thy destruction – O my Raymond, there is no safety for thee!’ (II:i) The sale, whereby the plague gains her but must then execute her fury against Raymond, parodies the pseudo-financial transaction between Manzoni’s Archbishop Borromeo and the plague. The archbishop cedes his own and other bodies to the plague, we may recall, in exchange for the liberation of their souls. But the model that is closer to home for Mary Shelley is that of her late husband’s transaction with the ‘West Wind’. In this ode the poet cedes himself, in death, to the raging wind on the condition that the wind then become him (‘Be thou me, impetuous one!’) and execute his will: Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth The trumpet of a prophecy! . . . (ll. 62–9)

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Shelley’s ode too concerns a ‘pestilence-stricken’ (l. 5) moment in history – as indeed all historical moments are pestilential – and negotiates with the pestilential forces and fires (‘unextinguished . . . sparks’) in view of future redemption. Our novels similarly contemplate the possibility that the epidemic may spread not only as the erotic devastation foreseen in Evadne’s curse, but as a benignant, healing agency. The contagious energy stems, in any case, not just from men but from women who have the power either to ruin, like Evadne, or to heal their lovers. ‘ “Under the dominion of passion” ’, Rochester tells Amabel, ‘ “I am capable of the darkest crimes, or of the brightest virtues” ’: ‘ “Reject me, and you drive me to despair, and plunge me into guilt. Accept me, and you may lead me into any course you please” ’ (IV:iv). The same impression that a power deriving from the woman can magnetize certain ‘energies’ in the man underlies the appeal of Ruffini’s Paolo to Lavinia: ‘ “There are stirring within me strange energies, either for good or evil; bid them take a lofty aim. . . . Illumine my path, and make me good” ’ (I:xvii). Most often we must wait until what may be considered a third stage for the stirring energies to manifest their healing powers. What Girard calls ‘the conflictual and destructive mimesis’ may then ‘turn into the nonconflictual mimesis of training and learning, indispensable to the elaboration and perpetuation of human societies’.5 The beneficent ‘dominion of passion’ spreads at this point not only from the women to their lovers. The rival male lovers themselves tend towards a reconciling mimesis, and in events that echo the initial idyll the daughters may become in some sense reunited with their mothers. Throughout these three phases, as this chapter proposes to show, relationships of love, including erotic desires, obsessions and jealousies, exemplify struggles in which power is asserted in the form of a contagious energy. Although recourse to outright physical violence is often threatened, the various parties usually exert or suffer, that is, the domination of the more mysterious force of contagion. Sometimes, as I have remarked, the reference to contagion occurs very explicitly. More frequently, the contagion is of the implicit sort that informs, according to Girard, the phenomenon of mimesis, a phenomenon especially noticeable in the many triangular relationships among lovers. To return then to the idyllic first phase, we find that some daughters remain in this state of innocence for many years. The daughter does not enter the father’s ‘symbolic order’ so fully or so quickly as the son does.6 In three of the novels the mother–daughter relationship endures, indeed, as a paradigm of ideal unity until the daughter is virtually grown up. Despite the strong presence of the father in Ainsworth’s story, the attachment of the eighteen-year-old Amabel Bloundel to her mother has thus remained very close until the events of the first chapter. Manzoni and Bulwer convey an even more precise impression that the daughters have never quite entered the father’s law because the fathers have died and the

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daughters have grown up with their widowed mothers. Of course these mothers and daughters cannot entirely escape the law of the father, which involves the hierarchies and systems of difference that regulate civilization. Still, amidst the structures of civilization, these mother–daughter relationships tend to sustain not only the women involved but a larger community that involves the male lovers. The mimetic doubling of mother and daughter in these three works itself involves a benevolent hierarchy. The obedient daughters Amabel, Lucia and Lilian acknowledge the authority and superior wisdom of the mothers, respectively Mrs Bloundel, Agnese and Annie Ashleigh. The mother has a particular competence in matters that concern the health of her daughter, the complexities of which the daughter herself cannot be presumed to understand. Especially in A Strange Story Mrs Ashleigh’s anxiety about Lilian’s fragile health necessitates frequent discussions with competing physicians about various medical regimes. The mothers also expect their daughters to have no secrets from them regarding their sentimental lives. So Amabel’s surreptitious encouragement of the gallant who will turn out to be Rochester in disguise deeply distresses Mrs Bloundel, who then insists upon her daughter’s act of penitence: ‘ “Make a clean breast, and hide nothing from me” ’. Immediately recognizing her mother’s rights, Amabel does tell her everything, asks for pardon and promises never to ‘ “offend you more” ’. And the relieved mother quickly reinstates the relationship of perfect trust: ‘ “I forgive you from my heart, child, and will trust you” ’ (I:iv). For Agnese it is similarly a surprise that Lucia has not told her about Don Rodrigo’s harassment although Lucia has confessed the matter to Fra Cristoforo: ‘“A tua madre”’, exclaims Agnese, ‘“non dir niente d’una cosa simile!”’ (III). This minor crisis too quickly passes when Lucia confides entirely in her mother once more, and the sense of their unity in duality is restored. These authoritative mothers do not abuse their power. Their daughters’ genuine well-being constitutes the all-engrossing concern of their lives, and in a relationship of mutual respect both Mrs Ashleigh and Agnese accept the choices of their daughters. When Allen Fenwick asks for permission to marry her daughter, Mrs Ashleigh takes ‘Lilian’s hand, simply place[s] it in mine, and [says], “As she chooses, I choose; whom she loves, I love” ’ (XVIII). Through thick and thin the mother becomes the most loyal advocate of Fenwick’s cause. At one low point of misunderstanding between the lovers, he calls at the house to find in the darkness ‘an arm thrown round me, my cheek kissed and wetted with tears. Could it be Lilian? Alas, no!’ (XLIII). It is, of course, Lilian’s mother, who loves him at that point more than her daughter does. And he returns the love just as Renzo in I promessi sposi returns the love of Agnese, to the extent that the hero in both novels seems to be marrying both mother and daughter at once. The presence of the good suitor thus creates a triangle that reinforces rather than threatens the mother–daughter idyll. So long

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as mother and daughter can imitate one another in returning the love of that suitor, they provide a fine instance of Girard’s non-conflictual doubling. Other instances of such triangles are more ambiguous. In Bulwer’s novel Ashleigh Sumner too seems to be marrying both mother and daughter. But in this case the ambitious Mrs Poyntz has sought to secure him more for her own sake than for her daughter’s. She intends to manipulate him in a political career in which she can take vicarious satisfaction. In Old Saint Paul’s as well, the hero Leonard Holt becomes ever more exclusively the mother’s choice and ever less her daughter’s. The desire to persuade her daughter, for her own good, to overcome the ruinous infatuation with Rochester and to marry Leonard dominates Mrs Bloundel with increasing imperiousness. The doubling of mother and daughter comes to involve a psychic violence as the mother seeks to force the daughter to imitate her own amorous preference. Whereas Mrs Ashleigh has agreed that ‘whom she loves, I love’, Mrs Bloundel’s formula is virtually ‘whom I love, she must love’. A conflictual triangle that threatens to rupture the idyllic doubling of mother and daughter is formed especially with the emergence of the bad or rival suitor. The bad suitor perceives that in his claims upon the daughter he has a rival not only in the good suitor but also in the mother. It becomes almost more important for him, in fact, to separate the daughter from her mother than from her other lover. While Rochester thus insults Leonard and fights with him, the principal conflict, he understands, opposes Mrs Bloundel and himself with respect to Amabel’s emotional loyalties. Fairly early in the story, when he still conceals his identity under the name of Wyvil, he flatters himself, mistakenly, about having already won this battle. Secretly gaining admittance to the house, he finds Amabel and succeeds in locking the two of them inside a bedroom – significantly enough, her mother’s room. When the worried mother calls from the other side of the locked door, he urges Amabel now to acknowledge that she and, as it were, the room belong to him: ‘She hears us?’ whispered Amabel. ‘What shall I do? You must not be seen?’ ‘There is no use in further concealment,’ cried Wyvil. ‘You are mine, and twenty mothers should not bar the way.’ ‘Hold!’ cried Amabel, disengaging herself by a sudden effort. ‘I have gone too far – but not so far as you imagine. I am not utterly lost.’ And before she could be prevented, she rushed to the door, threw it open, and flung herself into her mother’s arms, who uttered an exclamation of terror at beholding Wyvil. (I:iv)

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At this point it requires only the one mother to ‘bar the way’ and to reclaim possession of her room and of her daughter. But slowly matters will go as Rochester imagines, and Mrs Bloundel loses her hold upon Amabel’s loyalty if not her love. The mother struggles in her own imagination not just against a human enemy but against an obscure disease as she warns her daughter about ‘ “the moral contagion” ’. Although the physical contagion of the plague has not penetrated the defences of the barricaded house, the moral contagion has. The moral illness defeats all of the mother’s nursing skills and culminates in the mutual defeat of both mother and daughter. The worst of it for both of them is the inevitability of their definitive separation. On the night before Amabel’s departure from the house in which the physically and morally besieged family has been locked for months, mother and daughter embrace for probably the last time: The moment had . . . arrived when they were to bid each other farewell. The anguish displayed in his wife’s countenance was too much for the grocer, and he covered his face with his hands. He heard her approach Amabel – he listened to their mutual sobs – to their last embrace. It was succeeded by a stifled cry, and uncovering his face at the sound, he sprang to his feet just in time to receive his swooning wife in his arms. (III:v) In I promessi sposi the contagion of the bad suitor similarly operates to divide mother and daughter first psychologically and then physically. The scheme of Fra Cristoforo to protect Lucia from Don Rodrigo in the fortified convent of Monza fails because this fortress too is vulnerable to the penetration of moral contagion. Residence in the convent ironically subjects Lucia to the insidious supervision of Suor Gertrude, who counteracts the maternal authority.7 Gertrude insists upon removing Lucia from her mother’s presence and interrogating her privately. Convinced that Lucia must have felt the physical attraction of Don Rodrigo, she embarrasses Lucia with explicitly sexual language: La signora moltiplicava le domande intorno alla persecuzione di don Rodrigo e entrava in certi particolari, con una intrepidezza, che riuscì e doveva riuscire più che nuova a Lucia, la quale non aveva mai pensato che la curiosità delle monache potesse esercitarsi intorno a simili argomenti. I giudizi poi che quella frammischiava all’interrogazioni, o che lasciava trasparire, non eran meno strani. . . . A Lucia . . . ne rimanesse uno stupore dispiacevole, e come un confuso spavento. E appena poté trovarsi sola con la madre, se n’aprì con lei; ma Agnese, come più esperta, sciolse, con poche parole, tutti que’ dubbi, e spiegò tutto il mistero. ‘Non te ne far meraviglia. . . . I signori, chi più, chi meno, chi per un verso, chi per un altro, han tutti un po’ del matto.’ (X)

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More than by the menacing physical presence of Don Rodrigo, Lucia is contaminated by the contagious sexual awareness of Suor Gertrude, who draws from her what Foucault considers a truth-producing, sexual aveu.8 As a bad maternal double, Gertrude has imposed herself as the reflection in which Lucia may recognize her own desires. Agnese’s countering response, which would simply explain sexual desire away as a form of foolishness not to be taken seriously, cannot restore Lucia’s tranquillity. Soon Gertrude will separate Lucia quite literally from her mother and from the innocence and ignorance that have characterized her previous life. While Amabel has more than half desired to enter the new area of sexual experience, Lucia’s terror upon encountering it in the episode of her abduction entails nearly a mental breakdown. She now longs for Agnese even more than for Renzo. In her desperate bargaining with the Blessed Virgin she offers to give up her lover and, in effect, her sexuality in order to be restored to her mother: ‘“O Vergine santissima! . . . aiutatemi! fatemi uscire da questo pericolo, fatemi tornar salva con mia madre, Madre del Signore: e fo voto a voi di rimaner vergine; rinunzio per sempre a quel mio poveretto, per non esser mai d’altri che vostra”’ (XXI). One may intuit a utopian longing here for a world of female self-sufficiency, in which women live in safety, away from the dangers inherent in the male sex. In A Strange Story the devastating and contagious moral disease is probably once again to be understood as the guilt of sexual awareness. A new epoch for Lilian and her mother has begun with their move to the socalled Abbots’ House in the town of L—. The house is that in which Fenwick has attended the deathbed of his rival, old Dr Lloyd, who effectively curses Fenwick with his dying breath. An ‘irresistible impulse’ that we come to associate with that curse makes Fenwick enter the grounds of the house one evening just after Lilian’s arrival, where he sees her for the first time. Seated beside a well under a ruined Gothic dome – a trope that occurs frequently in romances by Bulwer and others – she is absorbed in an apparent trance.9 Fenwick, although already in love with her, leaves without venturing to disturb her. Later she will tell him the nature of the vision that was then absorbing her in what amounts to the Gothic dimension of the story. She has foreseen Fenwick himself and has heard the voice of her father, who apparently approves her union with Fenwick. But then the form of a serpent, which we probably associate with male sexuality, has troubled her vision: ‘there rose from the earth . . . a vague, dusky vapour, undulous, and coiling like a vast serpent, – nothing, indeed, of its shape and figure definite, but of its face one abrupt glare; and a flash from two dread luminous eyes, and a young head, like the Medusa’s, changing . . . into a grinning skull. . . . [My] terror still remained, even when I felt my mother’s arm round me and heard her voice.’ (XVII)

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The serpent-like menace, from which even her mother cannot protect her, coincides with Fenwick’s intrusion into her garden, but he is probably not to blame for her falling ill shortly thereafter. He sees her for the second time when, called as physician to her sickbed, he attends her in the very room in which Dr Lloyd has pronounced his curse and died. The contagion that has struck her, he believes, has emanated not from himself but from the ‘effluvia’ of the overly lush garden and from the miasmic atmosphere of Lloyd’s death chamber. ‘ “You had better shut up the chamber” ’, he tells Mrs Ashleigh, ‘ “for at least some weeks, burn fires in it, repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloroform” ’ (X). Lilian recovers, becomes innocently engaged to him, and the guilt of sexual awareness is perhaps attenuated for a time by the burning fires and chloroform. The idyll of mother, daughter and mutually adored lover that we have observed continues. Yet the serpent and the curse remain threateningly in the background, and we come to associate them with the advent of Margrave, the rival male figure. Although Fenwick begs Lilian not to allow ‘ “any one to introduce [Margrave] to you [–] I entreat you not to know him” ’ (XXXVII) – Margrave uses ploys like Ainsworth’s Rochester to gain admittance to her house. Having contrived to have Fenwick arrested on a murder charge, he ingratiates himself with Lilian and provokes a ‘change’ in her that makes her absent and cold towards her mother and Fenwick. Upon his release Fenwick seeks consolation from the mother who also fails to understand her daughter’s apparent susceptibility to Margrave. Indeed Mrs Ashleigh finds the animal magnetism or contagious energy of Margrave more repugnant than attractive: ‘ “I could never consent to trust him with my daughter’s fate. A voice at my heart would cry, ‘No!’ It may be an unreasonable prejudice, but I could not bear to see him touch Lilian’s hand!” ’ (XLIII). Clearly the mother has, after all, her own preferences and cannot repeat in all circumstances her formula, ‘whom she loves, I love’. Lilian no longer seeks, however, her mother’s approval, and Mrs Ashleigh rushes to Fenwick’s house one day with the terrible news that Lilian has disappeared, apparently having eloped with Margrave. Without actually violating her physically, Margrave has used the contagious power of his will to overcome Lilian’s will. To focus his volitional power and to draw her towards his hiding place, he lifts and points in her direction the wand that suggests both phallic and other potencies. Managing to find the couple and to wrest in a desperate struggle the wand from Margrave, Fenwick restores Lilian to her mother. The girl’s virginity remains physically intact but moral damage has been wrought, and it is too late to save her reputation. When Lilian learns that the Hill now ostracizes her as a fallen woman, her reason deserts her, and she ceases for years to recognize either her mother or Fenwick. In the other novels the breaking of the idyllic doubling of mother and daughter has occurred at a much earlier stage, and there is some doubt

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about whether it ever really existed. Yet the stories continue to imply its importance as a myth of origins, even if (re)constructed later on, and to associate its end with the menacing sexuality of a male figure. Ruth thus learns ‘to conjure up’ at will, during her harsh apprenticeship at the dressmaking establishment, memories of her frail mother, who died when she was twelve. At night she waits until the other girls in the bedroom are sleeping so that she can weep, ‘conjur[ing] up, with fond luxuriance, every recollection of the happy days, so little valued in their uneventful peace while they lasted, so passionately regretted when once gone for ever; to remember every look and word of the dear mother, and to moan afresh over the change caused by her death’ (III). Her dreams provoke weeping because, as she tells the concerned Jenny who arouses her from one dream, ‘ “when I tried to take hold of her, she went away and left me alone” ’ (I). The mother’s leaving the daughter alone has had, from the narrator’s practical viewpoint, the unfortunate result of rendering her vulnerable to the attentions of unscrupulous men: ‘She was too young when her mother died to have received any cautions or words of advice respecting the subject of a woman’s life’ (III). At this stage, though, the danger seems less than real, for Ruth experiences it, as she experiences the loss of her mother, in dreams. The night of her attendance at the ball in the shire-hall passes as a fantasy for her in which ‘it was enough to gaze, and dream of the happy smoothness of the lives’ of the dancers: ‘She did not want to know who the people were’ (II). As in the dream of Keats’s Madeline after a ball on a similarly cold January night, she encounters most significantly in this dream the man of her destiny. This man also comes precisely to replace the mother who has hitherto been the chief inhabitant of her dreams. Jenny, the roommate who has heard her nocturnal sobbing, now observes the sleeper’s smiles and supposes her to be ‘dreaming of last night’: It was true she was; but one figure flitted more than all the rest through her visions. He presented flower after flower to her in that baseless morning dream, which was all too quickly ended. The night before, she had seen her dead mother in her sleep, and she wakened, weeping. And now she dreamed of Mr Bellingham, and smiled. (II) It is ironic that she should welcome her mother’s supplanter with a smile, and she will waken soon enough to the cruel reality of what has happened to her. She can continue at least to invest her mother’s memory with enormous value – something that the daughters in the other novels, who have been separated even earlier in life from their mothers, cannot do. The mother of Clotilde, for example, has died when her daughter was seven, and so far as we know Clotilde does not recollect her. Still episodes recounted in La Curée suggest that she too may have experienced the

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idyllic phase. In moving to Paris, her father had wished to leave both Clotilde and her brother behind in the country. But Clotilde’s otherwise frail and self-effacing mother has insisted upon bringing her four-year-old daughter with her to Paris, where the father’s neglect has probably contributed to the closeness of mother and daughter. When her mother lies dying three years later, Clotilde plays uncomprehendingly at the bedside with her doll, and at the moment of her mother’s death, ‘la petite Clotilde berçait sa poupée sur un bord du drap, doucement, pour ne pas réveiller sa mère’.10 The loss of her mother is oddly associated again with the entry into her life of her man of destiny. Eager to be rid of his daughter, her father sends her immediately to his brother Pascal and marries the second wife for whom negotiations have begun even before the death of the first. Clotilde grows up then with the man who will become her passionate lover eighteen years later. Instead of erasing the traces of her mother, Pascal may also reinforce, as the good suitor, the doubling tendency of mother and daughter. For while Clotilde cannot recall her mother Angèle, the mother continues a shadowy existence among the files stored in Pascal’s armoire. In opening for Clotilde her own file on the critical evening of their clarifying struggle, he points out that her genetic inheritance comes chiefly from her mother. He describes, admittedly in not entirely flattering terms, the respects in which Clotilde imitates her mother: «Ta mère l’a emporté en toi, tu as son bel appétit, et tu as également beaucoup de sa coquetterie, de son indolence parfois, de sa soumission. Oui, tu es très femme comme elle, sans trop t’en douter, je veux dire que tu aimes à être aimée. En outre, ta mère était une grande liseuse de romans, une chimérique qui adorait rester couchée des journées entières, à rêvasser sur un livre.» (V) The mother–daughter configuration also shadows Clotilde’s relationship with Félicité. Clotilde not only imitates, that is, the indolent dreaminess of the mother that she does not recollect but becomes initially the ally and then the rival of her vigorous paternal grandmother. As allies at first in their affection for Pascal – while disapproving his irreligion – the grandmother and granddaughter may repeat the pattern of the mother and daughter who both love the good suitor. That suitor, who elsewhere becomes an implicit member of the family, is here, however, already a blood relative. For reasons that psychoanalytic criticism can best understand, Zola has evidently wished to represent the pattern in an especially incestuous version of the family romance. The two female characters are based in reality upon the two women with whom Zola was passionately but not incestuously engaged. His wife has clearly served, in my opinion, as the model for Félicité, who was first intended to appear in the novel as Pascal’s wife and was later transformed into his

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mother.11 As has been more generally recognized, the original for Clotilde is Zola’s very young mistress, Jeanne Rozerot, who would bear him two children and arouse the understandably fierce resentment of Mme Zola.12 By transforming the two women into the mother and the niece of his protagonist, Zola has unnecessarily, as one may suppose, but purposely made both relationships incestuous. The triangle that includes mother, daughter and lover also becomes unstable because of its own inner tensions as well as because of the external historical forces that menace all idyllic potentialities. In a situation that involves some striking parallels, Lavinia too learns from the man who aspires to become more than an uncle to her the truth about a mother that she cannot recollect. She has grown up from the age of seven, like Clotilde, in the home of this supposed uncle, Mark Jones, whose wife (somewhat like Félicité in the case of Clotilde) has engaged her affections. With this supposed aunt, she has enjoyed an attenuated version of the mother–daughter idyll. Then the death of the aunt triggers a series of revelations whereby Lavinia finds that Jones is not her uncle and that she is the illegitimate daughter of one Mary Holywell. Although that name implies a certain sanctity, the woman seems to have been a prostitute who has sold her daughter to Jones’s brother and has eventually died in dissolute poverty from consumption. Lavinia realizes that she has lost at once her dear aunt and the unknown mother that she has always imagined to be a model of devout maternity. The shattering of the idyll could not be more devastating: A thunderbolt does not carry stronger conviction of its reality to the senses of the terror-stricken wayfarer, at whose feet it falls, than did the truthfulness and authenticity of Mr. Jones’s statement to the almost stunned mind of Lavinia. She took in, nevertheless, at one glance and for ever, its whole purport, and was spared at least the struggles of suspense. All failed her at once – the past, the present, the future, even her own identity. The very affection, which from the other side of the grave cast a ray of light into the camera oscura of her life, was no longer hers – she had no right to it. Her inner as well as her outer world reeled and crumbled about her. Despair clutched the poor girl’s heart, and hiding her face with her hands, she burst into a passion of tears. (II:vi) The failure of the maternal figure, in this case even as a purely imaginary possibility, again accompanies the emergence of the would-be lover. As a negative version of Clotilde’s uncle Pascal, ‘Mr. Jones tried to console [Lavinia] in his way’. His way is to insist with crude brutality that since he is not really her uncle she must marry him forthwith. Lavinia would thus come, in a sense, to share this man with the dear woman supposed to be

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her late aunt. But although the relationship might technically recall other positive situations in which mother and daughter love the same man, this possibility of doubling obviously appals Lavinia. What is duplicated and multiplied is the wasting revelation of inauthenticity. All the figures who have constituted her identity – including the late aunt, who was not an aunt and who could not genuinely have respected her husband – mirror the same corruption. From the other side of the grave too comes not maternal affection but the infection of consumption, reminding us of other pestiferous gravesites in the novels. The contagious breath dissolves at once the sheltering camera oscura of her inner world as well as the material protection of her outer world. In fleeing without a spiritual inheritance and without financial resources, Lavinia decides courageously, however, to abandon the name Jones and to call herself Miss Holywell. For the daughter-protagonists of the two remaining novels, the situation initially emerges as almost more desolate since there is never any idyll – not even a recollected or imagined one – to be shattered. Already a young woman, Grace Harvey continues to live with her widowed mother, as do Lucia and Lilian. But Mrs Harvey scarcely resembles Agnese or Mrs Ashleigh, for debt-ridden and embittered she has become only an additional burden for her daughter in ‘the daily drudgery of life’ (II). While nothing Grace does can please her, she comes, in contrast again to Agnese and Mrs Ashleigh, to reproach her daughter especially for always wanting to go ‘ “to your young man” ’ (XXVI). That young man, Tom Thurnall, troubles her conscience, for as Grace will discover during the cholera epidemic, Mrs Harvey has stolen his money belt after Grace’s rescue of him from the sea. The money, given the impossibility of honestly accounting for it, lies uselessly hidden away, and the theft has perversely benefited Mrs Harvey only by arousing Tom’s suspicions and spoiling his love for Grace. The mother has jealously struggled to steal from her daughter, as it were, the man himself who owes his life to that daughter, and a complex triangle of rival desires and animosities has resulted. Still Grace does not, at least consciously, resent the mother who continues to engross her affections. Although removal of the maternal obstacle would vastly improve the quality of her life, she prays for her mother’s survival and yearns for the establishment some day of harmony between them. Only in that desire does one detect after all an allusion to the idyllic motif. From the viewpoint of her most un-maternally harsh godmother, the young Esther Summerson may ironically seem more fortunate than Grace in that she has never lived with her disgraceful mother. The godmother would train Esther indeed to give up entirely on her mother – never to remember her, never to imagine her, never to desire her: ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come – and soon enough – when you will understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can. . . . Forget your

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‘Our feverish contact’ mother, and leave all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness.’ (III)

Precisely as a woman, however, Esther nourishes what Dever calls ‘her phantasy of origins’ or of ‘an anterior utopia’ shared with the mother.13 She may to some extent enact that idyllic relationship with the doll to whom she confides all her secrets. One may think here of the little Clotilde too, who quietly mothers her doll beside her mother’s deathbed. The little girl grants herself in imagination the maternal affection that she loses in actuality. More than the other daughters Esther also remains, as she grows up, her mother’s double because of their extraordinary physical resemblance.14 That resemblance indeed perpetuates the trace or phantom of the ‘anterior utopia’ that has never actually existed. In her frequent apostrophes to her mirrored reflection, Esther thus addresses not only her buried self but the trace of the mother that she is unknowingly imitating. In this unrealized sense, she lives always in the presence of her mother’s image – or perhaps always with the reminder of the absence of her actual mother, the original of that reflected image. Meanwhile Lady Dedlock expresses a parallel self-division between authentic woman and reflected image although the authentic component initially goes undetected. It appears to most people in her world that her beautiful physical appearance and fashionably self-contained hauteur represent the entirety of her being.15 This means that the reflection in the glass, at which she too looks frequently, and the various portraits and engravings of her are the many equivalents of her superficial self. When she goes to town, the narrator notes that ‘My Lady is at present represented, near Sir Leicester, by her portrait’ (XVI), as if Sir Leicester may take as much satisfaction in My Lady’s representation as in her real presence. A possible disadvantage for her of such a situation is that the wanderings of her various doublings elude any central control. Rather than an identity that can be pinned down, she is only a ghostly facet, as Cynthia Malone has even argued, of ‘an unnamed, three-faced figure in flight’ behind which there is ‘no one’.16 This restless, mildly Gothic ghost can turn up anywhere, as when young Jobling (alias Weevle) decorates his lodgings with engravings of her and the other components of the ‘Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty’. In this last instance, ironically, she comes in the form of her likeness to inhabit the room in which her lover Captain Hawdon has died. As the narrator’s question – ‘where is she’ – has implied at the time, she ought to have arrived there earlier, in order to nurse her lover in his last illness. In one of her ghostly apparitions, to Jo, she has of course been looking for traces of that lover, and one may speculate that her ghosts have unwittingly been seeking the ghostly traces of their daughter as well. Without

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knowing it, both she and Esther are engaged in a quest for the missing, authenticating component of the shared mother–daughter identity.17 Their failures repetitively enact, then, the fragmentation of the idyll that has never been other than broken. Worse than unconscious enactment of the fragmentation would be its rehearsal in a painfully conscious and voluntary dimension, and this may actually occur, again because of the operations of a menacing male figure. Mr Guppy, as the version here of the bad suitor, threatens both mother and daughter. In taking the likeness of Lady Dedlock off Jobling’s wall, he seems to be touching My Lady herself: ‘ “It were in vain to conceal from you” ’, he tells his friend, ‘ “that between myself and one of the members of a swanlike aristocracy whom I now hold in my hand, there has been undivulged communication and association” ’ (XXXIX). Guppy has had communication, in fact, with both Esther and Lady Dedlock. Enticed by the beautiful face, he persecutes Esther mercilessly, and then having first met Lady Dedlock in the guise of her portrait at Chesney Wold, he pesters her too with letters and visits. In the portrait he has perceived, as Anny Sadrin remarks, a signifier possessed of a ‘double reference’.18 Although he intends then to bring the two signified women together, his interference ironically serves rather to arouse an awareness of division. After his first visit to Lady Dedlock, she breaks down into ‘a wild figure on its knees’ that cries in despair, ‘ “O my child, my child!” ’ (XXIX). She is no longer the simulacrum of a fashionable lady, one amongst many painted and engraved doubles. But in bringing her secret and supposedly dead child to life, Guppy has identified the double from whom she must now live in anguished separation. With her new load of remorse and terror of imminent exposure, the resumption of her mask becomes an ever more desperate necessity. In the knowledge of her mother’s identity, Esther experiences a new anguish as well. She has always been dead, she now learns, in the dimension inhabited by her mother. She was never supposed, as her godmother had emphasized, to be born or to grow up. Subsequent events too, like the burial of her doll and the use of the handkerchief bearing her name as a shroud for Jenny’s baby, have continued to mark her as the dead child. The motif is repeated in the meeting at Chesney Wold when, amidst what Schor considers a mutually menacing contagion, her mother waves the possibly infectious handkerchief at her.19 But now the mother insists that the daughter abandon her and consider her henceforth as dead.20 In order to live, each of them must reckon the other to be dead, but each of them will thus remain haunted by the ghostly double that reduces with its impalpable contagion the will to live. As she leaves the precincts of the Dedlocks, Esther again senses the menace of the ghostly dead child, and one portion of herself flees from that other portion in terror: my echoing footsteps brought it suddenly into my mind that there was a dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost’s Walk; that it was I, who

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‘Our feverish contact’ was to bring calamity upon the stately house and that my warning feet were haunting it even then. Seized with an augmented terror of myself which turned me cold, I ran from myself and everything. (XXXVI)

The ghostly, Gothic location, in which the purportedly dead daughter doubles or echoes the seventeenth-century ancestress and haunts the living woman, parodies the nursery and other sites of the mother– daughter idyll. For Esther the relief in leaving such a pestilential site is so extreme that her declaration of independence, just two paragraphs later, from the maternal heritage is uncharacteristically defiant. Her recent recovery from the contagious disease and the loss of the face that imitates her mother’s constitute the precise signs of her individual integrity and worthiness: ‘I saw very well that I could not have been intended to die, or I should never have lived: not to say should never have been reserved for such a happy life. . . . I knew I was as innocent of my birth, as a queen of hers’. The queen, in her view, may derive her status from her marriage to the king, which makes other factors regarding her origins irrelevant. Whereas other daughters unhappily depart from the regions of an innocent birthright and encounter the moral contagion of patriarchy, she happily escapes from the maternal contagion into a new environment of innocence. *

*

*

Esther’s sense of happiness and innocence does not last long, for in what may be considered the second phase of their experience the daughters all become the objects of contending and devastating desires. When the mother and daughter cease to function as doubles, a conflictual manifestation of doubling emerges between the two male rivals who desire the daughter. A triangle is formed that involves a good and a bad suitor. The figure that precipitates departure from the maternal setting is often, as we have seen, the bad male suitor rather than the father of Freud’s Oedipus complex and Lacan’s Law of the Father. Girard indeed maintains that the father himself does not usually operate as the most troublesome version of the male rival and double.21 Yet among the rival claimants that foment the pathology of disorder in our novels, some do possess paternal associations. The two principal rivals generally belong to an older and a younger generation, and the older and thus more paternal figure is usually, if not invariably, the bad one. Whether or not we discern fatherly qualities in him, the older rival is usually superior in terms of wealth and social authority to the younger man. This is obviously the case with Don Rodrigo, who also exerts his power, as if he were the father, to forbid the marriage of Lucia to Renzo. His desire for Lucia increases, it is of further interest to note, with the wish to demonstrate his power to others rather than from the prompting of sexual lust. When he first meets her, the cousin who is with him laughs at

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the spectacle of Lucia’s daring to rebuff him. Don Rodrigo feels bound in honour to avoid ridicule and to prove his virility. ‘Scommetiamo’, he replies to his cousin’s taunt that day, and when Lucia pointedly ignores him again on the next day, he adds, ‘vedremo, vedremo’ (III). The increasingly obsessive desire to win his wager, which he offers even to double, and to emerge as superior to his sceptical cousin motivates all his subsequent intrigues. In its contagious effects, his perverse desire to have his power recognized also undermines the healthily erotic component of the desire in both Renzo and Lucia. One of the worst effects of the contagiously ‘bravo’ mentality, as we have remarked, is seen in its contamination of Renzo. In reaction to Don Rodrigo, the younger man must win his own sort of bet, and he comes to imitate the tactics of his rival. He begins to think like a bravo himself: ‘Renzo era un giovine pacifico e alieno dal sangue, un giovine schietto e nemico d’ogni insidia; ma, in que’ momenti, il suo cuore non batteva che per l’omicidio, la sua mente non era occupata che a fantasticare un tradimento’. In fantasy he already enacts the murder of Don Rodrigo: Si figurava allora di prendere il suo schioppo, d’appiattarsi dietro una siepe, aspettando se mai, se mai colui venisse a passar solo; e, internandosi, con feroce compiacenza, in quell’immaginazione, si figurava di sentire una pedata, quella pedata, d’alzar chetamente la testa; riconosceva lo scellerato, spianava lo schioppo, prendeva la mira, sparava, lo vedeva cadere e dare i tratti, gli lanciava una maledizione, e correva sulla strada del confine a mettersi in salvo. (II) When he repeats such revolutionary fantasies to Lucia, she finds her lover virtually unrecognizable: ‘“Io m’era promessa”’, she tells him sadly, ‘“a un giovine che aveva il timor di Dio”’. Caring more for his revenge than for Lucia herself, Renzo responds with desperate determination: ‘“E bene!” gridò Renzo, con un viso più che mai stravolto: “io non v’avrò; ma non v’avrà né anche lui”’. If Renzo cannot have Lucia, at least he will have the satisfaction of preventing Don Rodrigo from having her too. Renzo and Lucia quarrel, and not only anger but perhaps techniques of deception begin to interrupt the sincerity of their intercourse. The narrator speculates that Renzo may to some extent be simulating a fury that he hopes will terrify Lucia into submitting to his violent schemes. In such situations, ‘quando due forti passioni schiamazzano insieme nel cuor d’un uomo, nessuno, neppure il paziente, può sempre distinguer chiaramente una voce dall’altra, e dir con sicurezza qual sia quella che predomini’ (VII). The danger is that anger towards his rival will predominate over the fancied love for Lucia, resulting even in anger towards her. The episodes of Renzo’s flight suggest further deterioration of his character as he drinks to excess, harangues mobs and nourishes illusions of

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power as a man of the world. Meanwhile Lucia will come in her captivity to regret the attachment to her poveretto Renzo as possibly displeasing to the Virgin. So she resigns her lover in her turn with the satisfaction of thereby preserving herself from Don Rodrigo as well; the obsession with Don Rodrigo causes the two lovers to lose the erotic desire for one another. Lucia also loses the desire to live, which apparently makes her more susceptible to the plague. The literal disease similarly emerges in the case of Don Rodrigo as a possible result of his own obsession. He will lose his wager, but so too may Renzo. The power struggles of the lovers in Lavinia lead to a similarly generalized state of self-defeat. The situation presents more complexity than that of I promessi sposi, however, because the coquettish heroine encourages at first her lover’s rivals, of whom there are many. She does not, to be sure, encourage the most fatherly of these, Mark Jones, the supposed uncle with whom she has grown up. Nor does Jones emerge in the early Roman part of the story as precisely a rival, but he and Paolo take an instant dislike to one another that may hint at things to come. The more immediate rivals are confidence artists, Count Mendez-Fortiguerra and Cavaliere Martucci. Although Paolo easily recognizes their fraudulence and coolly despises them, his speculations during a walk on the Pincio show that jealousy is beginning to haunt him. He entertains a fantasy of Lavinia’s secret engagement to the effeminate Cavaliere who seems almost like a woman in disguise. Despite his resistance hitherto to a love affair that would seriously threaten his artistic vocation, the dawning jealousy makes him now begin to desire Lavinia’s love. The recognition of his love occurs, that is, in Girardian terms as the jealous imitation of an ‘obstacle-model’.22 When Lavinia suddenly leaves Rome to spend three days in Frascati but then remains away for a week, Paolo readily convinces himself without any evidence of the Cavaliere’s being one of her party. His relief in discovering that Lavinia apparently does not care for the Cavaliere will cause him impetuously to propose marriage. Taken by surprise, she agrees with equal impulsiveness but then immediately regrets her rashness and plagues him with further occasions for jealousy. Paolo’s new rivals become the sinister Prince Rocca-Ginestra, who has like Don Rodrigo a criminal past, and the Marchioness Juanita. To Paolo’s thorough discomfiture, Lavinia retires to a country villa with these two in order to produce an opera – a scheme in which Paolo plays no part. The plot of the opera, which involves Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots and the Earl of Leicester, reproduces the furious jealousies that now characterize the triangular relationship among Lavinia, Juanita and the Prince.23 Love, as Mortimer Thornton has warned Paolo from the start, is a disease that ‘may leave your soul a cripple for life’ (I:vii), and Paolo has tried in vain to resist the contagion. Lavinia too resists and then helplessly resents the effects of love upon her: ‘ “I begin to feel irritation with [Paolo]” ’, she writes to a friend, ‘ “for the trouble he is causing me” ’.

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Lavinia’s letters document, indeed, an interesting awareness of the perversity involved in the conflicts not only between lovers but within each lover. He has told her, she reports in a passage already quoted in part, of his selfdivision: ‘There are stirring within me strange energies, either for good or evil; bid them take a lofty aim. I am, as it were, a child groping his way in the dark – illumine my path, and make me good. I feel as if I had something here and here,’ pointing to his forehead and his heart – ‘something like a golden thread worth discovering. Help me, and make me great. Be my good genius; be my muse; be –’ (I:xvii) In finding similarly conflicting energies within herself, she finds herself, against her own intentions, trying to wound him. As if it were a contagious virus, an imp has come to inhabit her: ‘ “I remember hearing an author of some fame . . . affirming that not he, but a homunculus within him, had written [his books] . . . not unfrequently against his will. I suppose I have some sort of an imp, a fæminula, for whose sayings and doings I the woman am not responsible” ’. Oddly the degree of her love at any moment seems inversely related to the degree of her security in the possession of Paolo: ‘ “we value most what we risk losing – when it seems secure we no longer value it” ’. At other times her love strikes her as a phenomenon of what she thinks may be his ‘magnetism’. His presence exercises a fascinating ascendancy over her, apparently overcoming the ‘irresistibility’ on which she has originally prided herself, but in his absence this power declines (I:xxii). Besides a disease, love is then a battle of magnetic wills, and military metaphors figure prominently in many episodes. According to a chapter entitled ‘A Stormy Truce’, the two ‘contracting powers’ have each ‘a particular bonâ fide interpretation of the agreement, at perfect variance and clashing with the interpretation of the other’. And ‘rare it is’, adds the narrator, ‘that, under such circumstances, what was to cement peace should not beget war’ (I:xxiii). Lavinia agrees to see him more often but believes her moral right to carry on an independent life is recognized, whereas Paolo officially forgives her but privately condemns her immorality. Soon they become ‘belligerents’ again, and the possibility of actual bloodshed is not ruled out. Lavinia imagines with a certain excitement that Paolo would be capable, as his own fantasy will imply, of murdering her. The operatic scheme involving Lavinia, Juanita and the Prince ends in disaster, but this is no victory for Paolo. He follows Lavinia forlornly to Paris, there to find himself again abandoned. At this point something worse than the imp that has contaminated Lavinia enters his system. The evil emanating from his rivals seems, as has happened to Manzoni’s Renzo, to possess him: ‘A new-born power’, we recall, ‘swells his heart,

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hardens his muscles, a power boundless for mischief’. While in fantasy, like Renzo, he thus commits murder, the actual mischief is done chiefly to himself. The emotional strain causes him that night to collapse with what appear to be symptoms of cholera, whereas the disease is a moral infection. In the next episodes, after his long convalescence, he frequents charming artists and decayed aristocrats of the Parisian libertine milieu, which mildly corresponds in its moral viciousness to the bravo culture of Manzoni’s novel. The contagion of the environment, in which Paolo also becomes acquainted, interestingly, with the novels of Balzac, is irresistible: ‘The atmosphere in which Paolo lived, notwithstanding his attempts to neutralize it, began to tell on him, imperceptibly, but steadily’ (II:xii). An attractive ballerina seduces him – because Paolo has rebuffed her and like Don Rodrigo she wishes to show off her power to her colleagues. In imitation then of dissolute rivals Paolo participates in the sexual games and leads for a time a debauched existence in which his artistic calling is forgotten. In A Strange Story Margrave may be identified as the rival who belongs to the older generation. For although he looks so youthful, we come to suspect that he is far older than Fenwick. Rather than radiating, as first appears, ‘the contagious vitality of . . . perfect health’, he actually diffuses the germs that threaten the realm of Mrs Poyntz with disintegration. The threat involves the unleashing of sexual desire as we gather from the nearly orgiastic effect of his wild performance of the tarantella upon her piano. When the dancing, which we have already seen as figuring contagion, becomes most frenzied, ‘Margrave started up, caught the skeleton hand of lean Miss Brabazon, and whirled her into the centre of the dance’. That spinster will thereafter conceive a ruinous, if absurd, passion for Fenwick and plot successfully to destroy her rival, Lilian. And as Mrs Poyntz realizes that her realm is in danger and attempts, too late, to enforce exile upon Margrave, she longs to win Fenwick for herself and joins in the plotting against Lilian. Amidst the disastrous propagation of rivalries among the women, the principal triangle remains that involving Margrave and Fenwick as rivals for Lilian. Margrave’s own motive differs, however, from those of the male rivals in most of the stories. Desiring neither sexual gratification nor the satisfaction of proving his superiority to other virile agents, he wishes to gain the scientific or pseudo-scientific knowledge that would permit distillation of the elixir of life. To this end he sows havoc in the community and seeks unscrupulously to subject both Lilian and Fenwick to his will. The paranormal capacity of Lilian to intuit truth and the acutely scientific and rational brain of Fenwick are both potentially useful to him. But to attain his end, he must prevent the two lovers from uniting against him, and his plots succeed in separating them. On his account the two quarrel, as indeed happens frequently when the bad rival provokes the jealousy of the good rival.

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In causing this quarrel, Margrave widens a split already present within Fenwick – an internal rivalry between Fenwick the scientist and Fenwick the lover. The scientist in him, to whom Margrave appeals, has always been hostile to Lilian, a situation that echoes the dilemma of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.24 Lilian belongs to the regions of ethereality and ‘soul’, which his materialism refuses to recognize and from which he has been secretly hoping to remove her. Indeed, the tremendous egoism of his admiration for his own scientific prowess, expressed in the treatise that he is composing, has always been subverting their love. During his work on that treatise, certain hints have indicated its function as a rival of Lilian for his nocturnal affections. At the end of one night, for example, when his written arguments have just demonstrated the impossibility of any after-life, he experiences a ghostly nemesis similar to the footsteps in Bleak House: Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh, – a compassionate, mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat, looked round, amazed to discover no one, – no living thing! The windows were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A silvery whiteness, vaguely shaped as a human form, receding, fading, gone! Why, I know not – for no face was visible, no form, if form it were, more distinct than the colourless outline, – why, I know not, but I cried aloud, ‘Lilian! Lilian!’ My voice came strangely back to my own ear; I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly. (XX) The determination to reject foolish, sentimental fallacies relates him indeed to Margrave, who will read and approve of his great treatise, but with one fundamental objection: ‘ “Why such a waste of argument” ’, asks Margrave, ‘ “to prove a fact so simple? In man, as in brute, life once lost is lost forever; and that is why life is so precious to man” ’ (LXXVI). Margrave carries his materialist convictions, which include the acceptance of paranormality, to ruthless extremes. He will sacrifice all other principles and all human affections and loyalties to the supreme value of indefinitely preserving his own physical existence and youthful health. So his attitude brings out the more crude implications of Fenwick’s position and suggests the moral corruption that already breeds within the latter. They are doubles engaged in the same power struggle as becomes clear in the tremendous fight for possession of Margrave’s strange wand. Managing at last to wrest the wand from his opponent, Fenwick turns it against him and forces him to do his bidding. Yet even if the position of the antagonists is thus reversed, both are defeated. The damage that both have perpetrated against Lilian, the object of their common desire, cannot be easily undone.

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In the triangular pattern of Old Saint Paul’s too, the heroine suffers greater damage than the two rivals. The bad rival does not literally belong here to an older generation, for at the start of the story the Earl of Rochester is only eighteen years old.25 But ‘ “though a mere boy in years” ’, as Mrs Bloundel remarks of the Earl to the gallant Wyvil (unaware that she is addressing the disguised Earl himself), ‘ “[he] is a veteran in libertinism” ’ (I:i). Ainsworth seems also to imagine him as an older, more experienced, Byronic figure, and of course he occupies a much higher social position than that of the grocer’s apprentice Leonard Holt. His original motivation makes him especially similar to Don Rodrigo. He boasts to his friends about the conquest of Amabel and wagers a large sum upon the successful outcome of the affair. The enterprise presents many difficulties because Amabel is so carefully guarded, and his schemes sometimes go awry: ‘ “These failures” ’, he nevertheless insists to Lydyard, ‘ “are only incentives to further exertion” ’ (I:iv). He enjoys the challenge and displays enormous ingenuity to prove that nothing can finally withstand his will to have his way. Indeed he vaingloriously assures Amabel, her mother and Leonard themselves of their inevitable defeat. This triangle differs importantly from the others, however, in that Amabel falls in love with Rochester and shows increasing coldness towards her mother’s candidate, the faithful Leonard. Still she knows that she must discourage Rochester and makes supreme efforts to resist the passion. To help herself she tells Leonard sometimes of planned assignations so that he can hinder them. Like a virulent disease, love nevertheless attacks and destroys her powers of resistance, and the novel frequently compares, as we have seen, her hopeless moral contagion to the actual plague. A version of the contagion strikes Leonard too. Possessed by violent jealousy, he cannot cease for an instant to watch for signs of the villain’s operations. Often he sees what others overlook: ‘Wyvil found means to deceive the vigilance of the grocer and his wife, but he could not deceive the vigilance of a jealous lover. Leonard discovered that his mistress had received a letter. He would not betray her, but he determined to watch her narrowly’ (I:i). Spying secretly upon Amabel, he becomes, in fact, one of the principal invisible watchmen of the novels. It appears that Rochester can turn up anywhere, and as with the plague no barriers can stop him. Although Leonard often comes to blows with him and puts him temporarily to flight, Rochester will always come back, as intrepid as ever. Leonard himself is therefore even more the besieged captive than the controlling watchman. He ought to rid himself of the infatuation that has in his case too become a wasting disease. Especially after Amabel’s elopement, Dr Hodges and other friends point out that he should forget about her and Rochester. Amabel does not deserve Leonard’s passion, which has become more nearly a fixation upon Rochester than a valid form of love for Amabel.

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Interestingly enough, Rochester becomes a similarly driven figure. His determination surprises the friends who advise him early on to pay off the wager and forget Amabel as clearly not worth the trouble. The plague itself has struck the house that he plans to break into, but ‘ “I cannot forget her” ’, he insists: ‘ “My feelings have undergone a total change. If I am capable of real love, it is for her” ’ (I:iii). Willing to risk for her the plague, he thereafter debates whether love has not conquered him and discerns, in Byronic fashion, the struggle between his own criminal imp and his noble tendencies. Amabel has more power over him, he later assures her, than he possesses over her. His vulnerability resembles that of Ruffini’s Paolo to Lavinia – ‘ “‘I am like soft wax in your hands, ready to be moulded to any shape you please” ’’ (Lavinia I:xvii) – as we learn from a passage already cited in part: ‘I will quit the court if you desire it; will abandon title, rank, wealth; and live in the humblest station with you. You know not what I am capable of when under the dominion of passion. I am capable of the darkest crimes, or of the brightest virtues. The woman who has a man’s heart in her power may mould it to her own purposes, be they good or ill. Reject me, and you drive me to despair, and plunge me into guilt. Accept me, and you may lead me into any course you please.’ Then when she refuses to trust him, the more criminal side of his character emerges, and he denies that she has power over him: ‘You are in my power, and I will use it. You shall be mine, and without the priest’s interference. I will not degrade myself by an alliance with one so lowly born. The strongest love is nearest allied to hatred, and mine has become hatred – bitter hatred. You shall be mine, I tell you, and when I am indifferent to you, I will cast you off. Then, when you are neglected, despised, shunned, you will regret – deeply, but unavailingly, – your rejection of my proposals.’ (IV:iv) The debate continues, for he cannot be indifferent to her. He convinces her to marry him but arranges a bogus ceremony so that he can later abandon her with impunity. The diabolical nurse Judith Malmayns has, however, double-crossed him, and it turns out that the marriage is valid. Yet when Judith offers to murder Amabel so that he can proceed to make a richer and more socially acceptable woman his countess, he demurs.26 Although he has tried to resist loving Amabel, a ‘real’ love has after all conquered him. The villain has in this case come to imitate, in his honest passion, the good suitor. He wants Amabel to survive now as Countess of Rochester and despairs upon learning that the plague,

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because of Judith’s treachery, already infects her. Morally speaking, the cause of Amabel’s death is nevertheless not the plague but the fever of love that has finally made her confide in the honourable intentions of her seducer. That contagion has infected all three of these figures and, amidst their power struggles, defeated them. The defeat receives emblematic depiction at the end of Book IV when the body of Amabel is loaded onto the plague cart. The ubiquitous Solomon Eagle, arrogantly speaking as usual for God, reproves the desperate attempts of Rochester to hinder the ignominious carting away of his wife, and the ever-watchful Leonard is reduced to impotence as well: ‘Place her in the cart,’ cried Solomon Eagle – for he it was – to the bearers. ‘This is a just punishment upon you, my lord,’ he added to Rochester, as his injunctions were obeyed – ‘oppose them not in their duty.’ It was not in the Earl’s power to do so. Like Leonard he was transfixed with horror. The other bodies were soon placed in the cart, and it was put in motion. At this juncture, the apprentice’s suspended faculties were for an instant – and an instant only – restored to him. He uttered a piercing cry, and staggering forward, fell senseless on the ground. (IV:vi) At such points the distinction between the rivals in terms of good and bad breaks down. In Two Years Ago, to proceed to the last novel in which the older or socially superior rival is bad, the pattern is also slow to emerge. It appears at first that Tom himself combines the functions of the two suitors, for Grace considers him at once a divine gift and a dangerous temptation. She has rescued him from drowning, and we understand later that she considers him a sort of reincarnation of her drowned brother, to whom she was strongly attached. This association implies, in Tom’s mind, some rivalry between himself and the dead brother, but he supposes that there is ‘not much [to] fear from a rival who has been washed out of this world ten years since’ (XIV). As a most negative factor for Grace, however, is Tom’s ‘godlessness’, an affliction that she and some of the other believers in the story evidently diagnose as a type of illness. Major Campbell feels helpless, for example, to save Tom in this respect: ‘The disease was entrenched too strongly in the very centre of the man’s being’ (XVIII). In addition, the matter of the stolen money belt must separate Grace from Tom. She knows that Tom, reasonably enough, suspects her of the theft or of knowing who the thief is. Grace herself suspects her mother but lacks proof, and her mother will not confess. Divided loyalties therefore paralyse Grace. While longing to confess to Tom her suspicion of her mother so as to win his confidence in herself, she cannot bring herself to betray her own mother.

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The conflict within Grace is mirrored in Tom’s inner debate. When she accompanies him in visits to the sick, as Clotilde similarly accompanies Pascal, he finds her gentle ways of comforting the sufferers effective to the point that they move him as well. He must dissociate himself, however, from the religious implications of her benignly contagious consolation. And although he tries to convince himself that her having stolen his money need not interfere with his love, that matter remains as deeply troubling for him as for her. The emergence of a much older and richer man as an obviously bad rival infects him with another strain of disease besides that of godlessness. After a sick call in which Grace’s sublimity arouses greater admiration than ever from Tom, she precedes him on the homeward path and is assaulted in a wooded area. Hearing her shriek, Tom rushes to the rescue and finds that the would-be rapist is the alcoholic Squire Trebooze of Trebooze – with ‘an evil laugh upon his face’ like the lascivious Jones and Duncan when they similarly threaten Lavinia. Tom and Trebooze fight: ‘Not a word passed between them. Silently and instinctively, like two fierce dogs, the two men flew upon each other; Tom full of righteous wrath, and Trebooze of half-drunken passion, turned to fury by the interruption’. Tom of course wins, as Fenwick has won the analogous fight with Margrave. The enraged Trebooze is sent home with Tom’s humiliating proposal of calling on him the next day to inspect his wounds: ‘ “As a doctor, I am still bound to see after my patient’s health” ’. But his patient’s brutal sexuality has proved contagious; an imp, to use Lavinia’s term, invades him. To the thankful Grace’s plea to her rescuer, ‘ “O, if you would but become a Christian!” ’, he responds in a godless way: ‘She had never looked so beautiful as at that moment. The devil saw it; and entered into the heart of Thomas Thurnall. He caught her in his arms, kissed away her tears, stopped her mouth with kisses’ (XIV). Maddened then by her resistance, he insists just as Rochester has done at a comparable moment with Amabel in proclaiming his ‘power’ over her: ‘ “I shall keep you in pawn for my belt. Till that is at least restored, you are in my power, Grace! Remember that!” ’ Her accusation then that he is ‘ “even such another as Mr. Trebooze!” ’ makes him desist, conscience-stricken, because ‘ “like Mr. Trebooze I am not. Forgive and forget, and let us walk home rationally” ’. In effect, he has imitated Trebooze, Rochester and other rivals in their bad phases in his misunderstanding of the principal font of power in such relationships. Stronger than the man’s ability to exercise violence or, as in Tom’s case, to blackmail, is the woman’s ‘dominion’. Even if he has originally contaminated her, she has become, as we have observed in Rochester’s admission, ‘ “the woman who has a man’s heart in her power” ’ (IV:iv). Still the factors of the woman’s power over the man and the man’s over the woman remain entangled and continue to trouble both of them. Weeping behind her veil, as they walk ‘rationally’ home, Grace recognizes

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and weighs the two considerations. He belongs to her, but she trembles before his judgement: She loved that man intensely, utterly. She did not seek to deny it to herself. God had given him to her, and hers he was. The very sea, the devourer whom she hated, who hungered to swallow up all young fair life, the very sea had yielded him up to her, alive from the dead. And yet that man, she knew, suspected her of a base and hateful crime. Intuiting behind the veiled face her state of mind, Tom similarly remains uncertain of his power. He must continue to submit to her moral superiority and resist the devil or contaminating imp that tempts him again to exercise his own superior physical force: Tom could not but see what, after all, no human being can conceal, that Grace cared for him. And the devil came and tempted him once more; but this time it was in vain. Tom’s better angel had returned; Grace’s tender guilelessness, which would with too many men only have marked her out as the easier prey, was to him as a sacred shield before her innocence. So noble, so enthusiastic, so pure! He could not play the villain with that woman. (XIV) For many members of the community, however, the rivalry between Tom and Trebooze continues to involve doubt about which of them is the villain. Tom naturally insists upon his own moral rectitude and power. When Trebooze absurdly sends Tom a challenge the next day to fight a duel, Tom ridicules Mr Creed, the bearer of the challenge. He makes Creed fear a counter-challenge that would punish him too for his part in such a dishonourable scrape. ‘ “There was my game – to frighten him” ’, Tom tells his friend Frank Headley, the Anglican vicar: ‘ “He’ll take care Trebooze shan’t fight, for he knows that he must fight next. He’ll go home and patch the matter up.” ’ Then to consolidate his superior position Tom follows through on his plan to call on Trebooze and to dress his wounds in front of his wife. To the vicar’s question about his motives for such a proceeding, he replies with what may seem an unholy glee suggested again by his devil: ‘Power. To have them, or any one, a little more in my power. . . . I knew that he dared not fly out at me, for fear I should tell Mrs. Trebooze what he had been after – you see? Ah! it was delicious, to have the great oaf sitting sulking under my fingers, longing to knock my head off, and I plastering away, with words of deepest astonishment and condolence. I verily believe that, before we parted, I had per-

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suaded him that his black eye proceeded entirely from his having run up against a tree in the dark.’ (XIV) In this power game, Trebooze does not yet admit defeat. He publishes a counter-version of the facts of that night which gains credit among Tom’s many enemies. Tom hears of it when Squire Tardrew refers to ‘ “that night Trebooze caught you and [Grace] together” ’. Tardrew speaks for the property owners that Tom’s warnings about cholera and campaign on behalf of sanitary reforms so deeply offend. According to Tardrew, Tom has also subjected Grace through some mesmeric means to his power: ‘I’ll tell you what, sir; ever since you’ve been in this parish you’ve been meddling, you and Mr. Headley too, – I’ll say it to your faces, – I’ll speak the truth to any man, gentle or simple; and that ain’t enough for you, but you must come over that poor half-crazed girl, to set her plaguing honest people, with telling ’em they’ll all be dead in a month, till nobody can eat their suppers in peace.’ (XV) The outbreak of the epidemic will vindicate Tom and defeat Tardrew, Trebooze and others like them. But with respect to his moral condition, Tom is still afflicted with the disease of godlessness. In the pattern that Kingsley establishes he also has in God a far more powerful rival than Trebooze for possession of Grace. Although Tom’s influence has, in Tardrew’s impression, ‘come over’ Grace and infected her with dangerous scientific notions, she will always remain primarily loyal to God. Against the divine rival Tom’s vaunted power is exerted in vain, and like the other human rivals in the triangular intrigues he must suffer defeat. If God can function as one of the contenders, he must naturally be referred to the class of the older, paternal or more strongly authoritative rivals. So these older rivals – that have so far included Don Rodrigo, Jones, Margrave, Rochester, Trebooze – need not always be bad, and the remaining three novels identify them indeed as entirely virtuous figures. In Ruth, quite clearly, the younger Bellingham functions as the bad rival while his good counterpart is the older clergyman, Mr Benson. Admittedly, Bellingham does occupy a social and financial position much superior to Benson’s, but in other respects we can associate him with the suitors who belong more nearly to the younger generation of the heroines. The parallel between the two rivals is established at first in terms of their rescuing functions.27 The day after Ruth’s initial encounter with Bellingham and her dream of him, he suddenly appears on horseback and, as she looks on, rides into the river to rescue little Tom. The child floating in the washing-tub is being ‘carried away slowly, but surely, by the strong full river which eternally moved onwards to the sea’ (II). More

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ambiguously, Bellingham will later rescue Ruth herself when she is exiled from Mrs Mason’s establishment and carry her off to Wales. There they stay in an inn that is termed the ‘Noah’s Ark’ because a long spell of rain confines the guests indoors. Old Saint Paul’s, it is worth recalling, also contains a ‘Noah’s Ark’ – the house of the Bloundels, barricaded against the plague and the libertine Rochester. And in Gaskell’s novel too, the various threatening elements – rushing water, erotic passion and contagious disease – are to be associated with one another. The Ark does not offer Ruth adequate protection, however, from these elements, and so Benson comes into her life as her true rescuer, to rescue her from Bellingham. Rather bored with Ruth, Bellingham urges her to go walking alone one day, and her path uphill beside a stream requires at one point a dangerous crossing on stepping stones: ‘The sound of rushing waters was in her ears to the exclusion of every other noise; her eyes were on the current running swiftly below her feet; and thus she was startled to see a figure close before her on one of the stones, and to hear a voice offering help.’ She accepts the hand of the hunchback, and they continue to walk upwards through a glen and into pasture land. In the course of his entertaining conversation, he points out fox-gloves, which according to legend do not bend and sway in the wind: ‘ “The Welsh tell you that this flower is sacred to the fairies, and that it has the power of recognizing them, and all spiritual beings who pass by, and that it bows in deference to them as they waft along” ’ (V). His own sensitivity to an invisible, ‘spiritual’ dimension will lead him, unlike Bellingham, to value Ruth less for her physical beauty than for her other qualities. In response to Ruth’s report of her adventure, Bellingham diminishes its significance and reproves her for referring to the ‘ “shabby and seedy” ’ hunchback as a ‘ “gentleman” ’: ‘ “He’s not a gentleman” ’ (V). On the next day Benson observes the child that ‘indignantly’ insults Ruth with a phrase that unknowingly echoes Bellingham’s: ‘ “She’s not a lady!” ’ (VI). Unfortunately Ruth interprets Benson’s glance, when she meets it, as a further reproof of herself. But for her Benson remains a ‘gentleman’: As she turned, she saw the mild sad face of the deformed gentleman, who was sitting at the open window above the shop; he looked sadder and graver than ever; and his eyes met her glance with an expression of deep sorrow. And so, condemned alike by youth and age, she stole with timid step into the house. (VI) Bellingham then takes her out for a walk that strikes us for its precise contrasts with the walk upwards into the pastures of the day before. They come ‘to a deep descent’ and follow a path that leads ‘sharp down’ into a ‘green gloom’ on the ‘lowest plane’. There instead of the stream they find a ‘circular pool overshadowed by the trees’, and instead of fox-gloves

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there are water-lilies. Bellingham picks these lilies, arranges them in her hair and insists that she look at her reflection in the pond. The reflection reveals the aspect of her that most enchants Bellingham: ‘Her beauty was all that Mr Bellingham cared for, and it was supreme. It was all he recognized of her, and he was proud of it’. She too ‘could not help seeing her own loveliness’, but she is not narcissistic. Her physical beauty ‘seemed abstract, and removed from herself. Her existence was in feeling, and thinking, and loving’ (VI). She vibrates, like Benson’s fox-glove, to spiritual impulses that Bellingham can never perceive. The tensions implicit in the potential triangle lead, as if contagiously, to a series of illnesses. Bellingham falls ill that evening with what develops into a brain fever, and later Benson injures himself so painfully that his suffering results in a fever too. Ruth seems to be the immediate cause of both illnesses, and she must succour both men. The rivalry between them comes to entail a competition regarding which of them needs her more. Finally she will succumb to a fever as well during which her pregnancy will be discovered as if it were one of the symptoms. Since Bellingham has entered Ruth’s life, we recall, as a replacement for her mother, her immediate impulse upon finding him unwell is to associate his condition with her mother’s invalidism: ‘ “Let me put my cool hands on your forehead,” she begged; “that used to do mamma good” ’ (VI). Thereafter she becomes by instinct a strong and effective nurse: ‘Exceeding love supplied the place of experience’ (VII). But then Bellingham’s own mother arrives to replace her, and she is cruelly dismissed from the scene. She runs in desperation for miles, it appears, to overtake the carriage that bears him away from her and eventually falls by the roadside, longing only to die. There Benson sees her for the third time, and as he had once saved her from falling into water, he tries to rescue her anew. His exclamations of pity arouse memories again of her mother, and now it is Benson who seems to take her mother’s place: Ruth lifted up her eyes, and looked at him with a dim perception of the meaning of his words. She regarded him fixedly in a dreamy way, as if they struck some chord in her heart, and she were listening to its echo; and so it was. His pitiful look, or his words, reminded her of the childish days when she knelt at her mother’s knee, and she was only conscious of a straining, longing desire to recall it all. (VIII) An inner struggle ensues between her own versions of the bad and good angels. The presumably bad angel, the imp, rekindles her desire for Bellingham, and she repels Benson in order to continue her chase after Bellingham’s carriage. The chase is also a confused rush towards suicide, for the setting again contains water from which Benson may not this time save her. The ‘dashing sound’ of a ‘little mountain stream’ tempts her ‘to

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seek forgetfulness in the deep pool into which [the water] fell’ – recalling the ‘circular pool’ in which Bellingham has had her gaze at her own beauty. But her good angel causes her loyalty to swing back again to Benson when, in going after her, he falls and emits a cry of acute anguish. She interrupts her flight: ‘Ruth, speeding on in her despair, heard the sharp utterance, and stopped suddenly short. It did what no remonstrance could have done; it called her out of herself. The tender nature was in her still, in that hour when all good angels seemed to have abandoned her’. Instead of throwing herself into that pool, ‘she made a basin of her joined hands, and carried enough of the cold fresh water back to dash into his face and restore him to consciousness’. The gesture recalls the putting of her cool hands on Bellingham’s brow, the healing touch that will be repeated with cool water when she nurses him at the end of the novel. What saves her now is the recognition of how much the suffering hunchback needs her: ‘she was wanted in the world, and must not rush hastily out of it’ (VIII). She helps him tenderly back to town where he arranges for her to move into his lodging house. A suicidal yearning after Bellingham nevertheless continues to compete with loyalty towards Benson, whose appeals ‘for His [God’s] sake’ not to fly off again are ‘answered by the demon, who held possession’. Then an inspiration prompts him to frame the appeal in the name of the mother about whom he knows nothing: ‘In your mother’s name, whether she be dead or alive, I command you to stay here until I am able to speak to you.’ . . . At length he said: ‘I know you will not go – you could not – for her sake. You will not, will you?’ ‘No,’ whispered Ruth; and then there was a great blank in her heart. She had given up her chance. She was calm, in the utter absence of all hope. (IX) In his feverish dreams of that night, Benson seems defeated over and over again with respect to Ruth as ‘she fled, relentless, to the deep, black pool’ (IX). The landlady awakens him in the morning with news of Ruth’s own dangerous illness. The fever that seems contagiously to spread from Bellingham to Benson to Ruth may typify the defeat, as in the other novels, of all three figures. Of course Benson will largely succeed in rescuing Ruth, whose pregnancy is now discovered, from Bellingham, and Benson rather than Bellingham will perform the paternal function in the life of Ruth’s son. But many years later Bellingham will return, bringing the erotic menace of rushing waters back into Ruth’s life. They meet beside the sea, and as a storm breaks later that night Ruth realizes, in a passage already cited, her helplessness before the renewed passion raging

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within her: ‘ “I do believe Leonard’s father is a bad man, and yet, oh! pitiful God, I love him; I cannot forget – I cannot!” ’ And with that ‘she threw her body half out of the window. . . . The wind was rising, and came in great gusts. The rain beat down on her’ (XXII). Like the other bad rivals Bellingham attempts at this point to assert his superior ‘power’. Knowledge of her guilty secret permits him, as in the case of Kingsley’s Tom with respect to Grace, to blackmail her: ‘ “If I spoke out ever so little, [these good people at Eccleston] would throw you off in an instant. Now!” ’ he continues menacingly, ‘ “do you understand how much you are in my power?” ’ Yet his love for her actually places him, like Tom and Rochester and the others, in the woman’s dominion, and in response to her firmness he retires baffled from the scene: ‘ “Neither you nor your child shall ever more be annoyed by me. I wish you a good evening” ’ (XXIV). In this case, unfortunately, the annoyance does not end here. The power struggle that had begun with Bellingham’s seduction and impregnation of Ruth will culminate in his transmission to her of the fatally contagious fever.28 On some fundamental level she has always been more in his power than he in hers. Resulting from her loyalty to the younger rival, her death also constitutes a more grievous loss for Benson than for her seducer. Bleak House too will associate the desire that the heroine inspires in lovers with disease. With respect to the love, we notice that it arises not only in the breast of male lovers but in everyone with whom she comes in contact. Her narrative tells frequently of her being surrounded always by attentive well-wishers that heap much more affection on her than she deserves. In the observation of Goldie Morgentaler, however, her tainted heredity has endowed her with another attracting capacity too: ‘Esther attracts to herself that other symbol of disastrous and degenerate propagation – disease’.29 Rather than allowing them to find her out, she seems to draw both love and contagious disease, as if they were interrelated, to herself. The fever that mars her beauty also seems in her self-deceptive thinking to have provided her with an immunity that will thereafter protect her from the more dangerous fevers of love. The early love triangle in which she figures, involving rivals that resemble Benson and Bellingham with respect to Ruth, may demonstrate such a result. The guardian Jarndyce, whom Esther had once speculated might be her father (VI), gives the heroine a home just as Benson does, while Guppy, like Bellingham, appreciates her only for her physical beauty. When that beauty is lost as a result of the contagious fever, Guppy immediately ceases to function as a rival and no longer poses a threat. The more important rival, however, is always Allan Woodcourt, and far from offering protection from love, the ravages of the disease will in this case increase the power of her attraction. The triangle that includes Woodcourt, Jarndyce and Esther constitutes, indeed, one of the most

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extraordinary in these novels.30 It calls into question the necessity of the otherwise ubiquitous power struggles whereby one party’s gain must mean another’s loss, leading probably to a general defeat. It does not show the dynamics of love as necessarily manifested in jealousy, hatred, battles; the disease may appear to be healed. Or, more probably, wasting pathologies do continue to operate in this love story while remaining subterranean and concealed through processes of self-deception. As in the episodes involving Esther and her mother, events regarding her rival lovers are, then, occurring simultaneously in at least two different dimensions, partially concealed from one another. In the more buried, irrational (and possibly demonic) dimension Esther and Woodcourt clearly desire one another, but in the more superficial and rational dimension she must first give her preference to Jarndyce. She believes that after the loss of her beauty Woodcourt can no longer desire her, and she owes an immense debt of gratitude to Jarndyce. In his letter to her, Jarndyce nevertheless insists, as she reports, ‘that I owed him nothing, and that he was my debtor, and for very much’. His letter addresses her ‘as if our places were reversed’, suggesting a complex instance of doubling whereby he imitates her condition and invites her to imitate his. The situation to which he refers, involving her power and his indebtedness, actually applies, however, only on the irrational, underground level. She recognizes the inauthenticity of such a reversal in terms of the surface realities that place her obviously in Jarndyce’s power. Rationally, there is no choice but to accept his proposal, despite all his assurances regarding her entire freedom. But if he couches his proposal in deceptive terms, her response entails an equal degree of self-deception. Although the letter announces what she has long dreaded, she must convince herself of her happiness. Her reflection in the mirror, offering a glimpse of the hidden dimension, is apostrophized: ‘ “So Esther, my dear, you are happy for life . . . happy in the undeserved love of the best of men.” ’ Yet her reflected, buried self weeps: Still I cried very much; not only in the fulness of my heart after reading the letter, not only in the strangeness of the prospect – for it was strange though I had expected the contents – but as if something for which there was no name or distinct idea were indefinitely lost to me. I was very happy, very thankful, very hopeful; but I cried very much. (XLIV) Her tears, like those shed in Tennyson’s lyric while looking at the ‘happy’ fields, are precisely not ‘idle’. It is not true that there is ‘no name’ for what is, in Tennyson’s phrase, ‘no more’, since Woodcourt’s name belongs with the withered flowers that she immediately goes on to burn. A week must also pass before she can bring herself to inform Jarndyce of her

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acceptance. The persuasion of her happiness receives a further jolt in the next chapter when she meets Woodcourt at Deal upon his return from India – wafted hence, in the Tennysonian image, by ‘a sail,/That brings our friends up from the underworld’. (The sailor-physician and survivor of a shipwreck reminds us of Kingsley’s Tom Thurnall too.) She interprets his facial expression as that of feeling ‘very sorry for me’ and is ‘glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten’ (XLV). Placing herself in his past rather than his present, she can indulge the notion of love. For, like the burnt flowers, it exists only in that other, imaginary dimension – ‘the days that are no more’ – concealed from present reality. But then it transpires that he does still love her in the present, and at this point she can only seek to make him understand why she must give her supreme loyalty to Jarndyce: ‘From my childhood I have been,’ said I, ‘the object of the untiring goodness of the best of human beings; to whom I am so bound by every tie of attachment, gratitude, and love, that nothing I could do in the compass of a life could express the feelings of a single day.’ ‘I share those feelings,’ he returned; ‘you speak of Mr Jarndyce.’ (LXI) Indeed he must go on to share those feelings in the sense of imitating her in her devotion to Jarndyce. He must feel grateful admiration towards Jarndyce not just because of his own dealings with Jarndyce but as a sign of his love for her and identification with her. By their mutual devotion to Jarndyce they will thus be secretly expressing or sublimating their buried love for one another: ‘ “If your highest homage and respect had not been his already, – which I know they are, – they would have been his, I think, on this assurance, and in the feeling it would have awakened in you towards him for my sake” ’. Woodcourt agrees ‘fervently’, as if this were a satisfactory way to enjoy Esther’s love. Their mutual self-denial, on the surface, disguises but somehow fulfils their underground love, and Esther again defines her ‘rushing tears’ as signs of happiness and her bondage as ‘triumph’: ‘They were not tears of regret and sorrow. No. He had called me the beloved of his life, and had said I would be evermore as dear to him as I was then; and I felt as if my heart would not hold the triumph of having heard those words’ (LXI). Power, as Foucault repeatedly finds, operates most effectively when concealed, and throughout these developments Jarndyce has managed to disguise his own power, even from a part of himself, as self-denial. His proposal to Esther, phrased as a humble petition, has mastered her while convincing her, as we have seen, of his entirely unselfish altruism. Betraying then the element of self-deception, he claims later that he has really wished to confer a blessing upon her rather than to benefit himself. Only after Woodcourt’s return has he intuited how matters secretly stand

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between the young people, whereupon he has invited Woodcourt to talk to Esther and inform him of her response. So Woodcourt has actually proposed to Esther as a sort of secret agent of Jarndyce, who has contaminated the sincerity of their mutual confidences, which have also amounted to exaltations of Jarndyce himself. The underground manipulations continue in the creation of the new Bleak House and in the unilateral decision of Jarndyce to cede Esther to Woodcourt. In the apparent reversal of the buried and superficial levels, the repressed love of Esther and Woodcourt emerges into the open as a power that can be exercised publicly. But in repressing now his own love, Jarndyce secretly, or perhaps not so secretly, maintains his own particular power. Like Esther and Woodcourt, whose love had previously and paradoxically triumphed in the moment of renouncing it, Jarndyce defines his renunciation too as the very opposite of self-sacrifice. His insistence constitutes an almost ominous warning to them: ‘Allan,’ said my guardian, ‘take from me, a willing gift, the best wife that ever a man had. What more can I say for you, than that I know you deserve her! Take with her the little home she brings you. You know what she will make it, Allan; you know what she has made its namesake. Let me share its felicity sometimes, and what do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing.’ (LXIV) The woman here has become an object and not a participant, as Sedgwick and Gayle Rubin, citing Lévi-Strauss, find to be characteristic of ‘patriarchal heterosexuality’, in an exchange that occurs between men.31 Perhaps Jarndyce does sacrifice nothing in this exchange because he knows that Esther and Woodcourt, bearing an enormous gratitude to him, will remain in his power. They will have to let him share their felicity, in a sort of ménage à trois, more often than his ‘sometimes’ would indicate. But they do also gain one another, and the pretence is that no one loses and everyone gains.32 Meanwhile the novel has contained, as John Kucich has noticed, another triangle in which that pretence does not obtain.33 There have been two rivals in the case of Esther’s mother too, the younger Captain Hawdon and the older Sir Leicester Dedlock. Although Sir Leicester pardons his wife, who flees and dies at the grave of her lover, desperation and disease defeats all three of them. The recollection of this defeat may subvert the too firmly asserted ‘felicity’ of the components of the other triangle at the end of the story. The triangle in Le Docteur Pascal also reflects and thereby reverses, as mirrors do, certain features of the principal triangle of Bleak House. The two male rivals, a paternal figure and a younger man, are again both good suitors who seek to avoid antagonism. The older one, the brother of

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Clotilde’s father, has also been like Jarndyce the heroine’s guardian, while the younger Ramond is, like Woodcourt, a physician whose career the older man has sponsored. There is, though, the reversal, which in this case relates to chronology. The heroine first agrees to marry the younger man and then ends up with the older. The hope remains that jealousies are healed and the vicious effects of power struggles avoided. Although Clotilde does not deceive herself in the manner of Esther, the initial prospect of marrying Ramond places her in an analogous position to Esther’s in the initial agreement to marry Jarndyce. Clotilde greatly respects but does not love Ramond, and marriage to him would mean submission to social pressure, duty and the claims of power. Pascal’s own respect for public opinion, as well as some more obscure imp,34 has led him to create the obstacle and rival that he now urges upon Clotilde. He authorizes his disciple Ramond to propose to her, as Jarndyce has done with Woodcourt, and Ramond makes his case in a sensible way: «Je vous assure, Clotilde, que c’est le dénouement le plus sage . . . Vous le savez, voici longtemps que je vous aime. J’ai pour vous une tendresse et une estime profondes . . . Mais cela ne suffirait peut-être pas, il y a encore que nous nous entendrons parfaitement et que nous serons très heureux ensemble, j’en suis certain.» (VI) Trying to argue in an equally rational manner, Clotilde points out that Mlle Lévêque would constitute a wiser choice for him: ‘ «Elle est plus jolie, plus riche que moi, et je sais qu’elle serait si heureuse» ’. He has reflected about this other possibility, however, and prefers Clotilde, who should also realize that she cannot expect to find a better man than himself: ‘ «vous n’avez vous-même pas de meilleur parti à prendre» ’. The matter reduces largely to questions of self-interest and a recognition of Clotilde’s limited possibilities for choice. She asks for time to consider and turns the conversation to the topic of Pascal’s health, about which Ramond can offer a medical opinion. The only factor that can really unite her to Ramond is that of their mutual devotion to Pascal, like the devotion for Jarndyce that Esther and Woodcourt share. So the subject of Pascal brings new animation to their faces, and Clotilde allows Ramond to take her hand. Pascal, who has discreetly left the room precisely to give Ramond the opportunity to propose to Clotilde, re-enters and experiences an epiphany, ‘un éblouissement’: ‘en les apercevant tous deux, si près l’un de l’autre, si animés, si jeunes et si beaux, dans le soleil, comme vêtus de soleil, il s’arrêta sur le seuil. Et ses yeux s’élargirent, sa face pâle se décomposa’ (VI). The revelation that they do love and will marry has suddenly shown him his jealousy, and he falls more seriously ill. Erotic longings torment him as he fears that he must die without ever having known a woman carnally. The old and ailing King David haunts his fantasies – David, to whose

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bed the servants conduct the beautiful Sunamite virgin Abisaïg so that she can sleep beside the king and warm him. Eager leafing through his fifteenth-century Bible leads him to similar episodes involving Booz and Ruth and various other patriarchs and young women. In his delirium he lives in those Old Testament times, and to him too comes a fair slave, ‘l’Abisaïg dévotieuse et docile . . . se donnant toute à son maître . . . en esclave heureuse’: ‘elle . . . ouvrait ses bras nus, ses flancs nus, toute sa nudité divine, pour lui faire le don de sa royale jeunesse’. If desire, as Girard believes, always imitates that of some ‘mediator’, King David, Booz and the others have become for him the mediator, as Amadis of Gaul had been for Don Quixote.35 The Old Testament is revealed as a contagious book that provokes imitations of its plots in modern actuality. Reminding us of Margrave too, Pascal thirsts generically for youth: ‘Ah! la jeunesse, il en avait une faim dévorante!’ (VII). The eros of youth that Pascal desires as a cure for his old age may, in his obsessive yearning for it, also aggravate his illness. With his remaining rationality, he therefore determines to remove from his house the temptation of Clotilde’s presence by insisting upon the scheme of marrying her to Ramond. Her concern for him in his illness has caused her to avoid making plans for the marriage, which she really does not desire at all. But now he must exercise his power over her for their mutual good and, in effect, privilege a rational theory of love over a surrender to eros: Le parti auquel il venait de s’arrêter, était de forcer Clotilde à engager sa parole. Quand elle aurait accepté formellement d’épouser Ramond, il lui semblait que cette solution irrévocable le soulagerait, lui interdirait toute folie d’espérance. Ce serait une barrière de plus, infranchissable, mise entre elle et lui. Il se trouverait, dès lors, armé contre son désir. (VII) The attempt to disguise as a positive outcome the erection of barriers and the prohibition of hopes and desires recalls Esther’s sobbing insistence upon her happiness in renouncing Woodcourt. So while believing that Clotilde has at last engaged herself to Ramond, Pascal dishonestly proclaims his joy: ‘ «je suis très heureux, très heureux, mes enfants, votre bonheur va me remettre» ’ – here of course echoing, for us, Jarndyce’s felicity in the felicity of the lovers. But such presumed happiness of theirs cannot help him to recover his own happiness and health. In opposition to the harsher Victorian doctrines of resignation, true health requires that such deception be exposed, not indulged. Whereas Esther has had to depend upon Jarndyce, though, for the release of eros, Pascal can now depend upon Clotilde. She announces her rejection of Ramond, ‘l’autre’, and her choice of Pascal: ‘ «– L’autre! je l’ai comparé à toi, et je t’ai choisi . . . Je l’ai congédié, il est parti, il ne reviendra jamais plus . . . Il n’y a

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que nous deux, et c’est toi que j’aime, et tu m’aimes, je le sais bien, et je me donne . . .» ’ (VII). She continues, as she always has, to address him as ‘maître’, and in her fantasy her delight comes in passively giving herself up to him for his own entire pleasure. As she melts indeed into his fantasy, her own mediator becomes precisely Abisaïg, of whom she makes a large pastel drawing. The Sunamite maiden stands in the drawing beside an impressive King David: Il régnait, il s’appuyait en maître puissant et aimé, sur cette sujette élue entre toutes, si orgueilleuse d’avoir été choisie, si ravie de donner à son roi le sang réparateur de sa jeunesse. Toute sa nudité limpide et triomphante exprimait la sérénité de sa soumission, le don tranquille, absolu, qu’elle faisait de sa personne, devant le peuple assemblé, à la pleine lumière du jour. (VIII) The patriarchal ruler traditionally celebrates his power, as Clotilde’s apotheosis of the ‘maître puissant’ suggests, through the possession of young concubines. The enjoyment of the concubine, which is forbidden to ordinary mortals, has apparently always carried overtones of incest as well. Referring to the tales of Œdipus and King Arthur and to the royal Shakepearean tragedies, W. Arens finds that ‘mythical kingship is associated with the incestuous deed’: ‘Incest and power are inextricably linked in our minds with ascending to the existing political heights’. In the ‘ideological link between sex and power’, it also appears that incest, which is ‘reserved for the political elite’, more than other forms of sexuality ‘exalts the individual over society’.36 So incest has become, as Vikki Bell further clarifies the matter, the equivalent now available to men of any social station for the relationship in Old Testament times between king and concubine.37 Zola has therefore turned his mistress into his protagonist’s niece because the incestuous relationship offers an even stronger potency than does the elixir that Bulwer’s Margrave desires to brew. Yet the power may belong more to Clotilde than to Pascal. Despite the emphasis upon her submission, Clotilde exercises the secret power behind the patriarchal throne. Her personal decision to favour Pascal, like Jarndyce’s to favour Woodcourt, has produced the condition of harmony. That condition again implies, however, not the victory of one party but the sublimation of the power struggle, for perhaps no one has lost. Since Ramond has never been very passionately committed to Clotilde, her rejection of him does not cause him to suffer. He becomes quietly engaged to the pretty and rich Mlle Lévêque who Clotilde has indicated to him, and their future promises well. When Pascal and Clotilde greet him affectionately one day upon encountering him in town, he is first tempted to snub them but then changes his mind: ‘il se contenta d’un amical salut, d’un sourire où il pardonnait leur bonheur. Cela fut, pour tous les trois,

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très doux.’ Pascal regains his health, because of the indulgence rather than the suppression of eros, and he and Clotilde radiate a generally healthy energy – or ‘contagion’ – in the community: ‘On ne pouvait se défendre de les envier et de les aimer, dans une contagion enchantée de tendresse’ (VIII). In contrast to Bleak House, however, the story does not end here, and a counter-contagion soon threatens the health and happiness of Pascal and Clotilde. In the community that has envied and loved them, the factor of jealous envy eventually prevails over love. Religion and public opinion, especially in the person of Félicité, cannot finally permit the idyllic love of such an irregular couple as King David and Abisaïg to flourish. The powers that Blake associates with Urizen-Jehovah pull them, as it were, back into the bondage of contemporary history, and Pascal sends Clotilde away to her ailing brother. So as in all the novels, except perhaps Bleak House, the impression of a generalized defeat of the parties engaged in the triangular struggles emerges. *

*

*

Le Docteur Pascal and the other novels do nevertheless manage, in what may be considered a third stage of the narrative, to indicate attempts at reconciliation that may mitigate the desolation of defeat. These reconciliations concern the figures composing the lovers’ triangles and, as we shall finally observe, some of the mothers and daughters. The reconciliation among the figures of the triangle is usually not so complete as in the case of Bleak House, which we have already discussed, and generally one of the figures dies. Still, the conciliatory efforts always occur and involve, except in Lavinia, mainly the two male rivals. They attempt, in Girardian terms, to convert the conflictual mimesis into a nonconflictual mimesis that implies the diffusion of a benevolent contagion. In Lavinia, to treat this exception first, the principal ‘belligerents’ have of course been the hero and heroine, and their friends must use all their influence to produce a harmonious understanding between them. Both of them have suffered physically – Lavinia ravaged by cholera and Paolo wounded in battle and now missing an arm – and each feels morally inferior to the other. Lavinia considers her illegitimacy as a form of guilt, while Paolo has committed sexual transgressions. So their reconciliation occurs as they see mirrored in each other their lost illusions, their tarnishment and their humility. It is also interesting that references to some of Paolo’s former rivals do occur in the last chapters to suggest that a kind of peace is struck with them too. Count Fortiguerra turns up on the ship that carries Clelia, the sweetheart of Paolo’s companion Salvator, to the east, and Paolo jokes about him as now ‘a rival for you, Salvator’ (II:xxvi). Fortiguerra currently poses as a Polish nobleman and veteran of the campaign of 1830, a convincing impersonation that arouses the bemused admiration of Clelia and the others. He no longer threatens Paolo, who

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asks with only mild curiosity about whether the effeminate little cavaliere still accompanies the count. On the last page we learn something of the more serious rivals, Mr Jones and the Marchioness Juanita. Unrepentant and unpunished, they live on as arrogantly as ever, but they have nothing now to do with Lavinia and Paolo. Although they no longer torment the protagonists, one cannot therefore discern any attempt at reconciliation with them. That attempt occurs in Ruth and specifically fails. When they meet at the bedside of the dead Ruth, Bellingham makes offers of reparation, which Benson firmly rejects – in what may appear a disturbingly unChristian spirit. Bellingham expresses his extreme ‘ “regret that she should have died in consequence of her love for me” ’ and wishes to place a large sum in trust for the maintenance and education of his son. He will also relinquish any paternal claims upon Leonard: ‘ “I should be glad to leave the boy still under your charge” ’. Benson has not until now realized that the man presently called Mr Donne is Ruth’s seducer of some twelve years ago. Instead of forgiveness his reaction conveys only hostility: ‘Mr Benson set his teeth hard together, to keep in words little short of a curse’. On Leonard’s behalf too he ventures to refuse all financial help and virtually turns Bellingham out of the house with a denunciation of his sin: ‘ “Men may call such actions as yours, youthful follies! There is another name for them with God. Sir! I will follow you downstairs” ’ (XXXVI). The anger derives not from Bellingham’s contagion of Ruth with typhus, which is not the man’s fault, but, as one supposes, from Bellingham’s expressed conviction that Ruth has continued to love him. The two rivals meet beside the dead heroine in Old Saint Paul’s too, as we have seen, but now her death will encourage the reconciliation of the men that have loved her. The repentant Rochester helps Amabel’s family to flee from the fire and specifically asks Leonard’s forgiveness: ‘I have wronged you – deeply wronged you – but I will make all the atonement in my power, and let me think I am forgiven.’ The blood rushed tumultuously to Leonard’s heart, as he listened to what the Earl said, but, overcoming his feelings of aversion by a powerful effort, he took the proffered hand. ‘I do forgive you, my lord,’ he said. ‘Those words have removed a heavy weight from my soul,’ replied Rochester. (VI:vii) The atonement of Rochester takes the particular form of seconding the efforts of Leonard’s other friends to cure him of his obsessive attachment to the late Amabel. Rochester now guides him to the other woman, Nizza, who has so long and so hopelessly loved Leonard. Her love for Leonard has been manifested in self-sacrifice, prompting her to curb jealousy and to devote herself as companion and protectress in exile to Leonard’s

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beloved Amabel. So their common devotion to Amabel may provide, as in the analogous situations in the other novels, the basis upon which Leonard can begin to love Nizza – in effect, Amabel’s double. When it transpires that Nizza is actually the daughter of an earl and the ward of King Charles, Rochester furthers Leonard’s cause with the king, who confers a peerage upon the grocer’s apprentice. Leonard thus gains from Rochester the sort of sponsorship that Jarndyce and Dr Pascal offer to their younger rivals, and Leonard rises to the social class of his erstwhile rival. Rochester and Amabel’s family, happily reconciled, attend Leonard’s wedding, at which the king gives away the bride. In three of the novels that contain physicians as protagonists, the reconciliation occurs in terms of the physician’s relationship with his patient. Despite his many reasons for hating Margrave, Allen Fenwick thus recognizes that the medical code imposes upon him a duty to treat his sick enemy with all the professional skill at his disposal. ‘ “The moment you make yourself my patient” ’, he tells the invalid when he turns up so unexpectedly in Australia, ‘ “I am bound to consider what is best for you” ’ (LXXIV). Yet the reconciliation does not in this case go very deep even though Fenwick will cooperate with Margrave in the experiment to distil the mighty elixir. We learn, indeed, that Margrave has never intended to respect his promise to share the elixir with Fenwick so that it could benefit Lilian too. The reconciliation of physician and patient possesses greater moral meaning in Two Years Ago. A hunting party organized by Squire Trebooze in which Tom Thurnall also participates offers the occasion. Having taken more than ever to anxious drinking during the cholera epidemic, Trebooze begins to act strangely and attracts the attentive observation of Tom before that of the rest of the party. Along with the hunting dogs, he perceives a menacing black hound that no one else can see and then rushes away under a guilty impression that serpents and repulsive insects are attacking him. Tom takes charge of the situation, immediately diagnosed as delirium tremens, conducts the poor sufferer up three miles of difficult road to his home, and administers a calming dose of laudanum. Just before drifting into sleep, the tormented Trebooze pleads for his former enemy’s forgiveness: ‘ “Thurnall, Thurnall!” calls Trebooze: “don’t leave me, old fellow! you are a good fellow. I say, forgive and forget. Don’t leave me! Only don’t leave me, for the room is as full of devils as – ”’ (XVIII). The event leads to the reconciliation of Tom and another enemy, Tardrew, too, who has observed Tom’s efficient kindness and lack of all rancour towards Trebooze. Tardrew confesses that Tom has after all been right about the cholera, which has just killed Tardrew’s daughter, and right about everything else. Whereas such reconciliations amount to a moral victory for Tom, his reconciliation at the end with God, the all-powerful rival, will occur as an admission of his own defeat. Although he has so enjoyed good fights

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throughout his life, he eventually admits to Grace, we recall, his ‘new cowardice’ and gives up the fight against God. The outcome is naturally to be construed as a desirable union of the victor and the vanquished. United in their devotion to God, Grace and Tom now resemble Dickens’s Esther and Woodcourt in their common devotion to Jarndyce. In Le Docteur Pascal the previously faint-hearted reconciliation between Pascal and Ramond becomes a more profound experience when Pascal makes himself, during his last illness, the patient of Ramond. Without Clotilde beside him now, Pascal also turns to Ramond as the object of his great yearning for love and embraces him: ‘il céda à un besoin débordant de tendresse, il le saisit entre ses deux grands bras, comme un camarade, comme un frère. Les deux hommes se baisèrent sur les joues, vigoureusement’ (XII). Later Ramond will administer the injections that Pascal has devised, and the men appear to collaborate intimately in an experiment reminiscent of the effort of Fenwick and Margrave to distil the elixir. While effective at first, the injections gradually lose their power, but undaunted, Pascal makes Ramond the heir of his scientific research in order to involve him in an ongoing, common endeavour. Whereas they had once been rivals in love, Pascal hopes for their affectionate partnership in science – a hope that Félicité’s burning of the manuscripts will sadly frustrate. A more surprising reconciliation between the younger suitor and his dying older rival occurs in I promessi sposi. Considering all the damage that Don Rodrigo has caused, one finds it natural that Renzo should continue to hate him and to maintain his homicidal intentions. He assures Fra Cristoforo in the lazaretto of his determination to go even to the ends of the earth in order to have it out with Don Rodrigo: ‘“E se lo trovo,” continuò Renzo, cieco affatto dalla collera, “se la peste non ha già fatto giustizia . . . la farò io la giustizia!”’ (Although the plague is not cholera, we associate it with Renzo’s ‘choler’.) Fra Cristoforo reacts passionately in his turn and exerts all his charismatic eloquence to persuade Renzo not only to pardon but to love his enemy.38 In this way Renzo can counteract the moral contagion, the choler, with which his enemy has poisoned him, and the healing influence may spread back to Don Rodrigo too. Allowing himself to be convinced, Renzo then follows Fra Cristoforo into the presence of the dying man, where the friar makes a final appeal: ‘ Il sentimento che tu proverai ora per quest’uomo che t’ha offeso, sì; lo stesso sentimento, il Dio, che tu pure hai offeso, avrà per te in quel giorno. Benedicilo, e sei benedetto. . . . Forse la salvezza di quest’uomo e la tua dipende ora da te, da un tuo sentimento di perdono, di compassione . . . d’amore!’ (XXXV) In silent prayer, Renzo does forgive, bless and utter his love for

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Rodrigo, who even if not aware of the gesture may yet receive, according to Cristoforo, his share of divine grace. The new bond, existing at least in Renzo’s mind, may strike us in its strength as among the most complete instances of reconciliation in all the novels. For Renzo, indeed, the rivals now become not himself and Rodrigo, but Rodrigo and Lucia: ‘Chi avrebbe mai detto a Renzo’, the narrator asks, ‘qualche ora prima, che . . . il suo cuore sarebbe stato diviso tra Lucia e don Rodrigo? Eppure era così’ (XXXVI). The love for Don Rodrigo and the love for Lucia that divide Renzo’s heart do not, of course, involve a serious inner conflict for Renzo. Fra Cristoforo has taught him that he can love both and leave the future developments of his relationships with them in God’s hands. The important matter is to praise God whatever the divine arrangement turns out to be. In this case God chooses to end the life of Don Rodrigo and to spare Lucia, with whom Renzo must next proceed to be reconciled. The obstacle here, as he soon learns, is no longer Don Rodrigo but Lucia’s vow to the blessed virgin and ‘Madre del Signore’. In this situation Lucia’s loyalty to the divine mother conflicts with her love for Renzo until Fra Cristoforo again finds a way to resolve the conflict. The vow to the virgin produces a conflict between Lucia and her human mother Agnese too. As we shall observe in four of the other novels as well, the last stage thus includes attempts at reconciliation not only between the male rivals but also between mother and daughter. There is, however, no question of renewing an idyllic condition. After Lucia’s release from the captivity of the innominato, she hesitates to confess her commitment to virginity, and Agnese must press her to explain the shadow that has fallen upon their relationship. Lucia’s confession then provokes Agnese’s characteristically reproachful exclamation, ‘“Ma non parlarne subito a tua madre!”’. The two of them recognize that without Renzo as a part of their lives each of them has become a ‘“povera donna”’ condemned to cling together in a diminished existence (XXVI). Fortunately, Fra Cristoforo later releases Lucia from what amounts to her mental captivity, and she will be able to marry Renzo. Just before announcing the news to Agnese, Renzo seeks to prepare her for the happiness of a future in which the three of them will be united: ‘“siete la nostra mamma: e voglio che campiamo insieme un bel pezzo allegramente, a conto del gran patire che abbiam fatto”’ (XXXVII). The desire to carry on happily for a fair stretch of time suggests, I believe, realistic rather than idyllic expectations.39 The captivity of the heroine of A Strange Story has been that of mental alienation in which she has recognized neither her mother nor her lover. Her restoration to sanity thus recalls Lucia’s release from her vow, which entails a simultaneous reconciliation with both mother and lover. The death of the bad, but now forgiven, male rival also appears once more to trigger the fortunate outcome whereby she regains not just

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mental clarity but physical health. During the night in which Fenwick and Margrave desperately brew the elixir, Dr Faber watches over Lilian, and as he reports the crisis of her fever, it must coincide with Margrave’s death: ‘For some hours in the night her sleep was disturbed, convulsed. I feared, then, the worst. Suddenly, just before the dawn, she called out aloud, still in sleep, – ‘ “The cold and dark shadow has passed away from me and from Allen, – passed away from us both forever!” ‘And from that moment the fever left her; the breathing became soft, the pulse steady, and the colour stole gradually back to her cheek. The crisis is past.’ (LXXXIX) ‘The cold and dark shadow’ may refer to the ‘dusky vapour, undulous, and coiling like a vast serpent’ that had intruded upon her vision the evening of Fenwick’s first sight of her. We have associated that serpent with Margrave, who has indeed ‘passed away . . . forever’. Without that menace, this lover, daughter and mother will live together, like Manzoni’s, for a fair stretch of time in a happier location than that of their original sufferings. Whereas Renzo takes Lucia and her mother away from Lombard jurisdiction into the Bergamasco, Bulwer’s protagonists have travelled all the way to the wilderness of Australia. The other novels narrate the death of the mother or the daughter and so imply journeys to a celestial destination and the impossibility of a fruitful reconciliation in this life. The heroine of Ruth thus finds her mother not in awakening like Lilian from a state of madness but in succumbing to ‘a sweet, childlike insanity’. While dying, she hears, as we have noticed, the waters associated with the love affair in Wales, but the death also restores her to her mother. The moment suggests, in the analysis of Marroni, ‘the warmth of a maternal embrace’ and the recovery of ‘an idyllic dimension’.40 Ruth sings during her last hours the songs of the mother that she has lost some fifteen years ago and so leaves behind in her homeward journey the living people that love her: They had never heard her sing; indeed the simple art which her mother had taught her, had died, with her early joyousness, at that dear mother’s death. But now she sang continually, very soft and low. She went from one childish ditty to another without let or pause, keeping a strange sort of time with her pretty fingers, as they closed and unclosed themselves upon the counterpane. She never looked at anyone with the slightest glimpse of memory or intelligence in her face; no, not even at Leonard. (XXXV)

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She dies as at once the daughter being reunited with her mother and the mother that abandons without farewell her child Leonard – a coincidence of reunion and separation that occurs somewhat differently in Two Years Ago. Grace Harvey imagines, that is, a passionate reunion with her mother even as the latter seeks desperately to elude her daughter. The episode begins when Mrs Harvey sneaks out of the house one night, and Grace, fearing that the guilty woman may be intending suicide, follows her on a barefoot clamber over slippery rocks. Mrs Harvey enters a cave by the sea and recovers the stolen money belt that she has hidden there, whereat a wave of agonizing compassion overwhelms her spying daughter. In a passage that I have already cited, Grace finds ‘that she had never loved her mother as she did at that moment’, and indeed she experiences an entire identity with the guilty woman. The merging of the two identities enables her simultaneously to suffer the full shame of the crime and yet to offer full forgiveness. The mimesis also entails a reversal of maternal and filial roles, whereby Grace becomes a loving mother who soothes her guilty child. In fantasy Grace yearns to ‘ “nurse her to sleep on my bosom, and then go forth and bear her punishment, even if need be on the gallowstree!” ’ (XXVI). Carrying the fainting mother home, the exalted daughter believes herself to be bearing a cross along her own Via Crucis. One can scarcely imagine a more complete reconciliation than that of the divinely atoning passion that is being enacted in Grace’s mind. At the same time, however, the mother elaborates a very different vision. She believes that Grace intends to murder her and tries to flee while apostrophizing the divine avenger: ‘ “God’s angel! God’s angel, come to destroy me! as he came to Balaam!” and in the madness of her guilty fancy she saw in Grace’s hand the fiery sword which was to smite her’ (XXVI). Terror brings on the symptoms of the cholera, and after forty-eight hours of unspeakable mental and physical anguish she dies, apparently unrepentant. For her, then, Grace has become not the Saviour who would die on her behalf but the implacable executioner – not the dispenser of divine grace but the spreader of cholera. Far from any nostalgic allusion to an original idyll, this mother–daughter plot ends, with respect to Mrs Harvey, in the most violent disjunction to be found in any of the novels. Both Two Years Ago and Bleak House may indeed support recent psychoanalytic theory that finds matricide to mark the usual conclusion of the idyll. The ‘founding moment of civilization’, in Marianne Hirsch’s summary of such theory, is the ‘mythic matricide’ of Clytemnestra, which must be repeated in every generation.41 The formation of language and culture – the foundation of the ‘Law of the Father’ – depends precisely on the suppression of the mother. And differently from what one may have expected, that suppression occurs not at the hands of the patriarchal figure but at the hands of the child. In Two Years Ago, as we have seen, Grace accomplishes the matricide unintentionally; it is willed, even if not desired, in the mind of the mother.

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In Bleak House both the daughter and the mother may share the awareness of the matricidal threat and collaborate in its execution. Albeit unwittingly, Esther has by her very existence made her mother conscious of the guilt that requires one or the other of them to die. After Esther’s recovery from the fever, Lady Dedlock accepts the inevitability of her own death while Esther speculates, we recall, about the ‘dreadful truth in the legend of the Ghost’s Walk’: ‘it was I, who was to bring calamity upon the stately house; and . . . my warning feet were haunting it even then’ (XXXVI). The threat derives, though, not from her conscious activities but from the ghostly double that she cannot control and that threatens her own conscious self as well. The portraits at Chesney Wold also typify the ghostly forces that operate especially when the house has ‘no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls’. At such times the changing lights and shadows give a kind of existence to the portraits, and a particular shadow disturbs ‘my lady’s picture’: ‘a weird shade falls from some old tree, that turns it pale, and flutters it, and looks as if a great arm held a veil or hood, watching an opportunity to draw it over her’. Later the hangman’s hood ‘changes into threatening hands raised up, and menacing the handsome face with every breath that stirs’ (XL). Long haunted herself by a sense of danger, Lady Dedlock becomes aware of its imminence when Guppy calls upon her for the second time to warn her that incriminating documents still exist. She collapses like Kingsley’s Mrs Harvey under the horror of her own impending execution. Her horror has a somewhat more rational basis than Mrs Harvey’s because there may be evidence to convict her of a capital crime. The loathed Tulkinghorn has been murdered of course by one of her doubles – Hortense – but Lady Dedlock experiences the guilt as her own: Her enemy he was, and she has often, often, often, wished him dead. Her enemy he is, even in his grave. This dreadful accusation comes upon her, like a new torment at his lifeless hand. And when she recalls how she was secretly at his door that night, and how she may be represented to have sent her favorite girl away, so soon before, merely to release herself from observation, she shudders as if the hangman’s hands were at her neck. (LV) Grace Harvey has entertained a fantasy of substituting herself on the scaffold for her mother, but it does not, naturally, occur to either mother to contemplate the possibility of such a Saviour. Lady Dedlock flees, and it turns out that she is fleeing from Esther, who pursues her just as Grace has done in trailing her mother over the rocks. Yet Lady Dedlock evidently wishes not to elude punishment but to make appropriate reparation for the years of her sterile and inauthentic existence as the fashionable lady. Her original crime resembles that of Clytemnestra, the

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betrayal of the soldier-lover, the father of her daughter, and by going to the polluted ‘berryin ground’ to die, she restores herself to him. She thereby restores herself to Esther too, who in pursuing her mother to that spot becomes strangely like Electra. In the interpretation of Hilary Schor, Esther whispers to Mr Bucket that the woman they are pursuing is her mother, and ‘as if by magic, her mother dies with that breath’.42 The confession of their relationship both reunites and divides the mother and daughter.43 The final stages of the other three novels do not suggest a reunion or a violent disjunction between mother and daughter. In Lavinia the corrupting pall that the fallen mother has cast from beyond the grave upon her daughter’s identity is quietly exorcized and forgotten. In Old Saint Paul’s the fallen daughter, buried in the plague pit, is forgiven, and the mother calmly goes on without her. The vengeful grandmother and the fallen granddaughter of Le Docteur Pascal are both living at the end, but each in her own world, in which they will cheerfully ignore one another. The mother–daughter relationships, like the other relationships of love, are thus worked out in the novels with many variations. The variations are, however, all upon the same themes and structures. What remains constant is the significance of the mother–daughter doubling in reference to some imagined idyllic condition from which the rest of life must represent a falling off or betrayal. And similarly constant are the triangular configurations that involve mother, daughter and lover as well as daughter and two rival lovers, sometimes complicated with multiple versions of one of the rivals. In terms of these patterns, love always emerges as an aspect of the historical power struggles and the historical contagion at work. The participants imitate one another and thus, or in other ways, pick up and transmit the contagion. In the economy of love it often appears too that for one party to live his or her counterpart must die, as we have seen most recently in the case of Esther and Lady Dedlock. Involving patterns of opposition and rivalry, love is expressed as violence and wasting disease that often leads to generalized defeat. In this portion of the historical arena, as in the others, the participants do, at happy moments, liberate territory from Necessity. There are the efforts to achieve reconciliations and to activate a mimesis that is nonconflictual. Between the male rivals the reconciliations may occur, however, in the interests of patriarchy, the ‘Law of the Father’. As Irigaray and Sedgwick have argued, the men appear, even when at enmity, to stick together, to make the laws and carry on what Rubin calls ‘the traffic in women’.44 While the women sometimes maintain their own occult power, they also bear, amidst the general attrition, the heavier losses. Perhaps their now fragmented mother–daughter idyll can still exert a shadow of its fascination and, despite its irrelevance to what happens in history, constitute in recollection a virtual principle of integrity. Yet the emergence of the matricidal potentiality betrays the flaw that has probably contaminated and doomed from the start even that imagined primal unity.

6

Writers and readers

The binary of writer and reader provides one of the models, in the religious perspective, for the relationship between God and humanity. The divine Logos, in writing himself in the book of nature, is the first writer, and human beings should consider themselves his humble readers. The implication for Kingsley’s Anglican priest is that human beings should not try to rival God by aspiring to become creative writers themselves: ‘ “God has written the poetry already, and there it is before me. My business is, not to re-write it clumsily, but to read it humbly, and give Him thanks for it” ’ (XX). But for many would-be readers the task proves daunting, because, as Darwin has suggested, ‘nature was not set up for our convenience in reading’.1 The Bible, as another divinely written text, seems not to offer the reading characters in our novels the same difficulty and lack of convenience. Read and referred to in episodes in all the novels, the divine text admonishes, consoles and offers patterns of conduct – in the patriarchs, we recall, for Pascal and in Jesus for many other readers. More importantly, it is the archetypal healing text because the divine author has informed it with a benign contagion that radiates from its pages. Its inspiration, as a First Cause of all subsequent healing writing, has supposedly flowed into texts like those of Manzoni and Ruffini. The impression of the healing power remains, to be sure, somewhat vague, and in reducing the Bible to a primarily healing or consoling book, its authority is attenuated. With respect to nineteenth-century theories of reading, nevertheless, any literary text may be considered positively or negatively contagious. The theories imply, in the summary of Vrettos, ‘a transmissibility of emotions from text to reader that paralleled medical and psychological discussions of suggestibility’.2 The so-called ‘sensational’ fiction might contaminate the reader in an especially painful and harmful manner. The process of reading acquires further complexity as well because it is not just a humbly passive task in which the reader submits to the influences of the text. The meaning of texts grows out of what Bakhtin considers the ‘active dialogic utterance’ of writer and reader.3 In this two-way process, readers may also impose a corruption or contagion coming from themselves upon the texts.

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Yet although Esther Summerson provides, as we shall see, a notable instance of just such a corrupting misreader, our novels usually present reading as a fairly submissive experience. Not humbly content to read the divine and other texts, many readers therefore seek to become writers themselves and to exercise authority in encounters with their own readers. On the whole the novels devote more attention to the complexities of the writing task and to the struggles among writers and their texts than to the experience of reading. For some of these writers, like Ruffini’s Miss Clara in the letter that we have noticed, the divine text remains the prototype and First Cause of all subsequent texts. Miss Clara’s very writing continues itself to read and to point to the divine finger. But more often, in the general loss of faith in a First Cause, a particular drive or, in Ruffini’s term, an imp within the writers becomes the local cause of their writing. As their writing then participates in the historical skirmishing with Necessity, they demonstrate, or fail to demonstrate, the superiority of the pen as a weapon to the sword. The superiority depends, in any case, not on the trifling instrument itself but on the virtuosity of its wielder, as stated most famously in the speech of Bulwer’s Richelieu: Beneath the rule of men entirely great The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold The arch-enchanter’s wand! – itself a nothing! – But taking sorcery from the master-hand To paralyse the Cæsars – and to strike The loud earth breathless! . . .4 As what Richelieu would hopefully consider ‘great’ rulers of the pen, our eight novelists have all aspired to produce important effects if not necessarily ‘to strike/The loud earth breathless’. But before returning in conclusion to their authorial accomplishments, our chapter observes the many, usually less than great, writers who reflect them – possibly parodying and subverting the writing task too – within the texts. In some cases the readers figured in the stories also require attention as patients or agents in the general historical spectacle of the contagious field. History is indeed occurring, its struggles being waged, in the textual dimension under examination, and at least as significantly here as in the military dimension in which swords may ‘paralyse the Cæsars’. Often the novels seem to debate Richelieu’s great respect for the potential might of the pen, as may appear first in the contrasting views of two illiterate young men. The death scene of Jo in Bleak House reveals him as a believer in the power of the pen that he cannot wield himself. Woodcourt, he speculates, might agree to forgive him if only his appeal could be published in writing. So he begs Snagsby ‘ “to write out, wery large so that any one could see it anywheres, as that I wos wery truly hearty sorry . . . and that I hoped as he’d be able to forgiv me in his mind. If the writin

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could be made to say it wery large, he might” ’ (XLVII). In demonstrating his hearty repentance, the ‘writin’ would produce the reader’s forgiveness and so tend to cancel the devastating effect of the contagion for which Jo has been guilty. While similarly associating the pen with power, Manzoni’s Renzo scorns, unlike Jo, the arrogance of that power. In the tavern that Angelo Marchese analyses, with reference to Bakhtin, as a ‘spazio demoniaco-carnevalesco’,5 he assumes the attitude of a democratic ‘predicatore’ to denounce ‘ “tutti quelli che regolano il mondo” ’: ‘ “voglian fare entrar per tutto carta, penna e calamaio! Sempre la penna per aria! Grande smania che hanno que’ signori d’adoprar la penna!” ’ (XIV).6 Sometimes Manzoni’s narrator too indicates the foolish pride of the penmen, and here, in contrast with the impression of Jo, writing possesses no power at all against pestilential phenomena. For generations the governors of Lombardy have been publishing ever more angry and menacing proclamations designed to counteract the lawless arms of the bravos who infest the country. But these published gride prove powerless and serve only to worsen the situation: Quelle gride, ripubblicate e rinforzate di governo in governo, non servivano ad altro che ad attestare ampollosamente l’impotenza de’ loro autori; o, se producevan qualche effetto immediato, era principalmente d’aggiunger molte vessazioni a quelle che i pacifici e i deboli già soffrivano da’ perturbatori, e d’accrescer le violenze e l’astuzia di questi. (I) Because of the inadequacy of the penmen, the sword here remains mightier than the pen. The impotence of the authors of words also emerges before the might of the plague itself. As if they thought that words could debilitate the contagion, the authorities at first publish reassuring accounts of the medical emergency as ‘non peste, assolutamente no, per nessun conto’. When the reality clearly contradicts that formula, other verbal descriptions are proposed, which fail in their turn – ‘febbri pestilenziali’, then ‘non vera peste’ and ‘non peste proprio’. Finally the strength of the contagion forces recognition of itself as ‘peste senza dubbio’ (XXXI). A struggle has occurred, it seems, between the human authors and the plague for possession of the pen. Since the former are not, in Richelieu’s phrase, ‘men entirely great’, they have had to cede the pen to the plague that uses it to write its own truth. The contagion has seeped into official writing. In the often vain efforts to establish positions of truth and power in writing, one also discerns a conflict between the view of language as properly constative and the belief in its performative capacity. Richelieu’s comparison of the pen to ‘the arch-enchanter’s wand’ indicates his fervent admiration for the performative function of language at its mightiest.

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Noting the centrality of ‘questions of language’ in I promessi sposi both for ‘the narrative style’ and ‘the heart of the story’s subject matter’, Gregory L. Lucente argues that Manzoni, in contrast, privileges constative language. The novel concerns pre-existent truths, Lucente believes, and the characters learn to use language correctly only insofar as they can make it restore and (re)present such truths.7 The question relates, as Mary Ambrose too has argued, to the correct use or the abuse of language.8 To deny in words the force of the bravos or of the plague is to create fictions that imply an abuse of language, which the force of reality must eventually expose. As this chapter seeks to show with respect to written language, the situation is more ambiguous than Lucente and Ambrose believe. Manzoni and the other novelists actually debate the matter and often celebrate the degree to which language can do more than simply bow to the superior force of such realities as swords and plague. As it engages with reality, writing not only reports it but infiltrates it for good or for ill in a process for which contagion again provides an analogy. It proves difficult, in the whole context of the contagious transgression of boundaries, to maintain a clear distinction between constative and performative language. The complex phenomenon regards five main categories of writing, which this chapter takes up in turn: copying and legal writing, private letters, scholarship and scholarly narratives, confessional narratives, poetry. Amongst these uses of writing, the least creative and most constative may be that of copying or of taking dictation. As texts merely replicate other texts, the writing process is also especially similar to spreading contagion. The writer submits passively in these exercises to the pre-existent text or to the spoken message of another. Such writing, according to Homans, is one of the sorts that patriarchal culture especially requires of women, who ‘bear’ in this way the ‘word’ originated by men.9 Ruth accepts these tasks cheerfully: ‘The occasional copying or patient writing to dictation, that gave rest to Mr Benson’s weary spine, was done by her with sunny alacrity’ (XXXII). Clotilde undertakes with similar good will to copy notes for her ‘maître’, before her grandmother’s influence leads her for a time to disapprove of his science. Her handwriting is far better than his, and her instinct of neatness permits her, going beyond a purely passive function, to put some of his files in order. Men can ‘bear the word’ at times too, for in Lavinia the male protagonist secures temporary employment as organizer of notes and copyist for the scientist: ‘from eight to twelve, he had to put in chronological order a good many notes, and then reading them aloud, to retrench or add to them under Mr. Boniface’s direction and dictation; from one to six in the evening, to make a fair copy of the morning’s work’ (II:v). While menial, such writing tasks are not burdensome, and the ordering of Boniface’s notes usefully accompanies the slow convalescence during which Paolo’s mind and body regain their own orderly functioning. As Harriet Martineau had discovered in her sick-room, even the mechanical aspect of

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‘rapid writing’ could become ‘therapeutic, bringing the “rising glow of a warm relief” ’.10 The benefits may far exceed, moreover, those of a medical therapy: ‘Thus Paolo, in his humble capacity of copyist, had a revelation, and a bird’s-eye view, of the world of intelligence’ (II:viii). The motif of copying, as a valuable activity, also occurs with respect to other sorts of reproduction. Since Clotilde possesses not only a beautiful writing hand but a talent for accurate drawing, Pascal has her make pastel sketches of flowers relevant to his botanical work. In Two Years Ago the painter Claude Mellot comes to believe in the superiority of photography as a means for reproducing natural forms: ‘ “photographing pays better than painting, considering the time it takes; and it is only Nature reproducing herself, not caricaturing her” ’ (XIX). In various ways, therefore, the task of non-creative, constative copying can faithfully report a preexistent truth and provide other benefits as well for the copyists. More often, as a negative version of Girardian mimesis, copying or taking dictation propagates a wasting energy. With far less alacrity than Ruth and Clotilde, poor Caddy Jellyby must submit not to a man but to her mother in drafting the endless letters on behalf of Borrioboola-Gha. The production of useless writing occurs still more deplorably of course in connection with Chancery, which appears in the perpetual industry of copying and recopying to generate tons of written documents. The purpose of all the expenditure of ink, according to the narrator, is quite frankly to benefit the parasites of the legal profession at the expense of everyone else, both women and men: The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble. (XXXIX) While regarding only the legal discourse, the pronouncement anticipates the insight of Foucault, as Said discusses it, that any discourse aspires most essentially and cynically ‘to maintain itself and manufacture its material continually’.11 The Dickensian narrator’s irony allows the laity to understand the accuracy of its own perception of the ‘monstrous maze’ rather than the insidiously ‘coherent scheme’. The production, duplication and multiplication of words – hinted at even in the name of the suit that could become Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce ad infinitum – is Chancery’s way of diffusing its contagion. The spectacle of legal texts that generate ever new texts suggests too the ‘monstrous’ replication of cancer cells.12 The process takes its origin from possibly healthy performative texts

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such as wills, testaments, indentures, contracts and promissory notes that ought theoretically to perform the will of their drafters. But in the perverse growth of new texts, the originals are lost to view or are challenged by the copies, as the original Lady Dedlock may be lost among her doubles and reproductions. The process of litigation inevitably obscures, postpones and fails to execute any original intentions. Far from constatating or reinscribing truth, the writing is revealed as performative in a diseased sense. Rather than the beautiful enchantment of Richelieu, its many pens perform an artificial substitution for reality that horrifies with its deformations. With a restless power dispersed amongst themselves, the texts of Chancery may manifest what Said has further termed in reference to Derrida’s La Dissémination the ‘unorganizable energy’ and ‘disruption of writing’.13 The words ever being copied and ever entering new texts take on an indomitable life of their own like the portraits of the Dedlocks in the gallery at Chesney Wold. Those portraits require for their shadow life no living viewers, and the ghostly, written legal ‘fictions’ seem to require no thoughtful readers. They have nothing to do, in Dever’s opinion, with an authentic extra-textual world: ‘In the world of Chancery, there is no cause other than the textual, and there is no effect beyond that produced by language’.14 The authentic, extra-textual world is often aware of the wasteful irrelevance of the performance going on within the texts of Chancery. The awareness is not that of readers since no one outside of Chancery reads its texts but rather resembles that of uninvited spectators at a ghastly theatrical performance. In attending a session at Chancery, Esther compares it to a ‘polite show’. As the actors perform ‘in full dress and ceremony . . . from day to day, and year to year’, the audience reacts with ‘universal horror, contempt, and indignation’ (XXIV). The performance nevertheless continues because the actors are oblivious of any audience. They ignore Gridley, for example, the enraged suitor from Shropshire, who cries out in the courtroom to a fictional Lord Chancellor who necessarily remains ‘legally ignorant of his existence’ (I). The virtuoso performance of Jarndyce and Jarndyce wears itself out at last, having performed nothing but itself, and Kenge is left to defend the value of the enterprise: ‘On the numerous difficulties, contingencies, masterly fictions, and forms of procedure in this great cause, there have been expended study, ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect, Mr Woodcourt, high intellect. . . . If the public have the benefit, and the country have the adornment, of this great Grasp, it must be paid for, in money or money’s worth, sir.’ (LXV) The defence of the Grasp may remind us of Baudrillard’s description of the cost of ‘modes’ in the world of fashion. Like epidemics, the modes

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eventually wear themselves out, when ‘le virus se fatigue’, but in the meanwhile the cost and wastefulness of epidemics, of modes – and of suits in Chancery – is always immense: ‘Le prix à payer, en termes de gaspillage, est le même: exorbitant. Mais tout le monde y consent’.15 Kenge avoids specifying here that the exorbitant price to be paid in ‘money’s worth’ includes the lives now devastated of victims like Richard.16 As in the patriarchal reduction of women to commodities, human beings are expended in the production of the texts of Chancery. Nor does Kenge appear to realize that the commodifying process has extended to lawyers like himself. With their ‘study, ability, eloquence, knowledge, intellect’, they have not exercised any authorial control over the performance. As a discourse with its own perverse logic, the ‘great Grasp’ has instead exploited their talents and performed itself through them. The exploited human agents have resembled the host cells that parasitic viruses inhabit and destroy in the interest of a viral logic. In writing itself through the pen of the anonymous copyist Nemo, the Grasp has produced a further unintentional victim. His ‘ “original hand” ’ has not fully succumbed to the contamination of ‘ “what you people call law-hand” ’ and has so aroused the attention of Lady Dedlock (II). Conveying a coded message, the copied text has caused Lady Dedlock to swoon and so indicated the wounding power of even such a use of the pen.17 More serious than the swoon itself has been the fall of this chance reader into the hidden power of the lawyer. The hidden power of Tulkinghorn relates to the disreputable locations that provide textual fuel for the more ‘polite’ performances of Chancery. Tulkinghorn searches on the black market for other stray specimens of the handwriting that does not correspond to a ‘law-hand’, a search that risks corrupting George and others hitherto innocent of the legal contagion. His foraging takes him as well to the shop in which Krook as a precise parody of the Lord Chancellor deals in written documents with respect to their unofficial value. Given the materialist nature of Krook’s interests, as in the shape and slope of letters that he enjoys copying, the fact of his illiteracy scarcely constitutes a disadvantage. Among his clients there figures Kenge’s employee Guppy too, who unknowingly competes with Tulkinghorn to gain possession of certain papers. It happens that Krook’s stock also contains an original version of the Jarndyce will that ought to have enormous value because of its legal contents. But when inherited by Smallweed, this document ironically surfaces too late on the official market to be awarded any value in terms of its legal implications. Like the other documents and like the gride in Manzoni, it too fails to perform the original intention of its drafter. That intention admittedly remains ambiguous because the charred portions imply the drafter’s wish to cancel the document. Still, ‘ “even if intended to be cancelled” ’, as Kenge will observe, ‘ “it is not cancelled” ’ (LXII). A more comical description in Ruth of the drafting of a will suggests the

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degree to which the discredit of Chancery and its dishonest fictions had become a commonplace. The servant Sally has wished to force her probably unwilling employers to accept the inheritance of her savings of thirty pounds, but the undertaking appears arduous. ‘ “I was afeard” ’, she confides to Ruth, ‘ “the money might be thrown into Chancery, if I didn’t make it all safe” ’. So she takes advantage of the chance visit in the town of a lawyer’s apprentice to have him draft her will in appropriately obscure language: ‘ “I’ll gie ye sixpence” ’, she has told him, ‘ “for every good lawword you put in it, sounding like, and not to be caught up as a person runs” ’. The resulting document contains four such words, for which she has given the equivalent two shillings, and she has paid ‘ “besides six-andeightpence as we bargained at first, and three-and-fourpence parchment” ’. For the validity of wills also depends upon the parchment: ‘ “People gets into Chancery if they don’t make them o’ this stuff” ’ (XVIII). In the domain of documents that aspire to legal force, the most pernicious may be the forgeries. Bradshaw’s son Richard, again in Ruth, has managed through forgery to swindle Benson of his entire fortune. The horrified father does not want to believe the written evidence of the crime: ‘there was still a faint hope that he might not be guilty of forgery – that it might be no forgery after all – only a blunder – an omission – a stupendous piece of forgetfulness’. (The desperate effort to find a formulation that denies the gravity of the situation recalls the verbal pyrotechnics of the initial definitions of the Milanese plague.) But when Bradshaw brings the document to Benson, the latter can only confirm the crime. He studies the signature, ‘so startled at the fetch of his own writing’, and concludes, ‘ “It is most singularly like mine; but I could not have signed away these shares – all the property I have – without the slightest remembrance of it” ’. Urging that ‘ “stranger things have happened” ’, Bradshaw pleads desperately against all probability: ‘ “For the love of Heaven, think if you did not sign it” ’ (XXX). If not a ‘stupendous piece of forgetfulness’ on Richard’s part, forgetfulness may have cancelled something in Benson’s mind. Or perhaps the personality of Benson has disintegrated, giving rise to a diseased double, like Mr Hyde, that does things to spite his healthy self. Forged writing can produce an uncanny ‘fetch’ that challenges the authenticity of an original identity. Worse than copying in one’s own hand or in an anonymous law-hand, forgery infects the principle of authenticity and breaks down whatever authorizing power the processes of Chancery have left to writing. *

*

*

While legal documents are ineffective and subject to abuse, forgery and contradictory interpretations, one might expect letters and other private communications in writing to be more simply what they appear to be. Yet they too are ‘implicated in the sin of transmission’, as Alison Milbank describes with respect to Bleak House the relationship between written

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transmission and moral contagion.18 Private missives transmit their contagion most insidiously when unsigned. Although not forged documents, anonymous letters may similarly produce for the recipient a subversive, sick double of the original self. Thus a letter in an unknown hand – but in the phrases of which Pascal immediately discerns his mother’s style – seems to speak in his own voice. This double or ‘fetch’ gives expression, more precisely, to his own hitherto suppressed ‘reason’. In the ensuing ‘combat entre son amour et sa raison’ (XI), the rational voice of the writing infiltrates and debilitates the love that is the expression of his more authentic and healthy identity.19 A still more nasty letter reaches Lilian Ashleigh on her wedding day. The anonymous author calumniates the bride and ‘convey[s] to Lilian, in the biting words which female malice can make so sharp’, the news of her ostracism from the society of L—. The letter warns the reader not to bring her disgrace upon poor, duped Fenwick by returning with him to L—. It is, in short, a poisonous document, and its falsifications succeed in contaminating Lilian: ‘The heart that took in the venom cast its poison on the brain, and the mind fled before the presence of a thought so deadly’ (LXIII). The ‘deadly’ thought relates to the period of which she preserves no recollection, when Margrave had exerted some mesmeric control over her. She may after all have become then the fallen woman that the anonymous letter describes. So as in the incidents involving Benson and Pascal, the writing raises the ghost of a doubled self, of whom she has forgotten. The sick double embodied in the writing replaces the original, virginal personality, and Lilian loses her sanity. The letter, which performs its ugly purpose, also escapes its author’s control and comes back to haunt her too. The gaunt Miss Brabazon confesses to Fenwick on her deathbed that she has written the letter because of her jealousy of Lilian and because of her desire to gain possession of the Ashleighs’ house. After the Ashleighs have departed, Miss Brabazon’s plan to take the house for herself works out, but to her own undoing: ‘ “And I did get it. What for? – to die. I had not been here a week before I got the hurt that is killing me – a fall down the stairs. . . . If I had stayed in my old lodging, it would not have happened” ’ (LXVII). The letter that she now wishes had not been written has poisoned her as well as Lilian. The textual poisoner or untore, in the term I promessi sposi uses for the spreaders of the plague, turns out to have been Margrave. Miss Brabazon has submitted as amanuensis to him, thus bearing not the divine word but, in her confession to Fenwick, that of ‘ “the Evil One” ’: ‘ “his laugh and his song haunted me. I thought I saw him still in my room, prompting me to write, and I sat down and wrote” ’ (LXVII). As Fenwick’s rival, Margrave has wanted to thwart his union with Lilian so that the virginal Lilian could remain the clairvoyant ‘Pythoness’ in Margrave’s service. The marriage of Fenwick and Lilian will indeed remain unconsummated for many years. In its fashion the letter that has arrived on their wedding day repeats the

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terrible promise of the monster to Shelley’s Frankenstein: ‘I will be with you on your wedding-night!’ The rivalry between Fenwick and Margrave for possession of Lilian has also involved, we recall, the physical struggle to possess the wand associated with volitional and phallic power. In the present context of writing, the wand may be further associated with the pen, as it is when Bulwer’s Richelieu compares the pen to ‘the arch-enchanter’s wand’. It is also a symbol for any discourse in Said’s sense of a discourse as ‘at once the object of struggle and the tool by which the struggle is conducted’.20 In wresting the wand from Margrave and using it against him, Fenwick has emerged as the superior penman and, in the discourse of love, as the superior lover. But the struggle between them, which is also a struggle to be the author of Lilian’s story, has not concluded. Fenwick has been able to prevail for a time, in that he takes Lilian and her mother off to his native Windermere where the marriage is performed. The night before the wedding he uses the wand to call up the ghost of Margrave as if to taunt him, but the ghost warns Fenwick ominously of coming disaster. Deciding that he has had enough of the wand, Fenwick rows out to the middle of the lake and casts the wand into the water.21 We wonder, though, if he has not thus rendered himself impotent. The next day, the letter dictated by Margrave arrives, suggesting that Margrave regains possession of the wand and replaces Fenwick on his wedding night. As a possibly happier transmission of epistolary power, Jarndyce’s letter to Esther also relates to their wedding, although not explicitly a ‘weddingnight’. If any written document can do so, this one ought to perform its writer’s benevolent goal. In not offering the actual letter for our perusal, the chapter called ‘The Letter and the Answer’ (XLIV) primarily concerns the question itself of how to write, read and answer the ideal communication.22 First the writer must establish the desirability of putting the matter into writing rather than into spoken form and gain the reader’s willingness to read the missive: ‘ “I have had some difficulty in approaching [the matter]” ’, says Jarndyce, ‘ “and I still have. I should wish it to be so deliberately said, and so deliberately considered. Would you object to my writing it?” ’. Then a week must pass while he deliberately composes the letter and she prepares herself for receiving it. On the appointed night, as agreed, she sends to him her maid Charley, who thus becomes a typical female bearer of the word. The circumstances of the transmission are emphasized: Charley went up the stairs, and down the stairs, and along the passages – the zig-zag way about the old-fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that night – and so came back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought the letter. Dismissing Charley, Esther lays the envelope on the table and slowly reviews the course of her life before opening it. She recalls her sad child-

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hood, the night of her arrival at Bleak House and the other significant events there: ‘I lived my happy life there again. I went through my illness and recovery, I thought of myself so altered and of those around me so unchanged; and all this happiness shone like a light, from one central figure, represented before me by the letter on the table’. In a novel in which texts frequently exist as a phenomenon that parallels or replaces organic life, Jarndyce’s letter may not only represent him, but constitute, like ‘My Lady’s portrait’, a substitute presence. Esther also wishes, in mentally ‘living’ through her own narrative again, to fit his text, when she reads it, into her context, to make it the continuation of her own story. The light described as effectively shining from his letter may also turn out to be a light that her interpretation casts upon the text. At first, though, the light does seem to stream, like a healthy energy, from the writer. While containing no surprises, the letter impresses its reader with what it says and with what it does not say. She recognizes the pious misrepresentations, which we have already noticed, in Jarndyce’s reversal of their symbiosis as creditor–debtor, and she notes the omission of any reference to ‘my disfigurement, and my inheritance of shame’. The letter, for which the reception has been so carefully prepared, both on his part and hers, and which has been so carefully composed, transmitted and read, must represent a triumph of communication. She understands Jarndyce as well as one human being can possibly understand another and perceives the authenticity of his generosity, fidelity and love especially because he does not convey it in words: But I knew it, I knew it well now. It came upon me as the close of the benignant history I had been pursuing, and I felt that I had but one thing to do. To devote my life to his happiness was to thank him poorly, and what had I wished for the other night but some new means of thanking him? The words therefore operate both constatively to testify to the logos of the writer that exists beyond themselves and performatively to achieve their purpose with the reader. Esther allows another week to pass, to observe a principle of symmetry between her week and his week of expectation, and then conveys her response with a kiss and a single word, ‘yes’. Yet in another sense the letter is that illuminated by the reader rather than an expression of the writer’s energy. As ‘the close of the benignant history I had been pursing’, the letter is exactly the text that Esther has desired for her own narrative. During the week in which Jarndyce has been composing the letter, she has been preparing herself and perhaps composing just such a letter in her own mind. Quite possibly, she could just as well have written the letter herself. Or maybe it would not be inaccurate to say that she does write it in the form of it inscribed into her narrative. No matter what the author may have said, we suppose, she

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would have been able to bring out of the letter the meanings that she desires. Her reading determines when to trust and when to distrust the words and indeed understands the text not because of, but in spite of, the words that are taken to misrepresent and omit so much. When in his apparent humility the writer even makes a case against himself as a worthy suitor, she deconstructs his statement and perceives the justice of the suit being urged upon her. She has already admitted his claim, and the letter only confirms, as a possibly superfluous ritual, her bondage to him. For what she has desired after all is a condition of bondage, not the exercise of free choice but a situation in which ‘I had but one thing to do’. Her ‘benignant history’ involves the experience of Necessity, but not in the sense of Jameson since she makes the Necessity for herself. It is likely that Esther’s active reading of the letter – by which, that is, she comes actively and paradoxically to collaborate in the repression of her own freedom – amounts really to a mis-reading. Probably Jarndyce did not intend to force any claim upon her and did intend his self-deprecating message to be taken at face value. He may have been making for her a genuine opportunity for free choice. The words have then acquired their binding power not at the moment of their writing but at the moment of their reading. Esther’s reading, which frustrates the writer’s intention, provides an anomalous instance of Foucault’s notion about the binding power that exists in texts. Generally it is the task of the critical reader to bring into visibility the power that the author has obscured in the text and so to neutralize it. But in this case the reader rather than the author seems to have implanted that power and its exposure, instead of neutralizing, only confirms it. While not precisely comparable to the venom contained in Miss Brabazon’s letter to Lilian, the power in Jarndyce’s letter transmits an immediately unhappy effect. Esther’s willing acceptance of Jarndyce’s scheme, which is really her own, also entails her bursting into tears of sorrow for a loss that has ‘no name’. The loss cannot, that is, be allowed to have a name or a textual existence, and the letter that has in her view left so much unsaid now cancels another sort of text. In the practice that we have observed whereby texts not only copy but undermine or cancel one another, the cancelled text is that of Woodcourt’s floral tribute to Esther. Caddy has carried, as another bearer of something like a word, the flowers from Woodcourt that Esther has kept pressed, in this textual context, in a book. In a remarkable gesture, Esther now takes the withered flowers into the room of the sleeping Ada, whom she first kisses herself and to whose lips she then puts the flowers. As an alter-ego Ada can evidently be made to give the farewell kiss that Esther dares not offer directly. Afterwards she holds the flowers to the candle, ‘and they were dust in an instant’. The other kiss that Esther reports of that night is for her housekeeping keys, which Jarndyce, interestingly enough, had also ceremoniously transmitted to Esther through a young female intermediary.23 She does not kiss Jarndyce’s letter, which has now supplanted the flowers.

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The other important example in our novels of epistolary transmission between lovers involves Renzo and Lucia, and its circumstances could scarcely be more different or less ideal. A great geographical distance separates Renzo in Bergamo from Lucia, who has returned after her release from captivity to her mother. Neither lover is prepared to receive a communication from the other, and unlike Charley the carriers of their messages travel slowly and often fail to deliver the messages into reliable hands. Worst of all, the illiteracy of Renzo, Lucia and Agnese forces them to depend upon copyists who refuse to remain passive takers of dictation. The scribe necessarily attempts to improve, according to his own understanding, the quality of the communication, but the effect is to contaminate: Il letterato, parte intende, parte frantende, dà qualche consiglio, propone qualche cambiamento, dice: lasciate fare a me; piglia la penna, mette come può in forma letteraria i pensieri dell’altro, li corregge, li migliora, carica la mano, oppure smorza, lascia anche fuori, secondo gli pare che torni meglio alla cosa: perché, non c’è rimedio, chi ne sa più degli altri non vuol essere strumento materiale nelle loro mani; e quando entra negli affari altrui, vuol anche fargli andare un po’ a modo suo. Con tutto ciò, al letterato suddetto non gli riesce sempre di dire tutto quel che vorrebbe; qualche volta gli accade di dire tutt’altro. (XXVII) In contrast to Jarndyce, who has wished to engage Esther to himself, Lucia tries to convey an impression of her vow to the Virgin in order to break her engagement to Renzo. But Renzo reacts with angry incomprehension – in contrast to Esther’s total comprehension, in her own opinion, of her correspondent. Renzo refuses as a result to accept the apparent import of Lucia’s sad letter, and his faith in her continuing love maintains the validity of their engagement. So whereas Jarndyce’s letter has failed in certain respects, Lucia’s has failed in others. Renzo too takes some parts of the letter to be clear and to mean what they say and other parts to be obscure and to mean something else. But in going through the letter, as Esther does, several times, the clearer passages also tend to become more obscure: ‘Tre o quattro volte si fece rileggere il terribile scritto, ora parendogli d’intender meglio, ora divenendogli buio ciò che prima gli era parso chiaro’. The lesson to be drawn resembles after all that conveyed by Jarndyce’s eloquent missive. Communication in writing, which must involve direct statement, allusion and omission, is inevitably tricky – no matter what the circumstances in which transmission and reception occur. An example again of the ‘sin of transmission’, the correspondence of Renzo and Lucia has conveyed primarily sorrow, doubt and incomprehension. *

*

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The narrator has experienced similar difficulties with editors in his own publishing career: the typical failure ‘accade anche a noi altri, che scriviamo per la stampa’. Writing designed like that of Manzoni’s narrator for publication can nevertheless communicate for good or for ill a power superior to that transmitted through private correspondence. The novels contain interesting references to both scholarly and creative writing that precisely aspires to perform through publication a function analogous to that of healing. Most obviously there is the scholarship of physicians like Allen Fenwick and Pascal Rougon, who consider their research and writing a more significant branch of their careers than their medical practice. With respect to Fenwick, we recall that among other works he has published a well-received treatise on ‘The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply’. Now in the period that constitutes the fictional present he is working on a more boldly ambitious ‘Inquiry into Organic Life’. One of the main threads of the narrative, and competing as we have seen with the love story, is the tale of this writing task. He mentions the philosophical and scientific sources to which he is indebted, summarizes some of his arguments and describes the particular chapters, which, at various times, he is drafting. The chapters include ‘Upon Knowledge as derived from our Senses’, ‘On the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral Phantasms’, ‘Sentimental Philosophers’ and his favourite ‘On the Cheats of the Imagination’. While a lonely task, the writing offers intense polemical satisfaction, and whenever an idea especially absorbs him, he notes typically, ‘I wrote on rapidly, warmly’. The altruistic desire to benefit humanity may not, to be sure, constitute his principal motive, for he confesses a wish to transmit into the future a personal sort of power too: ‘ “I have written that” ’, according to a statement already cited, ‘ “which will found a school, form disciples; and race after race of those who cultivate truth through pure reason shall accept my bases” ’ (XX, XLVII). Sir Philip Derval enters the story as a double and rival. Himself a scholar, Derval has also been studying the phenomenon of vitality and working on an epistemological theory that may define avenues towards a more transcendental cognition of life itself. His research has taken him into occult traditions, well-represented in the old library of his country house, and has led him to study with some of the most erudite sages in the east. His wisdom now transcends and threatens that of Fenwick. But after the murder of Derval, his heir appoints Fenwick as the scholar’s literary executor with the particular task of editing his long memoir. Fenwick thus comes to contemplate the existence of more potent vital energies and the possibility for more daring applications of these energies than anything that he has previously envisaged. As a letter attached to Derval’s manuscript indicates, the potentialities of his discoveries have frightened Derval himself. Fenwick must decide which portions of the memoir to publish and which to suppress as containing knowledge that may be more danger-

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ous than beneficial – if indeed the memoir can be published at all. For in an uncanny event the manuscript suddenly disappears from Fenwick’s hands as he sits reading it in the middle of the night in Derval’s possibly haunted library. The next day the police arrive to arrest Fenwick for Derval’s murder; he is suspected of murdering the man and destroying the manuscript because of his jealousy of a superior scholar. The manuscript, which Margrave has managed to spirit away, will re-appear later but badly damaged, like so many of our documents, by fire. An intertextual rivalry exists, in effect, between Derval’s memoir and Fenwick’s ‘Inquiry into Organic Life’. As the story continues, Fenwick also appears to wish to prevent his own text from being contaminated by that of Derval. He seeks to regain his own original intellectual position and to rule out the more surprising agencies that Derval has written about. In a sort of competition among the texts, another work then becomes even more contagiously threatening than that of Derval. This is the Bible, which Dr Faber urges upon Fenwick’s attention ever more pressingly. Faber considers the materialism of Fenwick both an instance of human arrogance and an acceptance of bondage. Man as described in Fenwick’s text is the victim, Faber believes, of a paralysing hallucination: ‘Here is the hallucination of the man seated on the shores of Nature, . . . who would say to the measureless sea, “So far shalt thou go and no farther;” here is the hallucination of the creature, who . . . ends with submitting to his interpretation of some three or four laws, in the midst of a code of which all the rest are in a language unknown to him, the powers and free-will of the Lawgiver Himself.’ The scholarship of Fenwick has created only an arbitrary verbal structure that bears little relationship to the free-will and language of the divine logos. In his authorial depiction of ‘Intellectual Man’, as we have already speculated, he has possibly created a fictional character, to whose legal authority he would now subject ‘the powers . . . of the Lawgiver’. The ‘creature’ has therefore been struggling for power with the divine Author. Faber would have Fenwick, in a drastic gesture of recantation, consign his manuscript to the flames that always provide, in our novels, the appropriate fate of ‘pestilential’ writing. From writing, Fenwick should turn to humble reading: ‘Burn your book. It would found you a reputation for learning and intellect and courage, I allow; but learning and intellect and courage wasted against a truth, like spray against a rock! . . . Burn your book! Accept This Book instead; Read and Pray.’ (XLVI) Of course, the spray may slowly erode the rock, and in the inquisitorial

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extremity of his proposed remedy Faber betrays a fear of the insidiously performative power of Fenwick’s writing. Fenwick himself continues to identify that writing of his own, rather than the Bible, with the rock of factual truth and immediately returns to work on his ‘Inquiry’. Able that very night to ‘force[. . .] all my powers of mind’, he composes ‘before daybreak . . . the logical reply to [Faber’s arguments] in an elaborate addition to my chapter on “Sentimental Philosophers” ’ (XLVII). So that the debate can then be concluded in Australia, preparations for the journey entail selection of ‘such standard authorities as I might want to consult or refer to in the portions yet incompleted’. At this point, perhaps not so oddly, ‘my hand, mechanically selecting the books I needed, fell on the Bible that Julius Faber had given to me’. In the only reported instance of his actually reading the Bible, he happens upon an interesting, if obscure passage from the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras (LXVIII). Thereafter it would seem that the vicissitudes involving Lilian, more than the Bible itself, gradually erode his confidence in the scholarly project. The apocryphal passage, which relates the desire of the trees and of the seas to encroach upon one another’s territory, implies that truth claims obtaining in one region may be irrelevant in another. But as with discourses that exist side by side, the energies in each of two regions will inevitably tend, contagiously, to transgress the porous boundaries. The reference is to Fenwick’s self-division between the powerful writer in his study, where the truths of science reign triumphantly, and the defeated lover, to whom those truths mean nothing. In what turns out to be only his illusion of power, the scientist’s vision cannot outlast the night. ‘When the pen dropped from my hand’, Fenwick reports after having so forcefully controverted Faber’s arguments, ‘and the day-star gleamed through the window, my heart escaped from the labour of my mind, and flew back to the image of Lilian’. Without the pen in hand to bolster his confidence, he must view that nocturnal phase with a sad irony: ‘The pride of the philosopher died out of me, the sorrow of the man reigned supreme, and I shrank from the coming of the sun, despondent’ (XLVII). The pen that has offered that temporary illusion of freedom and power may actually operate, as he later speculates, within ‘a system’ that subjects the writer to its own ‘tyranny’: Take any writer enamoured of a system: a thousand things may happen to him every day which might shake his faith in that system. . . . But when he settles himself back into the phase of his being as author, the mere act of taking pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him restores his speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The system, the beloved system, re-asserts its tyrannic sway, and he either ignores, or moulds into fresh proofs of his theory as author, all which, an hour before, had given his theory the lie in his living perceptions as man. (LXXIV)

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The situation recalls that whereby Jarndyce and Jarndyce, despite Mr Kenge’s encomium of ‘this great Grasp’, has taken control of the human ingenuities employed in its ramifications. A sort of logical demon within the ‘system’ – or the discourse itself – grasps Fenwick’s pen and makes it write theories that are even uncongenial to the ‘living’ man. The nocturnal work on his ‘Inquiry’ subjects him to a tyrannical love, a ‘beloved system’ that rivals the daylight love for Lilian. Nor can the two regions learn, like those of the trees and the sea of Esdras, to coexist in a condition of mutual respect. As the story of the fictitious ‘Intellectual Man’, the ‘Inquiry’ has required the author sternly to eliminate not only God but the ‘Soul’ – the element associated with Lilian – from his plot. Reduced to one of the ‘Cheats’ of the senses and of the imagination, the soul is demolished, he believes, by his arguments one night. Even when Lilian’s sighs then reach his ear in the light of dawn, he must resolutely refuse to heed them. His text can offer no place for Lilian’s participation in what Lyotard may have considered the debates of his language game. Still, in a development that we shall observe in Esther Summerson’s narrative too, the silenced voice continues as a repressed part of the narrator himself to make its language felt. Its contagion does seep into his text. And eventually love for Lilian will defeat the arguments and ‘power of mind’ of the ‘Intellectual Man’. Fenwick remains, of course, a writer, but instead of the ‘Inquiry’, he publishes the narrative that we have been reading. The last lines take us beyond the fictional present to the later period in which the penman, whose solitary scholarship has once contaminated his love, is now the narrator seated beside his healthily recovered wife: ‘even . . . now, at the distance of years from that happy morn, while I write the last words of this Strange Story, the same faithful arms close around me, the same tender lips kiss away my tears’.24 While shown to be steadily composing the ‘Inquiry’ in the fictional foreground, the author has also been penning, from his later perspective, the tale of the abandonment of that ‘Inquiry’ in favour of ‘A Strange Story’. As a subtext, relating to a later phase in his intellectual development, seems victoriously to cancel the primary text, we have the impression of a work being simultaneously written and unwritten – in a process somewhat analogous to the ‘double writing’ of Derrida.25 Both parts of the movement also prove to have been essential. The scientific work in ‘the [earlier] phase of his being as author’ has provided the protagonist with the necessary text that the new context can then subvert in order to gain thereby its own meaning. It is the counter-movement that now enables Fenwick’s pen to propagate a healing influence in the world and to contribute to his own immortality.26 The other principal scholar, Dr Pascal, similarly fails to publish the results of the research to which he has devoted his maturity. One reason is again the opposition of religious authority, in this case embodied in his mother. She fully recognizes the power of writing, and reminding us of

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the documents of Chancery, the notes and files of Pascal seem to her to possess the terrible power of a raging pestilence. Whereas Pascal intends his notes only to record constatively the illnesses and vices of the family, she evidently believes that writing brings, performatively, the evil into existence in a superior literary dimension of truth. So while he patiently prosecutes his research in the foreground of the story, she is ever looking tirelessly for the opportunity to destroy the fruits of that research. In this sense, the plots involving writing and unwriting again proceed simultaneously. Félicité finally prevails in the conflagration that suggests Pascal’s own funeral pyre. In contrast with the allusions to matricide observed in other cases, the mother seems here to murder her child and in destroying his writing to parody the female bearer of the word. It is frequently the destiny of writing, as A Strange Story and Bleak House have also demonstrated, to be menaced with fire or to be literally burnt. One other minor example from Bleak House deserves mention. When Charley tells about a veiled woman’s taking Esther’s handkerchief away from Jenny, Miss Flite – who traces everything back to the contagion of Chancery – identifies the woman as ‘ “the Lord Chancellor’s wife” ’: ‘ “He’s married, you know. And I understand she leads him a terrible life. Throws his lordship’s papers into the fire, my dear, if he won’t pay the jeweller!” ’ (XXXV). Besides making the Lord Chancellor’s wife yet another confusing double of Lady Dedlock (and therefore of Esther), the anecdote proposes her from our extra-textual perspective as a double of Félicité Rougon. She is another female who burns male writing – a burner rather than a bearer of the word in a relationship that possesses its own logic. The fire that unwrites imitates, in the practice of ‘double writing’, the pen that writes; the ‘Lady’ Chancellor’s fire makes visible the pestilential contagion already present in the writing of Chancery. Of course the fires are of different types. Faber considers the fire with which he menaces Fenwick’s book a welcome purificatory rite, like that which burns heretics, and Félicité believes her own fire to belong to this category. But as Clotilde and Ramond understand, Félicité’s conflagration enacts a regrettable pestilence, as page after page catches fire, in one of the most spectacular syndromes of contagion to which writing is vulnerable. Unlike the situation in Bulwer, the fiery unwriting of Pascal’s text manifests a dire misfortune – a defeat and not the conquest of a new area of freedom. The defeat is mitigated, however, in that the truth to which the writing has constatively testified naturally survives. From the ashes, Clotilde has also rescued some fragments, which turn out still to possess a communicative power for her. She can make out certain names and other words that call to mind Pascal’s eloquent summary of his files on that particular stormy night after their fight: Quand elle eut sorti les débris un à un, elle constata, ce dont elle était déjà à peu près certaine, que pas une page entière de manuscrit ne

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restait, pas une note complète ayant un sens. Il n’existait que des fragments, des bouts de papier à demi brûlés et noircis, sans lieu, sans suite. Mais, pour elle, à mesure qu’elle les examinait, un intérêt se levait de ces phrases incomplètes, de ces mots à moitié mangés par le feu, où tout autre n’aurait rien compris. Elle se souvenait de la nuit d’orage, les phrases se complétaient, un commencement de mot évoquait les personnages, les histoires. (XIV) One piece of paper remains intact. Pascal has kept the genealogical tree, that is, with him at the end. Just before dying, he has added those last entries regarding the date of his own death and the date of the expected birth of his child. The most precious of his writings in Clotilde’s estimation, it now symbolizes the essential core of the truth that the archives had elaborated in concrete detail. It focuses the experience of the family in the image of a tree that continues to live and to grow. Despite the wasting diseases, some indomitable vital sap still flows in that tree, and Clotilde studies the particularly hopeful branches: Il y avait là assez de sève nouvelle et de travail, pour refaire un monde. Clotilde, à ce moment, crut entendre le cri de Pascal: «Ah! notre famille, que va-t-elle devenir, à quel être aboutira-t-elle enfin?» Et ellemême retombait à une rêverie, devant l’Arbre prolongeant dans l’avenir des derniers rameaux. Qui savait d’où naîtrait la branche saine? Peut-être le sage, le puissant attendu germerait-il là. The writing itself seems to have possessed, after all, a strength that the fire has not cancelled. In looking at the ashes, Clotilde may recall the myth of the phoenix: ‘Et chaque débris s’animait, la famille exécrable et fraternelle renaissait de ces miettes, de ces cendres noires où ne couraient plus que des syllabes incohérentes’. In verbal terms the rebirth clearly occurs in Zola’s writing of the Rougon-Macquart novels, which amount to a translation of Pascal’s scholarship into a narrative mode. As in Bulwer, a narrative replaces the scholarly work that can no longer be published – with the difference that the narrative only translates now and does not contradict the scholarly intention. Yet Zola may also believe that his own strange story conveys its truth more powerfully than the work of scientific scholarship could have done. Zola too has wished to narrate in the case of Pascal a tale of defeat, as if to demonstrate his own literary success in terms of its difference from and contrast with that failure. Zola does not make his relationship to his scholarly protagonist (or antagonist) explicit, but Manzoni’s narrator often does define himself interestingly with respect to his scholarly sources. His narrative too grows out of scholarship and perhaps demonstrates its strength in terms of a contrast with the earlier works that he has consulted. He mentions the

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inadequacy, for example, of Ripamonti and Rivola in their failure to understand the mechanism of the conversion of the innominato (XXIV). When the moment comes later to narrate the plague, he admits the superiority of Ripamonti’s account over the others but also emphasizes the general confusion that reigns in contemporary sources: Delle molte relazioni contemporanee, non ce n’è alcuna che basti da sé a darne un’idea un po’ distinta e ordinata; come non ce n’è alcuna che non possa aiutare a formarla. In ognuna di queste relazioni, senza eccettuarne quella del Ripamonti, la quale le supera tutte, per la quantità e per la scelta de’ fatti, e ancor piu per il modo d’osservarli, in ognuna sono omessi fatti essenziali, che son registrati in altre; in ognuna ci sono errori materiali, che si posson riconoscere e rettificare con l’aiuto di qualche altra, o di que’ pochi atti della pubblica autorità, editi e inediti, che rimangono. (XXXI) The contemporary works lack clarity in three particular respects, the first involving the definition of cause and effect: ‘In una si vengono a trovar le cagioni di cui nell’altra s’eran visti, come in aria, gli effetti’. The second weakness relates to chronology: ‘In tutte poi regna una strana confusione di tempi e di cose’. Finally he misses any sense of overall design to which details are subordinated: ‘è un continuo andare e venire, come alla ventura, senza disegno generale, senza disegno ne’ particolari’. It is as if the plague that Girard believes always cancels social hierarchies, differences and structures had here subverted the writing that describes it too.27 The submission of language to a superior pestilential force is further evidenced, as we have noticed, when the plague frustrates attempts by the authorities to apply innocuous terms to it. The narrator has proposed to remedy the chaotic linguistic situation in creating his own accurate and properly organized account. Although his account pretends by no means to approach definitiveness, admirable principles have, according to the summary of his method, guided his research. The resulting narrative does clearly possess the three virtues of distinguishing causes from effects, maintaining chronological coherence, and imposing a dominating impression of structure. The relationship of his narrative to the original texts resembles that of orderly récit to chaotic histoire. Still the récit does not fully replace the histoire. Manzoni’s structure depends upon the maintenance of a tension between the disintegrating tendency evident in his sources, as in the plague itself, and the rage for order associated with narrative. The contagion continues to operate within a narrative that cannot entirely debilitate it and that even derives from it a useful energy. With regard to the love story, the disintegrating or contagious element comes from the anonymous manuscript composed by someone who supposedly knew Renzo and Lucia. The device of referring

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frequently to this defective manuscript enables the narrator to make us aware of his task as a constant struggle to bring form out of chaos or health out of sickness. There can be no final success, and the imperfections of the narrator’s attempts become virtues of the story. They help convey the sense that not only the protagonists of the story but the narrator himself are living amidst the contagion of history. In serving to authenticate the narrative as referring, constatively, to some original logos or truth, the manuscript is both a necessary presence and, in at least two respects, a constant source of frustration. On the one hand, it omits significant information, and the narrator finds himself torn between the duty humbly to confess ignorance and the temptation to makes guesses. Much of his story, he admits, has involved guessing. On the other hand, the manuscript contains too much material, and the narrator’s duty to include everything conflicts with the desirability of making his own omissions.28 He feels forced to narrate some incidents that he regrets, like the drunkenness of Renzo that introduces an incoherent, morally sick element into the characterization of the fictional protagonist. In his treatment of the library of Don Ferrante, however, he decides with equal regret to omit material. As a scholar himself he considers libraries enormously interesting and so has allowed himself to begin a catalogue, which is then broken off mid-way because of the risk of boring the reader: ‘lasciando scritto quel che è scritto, per non perder la nostra fatica, ometteremo il rimanente, per rimetterci in istrada’ (XXVII). Risking narrative incoherence, he chooses not to cancel these traces of digression, but to prevent the disintegrating tendency from going too far, he also practises omissions. These omissions occur without regret whenever scenes can more effectively be left to the reader’s imagination.29 Critics have frequently noticed indeed the reticences and silences of Manzoni’s narrator, which nevertheless create their appropriate effects.30 The historical, moral and aesthetic power of the text is thus supposed again to derive both from its constative respect for some truth and its performative superiority to its sources in transmitting that truth. In that transmission, the awareness of the defective sources also remains, both in explicit references and in ghostly traces of omitted, unwritten or unknown information, as a useful allusion to ever-threatening disintegration. The particular reticence of Manzoni with respect to the story of Suor Gertrude receives, as it happens, interesting attention in another of our novels, Lavinia. Paolo discusses I promessi sposi with an evidently absurd young French writer, Courant, who after summarizing the plot of his own current novelistic endeavour, indicates where Manzoni went wrong: ‘ “The author had a precious gold vein within his reach, in the love affair of La Signora with Cavaliere Egidio – the passion of a nun; a capital hit, if properly developed. But no; he did not see it” ’. While Courant abuses Manzoni for not having written a different novel, Paolo defends him precisely because, with reference to that unwritten novel, ‘ “He rejected, he

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spurned it” ’ (II:viii). The value of what Manzoni has written emerges in terms of its contrast with the potential novel that he has rejected. Yet Paolo’s response is not quite accurate, for Manzoni has not entirely spurned that potential story. Enough of the sickly erotic story of Egidio and Gertrude is allusively narrated in I promessi sposi. Just as Gertrude insinuates a disturbing erotic awareness into Lucia, the subtext of the unwritten novel instils its contagion into the main text. That contagious presence is one of the essential elements that make the novel what it is. *

*

*

The other narrator whose reticence prompts frequent comment is Esther Summerson, who nevertheless differs from Manzoni’s narrator – and from Fenwick and Pascal – in not belonging to the scholarly category. Indeed her narrative is a confession, and she presents herself in her first sentence as not an intellectual at all: ‘I have a great difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever’. Her difficulty relates to the ambiguity of her truth, which because of her attitude towards it resists written expression more strenuously than the truth of the scientist or historian. The confessional truth in which she most interests us concerns her own identity. She appears both to ‘know’ and to try not to know or to deny that identity, and her writing amounts at least as much to suppression as to confession of aspects of herself.31 Like Allen Fenwick and all first-person narrator-protagonists, she is of course divided between the earlier narrated self and the later narrating self. The later self is sometimes dramatized, as when she pauses on the fourth page of her narrative, with respect to recollections of the doll to whom she has addressed her first unwritten confidences: I hope it is not self-indulgent to shed these tears as I think of it. I am very thankful, I am very cheerful, but I cannot quite help their coming to my eyes. There! I have wiped them away now, and can go on again properly. (III) The principal self-division is not between her earlier and later selves, but between two Esthers that have always coexisted and continue to do so. She has always felt the unhappy impulse to weep and the contrasting need to fight back tears and convince herself that she is ‘thankful’ and ‘cheerful’. Her writing thus expresses the latest repetition of a life-long effort to repress the unhappy self. Even as a writer she cannot ‘quite help’ the tears that will come into her eyes and break into her writing as well. Her writing entails, as it were, both the primary and ‘happy’ written story and a secondary, tearful story that she tries unsuccessfully to keep unwritten. In the terms of the present argument, the secondary story is that of the sick Esther who threatens with her contagion to contaminate the story of the healthy Esther.

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In the primary, written story she lives a fortunate existence surrounded by loving and generous people. They are engaged in what she terms ‘the general conspiracy to keep me in a good humour’ or ‘the old conspiracy to make me happy! Everybody seemed to be in it!’ (XXIII, XXXV). While the happy object of this mysterious conspiracy, she virtually ceases to function as the protagonist of her own narrative: ‘My lot has been so blest that I can relate little of myself which is not a story of goodness and generosity in others’ (XLIII). Although it is clearly not true that everyone participates in the conspiracy, she maintains the coherence of her fiction by insistently subordinating the role of the non-conspirators. The chief conspirator and hero of her narrative emerges as Jarndyce; she tells mainly the successful story of his goodness and generosity, not only towards herself but towards everyone else. The sick Esther that she cannot always keep repressed threatens to defeat the conspiracy. There is also an analogy between this other Esther and the contagious fever that strikes and disfigures her. In the episode of her illness, the fever attacks as a wild, irresistible principle of disintegration that makes a chaos of her orderly identity and of chronology: ‘The way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman . . . I was . . . oppressed . . . by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them.’ The sense of cause and effect, of time and of hierarchical structures breaks down, as Manzoni had noticed in written accounts of the plague. In fact, Esther is unwilling to narrate this portion of her life, which resists reduction to writing. Only those who have been through such an experience, she fears, ‘can quite understand what I mean’, and ‘for the same reason I am almost afraid to hint at that time in my disorder – it seemed one long night . . . – when I laboured up colossal staircases’. She comes to inhabit spaces ‘without origins, beginning or end’, according to Tambling, that resemble those of De Quincey’s opium visions.32 Of the experience of being a bead on ‘a flaming necklace’, she asks, ‘Dare I hint at that worse time . . .?’ She determines to keep as much of the illness as possible out of her writing because ‘the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and the more intelligible I shall be’(XXXV). Yet such references to what she omits serve after all to admit a strong awareness of the ‘sick experiences’ into her narrative. Like the fever that deranges her healthy rational life, then, the wilder self breaks into the story in the form of tears and other unruly impulses. Observing herself in the mirror, the narrated Esther has often apostrophized and scolded this other self. In one such moment ‘fancy, made a little wild by the wind perhaps’, has carried her into ‘shadowy speculations’ about the past, until she abruptly comes back to the present: ‘I said to myself, “Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!” and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake, that they sounded like little bells’ (VI). The narrator manages here not to put into words the exact

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content of her ‘shadowy speculations’, but she allows it to drop that they have concerned Jarndyce – ‘even as to the possibility of his being my father’. The forbidden speculation is immediately cancelled – ‘that idle dream was quite gone now’ – but it has left a sign in the text. A subtext tells another story about Esther in which she would have been Jarndyce’s daughter, and such impulses to narrate anarchic subtexts are constantly in ambush. Against their contagious energy, the sternest forms of repression must be applied. Esther’s shaking of the keys at herself on this and many other occasions suggests her need to be locked up and reminds us of Tulkinghorn’s waving of the key at the wild Hortense. As another version of the wilder Esther, Hortense will indeed be incarcerated, and her prison becomes an image for the primary narrative itself that seeks with difficulty to restrain the underground narrator. When tears begin to rise in the presence of Richard and Ada on another occasion, the young Esther is shown to have made an even more drastic threat to her underground self: ‘ “Now, Esther, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again!” ’ (LI). More than Fenwick’s refusal to heed Lilian’s reproachful sighs, the threat carries the opposing Esthers into what Lyotard considers the area of terrorism. If certain conditions are not met, one opponent will physically eliminate the other from the language game representative of civilized intercourse itself.33 In the present game, the player who uses words may also consider the other player’s response with eloquent tears somewhat unfair – as occurs in Faith Benson’s mind when Ruth expresses her responses with dumb weeping.34 The wilder Esther feels the force of the intimidation: the primary writer with her keys may shut up this other self in silent confinement as Tulkinghorn does with Hortense. By never speaking again to the rebellious weeper, the narrator would be banishing all the tearful signs of her from the writing and effectively withdrawing recognition of her very existence. It would appear, however, that a compromise is re-established whereby the wilder self maintains some acknowledgement, yet not too much, in the text. Much of the narrative that the primary Esther tries not to write concerns her mother, who is perhaps the most significant of the figures that do not participate in the happy conspiracy. That maternal figure too, like the weeping reflection in the mirror, must be silenced and eliminated as far as possible from the written story. Fearing, indeed, lest the sin of the wayward mother contaminate the child, ‘ “according to what is written” ’, Esther’s godmother has already initiated the terrorist project of cancelling that mother from the subsequent episodes. Esther’s narrative thus demonstrates from the start what Dever considers a characteristic practice of Victorian fiction, to shape any maternal ideal ‘in the context of almost complete maternal absence’. The maternal void even appears to become ‘the necessary vehicle’ whereby a life can be written in the Victorian period.35 In this case a principle of symmetry requires further that the life of the fashionable Lady Dedlock, in another fictional compartment,

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depend upon the absence and, as she believes, non-existence of her child. Her story involves a struggle to suppress a rebellious double too. Rather than a mirrored reflection, it is the fierce Hortense, who seeks revenge for her banishment by murdering their common enemy and plotting to implicate Lady Dedlock, before being definitively locked up. The existence of her daughter, who cannot, as it were, be kept locked away, nevertheless remains the primary threat to Lady Dedlock’s security. So in learning of the daughter’s survival, she responds with the written account of her own life that insists heavily upon the certainty of her child’s stillbirth. The emphasis during the meeting in which she consigns the letter to Esther falls as well upon the sorrowful but peremptory necessity for maintaining their virtual non-existence for one another. Their narratives must not henceforth contain contagious signs of one another, and after reading the letter, Esther’s ‘first care was to burn what my mother had written, and to consume even its ashes’ (XXXVI). But Lady Dedlock does not act with quite the same – possibly terroristic – firmness to eliminate all written signs of her daughter’s identity. Bucket’s searching through the closets and drawers of her boudoir, after her flight, turns up the handkerchief embroidered with the name ‘Esther Summerson’. The inscription enables him to reconnect mother and daughter within the same story, in which they come to figure as desperate fugitive and pursuer. Of course Esther too has already proved unable to cancel her mother from her consciousness although she has tried in both her narrated and her narrating roles to omit written references to her. After burning the letter, the narrated Esther has also attempted to avoid registering that contaminating existence in spoken or heard words: It matters little now, how much I thought of my living mother who had told me evermore to consider her dead. I could not venture to approach her, or to communicate with her in writing, for my sense of the peril in which her life was passed was only to be equalled by my fears of increasing it. . . . At no time did I dare to utter her name. I felt as if I did not even dare to hear it. If the conversation anywhere, when I was present, took that direction, as it sometimes naturally did, I tried not to hear – I mentally counted, repeated something that I knew, or went out of the room. (XLIII) As an example of what Lacan calls denegation, the phrase, ‘it matters little now’, must be construed to mean the opposite of what it says. In other instances denegation may operate in even more complex ways, as when Esther claims that her tears express happiness while we suspect that, like most tears, they express sorrow. And when she derives from Jarndyce’s letter a meaning quite different from the apparent one, as if suspecting him of denegation, we suspect the trustworthiness of her interpretation.

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‘Denegation is’, Joffe believes, ‘the structure of Esther’s identity’ whereby besides reversing others’ statements about themselves she permits us to do likewise with her own self-representations.36 So the consciousness of Lady Dedlock does loom significantly, as a contagion, in passages like this, precisely in the stated desire to repress that consciousness. The narrated Esther is also shown to contradict herself in that while not wanting to see or hear signs of her mother she has simultaneously wanted precisely that. The contradiction involves the narrator as well, when she repeats the formula of its mattering little but still annotates other details that betray the mother’s continuing importance: It matters little now how often I recalled the tones of my mother’s voice, wondered whether I should ever hear it again as I so longed to do, and thought how strange and desolate it was that it should be so new to me. It matters little that I watched for every public mention of my mother’s name; that I passed and repassed the door of her house in town, loving it, but afraid to look at it. The paragraph continues, ‘It is all, all over’, and then, after the statement defining her story as primarily concerned with the goodness of others, concludes: ‘I may well pass that little [which does not relate to others’ goodness], and go on’ – returning, that is, to the main story about the goodness of Jarndyce. But even if cast in the form of a minor element that now ‘matters little’, the episodes involving her unhappy mother have inevitably invaded with their contagion the entire text. At the end Esther will allow her mother’s writing to enter her own narrative. Instead of burning the notes written in her mother’s last hours, as she has done with the earlier letter, Esther publishes the broken text in its entirety. The mother tells in that text of the devastating, disintegrating power of her own no longer restrained underground self. Apparently she poisons herself or allows herself to contract an infection, but the disease that kills her is also a moral one: ‘ “Cold, wet, and fatigue, are sufficient causes for my being found dead; but I shall die of others, though I suffer from these. It was right that all that had sustained me should give way at once, and that I should die of terror and my conscience” ’ (LIX). Perhaps because her life is suppressed, her writing can now be accorded, despite its disruptive threat, official recognition and a place in Esther’s story. An equally important strand in the story that the narrator seeks not to write relates to Woodcourt, who belongs to the conspiracy, but in a way that she has wished not to recognize. As in her conscious life at the time so again in the written narrative, Woodcourt must be duly noticed but the implications of his presence kept unacknowledged. Here the signs of faltering in some of her written formulations recall the effect of the plague upon the very language of Manzoni’s sources: ‘I believe – at least I know –

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that he was not rich’, and ‘I think – I mean, he told us – that he had been in practice three or four years’ (XVII). Oddly she has not corrected such passages, but we gather that she has also wished to convey a hint of a disorder that she cannot put directly into words. The original difficulty of knowing but trying not to know becomes in the written text the problem of simultaneously conveying and not conveying something to the reader. She appears to make some distinction, however, between the internal dialogues with herself and the writing in which she addresses a reader. When Jarndyce proposes that Woodcourt’s irritating mother visit them, the younger Esther experiences the difficulty as one of explaining her instinctive objection in words either to herself or to Jarndyce. The narrator experiences the somewhat different difficulty, I think, with respect to the reader, from whom she cannot or will not so easily hide: I had nothing to say. At least I had nothing in my mind that I could say. I had an undefined impression that it might have been better if we had had some other inmate, but I could hardly have explained why, even to myself. Or, if to myself, certainly not to anybody else. (LX) The ‘impression’ remains ‘undefined’ and ‘nothing’ in words, as far as she and Jarndyce are concerned, but the reader constructs from the broken language the meaning of the unspoken and unwritten communication. Esther seems in such passages to require a reader that will construe unconfessable intentions. The awareness that her audience is not only herself but an eventual reader probably becomes most nearly explicit when she discloses to that audience the ‘secret’ of her love for Woodcourt: And now I must part with the little secret I have thus far tried to keep. I had thought, sometimes, that Mr Woodcourt loved me; and that if he had been richer, he would perhaps have told me that he loved me, before he went away. I had thought, sometimes, that if he had done so, I should have been glad of it. But how much better it was now, that this had never happened! (XXXV) The secret, long known to both her conscious and repressed selves, is being confessed, and yet not entirely confessed, to the reader.37 It is avowed, as it were, incidentally – as an impression that had only occurred to her ‘sometimes’ and that was ‘perhaps’ a possibility. Whatever the dubious chances of its having been true, it does not in any case possess a relevance to the present circumstances. A denegation, it can be mentioned now precisely because it refers to something that ‘had never happened’. So the interesting episodes of the secondary story are once again allowed to break into the primary story only when they cease to matter,

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when the contagion can no longer disrupt. The secondary story remains, in this strategy, largely unwritten and fragmentary. Still the triumph of the primary story also signals its defeat. Jarndyce comes to realize in his winning of Esther that the conspiracy to make her happy has failed. He cedes her to Woodcourt, to whom the tearful underground Esther already belongs in secret, and the secondary story subverts the foregrounded story of the happy Esther’s grateful love for Jarndyce. In releasing the wilder self that had been threatened with definitive silencing, the denouement reveals that she has always been the true protagonist. Indeed her life, supposedly unwritten, replaces the painstakingly written account. Although the letter of her mother and the flowers of Woodcourt have been burnt, those figures have also re-emerged as defining elements of Esther’s authentic identity. In terms of writing, her text now includes her mother’s last fragmentary message and the possibly corresponding written sign over the house in which Esther will be mistress: ‘We went out of the porch’, she states of the moment in which she learns that she is destined to belong to Woodcourt, ‘and he showed me written over it, BLEAK HOUSE’ (LXIV). As Woodcourt’s Bleak House replaces Jarndyce’s, and the secondary narrative replaces the primary one, the positions of health and disease may also be reversed. We may decide, that is, that the determinedly happy, disciplined Esther has always been a less healthy version of herself than the wilder, underground Esther. The reversal resembles that of A Strange Story in which the apparent tale of the successful writing of Fenwick’s great ‘Inquiry’ turns out to be the underground tale of its unwriting. The results, as in the narratives of Zola and Manzoni too, establish the value of the finally victorious written texts in terms of the failure of those initially encountered. In the case of Esther, however, the pattern has seemed to many readers to function in a bewildering way. In narrating her story, she seems not just to be reporting, with due ironic distance, but to be repeating in writing the wrong (primary) story, when she already knows it to be wrong. After seven years of marriage, her written re-embarkation upon the course of her life repeats with apparent conviction the wrong tacking manoeuvres that define Jarndyce as her primary destination. Dickens has tried ‘to make Esther function’, in the useful formulation of Michael Slater, ‘as an unreliable and as a reliable narrator at the same time’38 – unreliable in her continuing selfdeception and reliable in her achieved self-knowledge. The difficulty diminishes, in the view of Michael Kearns, if we accept the likelihood that even the married Esther has continued to feel guilt and deep displeasure with herself. The suspicion that she should not really belong to Woodcourt has remained. It is then Woodcourt, Kearns has found evidence for suggesting, that assigns her the task of narrating her story. Through this narrative task she finally comes to believe that she is beautiful and rightly belongs to Woodcourt. Whereas her experience of life itself has not quite led her to admit the wrongness of the primary story

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and the rightness of the secondary story, her experience as narrator finally accomplishes the recognition. Because of ‘the power of a text for both Dickens and Esther’, the narrator of a story may be ‘reshaped’ by it: ‘The written word, which has so many ill effects in the world of Bleak House, thus is also a force for good’.39 The force in narrative writing is like that in any discourse. In the legal discourse, as we have seen, the ‘Grasp’ subjects human ability and eloquence to its logic and writes itself through the pens of scribes; Fenwick’s pen submits to an analogous scientific ‘tyranny’. What Esther finds as her narrative develops is therefore what many novelists discover, that the story possesses its own logical force and begins to tell or perform itself. Her pen can only constatate that power, which in this case liberates her from guilt. If it is true that Woodcourt has set her on this narrative course, he becomes the indirect author, thus replacing Jarndyce, of her story. In this sense Woodcourt, who has not written anything else in the text, may also emerge as one of the writers. The heroine of Lavinia, who becomes like Esther the narrator of a portion of the novel, betrays in her writing a self-division analogous to Esther’s. Here too, in our last case of narrative writing, the division does not exist, principally, between the narrated and the narrating woman, but the reason for the congruence of the two is different. Lavinia narrates her Roman adventures, in the form of journal letters to a female friend, just after the incidents have occurred and in the heat of the experience. So retrospective wisdom is seldom even a possibility for this writer although later experiences will sometimes enable the material of earlier letters to be reinterpreted. The interesting division again exists between the consciously controlling personality and the less well-known, repressed aspects of herself. The narrative also begins once more as the story of the more conscious self, who expresses intentions that are gradually subverted in a process that reshapes the writer. As in Esther’s case, the writing itself submits to a power that appears contagious, but Lavinia’s writing aspires to transmit that contagion further to an identifiable reader. Lavinia’s narrative occupies five non-consecutive chapters of the first volume (I: viii, x, xiii, xvii, xxii). While the chapters are intriguing as an account that challenges the views of the omniscient, presumably male, narrator of the intervening chapters, the letters serve another dramatic purpose for their writer. Lavinia seems to live in the dimension of reality for the sake of being able to remake her real experiences in the dimension of the letters. More than transmitting constative information, her letters enable her to perform her experiences before what she imagines to be the rapt admiration of her reader. She requires this sense of a reader whose responses to situations will imitate and validate her own, and writing thus becomes, at this stage, an indispensable component of her life. The first phase of her story reveals her as a self-absorbed, strong-willed, complacent young woman. She intends to impress her correspondent,

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Lady Augusta Barre, with her own cleverness and general success in arousing admiration and gaining what she wants. Lady Augusta is apparently both a rival and a Girardian model to be imitated. She has been to Rome herself, where she has employed Paolo as a drawing teacher, and Lavinia wishes to repeat, and improve upon, many of her exploits. The first letter confesses the feeling of being somewhat humbled by Rome, but the feeling seems merely to repeat a convention that does not convince us of its particular sincerity: ‘ “A melancholy but a wonderful city – well named the Eternal. It looks as if built by giants to last an eternity. How little one feels oneself amid the antique grandeur! It gives me a feeling something like that I had when I saw the Jungfrau for the first time” ’ (I:viii). The narrative quickly becomes one of her conquest of Rome and of Paolo. She has set herself the challenge of securing Paolo – who has, since Lady August has known him, become too important a painter to give lessons – for her own docile drawing master. Her ruses succeed, as she announces gleefully to Lady Augusta: ‘ “Caught him, and carried him by storm! I may say with Cæsar – veni, vidi, vici. I am quite charmed with my success, but it is such a long story, and I am so pressed for time, that I shall never be able to make you understand what a battle I have won” ’ (I:viii). Her pleasure in her success does, in fact, lead her to tell the ‘long story’ so as to arouse her correspondent’s envious admiration. A second phase in the story then begins, however, in which she succumbs gradually to Paolo’s power rather than he to hers. Her letters accordingly tend to become vehicles for the transmission of his power rather than her own to Lady Augusta. He also forces her to submit more profoundly to the spell of Rome: ‘ “I thought I had known a great deal of Rome, but I was mistaken. One must see Rome with a guide like this young man to form any real idea of it. He knows it by heart. Listening to him, old scenes revive as if they were of to-day. I am in a fit of ancient Rome fever” ’ (I:x). While she moves in the spaces of the past, her ‘ancient Rome fever’ presages for us the Roman fever that will smite Daisy Miller a few years later. Among the Roman sites, she visits the one in which James’s heroine encounters the miasmic contagion, the Colosseum by moonlight. Lavinia duly alludes in her letter to Manfred and Childe Harold,40 but more than Byron it is Paolo who succeeds with ‘ “his usual eloquence . . . [in] filling the gloomy solitude with the din and strife of life” ’ (I:x). Here, she reports further, her imprudent determination to climb higher than she should has caused Paolo to pull her precipitously back to safety, reminding us of an incident in James’s Roderick Hudson. Although Paolo clearly emerges as the main actor in the drama of her life, she attempts at times to maintain her own control over how to present him in her letters. She finds reasons for criticizing him to her correspondent, but then she repents: ‘ “I was in a fit of misanthropic humour when I wrote the above. I leave it as it is, as a punishment for having

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penned such contemptible nonsense. My accusation of ingratitude against Signor Paolo is absurd and odious” ’ (I:xv). In the decision here not to cancel a passage, that passage comes oddly to mean the reverse of what it says. The life-drama is being performed within the writing itself. The same reversal or undermining of the meaning of her text evidently occurs now with respect to many of the complacent passages in the first letter, which cannot of course be cancelled. Originally intended to show off Lavinia’s power, they demonstrate in retrospect her foolishness. Much of her writing becomes an instrument of self-punishment, for exalting Paolo at her own expense in the eyes of Lady Augusta. She has also been disappearing from the action as the mode has become ever less confessional and more dramatic. In the drama she has become the passive spectator, a position analogous to that of her reader. As spectator she admires Paolo’s enormous histrionic talent in his narrative of episodes of the Risorgimento: ‘He gave us several anecdotes of the last war, and a full description of the defence of Villa Spada on the 30th June, 1849, which made one’s flesh creep. The loss of the Romans at that place was dreadful, many of their best officers there met the death of the brave. The emotion of Paolo on speaking of these fine fellows was infectious; so much so, that aunt, who understands Italian but imperfectly, was actually sobbing, and I was scarcely less moved. His pantomime was as eloquent as his speech.’ (I:x) On other occasions she reports his infectiously passionate speeches word for word, most memorably when he angrily refuses her offer to bribe an ecclesiastical figure that might help his worldly fortunes. This would imply his grovelling before the villain who had callously destroyed his parents. ‘ “All hell would laugh and paradise weep if I did so” ’, he exclaims Byronically and proceeds to deliver a most rhetorically effective denunciation of the villain. The awe-struck Lavinia experiences a particular longing in this case to translate the contagious effect of the drama into language that will make Lady Augusta succumb to its power too. Here it is insufficient, she believes, to report as a humble amanuensis and female bearer of the word just the words themselves: ‘ “I don’t know what impression they may produce on you – paper is but a poor conductor of the electricity of passion; but the words, voice, and look made me feel as I never felt before in my life” ’. Paolo’s eloquence has reduced the once-proud Lavinia to such a state of contrition that ‘ “I was ready to cry, and fall at his feet, and beg him to forgive me, but I could not speak a single syllable for the lump in my throat” ’. To overcome the speechlessness and transmit the truth if not to him at least to Lady Augusta, Lavinia must resort to a superior vehicle of artistic expression. She can think of no better expedient than to allow the music of Ruffini’s friend Donizetti to invade her text:

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‘Our feverish contact’ ‘So young! so heroic! I can’t describe to you how he looked, standing there alone – one against the world! . . . The only way I have of making you comprehend at all what I mean, is to say he was like Mario as Ravenswood, when he hurls at the Ashtons that contemptuous curse, Vi disprezzo. Do you remember how it always made us cry, and long that we could have helped him, and given proper courage to that poor little Lucy?’ (I:xvii)41

The ‘poor little Lucy’ of Lucia di Lammermoor has not at that point in the drama risen properly to the occasion. The situation implies, however, a model of heroism that Lavinia and Lady Augusta may both wish to imitate. Lavinia hopes at least to find in her reader’s imitative response a validation of her own feverish condition. But then, in a third phase, some perversity causes Lavinia to imitate Lucy in another respect: she betrays Paolo, as Lucy has betrayed Edgar of Ravenswood. For the feverish obsession with Paolo, she substitutes an equally dominating obsession with the Marchioness Juanita, who does more to flatter her ego. Probably Juanita is also being proposed to Lady Augusta as a rival and appropriate candidate for her jealousy. Lavinia’s last letter reveals her after a long period of silence to be living, the object of immense adulation, with Juanita at the Villa Torralba. (There she becomes involved in the production, to be considered in the next chapter, of an opera roughly modelled on Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. Perhaps because the performance fails, it does not enter the epistolary narrative.) Several weeks pass, during which Lavinia makes infrequent entries in her journal-letter, and the name of Paolo that has so dominated her correspondence does not occur at all. In the terms of Lyotard the narrative is attempting terroristically to silence one of the players who has been participating with too dangerous an eloquence in the language game. The massive, unexplained absence of Paolo from her text, which Lady Augusta cannot help but notice, conveys of course its own eloquent message. In Lavinia’s compulsive frivolity and frenetic efforts to regain the tone of her first letter, we intuit still the virtual, undermining presence of Paolo. The drama continues, that is, in the text itself precisely in what it seems so ostentatiously to omit. At length Lavinia, apparently afraid to be with Paolo alone, takes Juanita to see him in his studio, and he returns into her writing. The correspondence now becomes a more humble appeal for help from Lady Augusta, whom she has hitherto been seeking to overawe and to contaminate with her own passions. Perhaps Lady Augusta, in her geographical distance from Paolo, has preserved a sufficient detachment to enable her to explain Lavinia to herself. The problem is the coexistence within Lavinia of the self that has submitted to the magnetism of Paolo’s histrionic presence and the counteracting self that has sought anarchically to

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pain both herself and him. The latter is the imp in her, ‘ “for whose sayings and doings I, the woman, am not responsible” ’. It is also the imp that may grasp the writer’s pen and make him write things ‘ “without his knowledge, not unfrequently against his will” ’. When it appears that her mistreatment of Paolo is causing him to break their engagement, she seeks humbly to regain him. But after regaining him, she starts again to abuse him, and she begs for an explanation: ‘ “Who can fathom this mystery for me? who explain this contradiction? Is it but the momentary reaction which follows a fit of fever?” ’ The answer is not going to come from Lady Augusta, whose epistolary replies do not enter the text. Perhaps, although she does appear in the novel as a real figure at other points, Lavinia simply constructs her, in the manner of Esther Summerson, as a reader-reflection of herself. But the letters have nevertheless depended for their communication of a meaning upon the writer’s impression that they were transmitting their contagion, the ‘fit of fever’, to an actual reader. Meanwhile Lavinia’s narrative has offered an example again of how the determination to tell a particular story is subverted by the release of an antagonistic power. The story, like some of the others, becomes a tale of defeat. The ‘infectious’ eloquence of Paolo as well as the ‘ancient Rome fever’ have taken their toll, and Lavinia’s last letter breaks off inconclusively. She has cast herself in these letters as a character in a work of fiction that now seems destined for an unhappy and possibly violent ending. The logic inherent in the narrative discourse guides her pen, and she almost regrets that she has ever initiated the novelistic story: ‘I begin to wish I had never come to Rome; he is capable of killing me, he is indeed. A famous dénoûment for a novel. Few men in real life love enough for the attempt. You will abuse me for being romantic, but there is something flattering in being loved so ferociously.’ (I:xxii) In the story that Ruffini’s narrator writes for us, as opposed to the story that Lavinia writes for Lady Augusta, the heroine will not come, of course, to such a violent end. Paolo will not perform to its bitter denouement the role of the ferociously romantic lover in which Lavinia’s wish-fulfilment has cast him. The two narratives also diverge in their ways of developing several of the minor characters. The Count Fortiguerra figures, for example, as a far more admirable and effective aristocrat in Lavinia’s story. Evidently we are to recognize Lavinia’s blindness in many areas, but often her alternative narrative conveys such a persuasive plausibility that we do accept it. Not entirely absorbed into the structure of Lavinia, her perverse letters contribute to the novel a subversive element or a pervasively subtle contagion in the manner of the episodes involving Manzoni’s Gertrude and Egidio.

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With reference, indeed, to the letters of Lavinia to Lady Augusta, Ruffini’s narrator comes at the very end of the novel to suggest that aspects of the story still escape his own control. The story resists any clôture and will continue, as we read on the last page, after he has ceased to write it. That continuation will occur not only in some virtual reality but also in virtual writing: ‘Lady Augusta, now Countess Terrol, is still Lavinia’s most intimate friend, and their correspondence goes on as regularly as in the days of the diary from Rome’. Yet after the long break in their correspondence, the written story will represent less a continuation of Ruffini’s novel than a new one that submits to the imp of new narrative exigencies. *

*

*

Before Lavinia takes up her correspondence again, she will meet a poet, and the episodes concerning poetry in this novel and in Two Years Ago enable us to consider a final category of writing. Mechanisms similar to contagion operate here with respect to literary influences and inspiration. More than other writing, poetry appears to require inspiration, the breathing-in of some empowering energy. The poets in these two novels receive their inspiration mainly from muses, who are female, or intertextually from works by other poets, who are male. The resulting poetry then transmits its power onto readers and other poets in a continuing chain of influences. Before examining specific references to poetry, it is interesting to observe in Lavinia other writing that operates as a chain of influence to lead the heroine to her encounter with the poet. In the delirious desperation of her breakdown at the end of her period as a self-employed seamstress, she happens upon the Bible. There is ‘a New Testament lying on her dressing-table – a gift from Lady Augusta’s mother –’ with whom she has lost touch since breaking off the correspondence during her Roman sojourn. The Testament ‘opened of itself at these words: “Come unto me, all ye that labour” ’, and she reads more of ‘the Word which never fails to calm, and soothe, and comfort’. Then a paper – another text – falls out, which happens to be the card of the donor, the Countess of Willingford, who has written on it, ‘ “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” ’ (II:xv). Lavinia reads the message not only as the divine ‘Word’ that opens of itself but as a providential invitation to write – still another text – to Lady Willingford, who promptly responds. So Lavinia is reunited with Lady Augusta and her mother, who have been worried by the long silence following Lavinia’s last letter from Rome. They secure, through letters, a suitable position for her as a companion to a lady in Dorsetshire. But when Lavinia arrives there, the lady is away, and Lavinia becomes the guest instead of the lady’s two nieces, one of whom is married to the poet George Aveling. In a letter to the Avelings, the other niece, Miss Clara, will later ‘ “trace the finger of God in the course of events which have led to this issue” ’ (II:xx). The

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course originated by the divine Word has involved a chain of texts that have conducted Lavinia to the poems of Aveling. As a poet, Aveling is almost bewilderingly split between the two conditions of passive link in a chain of influences and active propagator of his own power. The passive aspect emerges first because he has begun his career as recipient of authorizing poetic recognition for his probable conformity to a tradition. He has received a ‘letter of encouragement . . . when quite a lad, from the laureate of that day’ – presumably Robert Southey – and has published with success his first poetry at the age of seventeen. He surprises Lavinia now by emphasizing the passivity of his submission to another inspiring power, that of the muses, who in his case are his wife and her sister: ‘ “The verses which the reviewers criticize as mine, or praise as mine, belong by right of authorship to the two blessed women who are sewing by your side” ’. Despite the protest from the two women – in whose influence upon the poet Ruffini may be figuring that of Cornelia Turner and Henrietta Jenkin upon himself42 – he insists on his point: ‘I protest to heaven and earth, Miss Holywell, that not one deep feeling or striking thought, not one felicitous image or expression, ever dropped from my pen, whose filiation I cannot easily trace to some feeling, thought, image, or expression of theirs; that not one of those gentle personations, which have given some little fame to my name, but is their work, their creation, the very essence of their souls crystallized. In short, they are at once the poet and the poem, and I but the amanuensis.’ (II:xvii) As amanuensis, he reminds us of the mindless copyists in Bleak House, and later in making his wife ‘ “the sun, and I only the photographic machine” ’, he may resemble Kingsley’s Claude Mellot. His activity seems rather more creative, however, in its connection with sewing. Characteristically he and the women spend their time together in the library while he composes poetry and they sew – at the moment, sewing ‘flannel jackets for the Crimea’. The silence is usually broken only by ‘the scratching of the pen on the paper, the hissing of the thread, and the ticking of the French clock on the mantelpiece’. Conversation does sometimes break out: ‘on went the pen and on went the needles, this time not without a brisk accompaniment from the tongues of the needlewomen’. Since they discuss the Crimean fighting, which has prompted their sewing, it appears that the activities of poet, needlewoman and swordsman are emblematically parallel here, while the clock suggestive of history ticks on. Stitching, as it were, his verses, the poet seems in particular to be translating into his own medium the constructive industriousness of the needlewomen. Lavinia joins the other two women in contributing to the poetry. It

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turns out that Aveling’s present composition has a Roman setting, and he suddenly needs help in finding a metaphor for the Colosseum. When Lavinia mentions her recent stay in Rome, he wonders if she has seen the Colosseum by moonlight. Naturally, she has, ‘ “as every one makes a point of doing since the days of Byron” ’, and she recalls ‘with a little sigh’ something that Paolo has said during that night already described to Lady Augusta: ‘A young Roman painter, who was of our party, likened the Coliseum, looked at sidewise, remember – and the image struck me by its justness – to the carcase of a gigantic ship, stranded –’ ‘Stranded on the shore of Time’s ocean,’ concluded Mr. Aveling, with a flourish of his right hand. ‘That’s it: simple, grand and true. I am much indebted to you, Miss Holywell.’ (II:xvii) In the form of this metaphor, not only Lavinia but Paolo will enter the poem of Aveling. The power of that Roman night that Lavinia has sought inadequately to convey in words to Lady Augusta will endure in its tributary participation in the energies of this poem. But the plurality of the links in the chain of transmission here, as with the power stemming from Lavinia’s reading of the Gospel, implies that the original power must now operate in much attenuated form. Aveling’s metaphor is not Byron’s and differs from the one, enunciated by Paolo in a different context, that has influenced it. The women force Aveling indeed to admit that he attenuates, transforms and does much more than submit passively to inspiring influences. The tables in this language game are now turned as Aveling goes on to assert that the poet actively recreates his material and breathes life into what was dead. Of his favourite poetic heroine, he has ‘ “had the revelation that my Galatea had the breath of life in her” ’. That life has been revealed, paradoxically, in his determination that she must die. Surprisingly far from mere amanuensis, the poet has here exercised tyrannical control over his fiction and stubbornly denied, Miss Clara reports, the appeals of his two supposed muses to keep this particular heroine alive: ‘ “It was an absolute necessity that she should die, he affirmed. Authors are among the worst of tyrants, they destroy the flower of their flock” ’ (II:xvii). In the power struggle between the poet and his muses, the slaughter of the poetic heroine takes on the connotation of murder of the muses themselves. The poet ruthlessly declares his freedom from conditioning influences in his recognition of some higher ‘necessity’. Discovered perhaps in the material itself, this necessity may correspond to the imp that comes to guide the pens of other sorts of narrators too. The poem has thereby gained its own power to subdue readers. While the homicidal tyranny has dismayed – precisely as Gaskell’s martyrizing of

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Ruth has dismayed Charlotte Brontë and other readers – it has ultimately assured the success of the poem.43 The episode of martyrdom has produced one of Aveling’s most powerfully affecting poems, as its tendency to reduce all readers and auditors to tears has testified. Two Years Ago offers similar theories of poetry but exemplifies them in the more complicated context of a poet that fails. The inspiration of Elsley Vavasour has come not from particular muses but from the atmosphere of the Romantic poetry in which he has steeped himself. He has thirsted in Shelleyan fashion for the sacred ‘fire’ and has transmitted some of its energy effectively to readers: ‘his words may have awakened here and there in others a love for that which is morally as well as physically beautiful’. The words have channelled towards the future a utopian ideal that comes from the past. The poems ‘may have kept alive . . . the recollection that, both for the bodies and the souls of men forms of life far nobler and fairer than those which we see now are possible’. The vitality of this recollection gives hope that the present fragments of the original idyll may ‘reappear and combine themselves in some ideal state’ – in, as Kingsley cites Tennyson, the ‘ “One far-off divine event” ’. Along with their utopian implications, the poems have also been valuably situated in contemporary history in that Elsley has chosen for his materials ‘needle-women and ragged schools, dwellers in Jacob’s Island and sleepers in the dry arches of Waterloo Bridge’ (X). Unfortunately, in the narrator’s estimation, ‘the sympathy with the sinful and fallen which marks his earlier poems’ has given way ‘to a Pharisaic and contemptuous tone’. Instead of genuinely observed human suffering he now deals with ‘the more picturesque woes of Italy and Greece’. The poetry demonstrates the absence of inspiration and has declined into soul-less aestheticism or hollow, performative virtuosity for its own sake: The poems written after he settled at Penalva . . . are more and more full of merely sensuous beauty, mere word-painting, mere wordhunting. . . . As the originality of thought . . . decreases, the attempt at originality of language increases. Manner, in short, has taken the place of matter. (X) The situation instances, according to Megan Perigoe Stitt, the tendency of Kingsley ‘to polarize artificial and true language, in a Wordsworthian gesture’ that relates him to Sir Walter Scott and Mrs Gaskell too.44 Without the inspiration of truth, language loses power as Kingsley’s narrator demonstrates in describing the use to which Elsley has put a work by another author. This work, which deserves appreciation ‘both for its matter and its manner’, is ‘that sad and fantastic tragedy of Fra Dolcino and Margaret’, just published by Mariotti (Antonio Gallenga).45 Rather than exemplifying inspiration or profitable mimesis, Elsley’s version of the

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noble story has diminished it. The vigorous, patriotic protagonist of the original is made into a ‘self-indulgent dreamer’. The conception suggests further a derivative drawing upon Shelley, for it ‘never would have entered Elsley’s head, had Shelley never written the opening canto of the Revolt of Islam’ (X). The fall of the poet occurs in parallel with his defeat in a struggle for power that Tom Thurnall has, rather ungenerously, initiated with him many years before. The struggle pits the believer in the power of ‘the archenchanter’s wand’ against the materialist physician with worldly ambitions. Before Elsley had assumed his present name and was called John Briggs, he and Tom had been rival apprentices in a chemist’s shop. Tom had then cruelly mocked John’s poetical pretentiousness and the absorption in fantasies that had caused him nearly to poison clients with badly concocted drugs. When Tom happens now to be shipwrecked near the western town where Elsley has settled, Elsley uses his pen, even before learning the survivor’s identity, to regain a certain power over him. He writes, that is, a poem about Tom’s rescue and imagines that he is placing a great obligation upon him: ‘the weak, vain man chatted on’, notes the narrator, ‘and ended by telling Tom all about his poem of “The Wreck”, in a tone which seemed to imply that he had done Tom a serious favour, perhaps raised him to immortality, by putting him in a book’ (VI). Tom does not recognize, however, the power of Elsley’s poetry, and if the poet has fancied himself as the immortalizing rescuer of the shipwrecked man, the latter has emblematically drowned the poet. Although he pretends to Elsley that he has read his first volume, ‘The Soul’s Agonies’, with profit in the Rocky Mountains, we find that he has actually ‘pitched the said volume into the river in disgust . . . [where] it was, probably, long since used up as house-material by the caddis-baits of those parts’ (VI). (This is the only instance in our novels of the destruction – or re-cycling perhaps – of a written text by means of an element other than fire.) Seeing the poet with his changed name as an impotent and phoney figure, Tom is now tempted to expose him, as he later threatens to do with Squire Trebooze, to his wife. Elsley has hoped to keep his wife, a rich viscount’s sister,46 ignorant of his former identity. ‘ “Remember” ’, Tom warns him brutally, ‘ “that, after all, you are in my power, and I had better remind you plainly of the fact” ’. So Elsley must not seek to avoid Tom or belittle him to others: ‘ “because I wish for practice, and patients, and power, you will be so kind as to treat me henceforth as one high-minded man would treat another, to whom he is obliged” ’. To achieve ‘ “my purpose to become the principal medical man in this neighbourhood” ’, Tom can employ of course other weapons besides blackmail: ‘ “My tools are my lancet and my drugs” ’, which are evidently mightier than the poet’s pen. But poison, as suggested by the early episode of Elsley’s unintentional poisoning of patients, becomes a possible tool as well. Tom answers the poet’s ominous prophecy of their struggle’s ‘ “end[ing] in the

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death of one of us” ’ with speculation about the potency of ‘ “each other’s potions” ’ (X). The potion or poison with which Elsley is now particularly associated is laudanum. He administers the poison, that is, to himself in the conviction that it will increase, as a material sort of inspiration, his poetic power: ‘Years before, Elsley had tried opium, and found, unhappily for him, that it fed his fancy without inflicting those tortures of indigestion which keep many, happily for them, from its magic snare’ (XXI). But he is now addicted, and the poetry conveys the insidious effects of the poison. From an original stage of some promise, in which his poetry has drawn power from the sacred fire, to a second stage of hollowness or lack of inspiration, his poetry has declined further. It seems now to transmit a poisonous power. Despite the hostility between them, Tom does not really wish to destroy Elsley but, as in the case of the alcoholic Trebooze, to save him from going down in his own version of shipwreck. Tom struggles with professional skill to wean Elsley from opium. The poet’s decay nevertheless proceeds inexorably, for in the absorption with his poetry a solipsistic tendency has deranged him and further weakened the poetry itself. Tom discerns, particularly in Elsley’s hostile neglect of his wife, the syndrome of a disease that is both moral and poetic, since a bad husband must be a bad poet. When the cholera epidemic rages, absorbing all Tom’s attention, the relationship between husband and wife reaches its breaking point. The couple have retreated to the Welsh mountains to escape the cholera, but a virulent disease worse than cholera strikes them there. In his opium-induced derangement Elsley accuses his wife groundlessly of adultery and writes her, in the most perverse use to which the poet’s pen can be put, a poisonous letter: ‘The words of a man trying to supply the place of strength by virulence. A hideous letter, unfit to be written here’ (XX). A similarly poisonous letter in A Strange Story, we recall, accuses an innocent woman of having fallen, and there too the letter is too hideous to appear in the text of the novel. Once again the poison also operates against the writer of the letter. After this further, unprintable evidence of moral decline, Elsley flees furiously into the wilds and climbs a mountain. At the top, in sight of Mount Snowdon, a solipsistic epiphany occurs that parodies and, in the context of our argument, unwrites Wordsworth’s experience on that mountain: He has desired to be alone; and he is alone; the centre of the universe, if universe there be. All created things, suns and planets, seem to revolve round him, and he a point of darkness, not of light. He seems to float self-poised in the centre of the boundless nothing, upon an ell-broad slab of stone – and yet not even on that; for the very ground on which he stands he does not feel. He does not feel the mist which wets his cheek, the blood which throbs within his veins. He only is; and there is none beside. (XXI)

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The ‘boundless nothing’ recalls the mental ‘space without origins, beginning or end,’ that Tambling analyses in connection with Esther’s feverish delirium and that resembles the opium dreams of De Quincey.47 With its ‘mist’ it alludes to another Wordsworthian passage too, involving the Alpine crossing as a mental event: ‘That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss/Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,/At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost’.48 In addition to De Quincey and Wordsworth, Elsley’s exaltation comes after this to identify him with a Shelleyan hero.49 A storm breaks, and in a state of ‘perfect rage, [which] like perfect love, casts out fear’, he challenges the elements to do their worst: ‘He was Prometheus on the peak of Caucasus, hurling defiance at the unjust Jove’. After a collapse – which brings to mind the heroine’s suicidal flight in Ruth over the Welsh hills50 – he revives in a calmer state but determined still to follow a Shelleyan trajectory: He would escape to Bangor, and then to London, cross to France, to Italy, and there bury himself amid the forests of the Apennines. . . . If the world heard of him again, it should be in such a thunder-voice as those with which Shelley and Byron, from their southern seclusion, had shaken the ungrateful motherland which cast them out. (XXI) The trope of the omnipotent poet that subjects the world to his ‘thunder-voice’ – or to his ‘arch-enchanter’s wand’ in Bulwer’s metaphor – is miserably inappropriate. Elsley falls a victim or unwriter of the Romantic myth of the poet rather than a propagator of its power. He gets no further than London, where Tom tries in vain to rescue him from the devastating effects of opium and an apparent attempt to drown himself. His last poetic project involves going to the Crimea in order to fight and to celebrate the heroic fighting in verse: ‘ “It is a grand thought! The true war-poets, after all, have been warriors themselves” ’. Tom encourages the illusion as an expedient for strengthening along with the will to write the will to live: ‘ “A new country – one of the finest in the world. New scenery, new actors. . . . Yes, there is another ‘Revolt of Islam’ to be written yet” ’ (XXIV). Like Dickens’s Nemo, another failed soldier and penman, Elsley then dies ingloriously from too much opium and rheumatic fever in squalid East-End lodgings. He ends amidst an ugliness that may ironically remind us that he has once proudly shared ‘all Goethe’s dislike of anything terrible . . . of sickness, disease, . . . anything which jarred with that “beautiful” which was his idol’ (X). The new poem of revolutionary power will not be written. In the struggle that would ‘ “end in the death of one of us” ’ the poison has defeated the instruments of both the poet and the attending physician. For the death of Elsley does not signal the victory of the once cocky and ambitious Tom, the writer of nothing who will humbly announce at the end his own defeat to Grace.

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Since the new ‘Revolt’ may have diffused its own sort of disease rather than a redemptive energy, it is just as well that it remain among the nonexistent, uncompleted, unpublished texts in our novels. Other poems that Elsley has actually written may come to figure among the burned texts, for when his forgiving wife unexpectedly arrives at his deathbed, he asks her to promise one thing: ‘ “That you will go home and burn all the poetry – all the manuscripts, and never let the children write a verse – a verse – when I am dead!” ’ Another female that burns male writing, she will perform the auto da fe that brings the pestilential implications of the writing into visibility and undoes them. Elsley will die without poetic progeny to be infected by his unhappy influence, and his very name as poet is cancelled: ‘ “call me no more Elsley” ’, he whispers to his wife, ‘ “call me John Briggs, and let us have done with shame forever” ’ (XXV). In recalling the attempt to drown himself and the poetry that has met, thanks to Tom, a watery doom, we may apply the Keatsian epitaph to this disease-smitten poet – ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’. The novels indeed raise with remarkable frequency the possibility that texts – like the bedding of Keats and the clothing in Old Saint Paul’s – may contain pestilential viruses and merit burning. The ‘fit of fever’ to which Lavinia, for example, has succumbed may infect the reader of her letters. Esther, who has been so careful to avoid infecting Ada, also appears to suspect the infective power of a text when she attempts to keep as much of her fever as possible out of the narrative. Among the readers within our stories, to notice again in conclusion the reading experience, Grace Harvey stands out as the most susceptible to textual contagion. The text transmits to her body, to be sure, not an infectious disease but a more lethal violence, the exquisite torments of martyrdom. The harrowing tales of martyrdom in her favourite Book of Martyrs offer, we recall, the opportunity to experience almost physically the torturing, erotic delights: ‘she would . . . feel with Perpetua the wild bull’s horns . . . or see with triumphant smile, by Anne Askew’s side, the fire flare up around her at the Smithfield stake’.51 The auto da fe performed in the text therefore spreads outward in this case to set the reader ablaze too. Fire, which has been proposed as a metaphor for writing or unwriting, becomes a metaphor for reading as well. The narrated pains, passions and fires that invade her very being further resemble, the narrator believes, those that penetrate actresses. The sensations that secondarily infect audiences in the theatre first inhabit, in the chain of contagion, the performers. As a sensitive reader, Grace is also an actress that performs written texts in privacy: who that applauds a Rachel or a Ristori for being able to make awhile their souls and their countenances the homes of the darkest passions, can blame her for enacting in herself, and for herself alone, incidents in which the highest and holiest virtue takes shape in perfect tragedy? (X)52

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The power of texts to contaminate readers in this respect is often discerned in the so-called ‘novels of sensation’ of the mid-nineteenth century. Mrs Oliphant published an interesting analysis in this context of just how Collins’s Woman in White conveyed its sensations physically to readers. Although the sensation might not necessarily be pathological, a considerable debate developed later, according to Winter, about whether it was ‘healthy to read sensational material’: ‘This question was central to worries about the health risks of reading that reached their peak in the 1880s.’ Reading, like opium, could create an addictive dependence, and ‘there was a gathering storm over whether reading was becoming a “disease” ’.53 In a last example of the representation of reading within a text, Wilde’s Dorian Gray may read in the ‘yellow book’ the nearly archetypal example of contagious, addictive writing: It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming.54 Among the eight works of our own canon, Ruth in particular was considered ‘contagious’ and produced the strongest effects upon readers. While not a novel of sensation, many readers evidently did find it poisonous. ‘Never before’, Bonaparte claims perhaps hyperbolically, ‘had any novel so outraged the reading public’,55 and it prompted not fictional but literal instances of the auto da fe. On several occasions, that is, copies of it were publicly burnt. Yet as d’Albertis reports, many readers, like the young Josephine Butler, experienced the book as a distinctively positive form of contagion. She attested to the ‘infectious missionary character of Gaskell’s book’, which had called her to a lifelong vocation that included the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and state regulation of prostitution.56 Except for Old Saint Paul’s, our other novels too have not only included episodes of reading but demonstrated their power, if less spectacularly than in Gaskell’s case, over actual readers. Whereas Ruth has polarized its readers into two mutually hostile camps, I promessi sposi has appeared to Sante Matteo to appeal in a different way to two classes of readers. Matteo supposes, rather ingeniously, that Manzoni’s narrator controls his readership, more consciously than does Gaskell’s narrator, as with different literary styles he addresses, alternatively, an elite and a common audience. The purpose is finally not to polarize but to forge a unified Italian reading public.57 While dealing with the plague, I promessi sposi has also been considered, as we have observed in Ruffini’s testimony, a healing book. And during

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periods of convalescence early readers of Ruffini experienced the same health-giving power in his works. Hillis Miller finds that Bleak House, which Dickens himself desired to make one of his most efficacious novels, actually does ‘exert a magic transformative power over the reader’.58 The novels of Kingsley, Bulwer and Zola are, in part, Tendenzromane that seek sometimes passionately to persuade readers, although the tendentious passages may no longer strike us with the same force. The true power of a text, as Arnold, Darwin and many others believed, lay not in what was stated explicitly but in what was implied: ‘tell the truth, but tell it slant’, in Douglas-Fairhurst’s summary of their theoretical advice, ‘avoid the headon assault of argument, and instead fall back on the oblique but steady moulding of public opinion’.59 The description in Dorian Gray of the yellow book suggests that its power too comes not from ‘head-on assault’ and explicitness but from the obliquity and subtlety of its style and its implicit atmosphere. The power is that of imperceptible contagion rather than rationally or consciously perceived demonstration. In this respect its insidious poison seems curiously analogous to what our writers take to be the power to cure of the Bible. More than for its explicit teaching and its doctrines, the Bible seems to our novelists to offer a style and an atmosphere, as in the reference in Lavinia to ‘the Word which never fails to calm, and soothe, and comfort’. As the archetype of health-giving writing, the Holy Scriptures offer an antidote to the poison or contagion of the yellow book that subverts principles of authority, order and integrity. Besides their references to diseased texts, all of our novels allude frequently to biblical passages, as if thereby to gain authorization for the truthful propensities of fictional writing as well.60 Biblical echoes in the form of stylistic devices and vocabulary even pervade Le Docteur Pascal, despite Zola’s wish to refute Christianity, and endow it with an atmosphere of patriarchal solemnity and evangelical earnestness.61 The end of Ruth provides one of the most suggestive instances of the biblical appeal when Benson reads the text of Revelation that foresees the utopian, heavenly order: ‘ “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” ’. The referential meaning of the beatific vision may remain obscure, but in Benson’s earnest reading the passage soothes and consoles. Its style could scarcely differ more from Elsley’s mountaintop defiance, deriving from ‘perfect rage’, of divine injustice. More often than the poet’s ‘perfect rage’ or God’s ‘perfect love’, the texts referred to within the novels convey the less extreme emotions, desires and projects of men and women. The legal, epistolary, scientific, narrative and poetic writing represents and expresses the ‘hunger’, ‘thirst’, ‘heat’ – and contagion – of historical experience. Operating in

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this context, the pen also functions more significantly than other weapons, for more than on the Crimean battlefields, history is occurring in the writing that shapes and un-shapes its energies. The writing does not so much constatate, that is, an antecedent truth of battles as perform its own battles. The writing even appears sometimes to escape the control of the penmen and penwomen in order to participate in unauthorized battles of books – or play of contagion and counter-contagion – that has its own intertextual vitality. The conflicts involve the destruction or cancellation of texts not only through fire but in the various versions of unwriting or of leaving unwritten. Although writing may seldom achieve its stated purpose and may offer, like history itself, an ‘immense panorama of futility’, there are many efficacious texts. Pascal’s tree is saved from the ashes, and the other successful texts take much of their meaning and energy from the ashes of the texts that they unwrite or replace. In Bleak House, to return to an early example of this chapter, virtual writing will effectuate Jo’s forgiveness. As reparative and undoing gestures, pleas for forgiveness and concessions of forgiveness function not just as writing but as unwriting that heals bitterness and reintegrates broken relationships. Lady Dedlock will unknowingly imitate Jo’s gesture in her last written words: ‘ “The place where I shall lie down, if I can yet get so far, has been often in my mind. Farewell. Forgive” ’ (LIX).62 And indeed her husband, unable to speak, has already responded in writing that unknowingly pre-echoes her alliteration: ‘Sir Leicester writes upon the slate. “Full forgiveness. Find –” ’ (LVI). Jo, Lady Dedlock and Sir Leicester are all defeated, but the plea for forgiveness and the responsive offering of full forgiveness reverberate in textuality and contribute their healing power to Esther’s story. ‘Folded in a single party’, as in the historical vision again of ‘Little Gidding’, the power of the defeated permeates with its haunting shadows the very words of the victorious.

7

Speakers, singers and listeners

In Old Saint Paul’s Solomon Eagle defiantly brandishes the weapons of Heaven against the menacing swords of Rochester and Etheredge: ‘ “Advance, if ye dare! and try your strength against one armed by Heaven” ’ (II:vii). The heavenly arms are not here the pen, for while pens are making the texts that represent history, episodes like this one show a perspective in which writing possesses little utility. Kingsley’s Major Campbell, who will become one of the valorous swordsmen in the Crimea, observes that ‘ “God dwells no more in books written with pens than in temples made with hands” ’ (XX). God dwells in the temple of the natural creation in which, more powerfully than in a written message, his word is spoken and heard. Solomon Eagle, who does not write, thus believes that God has armed him with the supreme weapon of the divinely inspired voice. God speaks, that is, not only in the sounds of nature but in the voice of prophets like Solomon. The voice of the divine Maker does not limit itself to beautiful utterances. Audible revelations of God often occur in the terrific eruptions that unmake the natural creation. In a long tract, Gods Terrible Voice in the City, Thomas Vincent hears ‘the sound of the [divine] Voice’ in the cataclysmic plague and fire of 1665 and 1666. Constantly hearing, all but literally, its thunder, the author elaborates throughout his tract an ‘Interpretation of the Voice’. The interpretation underlies, I believe, that elaborated by Ainsworth’s Solomon, who is otherwise based on Defoe’s account of the figure. As one of its organizing principles, Vincent’s tract catalogues the many ‘Calls’ of God to which the inhabitants of London have been guiltily ‘deafening the Ear’.1 The spreading contagion is then God made audible – and in the next stage of incarnation, which we have already considered, the fire evidently becomes at once the contagion and God himself made visible. The audible effect seems to require, however, a human voice in order to overcome the resistance of the deafened human ear. In conveying the divine message to the ears of his auditors, Solomon’s thundering voice not only informs them, constatively, of God’s presence but enacts that presence with punishing force. The voice diffuses a contagion that

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attacks more than the ears. His auditors sicken and die, and one of these, Westwood, who doubts the presence of God, accuses Solomon of homicide: ‘ “Your fearful prophecies and denunciations so terrified my daughter, that she died distracted. My broken-hearted wife was not long in following her; and now you have made me the murderer of my son” ’ (III:ii). Westwood has accidentally shot his own son, that is, while taking aim at Solomon. More than ever convinced of the superiority of his own verbal weapons to firearms and swords, the ‘enthusiast’ Solomon continues unperturbed with his oration. It turns out that while his voice is diffusing the contagion, his words can also prescribe the antidote: ‘ “Now, mark me what you must do to free the city from contagion. You must utterly and for ever abandon your evil courses. You must pray incessantly for remission of sins. You must resign yourselves without repining to such chastisement as you have provoked” ’. And his words finally convince Westwood that he has somehow deserved the chastisement of the deaths of his daughter, wife and son: ‘ “I feel the force of your words,” faltered Westwood, – “would I had felt it sooner!” ’ (III:ii). But because many of Solomon’s auditors fail to heed the message, his vocal force tends more to transmit the pestilence than ‘to free the city from contagion’. In Two Years Ago a corresponding spokesman for God appears to be a Methodist, who takes advantage of the cholera to preach a hell-fire sermon designed to produce converts for his own congregation. ‘There is no need’, remarks the narrator, ‘to transcribe [this sermon]’, for everyone has heard discourses of the sort, sometimes even in Anglican churches: ‘The preacher’s object seemed to be . . . to excite in his hearers the utmost intensity of selfish fear, by language which certainly, as Tom had said, came under the law against profane cursing and swearing’. Such sermons have already terrorized some members of the community into a state of anxiety that has brought on the symptoms of cholera and led even to death. This time too the violently aggressive, contagion-bearing language is breaking down rational restraints (of the deafened ears) and diffusing a mass hysteria. Fortunately, the audience in the meeting-hall includes Major Campbell in uniform, who interrupts the preacher with an authoritative command: ‘ “Stop! I, too, have a sermon to preach to you” ’, and he invites the congregation to leave the ‘temple made with hands’ in order to listen to him outdoors. In a challenge to the ‘profane cursing and swearing’ of the preacher, Campbell wins, evidently because there is a genuinely divine presence in his words even if no ceremony of ordination has blessed him: Whatsoever words he spoke they came home to those wild hearts with power. And when he paused, and looked intently into the faces of his auditory, to see what effect he was producing, a murmur of assent and admiration rose from the crowd, which had now swelled to half the

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population of the town. And no wonder; no wonder that, as the men were enchained by the matter, so were the women by the manner. (XVII) While the gender distinction may amuse us, it is clear that language that conveys the power of health rather than the contagion of disease must demonstrate the proper wedding of matter and manner. (The poetry of Elsley, we recall, has featured much manner and little matter and so evidently been effeminate despite its noisiness.) The oldest members of Campbell’s audience recall their fathers’ narratives about ‘when John Wesley, on the cliffs of St. Ives, out-thundered the thunder of the gale’, with reference presumably not just to literal volume. God can, then, reveal his truth not only in the thunder and poetry of nature but in the words of men. In another and even more spectacular demonstration, Campbell again proves the force of words, but this time, curiously, with words that bring forth not health but disease. Not satisfied with the popular judgement in favour of Campbell, the infuriated preacher appeals to a higher court: ‘ “Let the Lord judge between me and him!” ’ Accepting the new challenge, Campbell calls on the preacher ‘ “in the presence of God [to] answer for the words which you have spoken this day” ’: ‘ “I call on you to answer to Him for the innocent lives which you have endangered and destroyed, for the innocent souls to whom you have slandered their heavenly Father by your devil’s doctrines this day!” ’ (XVII). The contest, which explicitly resembles that between Elijah and the priests of Baal, ends with what evidently strikes the crowd as God’s clearcut verdict. The cholera suddenly attacks the preacher and carries him off within four hours. In this case, when Campbell’s words somehow bring on the infection, we are less certain about whether to consider them the messengers of a divine judgement. Tom Thurnall naturally doubts that God has been involved and ascribes the responsibility for the preacher’s death simply to Campbell: ‘ “Those words of yours went through him, sir, like a Minié bullet. I was afraid of what would happen when I heard them.” ’ While resembling bullets, Campbell’s honest words should not, in any case, be considered the carriers of contagion, as the preacher’s words have been. Probably the contagion has already been lurking within the preacher, and Campbell’s words have produced a consternation that has weakened the immune defences. The novel has already shown the importance of psychological factors in bringing on cholera. Campbell almost regrets, indeed, that he has fired those lethal words but claims that ‘ “I felt a power upon me, – you may think it a fancy – that there was no resisting” ’. So God may have been present and may have made of Campbell a medium for his own punishing words. The point remains the power, whether divinely authorized or not, of words that can even kill. In the event, Tom concludes, the

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preacher has deserved to die and knocking him off is ‘ “not more awful than killing a man in battle” ’ (XVII). In the context of plague and disease, the eloquent voice is not only that of the possible spokesman for God but of the afflicted and suffering patient. Recent interpreters, like Sontag, of the audible signals of disease have found that the human sufferers are ‘speaking through the body’. Whereas health involves, according to Bichat, the ‘silence of the organs’, individuals unable otherwise to speak choose, perhaps unconsciously, to communicate through the metaphorical noisiness of disease.2 In Marroni’s analysis of ‘malady as a language’ in nineteenth-century fiction, ‘the sick voice’ also expresses an anxiety to provoke a response, with ‘words of hope [or] words of despair’, from attentive listeners.3 The sufferers may thereby exert not only a subtle power but become more comprehensible to themselves as well as others. Among the many examples in our novels of such wordless, but somehow vocal, appeals for comprehension, the sicknesses of Amabel and Dr Pascal, deriving from the frustration of love, appear particularly eloquent. Interpretations of sickness as a linguistic phenomenon emphasize its vocal rather than written qualities because, evidently, the immediate, physical presence of the sufferer seems so crucial to the message. According to the platonic metaphysics of presence, which Derrida and his followers seek to deconstruct, the truth is entirely present in language only at the moment of its spoken utterance. Any effort to mediate the truth in writing, which can then be read in the speaker’s absence, must dilute and alter the truth.4 Indeed our novels very often seem in their treatments of speech acts to subscribe to a metaphysics of presence. In the introductions to the three versions of his novel, Manzoni urges his audience, according to Procaccini, ever more specifically to respond not as readers but as auditors of a speaking voice.5 Ruffini’s Lavinia, as we have seen, has been aware of the power of presence in Paolo’s magnificent speech. The truth has depended not just on the words, which can be reported in writing, but on the entire context of their speaking – ‘the electricity of passion, . . . the words, voice, and look [that] made me feel’. Lavinia thus despairs of conveying, with pen and paper, the quality of her experience to Lady Augusta. A similar speculation discourages Bulwer’s Fenwick when he wonders how to do justice to the charismatic presence of Margrave: I give as faithfully as I can recall them the words in which Margrave addressed me. But who can guess by cold words transcribed, even were they artfully ranged by a master of language, the effect words produce when warm from the breath of the speaker? Ask one of an audience which some orator held enthralled, why his words do not quicken a beat in the reader’s pulse, and the answer will be, ‘The words took their charm from the voice and the eye, the aspect, the manner, the man!’ (LXXIV)

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In Lavinia’s ‘words, voice, and look’ and Fenwick’s ‘voice’, ‘eye’, ‘aspect’, ‘manner’, ‘man’, we may locate the contagious force of the communication, what Lavinia also terms ‘the electricity of passion’. Here it would seem that the power derives less from the ‘matter’ of what the words literally signify than from the ‘manner’ that Kingsley identifies as the more feminine component of language. Besides navigating amongst treacherously fluid written texts – to risk another metaphor – the novels broach with such considerations the shoal of the specific power of the spoken word, and occasionally of the siren’s song. By definition the novels cannot, as written texts themselves, convey the power of the speaking or singing voice. At best they can by ‘artfully rang[ing]’ their words convey implications analogous to the ‘poison’ that lurks within the yellow book of Dorian Gray. Even with all the artfulness of the writer’s manner the episodes representing powerful speech must remain at one or two removes from the powerful presence itself. For Derrida, of course, the logos is never really present but is always intuited as an absence. The speaking voice itself makes us aware of what is not there or what has passed away in the act of speaking. Unlike Derrida, however, nineteenth-century audiences may have considered the spoken word to possess a presence that endures beyond the moment of its utterance. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away’, Jesus says, ‘but my words shall not pass away’.6 Indeed, it may be, as Douglas-Fairhurst discusses Victorian impressions about sound waves, that no words pass away. In the speculation of Charles Babbage that so impressed Dickens and many others, ‘the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise’: The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or even whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.7 The same air that is so filled with miasmic contagion and germs contains the continuing pulsations of every word that has ever been spoken. The situation implies an analogy between words and germs that helps to explain how the words, in the episodes cited above, induce sickness in the listeners. A further implication of the airy library is that its archives endure far longer and in far greater security than the written works housed in the libraries – ‘made with hands’ – on the terrestrial surface. Libraries, like the great one of ancient Alexandria, burn down, and fire consumes, as we have seen, so many of the written documents of our novels. But while all the unexpressed thoughts and intentions of humanity and all of those expressed in merely written words may be doomed sooner or later to perish, the spoken words will last forever.

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As Babbage’s reference to ‘vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled’ suggests, the issue of the endurance of the spoken word acquires most interest with respect to weighty, performative utterances. Our novels treat the issue with respect to solemn pronouncements in which the speaker is able – or fails – to express a power that produces a lasting effect. The questions concern the authorizing presence, whether divine or human, in the utterance and the factors in the context, the ‘manner’, that produce the power. In other ways of exercising power, it has often appeared to us that the historical forces like those of Chancery, are working themselves out, spreading their own contagion, through the actions of individuals. But in a strong speech like that of Paolo before Lavinia, the speaker may be making his own truth present. He breaks through the conditioning of history and speaks not for God or others but freely for himself. In general the powerful utterances are aligned, even as free utterances, either with the disintegrating forces associated with contagion or with the integrating influences that resemble healing. But rather than insisting, perhaps repetitively, on the terms contagion and healing, this portion of my argument questions the extent to which the novels do, after all, represent spoken words as freely powerful. The categories to be considered are first public utterance, which usually involves clergymen, as in sermons and marriage ceremonies, and second more private speech acts, which include blessings, curses and prayers. The spoken events of the first category often occur within churches or ‘temples made with hands’, while those of the second category transpire in less hallowed structures. It may be, as I have implied, that God dwells convincingly neither in temples made with hands nor elsewhere. His ‘terrible voice’ may not, as Thomas Vincent and Solomon Eagle have thought, be resounding ‘in the city’. While some speakers eager to assert their own freedom may welcome, however, this absence of God, they or their listeners, including ourselves, may notice that the merely human power is illusory too. A nostalgia for the divinely authorizing presence then weakens the conviction that human words, in the struggles waged in the locations of this chapter, can produce powerful effects. With respect to the more public utterances, there are, besides the noisy haranguers that we have already noticed in Ainsworth and Kingsley, two other dissenting preachers of sermons. Both wish to make God powerfully present to their auditors, but the first, Dickens’s Chadband, is evidently a charlatan. He depends very obviously on ‘manner’ and functions as an exemplar of linguistic abuse – only less lethally so than Kingsley’s preacher ‘whose language . . . came under the law against profane cursing and swearing’. With the repetition of his rhetorical formulae Chadband overawes the captive Jo and the rest of his predominantly female audience in Snagsby’s house, made into a sort of temple for the occasion: ‘ “It is . . . the ray of rays, the sun of suns, the moon of moons, the star of stars. It is the light of Terewth” ’. Pleased with the effect of his trope, he continues to

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improvise and to dramatize in the repeated ‘I say’ a fascination with himself as the performing speaker: ‘Of Terewth. . . . Say not to me that it is not the lamp of lamps. I say to you, it is. I say to you a million of times over, it is. It is! I say to you that I will proclaim it to you, whether you like it or not; nay, that the less you like it, the more I will proclaim it to you. With a speakingtrumpet! I say to you that if you rear yourself against it, you shall fall, you shall be bruised, you shall be battered, you shall be flawed, you shall be smashed.’ (XXV) His oration is ‘much admired for its general power’, which probably has much to do with its deafening volume as if delivered through ‘a speaking trumpet’. His female auditors may also be especially susceptible to the ‘general power’ of manner and unlikely to observe the absence of matter. Although he threatens them with such dire battering, smashing consequences, the aggression is really conducted against language, which seems smashed into incoherence. The effect upon language may resemble that provoked, in Manzoni’s view, by the plague. If Chadband has produced any sense of presence finally, it is not God’s but that of his own useless egotism. The minister Benson in Ruth wishes more humbly to speak words of power. In the sermon that has cost him more effort and pain than any other of his career, however, he becomes sadly aware of the weakness of words. This is the funeral sermon for Ruth, for which ‘words seemed hard and inflexible, and refused to fit themselves to his ideas’. At the funeral service, he anxiously takes out the sermon, ‘his great, last effort in her honour – the labour that he had prayed God to bless to the hearts of many’: For an instant the old man looked on all the upturned faces, listening, with wet eyes, to hear what he could say to interpret that which was in their hearts, dumb and unshaped, of God’s doings as shown in her life. He looked, and, as he gazed, a mist came before him, and he could not see his sermon. . . . Sermon and all was forgotten. He sat down, and hid his face in his hands for a minute or so. Then he arose, pale and serene. He put the sermon away, and opened the Bible, and read the seventh chapter of Revelations. (XXXVI) Regretting that Benson has not delivered his sermon, Sally still admires its power even in its unspoken virtuality: ‘ “I make no doubt” ’, she assures the physician Davis, ‘ “there was as grand a sermon in yon paper-book as ever we hear in church” ’. As in the case of the unpublished or destroyed

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written texts, however, the value of the undelivered sermon emerges in its suppression. The unspoken words of Benson’s sermon serve to indicate the greater power of the words already formulated in the Bible. Only in repeating the biblical text can the preacher attempt to make truth present to his audience. But it is a presence at several removes since it derives from what was written long ago and has undergone various translations. The truth is that which is already present in the hearts of the audience, but ‘dumb and unshaped, of God’s doings as shown in [Ruth’s] life’. Of that life, it may now appear, the biblical words tell us that the divine ‘Lamb which . . . shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters’ has been present in Ruth’s earthly career. Ruth’s silently healing ministry has embodied a wordless promise of the restoration of paradise. In Benson’s inability to convey this meaning in his own words, we also discern, possibly, the inadequacy of Gaskell’s narrative itself to reveal God in the heroine’s life. Yet the narrator has not put her own text away. The truth, we suspect, is chiefly that one that lies ‘dumb and unshaped’ in human ‘hearts’, which may not correspond to ‘God’s doings’. Gaskell is able in her narrative to gesture towards that human truth if not to make it present, and so her narrative stands. She has not aspired like Benson to produce any presence. Besides the words of sermons, the novels question the ability of words in ceremonial rituals to perform powerful and enduringly valuable actions. Usually requiring the authority of the priest, the ritual that most classically demonstrates the performative power of language is probably that of marriage. The institution of marriage, it is also thought, functions as a primary element of cohesion for the entire civil order; it evidently belongs to what Sir Leicester Dedlock considers ‘ “the framework of the cohesion by which all things are held together!” ’ (XL). Against the various aspects of the plague that disintegrate, in Girard’s phrase, the ‘cultural system’, the marriage ceremony must therefore be able to impose a strong binding or integrating power. To do this, the ceremony requires the contracting parties publicly to pronounce certain words before God and his priest. Except in Le Docteur Pascal, where the voice of nature substitutes for God, the divine presence authorizes the enduring power of the ceremony. But in six of the novels, something goes wrong in the particular enactments of the verbal ritual, and the divine presence does not confer the chrismon of lasting authenticity upon the union. The pestilential influence that attacks the integrity of spoken as of written language tends to prevail, and the bride risks becoming not a legal wife but a fallen woman. In a context of social disintegration, the opening episodes of I promessi sposi show the inability of Renzo and Lucia to pronounce the appropriate words before the appropriate audience. After the bravos of Don Rodrigo have terrorized Don Abbondio into refusing to marry them, Renzo con-

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cocts a plot to force the priest to hear the binding words. Entering with Lucia the priest’s house by stealth, he succeeds in uttering before him and other witnesses the ritual phrase: ‘ “– Signor curato, in presenza di questi testimoni, quest’è mia moglie. –” ’ but the terrified Lucia does not get beyond ‘ “– e questo . . . –” ’ before the priest smothers her with a tablecloth (VIII). So the plot fails, and the rest of the novel traces the complex struggle to defeat at last the forces that would keep the words unspoken. One of the hindrances becomes Lucia herself, when in order to escape Don Rodrigo she renounces Renzo in favour of a chaste devotion to the blessed Virgin. This vow of chastity, which we may consider an antimarriage, also occurs in solemnly pronounced words. ‘ “– O Vergine santissima, . . . fatemi uscire da questo pericolo, fatemi tornar salva con mia madre, Madre del Signore; e fo voto a voi di rimaner vergine; rinunzio per sempre a quel mio poveretto, per non esser mai d’altri che vostra” ’ (XXI). These words bind her, she believes, even though overheard by no human ear, but Renzo thinks otherwise about such a solitary and unratified contract. After finally meeting up with Lucia again, he points out that the Virgin herself has not spoken to confirm their pact, and so it is probably not in force: ‘ “– Se la Madonna avesse parlato, oh, allora! Ma cos’è stato? una vostra idea” ’. The ritual has failed just like the earlier attempt before Don Abbondio because only one of the parties has uttered the appropriate words. Instead of being recorded in Babbage’s airy library, the contract exists now only as an ‘idea’; like their still uncelebrated marriage, it belongs to an unreal and impalpable level of desire. It transpires further, according to the doctrine of Fra Cristoforo, that the spokesman for God, who can confirm binding words, also has the authority to pronounce unbinding words in the name of God: ‘ “– Dio ha data alla sua Chiesa l’autorità di rimettere e di ritenere, secondo che torni in maggior bene, i debiti e gli obblighi che gli uomini possono aver contratti con Lui” ’. When the still-troubled Lucia confesses that her vow has been uttered from the heart (‘ “l’ho fatta proprio di cuore” ’), Cristoforo insists that this fact scarcely matters if the heart-felt truth has now changed. Indeed heart-felt intentions, as an aspect of the fluid context or ‘manner’, are less stable and certain than the ‘matter’ of words. But words too can be revoked. He pronounces in formal terms that seem impressively legal her absolution from any residual obligation that the vow may have imposed upon her: ‘ “– Con l’autorità che ho dalla Chiesa, vi dichiaro sciolta dal voto di verginità, annullando ciò che ci poté essere d’inconsiderato, e liberandovi da ogni obbligazione che poteste averne contratta” ’ (XXXVI). Lucia’s anti-marriage is dissolved, if indeed it had ever been valid, and she will be able without betraying the Virgin and so becoming a fallen woman to marry Renzo. We may nevertheless wonder about the real authority of words pronounced in the divine presence if they can be revoked so easily. While I promessi sposi thus accords a somewhat shaky authority to words,

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solemnly pronounced by the Church, to establish or disestablish a truth, Old Saint Paul’s makes the situation more problematic. The issue again regards the libertinism of the age, against the background of the plague, that is subverting the institution of marriage. From Bloundel’s prayer in the opening pages we gather that the literal plague ravages the city as an inevitable accompaniment of the sexual licentiousness and ‘ “all manner of vice openly practised” ’. The widespread diffusion of adultery and fornication constitutes the moral dimension of the plague, in which marriage vows are consistently broken and in which promises in general appear to have little binding force. The words of Rochester in particular amount to a tissue of lies, and Amabel knows that she cannot trust any of his extravagantly solemn promises. As either cause or effect, which become confused, of the plague, spoken words frequently fail then to establish any truth. Rochester nevertheless understands that he can physically possess the sceptical Amabel only by convincing her of his sincere marital intentions. So he devotes himself to persuading her to participate in a convincing, but counterfeit, marriage – as Renzo has conspired to make Lucia participate in a true one. The situation of the plague enables him to feign his own illness, nearly to the point of death, and he thereby arouses her compassion. When she agrees at last to marry him, he arranges what he intends to be a false ceremony. The priest is an impostor; the witnesses, his cronies, will be prepared to swear later that the ceremony has never occurred; his own solemn promises do not indicate the genuine intentions of his heart. Only the words of Amabel express the truth of her intentions. Despite his plans, however, the words pronounced may have performed a valid marriage. The man that Judith Malmayns has found to pose as the priest turns out to be a true priest, licensed to perform marriages. Judith and her own crony Chowles have also been secretly present as hidden witnesses who will be prepared to swear to the legitimacy of the ceremony. Judith has secured a certificate, moreover, that constitutes a further written attestation to the fact that the ceremony has occurred. There is nevertheless a further reversal, which may render the ceremony null and void after all. The priest has died of the plague shortly afterwards; for a price Judith and Chowles will swear that they have never witnessed such a ceremony; Rochester may destroy the certificate if he buys it from Judith. Has Amabel then become Countess of Rochester or simply the mistress of the libertine? What is the crucial contextual element that would give objective validity to the marriage – the intentions of the contracting parties, the words that they have actually pronounced before an authorized priest, the existence of witnesses, or the written document? The spoken words in this case appear less powerful at first than the intentions of Rochester. When the plague strikes Amabel – actually because Judith infects her but morally because of Rochester’s perfidy – he

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repents and decides to acknowledge her as his countess. His change of heart or change of intention at last gives force to the marriage that has already occurred in words. Yet it is also his spoken words, beyond the intention itself, that convince the dying Amabel of the validity of the marriage that she has come in despair to doubt. The words again take their authority from an appeal to God: ‘Heaven is my witness, that even now I would make you all the reparation in my power, were it needful. But it is not so. The wrong I intended you was never committed. I myself was deceived. I intended a feigned marriage, but it was rightfully performed. Time will not allow me to enter into further particulars of the unhappy transaction, but you may credit my assertion when I tell you you are indeed my wife, and Countess of Rochester.’ (IV:vi) He offers to show her the certificate, to corroborate his own words, but she can no longer read. The spoken statement that he makes before ‘Heaven’ suffices to convince her, and perhaps in the view of God they are married whether or not a written document or other supporting witnesses exist. If so, the situation differs from that in Manzoni, when Lucia’s words, pronounced with the silent Virgin as supposed auditor, fail to perform a binding contract. The enduring sincerity of Rochester’s intentions remain, in any event, uncertain. His assurance that she has become Countess of Rochester may derive only from the impetuous emotion of the moment, for he knows that her impending death will soon liberate him of any bond. She will soon be carted off to the plague-pit, ignominiously to decay with all the nameless victims of the contagion, and no trace will remain of such a Countess of Rochester. Unknown to the rest of written history, the only record of Amabel’s marriage – and of Amabel’s existence itself – is in the fiction of Ainsworth, or just possibly in Babbage’s library in the air. The ‘matter’ relates then to the performative power of Ainsworth’s fictional words, regardless of intentions, to reproduce those airy records and to bring historical truth back into consciousness. The motif of the fictitious marriage figures in three situations in Ruth in the context of a debate about the legitimacy of doing ‘evil that good may come’ (XXII). While evil would lurk in the ‘manner’, the substantial ‘matter’ would be good. The initial instance is the lie that Ruth has been married, published for the sake of preserving her son from the unjust suffering of having to grow up as an illegitimate child.8 As John Kucich has shown, Victorian culture proclaimed the fundamental value of truthtelling and yet, as an instance of Bakhtinian symbolic reversal, invested lying too with immensely positive associations.9 In terms of gender, instinctive associations connected truthfulness with manly candour (‘matter’)

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and lying with a female tendency towards duplicity (‘manner’). Although Gaskell often reverses the usual gender characteristics, she seems here to respect them.10 The impulse to tell lies about the heroine originates with Benson’s sister Faith in the question, ‘ “Could she not go into quite a fresh place, and be passed off as a widow?” ’. The question constitutes a temptation to which the brother, like Adam, succumbs: ‘Ah, tempter! unconscious tempter! Here was a way of evading the trials for the poor little unborn child, of which Mr Benson had never thought. It was the decision – the pivot, on which the fate of years moved; and he turned it the wrong way’ (XI). Although committed for the best of intentions – for the innocent child’s sake – the sin appears to the narrator just that, and Benson’s conscience will thereafter trouble him.11 Step by step, the sister and brother nevertheless construct the fiction of Ruth’s marriage to a surgeon, Mr Denbigh, who has died shortly afterwards. Faith comes positively to enjoy her creative function that seems to make her a representative within the work for the novelist: ‘I do think I’ve a talent for fiction, it is so pleasant to invent, and make the incidents dovetail together; and after all, if we are to tell a lie, we may as well do it thoroughly, or else it’s of no use. A bungling lie would be worse than useless. And, Thurstan – it may be very wrong – but I believe – I am afraid I enjoy not being fettered by truth.’ (XIV) In their creation of a fictitious rival for Bellingham, they do not need to forge any documents, and there has never been, as in Ainsworth, the staging of a feigned ceremony. It is necessary only to tell Mrs Bradshaw who immediately spreads the story throughout the community in such a form that ensures its general acceptance as truth. The marriage appears, however, to have the sanction of the verbal authority of the clergyman, Benson, and he almost fears that he has thus implicated God in the deception: ‘ “I hope God will forgive us” ’. He urges his sister not to go too far: ‘ “pray, dear, don’t add one unnecessary word that is not true” ’ (XIV). The damage is nevertheless done, and apparently the subtle contagion in the atmosphere of the lie comes to infect Ruth’s son. At the age of six, ‘Leonard had for some time shown a strange odd disregard of truth; he invented stories, and told them with so grave a face, that unless there was some internal evidence of their incorrectness . . . he was generally believed’. When Benson sadly decides that he must whip the lad to cure him of the habit, the old servant Sally comes unexpectedly to oppose her master. Her opposition depends on two interesting appeals to the authority of the Scriptures, the source of truth itself. It appears that since Benson has compromised his own integrity he is likely now to misinterpret, misuse or ignore these biblical texts to suit himself. When he cites the precept,

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‘He that spareth the rod, spoileth the child’, Sally accuses him of taking the precept out of its appropriate Old Testament context. According to Sally’s own possibly contorted hermeneutics, the text does not mean what it says, for the words are uttered by Solomon who is elsewhere shown to be a bad father. Never having believed the story of Ruth’s marriage, Sally also finds it unfair, with reference to a New Testament passage, that Benson as propagator of lies should punish Leonard for the same sin: ‘ “I think it’s for them without sin to throw stones at a poor child. . . . I only do as my betters do, when I call Leonard’s mother Mrs –” ’ (XIX). While one should not, of course, cast stones at either the fallen woman or the child, the recognition that no one is ‘without sin’ implies the contagion of a generalized moral laxity. Sally herself has been infected in that she now imitates her ‘betters’ in repeating the lie. The breakdown of words as vehicles for truth has come into evidence in the Bradshaw household too, although as a parallel event rather than as a result of the Bensons’ lie. In connection with the Parliamentary election, a frequent presence in the house is Mr Donne’s manager, Mr Hickson, who insists upon the sorry condition of English law: ‘he . . . professed a great disgust to the law, as a “great sham,” which involved an immensity of underhand action, and truckling and time-serving, and was perfectly encumbered by useless forms and ceremonies, and dead obsolete words’. The goal of removing the ‘useless forms’ and ‘obsolete words’ requires a new reforming majority in Parliament, and the achievement of this Liberal majority requires the employment of rather dubious means: ‘ “as the world stands, they who would succeed even in good deeds, must come down to the level of expediency” ’. The term ‘expediency’, with respect to the attainment of a ‘good’, ‘lofty’, ‘holy’ purpose, therefore substitutes for the evil term ‘bribery’ to which Mr Bradshaw is actually contributing his financial resources. When Bradshaw learns that a pious lie has concealed the truth of Ruth’s fallen condition, he nevertheless reacts with righteous indignation. Lying words, no matter how forcefully uttered, do not have the power to accomplish a marriage. Bradshaw forbids Ruth or her ‘bastard’ ever to intrude again with their ‘corruption’ into his house. His horror, as Jill L. Matus has argued, reflects that of William Acton about the possibility that fallen women may go on so convincingly in later life to imitate the condition of honest women. Because fallen women were so likely to be contaminated with venereal disease, the possibility meant that they could carry not only moral contagion but physical contagion into honest families.12 Although the repentant Benson agrees that the truth should not have been concealed, he deplores the blanket reprobation by the ‘world’ of all fallen women. Bradshaw should recognize a higher truth than that of the letter of the law that condemns sexual sinners, and Benson wonders how to make him do so. Since his previous lie has compromised the authority that his words possess for Bradshaw, his message will now require a new

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influx of divine empowerment: ‘ “Now I wish God would give me power to speak out convincingly what I believe to be His truth, that not every woman who has fallen is depraved” ’. But Benson’s words fail to convince Bradshaw. The ‘power to speak out’ freely encounters the moral Necessity that Bradshaw, in a passage already quoted in Chapter 2, associates with ‘the world’: ‘ “The world has decided how such women are to be treated; and, you may depend upon it, there is so much practical wisdom in the world that its way of acting is right in the long run” ’. (Although ‘the world’ here is thought only to be ‘decid[ing]’ and ‘acting’, ‘the world’ elsewhere in the novels of Gaskell, Bulwer, Dickens, and others also has a ‘voice’ that speaks.)13 Benson can only make a solemn declaration of his own loyalty to a higher authority than that of the world: ‘ “I take my stand with Christ against the world,” said Mr Benson, solemnly’ (XXVII). Even in terms of the moral authority that Bradshaw respects, however, his own household already suffers from a deep contamination that has nothing to do with Ruth. Bradshaw soon discovers that his son Richard has committed forgery, and a loyalty to a principle of coherence makes him impulsively exile Richard too, as another bastard, from the house. Spoiled by his mother, Richard has ceased to be his son, and the youth’s expulsion from the family is decreed in solemn words before a clergyman, Benson again: ‘ “He is no longer as my son to me. I have always resolved to disown any child of mine who was guilty of sin. I disown Richard. He is as a stranger to me” ’ (XXX). The situation implies the dissolution of a second marriage in which the community has believed. Mrs Bradshaw threatens to abandon her husband in order to accompany her poor son to prison. After the revelation of the fictitiousness of Ruth’s marriage to one Mr Denbigh, the separation of the Bradshaws suggests an epidemic of familial disintegration. The Bradshaw family does not, however, dissolve, for Richard’s injury in a road accident arouses a certain paternal tenderness and leads to the revocation of the disowning edict. The solemn pronouncement has not, after all, meant very much, or it has resembled the crude first stone that Bradshaw, himself implicated in bribery, has no right to cast against anyone. We discern again, as in the words that may have made Amabel not Rochester’s mistress but his countess, the untrustworthy power of spoken formulae, even if ratified by Heaven, to create or dissolve families. In the case of Leonard, the lies have failed to give him legitimacy as the son of Bellingham’s ghostly rival, Mr Denbigh. There are other ineffectual attempts as well to make him a more or less legitimate son. Donne (alias Bellingham) offers marriage to Ruth – the third dubious marriage in the novel, for it would not precisely make public reparation for the wrong done: ‘ “No one else [besides the Bensons] need know but what you are really Mrs Denbigh. Leonard shall still bear this name, but in all things else he shall be treated as my son” ’ (XXIV). There arises here a question similar to that concerning what would make Amabel a legitimate countess.

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If Leonard’s parents should legally pronounce marriage vows, would he not then become, in some retrospectively effectual sense, the legitimate son of Donne even while considered still the son of Denbigh? Donne’s offer, as he later tells Benson, has nevertheless been simply ‘ “to marry [Ruth], and provide for the boy as if he had been legitimate” ’ (my emphasis) (XXXVI). Mr Davis, who has no children and desires an heir for his medical practice, then urges his own candidacy for the paternal function. A sense of his own authority leads him to make his solemn offer to Ruth in a scene that somewhat recalls Gabriel’s annunciation to the Blessed Virgin. The announcement appears designed, that is, more to inform Ruth about the great destiny in store for her son than to ask for her consent: ‘ “I grieve over my good practice going to a stranger, when I ought to have had a son to take it after me. . . . I’ve got to look with covetous eyes on all healthy boys, and at last I’ve settled down my wishes on this Leonard of yours, Mrs Denbigh” ’. When Ruth does not respond with immediate gratitude, he assures her that he would not take Leonard entirely away from her: ‘I shall be glad to leave him with you as long and as much as we can; he could not be tied to your apron-string all his life, you know. Only I provide for his education, subject to your consent and good pleasure, and he is bound apprentice to me. I, his guardian, bind him to myself.’ (XXXIV) Whether Leonard will be legally bound to the guardianship of Davis we do not learn. Of all the paternal candidates, Benson possesses the best claim, and in taking leave of Benson, Donne is finally happy ‘ “to leave the boy still under your charge” ’. Without the need for words to solemnize the relationship, the paternity belongs effectively, if not legitimately, to this charitable minister of the gospel (XXXVI).14 An episode in Two Years Ago as well involves the weakness of solemn words in constituting and holding together a legitimate family. Sacred promises cannot prevent Elsley Vavasour from repudiating his wife. There have indeed been two promises on his part, for besides the original marriage vow he has later promised her ‘never to touch opium again’ and has, as ‘a man of honour’, kept his word. But when it appears to him that she has broken her marriage vow and fallen into adultery, he feels released in his turn: ‘ “I promised her, and therefore I will break my promise! She has broken hers, and I am free!” ’ (XXI). In a sort of epidemic disintegration of verbal commitments, he not only leaves his wife but falls into a diseased condition, helplessly addicted to the poison that will soon kill him. So he has hardly gained freedom, for health and freedom are better secured in obedience to the spirit of love that the marriage vows merely represent. The words themselves remain powerless to enforce obedience and can be

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revoked. As in Ruth too, respect for the law of love in Christ Jesus is thus preferable to the legalistic reasoning, or respect for literal language, that casts stones and leads to Elsley’s downfall. For other reasons the ceremony performed at Windermere in A Strange Story fails to create a genuine marriage between Lilian and Fenwick. As the words of the poisonous letter undo the words spoken before the priest, the bride comes in this case to fear that she is a fallen woman. For years the unconsummated union remains, as Joseph I. Fradin points out, a ‘marriage but in rite’.15 The issue of marriage comes finally and oddly for us into the story of Dr Pascal and Clotilde when Félicité insists that their affair would be less scandalous if they were at least married (XI). For her Catholic mentality, the question is the exquisitely legalistic one of whether marriage vows have been exchanged and recorded. So she focuses upon the secondary consideration of their not having married rather than upon the primary cause of that situation, the fact of their being uncle and niece. Yet according to the passage that describes their first night of love, a sort of marriage does, after all, occur along with the coming of dawn: ‘Le soleil fécondant d’avril se levait dans un ciel immense, d’une pureté sans tache, et la terre, soulevée par le frisson des germes, chantait gaiement les noces’ (VII). The song of the earth performs the nuptial ceremony in the temple not made with hands of the natural creation. No further authorization from a human or divine institution is required to bless such a union. The impression recalls that of Kingsley’s vicar regarding the poetry of the earth: since ‘ “God has written the poetry already” ’ in the form of nature, human poets have nothing more to do ‘ “but to read it humbly, and give Him thanks” ’. Although the author of the poetry and the authorizing celebrant of the marriage is not God for Zola, but life (‘la vie’), the antinomian implications are similar. Zola thus brings another category of marriage into the picture. Besides the marriage regularly performed by the priest, the antimarriage, the counterfeit marriage, the fictitious marriage, and the solemnly dissolved marriage – all of which involve verbal pronouncements – we now have the ceremony of the earth’s song. This may indeed be the most promisingly authentic of the marriages; it depends on the phonic presence of life itself rather than on the trickiness of lexical language. Of course, in ignoring legal structures, this marriage also seems the most anarchically subversive of the ‘cultural system’. That song of fecundity must reveal its power, however, in a subsequent development as well, the conception of a child. Until Clotilde becomes pregnant, Pascal will not believe that the power of life, in which he believes, has fully ratified their union. The significance given to the coming of the child recalls the myth of the woman who bears the divine word, the word made flesh. In this sense, therefore, the wordless union of Pascal and Clotilde does come like the others to require the validation of an authorizing word. Because it appears, as time passes, that the child will

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never arrive, Pascal decides in despair that he must send Clotilde away. Their union has proved null, just as Renzo has interpreted Lucia’s vow to the Virgin as null because the latter has pronounced no word. The last words that Pascal will ever hear from Clotilde, as her train departs, are the deeply melancholy, ‘ «Ah! si l’enfant était venu!» ’.16 Then she believes that he sighs indistinctly, ‘ «Oui, l’œuvre rêvée, la seule vraie et bonne, l’œuvre que je n’ai pu faire» ’ (XI). As the only true work of his life, the child would have possessed greater value than all the words that he has written. The marriages considered so far, we may conclude, have all tended to fail. Of course the denouements of the novels also propose other matrimonial unions that, it may be supposed, will endure ‘happily ever after’. But we lack evidence about these marriages, and the marriages that most interest us because of the attention devoted to them as speech events show the weakness of words to accomplish lasting effects. Insidious forces have undermined the authority of the words, sometimes because the words have been lies, and they have not strengthened ‘the framework of the cohesion by which all things are held together’. The failure has represented mainly, I believe, the failure of the divine presence, upon which strongly performative speech acts traditionally depend. Marriage is after all only a human institution and so subject to the concomitant flaws. As implied in the failure of performances of the scapegoat rituals that we have examined in Chapter 2, a providential God no longer exists to save the community. More private transactions in spoken words are more likely to achieve appreciable results. This private category includes first earnest appeals, reproaches and blessings that may provoke a change of heart, second a curse to be healed by forgiveness, and finally prayers possibly not to be answered. Here too the issue of the divine presence, as a performing and ratifying agency, remains problematic. Manzoni’s Lucia utters the most powerful of the earnest appeals. During the same evening in which she will make her promise to the Virgin, she has previously dared to pronounce, to tremendous effect, an appeal in the name of God. Although her captor, the innominato, is specifically hard-hearted and apparently incapable of feelings of guilt, she pleads with him ‘ “in nome di Dio” ’, the supreme logos that authorizes all other words. The unnamed man seems at first to reject this appeal as the unfair tactic so characteristic of the physically weak: ‘Dio, Dio,’ interruppe l’innominato: ‘sempre Dio: coloro che non possono difendersi da sé, che non hanno la forza, sempre han questo Dio da mettere in campo, come se gli avessero parlato. Cosa pretendete con codesta vostra parola? Di farmi . . .?’ e lasciò la frase a mezzo. (XXI)

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That night the interrupted battle continues silently upon an internal battlefield (‘campo’). An impression not so much of God himself as of Lucia, who has called upon God, terrifies the innominato. She has uncannily happened to enunciate a word – ‘codesta vostra parola’ – that has already been working within him on the unconscious level to undermine his security. Her unknowing recognition of his condition brings into consciousness his own repressed double, and guilt and remorse for his past life lead to his conversion before morning. The psychological mechanism probably resembles that whereby Kingsley’s Campbell has aroused such self-accusatory consternation in the Methodist preacher as to make him succumb to the cholera. Although the awe-struck populace in Manzoni, as apparently in Kingsley, considers the event a miracle of divine intervention, Manzoni’s narrator does not.17 The ‘forza’ of Lucia’s word has been that of an accidental catalyst. Indeed Lucia remains ignorant of what her word has accomplished, and she will pronounce later that night her uselessly self-destructive vow to the Virgin. The impression that here, if anywhere, the precisely divine presence has been actively powerful proves inaccurate.18 With respect to two other spoken appeals in this novel, conducted by clerical authorities against sinful inferiors, one fails and one succeeds. The first occurs in the intense verbal duel between the Cardinal Federigo Borromeo and Don Abbondio. Here, among all the episodes examined, we find writing itself able to communicate, in the representation of the cardinal, the strongest impression of a mesmerizing, speaking human presence. The struggle in spoken words becomes a particularly tense moment not only of a personal confrontation but of history in action. Unfortunately, the ears of Don Abbondio are too artfully deafened, and he successfully resists the strong presence, whether of God or the reproachful cardinal, that would impose guilt upon him. Remorse will never trouble the stolid priest for his refusal to enact, in the marriage of Renzo and Lucia, the speech event that God has required of him. The outcome is reversed in the second case, the encounter in the lazaretto between Fra Cristoforo and Renzo. Cristoforo’s eloquence induces contrition in Renzo for his unforgiving spirit towards Don Rodrigo. ‘ “Benedicilo, e sei benedetto” ’, Cristoforo proposes as a verbal transaction. Renzo formally blesses his rival and evidently receives an equivalent blessing in return (XXXV). Still it is not certain that the blessing emanates from the divine presence, since what Renzo experiences is mainly the psychological relief of being rid of an obsessive hatred. The transaction has occurred within himself, although its value may be propagated further if other individuals imitate it. A Strange Story provides the principal instance of an uttered curse and traces the outworking of its power in three episodes of illness that occur in the same bedchamber of the Abbots’ House. Dr Lloyd, whose reputation

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and practice Fenwick has ruined, pronounces the curse against his rival on his deathbed in that room: ‘ “Verily, retribution shall await you! In those spaces which your sight has disdained to explore you shall yourself be a lost and bewildered straggler. Hist! I see them already! The gibbering phantoms are gathering round you!” ’ (II). In passing the Abbots’ House some months later, Fenwick has his first experience of an uncannily irresistible force: ‘The dying man’s fantastic threat rang again in my startled ears. An irresistible impulse, which I could not then account for, and which I cannot account for now, . . . urged me on through the open gates up the neglected grass-grown road’ (IV). He then sees Lilian, his Egeria sitting beside the well, and falls in love with her. But as an aspect of the retribution that Fenwick is to suffer, the curse now falls on her too. Fenwick is called to her bedside in the room in which Lloyd has died. Lilian’s fainting fit may be attributed to ‘ “effluvia” ’ coming in through an open window, but the contagion derives more probably from the lingering effects of Lloyd’s ‘ “prolonged illness” ’ and death. In a statement that we have already noticed, Fenwick prescribes purification of the room: ‘ “You had better shut up the chamber for at least some weeks, burn fires in it, repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloroform” ’ (X). We nevertheless suspect that rather than a contagion susceptible to chloroform, the curse itself has infected the room; it has become an antithetical version of the ‘temple’ in which God dwells. There, even in the absence of the speaker, the words continue to reverberate and to diffuse their malady. (An incident that Margrave reports later similarly suggests the power of a curse to infect a fabric or remain as ‘a taint in the walls of the house’ [LXXIV].)19 After Miss Brabazon’s intrigues have caused Lilian and her mother to leave the house, the new inhabitant does not remain there for long. Less than a week after moving in, Miss Brabazon suffers ‘ “a fall down the stairs, – coming out of this very room” ’ – Lloyd’s death chamber of course – and Fenwick will attend her deathbed there too. She confesses her guilt for sending the poisonous anonymous letter that has driven Lilian mad and begs Fenwick to forgive her: ‘ “Oh, say you forgive me! Say, say it, even if you do not feel you can! Say it!” And the miserable woman grasped me by the arm as Dr. Lloyd had grasped me’. The spoken words in themselves thus count more for her than the intentions behind them. But Fenwick cannot bring himself to pronounce such words unless they truly express his intention, and for a time he hesitates. Then an awareness of his own human failings leads him to pity the earnestly pleading ‘fellow-creature’, and he speaks the words: ‘ “Be comforted. In the name of Lilian, my wife, I forgive you for her and for me as freely and as fully as we are enjoined by Him, against whose precepts the best of us daily sin, to forgive” ’. The divine presence is implicated in the solemn words, and he receives in return her ‘ “Heaven bless you!” ’ and wonders if that blessing will now cancel the curse of Dr Lloyd:

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‘Our feverish contact’ ‘Ah!’ thought I, ‘what if the pardon I grant for a wrong far deeper than I inflicted on him whose imprecation smote me in this chamber, should indeed be received as atonement, and this blessing on the lips of the dying annul the dark curse that the dead has left on my path.’ (LXVII)

The situation precisely echoes that in Manzoni whereby, in forgiving and blessing the dying Don Rodrigo, Renzo receives a blessing in return. But to what extent has the divine presence really been operative? Fenwick has encountered three invalids in that room, and in struggling with their diseases has been first infected and later healed himself. There he has been both punished – by words that have a power to echo for years, even beyond the boundaries of the four walls in which they were first uttered – and later redeemed. But since we may well doubt, I believe, that the Christian God has been implicated in Lloyd’s original and rather Gothic curse, the episodes have suggested a primarily psychological pattern of Hubris and Nemesis. The hope now is that a psychological power of repentance, stronger than that of sprinkled chloroform, has laid to rest the ghostly curse that Fenwick’s original arrogance has pronounced against himself. All the novels attribute to spoken words of contrition and pardon an enormous power to heal and to annul evil. The further circumstance of being pronounced on or beside a deathbed appears to grant them an even increased force. We have noticed the written pleas for forgiveness and the written concession of forgiveness in Bleak House, and the novel contains in Richard’s dying plea an earnestly spoken example too. Another instance is provided by Ainsworth’s Amabel, who murmurs to Rochester: ‘ “With my latest breath I forgive you, my lord, for the wrong you have done me, and bless you” ’ (IV:vi). As death effaces the speaker herself, the power of her life passes into the last words that continue to perform their blessing in her absence. Prayers, finally, constitute a significant language of power, but they figure less interestingly than one might expect in our novels. Sometimes, as in the long prayers in which Bloundel leads his family in Old Saint Paul’s, they sound like noisy sermons. Public rather than private utterance, they are directed as exhortations to the human auditors rather than towards God. On other occasions prayers remain largely unspoken, as with the Lord’s Prayer in which Woodcourt begins to lead Jo and which death soon interrupts. Fra Cristoforo teaches Renzo that the best prayers express only resignation and request nothing – a mental passivity that scarcely needs to be put into words. Although the narrator suspects that ‘it might be superstition’, Ruth too dares formulate no requests in her prayers for her son: ‘she never lay down to rest without saying, as she looked her last on her boy, “Thy will, not mine, be done” . . . even while she trembled and shrank with infinite dread from sounding the depths of what that will might be’ (XIX). Later, as Wheeler points out, she manages even amidst

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the intensity of her desire upon Bellingham’s reappearance to cry in her petition to God, ‘ “In the name of Jesus Christ I pray for strength to do Thy will!” ’ (XXIII).20 When Fenwick, similarly, comes at length and for the first time to pray, he relinquishes what Faber has considered the perverse propensity of Fenwick as writer to impose his own ‘will’ upon others.21 His prayer supplicates instead a passive resignation that will release him from tormenting desire and will: ‘I prayed that my soul might be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain’ (LXXXIX). Prayers should not then seek, like Bloundel’s, to exercise power but to offer a vehicle for submitting to power. Like blessings and curses, prayers seem to represent transactions with another party – especially the God before whom they are pronounced – but they are also transactions with oneself. The person praying seeks to cast out arrogance, hatred, rancour, selfish desire, ambition and thereby to achieve the blessings of serenity and resignation. Although the serenity and resignation are associated with the divine will and presence, God is no more needed, we might say, than the psychoanalyst for such conquests of peace of mind. Or perhaps the sufferer does require God or the psychoanalyst, but the struggle remains chiefly an internal or psychological one. The internal dimension does not make the struggles any the less historical. The contagion that infects Lucia, Renzo, Fenwick, Ruth and all the others in the psychic dimension is really the same pestilence that rages on the other fields that we have been examining. By their spoken expressions, in solemnly pronounced blessings, prayers, offerings of forgiveness, they also tend to debilitate the pestilence not only in the psychic dimension but in all its ramifications. The healing power, like the pestilential power, radiates outward into the general atmosphere, preserved with all the vibrations of sound collected in the aerial library. Besides in private utterances, history occurs in the more public utterances pronounced in churches and other temples. Here the prestige of the spoken word, traditionally associated with God, confers an especially dangerous charisma upon those that speak the word factiously. These false prophets include Chadband, who is fortunately too silly to be enormously dangerous, as well as the mortally poisonous Solomon Eagle and Kingsley’s Methodist preacher. Among other selfishly abusive usurpers of verbal authority may be ranked Rochester, Elsley Vavasour and Bradshaw, although they manage in part to redeem themselves. In contrast to the impostors and hypocrites, the novels celebrate the heroes of honestly forthright and powerful speech – notably Major Campbell, Fra Cristoforo, Cardinal Borromeo, but also the sometimes timorous Lucia. Thurstan Benson emerges too as a valiant preacher, compromised by his lie but more than vindicated by his determination finally to stand by Christ. Even if the divine presence may be doubted, some of the human protagonists of speech can make their own truth powerfully present. *

*

*

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The novels occasionally suggest another linguistic category in which truth may become present even more powerfully than in either written or spoken words. This is language set to music or made to approach the condition of music, an example of which we have already observed in the reference of Ruffini’s heroine to Lucia di Lammermoor. Related to Kingsley’s considerations of matter and manner, discussions of opera have always debated the relative weight of the words and the music in the production of operatic power. The matter, associated with the words, naturally provides the more masculine element while the manner and the music suggest the more seductively irrational and feminine element, the Siren’s call. The masculine language is originally that of patriarchy, the name and law of the father that begins with the silencing or slaughtering of the mother and her non-symbolic language. What we notice in the texts as arranged in this part of the argument is, with respect to music, the mother’s eventual turning of the tables. While the verbal and musical elements of the operatic episodes of Lavinia may have roughly equal weight, the purely musical, feminine component increasingly prevails in episodes of singing in A Strange Story and Ruth. Song almost necessarily exemplifies a contagious manifestation of power. Whereas speech may in theory attempt rationally to persuade without knocking out the rational defences of the interlocutor, song inevitably exercises its influence in subtle, perhaps subliminal, appeals. The contagion associated with manner, already likely to be present in the words, is greatly heightened by the musical component. In the period before sound recordings, the contagious power of song depends as well upon the talent and physical presence of the performer. Here, possibly more validly than in occasions of spoken utterance, the metaphysics of presence may locate the truth in the moment of performance. That moment may strike some listeners as so sublimely moving that the opera house will seem a privileged location or pocket of freedom removed from the contingencies of history passing outside. Such was most notably the experience of Stendhal during his years in Milan. Yet, for deconstructionists, staged events too refer to pre-existent and absent elements, and depend for their meaning upon an historical context. Like the fictions or lies that perform Ruth’s marriage to one Mr Denbigh, the operatic performances must, as fictional events, encounter history and establish their validity with respect to its immediate Necessity. Sometimes, in Lavinia, they succeed in these encounters in transfiguring historical contingencies into a more exalted, healing truth, and at other times those contingencies debase and contaminate them. The healing potentiality of music amidst the tribulations of history comes out most paradigmatically when Miss Clara hopes that Lavinia will sing for the Avelings and herself. She considers music ‘ “one of the most elevating and beneficial influences in the world” ’. Her poetic brother-inlaw finds, moreover, that whenever some injustice in the world ‘ “puts his

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soul, as he expresses it, out of tune – music charms away his irritation” ’ (II:xvii). With her singing ability, Lavinia also emerges as one of the most versatile of our heroines, for we have already seen her as a fine needlewoman, nurse and writer. In the Avelings’ library the parallel activities designed to counteract historical injustice now include her singing, the women’s stitching of Crimean jackets and the poet’s writing, while the French clock marks historical time. The listener to music is not always such a passive instrument, as Aveling’s description of one that can be tuned and played on might imply. Listening can involve active resistance (recalling the deafened ears of Thomas Vincent) as well as submission to the music. In the Roman episodes of the novel, Paolo and his artist acquaintances discuss operas such as Il trovatore and La traviata and argue heatedly about the merits of Verdi and others. The listening and performing roles are easily exchanged or combined too, in a cultural environment that includes so many amateur singers and players. Paolo’s particular friend Salvator provides an amusing example of the knowing listener and eager performer. He appears to know many operas by heart, and a large percentage of his reported verbal communications takes the form not of spoken prose, but of sung snippets from various operas. Although the rest of the dialogue amongst the Italian speakers is rendered in English, Salvator’s remarks remain in Italian as citations of opera libretti. His singing of appropriate or charmingly inappropriate passages contributes both to the hilarity of occasions and to the effect of life being lived with a theatrically heightened consciousness. The operatic experience occurs, we might say, both within opera houses ‘made with hands’ and in the other locations of the city. The boundary between the opera house as a privileged location and the region of ongoing history outside is extremely porous, and most of Italian life submits happily to the musical contagion or transfiguration. Precisely within the opera house, Lavinia and Lady Augusta have heard the tenor Mario in the performances of Lucia – emotionally contagious in that they have ‘ “always made us cry, and long that we could have helped him” ’. But again the distinction between the theatrical experience and real life is blurred when Lavinia finds herself melting in tears to Paolo’s performance in an analogous event outside the opera house. The external event is validated and transfigured as mimesis, in the Girardian term, of the operatic event; or, in Oscar Wilde’s terms, life imitates art. It is incidentally illuminating to compare Lavinia’s experience of Lucia di Lammermoor to that of Mme de Bovary. In the opera house in Rouen, Charles Bovary, who conforms to the male stereotype in privileging words over music, finds it difficult at first to follow the story – ‘à cause de la musique, qui nuisait beaucoup aux paroles’. Meanwhile the performance of the tenor Lagardy increasingly absorbs Emma. After the sextet of the second act, at the precise point that has so enraptured Lavinia, Emma falls entirely under the seductive spell of the tenor himself – not the character

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Ravenswood, but Lagardy. She longs wildly to become his mistress, to accompany him in his singing career, to attend his performances in all the opera houses of Europe. Then he appears, from the stage, to spot her in her box: il la regardait, c’est sûr! Elle eut envie de courir dans ses bras pour se réfugier en sa force, comme dans l’incarnation de l’amour même, et de lui dire, de s’écrier: «Enlève-moi, emmène-moi, partons! A toi, à toi! toutes mes ardeurs et tous mes rêves!» Le rideau se baissa.22 In Emma’s case, the opera house is at that point a privileged location outside of history, and she would like to join Lagardy as a performer in that atmosphere forever. She has been contrasting in her mind the enchantment of love as expressed on the operatic stage and the tawdriness of her own experiences of love in reality. Her situation resembles indeed that of the poet of the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ that longs to leave behind ‘the weariness, the fever, and the fret’ and to ‘fly’ into the dimension of the ‘immortal Bird’. But when the curtain falls, Emma recognizes the impossibility of her operatic dreams. Although she has felt the appeal of the singing so powerfully for those moments, the effect will not last when she leaves the theatre, except to increase her dissatisfaction with the normal experience of Necessity. There is no hope of finding within history, as Lavinia has done, an experience that imitates that of the opera. Later, in Paris, it is Paolo’s turn to listen and to submit to the melting power of Mario (who was in real life the friend of Ruffini).23 During a performance of La sonnambula at the Théâtre des Italiens, Paolo’s ‘soul swam in a bath of delight’, which becomes more intense when he notices a lovely young woman seated near him. Tears come to her eyes, and she and Paolo realize that the music is affecting them similarly. After a few remarks are exchanged, she guesses him to be Italian because ‘ “only an Italian can feel this music as you do” ’: ‘When Mario sang Il più triste dei mortali, the sentimental lady fairly gave way and sobbed aloud; she knew it was very foolish, but she could not help it. It was all Paolo could do not to follow her example’ (II:xiv). In following her example, Paolo would at the same time be imitating her and succumbing to the contagious force of the singing in an ambiguous mixture of operatic and extra-operatic influences. The sentimental lady has infiltrated, as it turns out, the operatic atmosphere with a contamination deriving from the world outside. Her tears have been insincere; she is an actress named Mlle Clarisse, and her performance at the operatic performance has constituted the first step in her plot to seduce Paolo. She has been able to appropriate the power of Mario and of Bellini’s music as a component in her own performance. Whereas Salvator and his friends have happily diffused the welcome oper-

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atic contagion into their daily lives, Mlle Clarisse has dangerously abused the power of music and profaned the operatic temple. The amateur production of a Maria Stuarda at the Marchesa Juanita’s villa in the campagna, demonstrates another abuse that turns music into a contaminating rather than healing phenomenon. In this case Lavinia figures, as at the Avelings, amongst the performers rather than the auditors, and the abuse occurs on the stage rather than in the stalls of the public. While performers, in theory, properly exercise power over auditors, they should in their turn submit their talents to the genius of the music, and this is what fails now to happen. Lavinia, Juanita and the Prince effectively appropriate the operatic situations, even more egregiously than Mlle Clarisse, for their own debasing power struggles. Bound in real life in a love triangle, they attempt in their singing literally to humiliate and subject one another. Music becomes a re-enactment of their jealousies, a sordid imitation of historical contingencies, rather than the marriage in which music and words come together to make present a transfigured truth. In a more complex and articulated way than the singing of Lagardy, the lyrical episodes of A Strange Story suggest a music that offers an entry into a non-historical dimension. The principal musician of the novel is Margrave, who among his other talents sings and plays, and the musical component prevails in his performances even more fully than in Lagardy’s over the words. While his singing exerts a seduction as powerful as that of Mario or Lagardy, Fenwick finds during their first ramble through the countryside that the actual meanings of the words elude him: ‘The air was grand; the words had a sonorous swell that suited it, and they seemed to me jubilant and yet solemn’. The song, as Margrave then identifies it, is ‘ “a Persian fire-worshipper’s hymn to the sun” ’: ‘ “The dialect is very different from modern Persian. Cyrus the Great might have chanted it on his march upon Babylon” ’ (XXIV). In his performance some days later of the tarantella at Mrs Poyntz’s, the words may belong to no recognized dialect, whether modern or ancient, at all: they are ‘certainly not in Italian, perhaps in some uncivilized tongue, perhaps in impromptu gibberish’ (XXVI). Clearly the auditors need not understand the words in order to feel the ecstatic impact of the music, which resembles that of ‘the lyre of Orpheus’. But do the words possess specific meanings that empower them even if they are not understood, or are they pure sounds, like the sounds of horns and violins? In this latter case, language has not only approached the condition of music but has become entirely music and not a verbalized idiom at all. (It is possible, according to Michael Allis, that Margrave’s incomprehensible words have indeed been translated into an entirely musical, non-verbal medium, for us to experience as well, in the piano quintet of Sir Edward Elgar.24) In Margrave’s subsequent performances, the phonic element continues to preponderate over the lexical element. The performances also carry

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the listener ever further from settings like the opera houses and the drawing room of Mrs Poyntz in which historical Necessity may be challenged but not simply ignored. The next episode occurs in the haunted, perhaps Gothic, setting of Derval Court when the ghostly Scin-Læca of Margrave makes a nocturnal apparition. Although the spectre may chant ‘words’ (the incantatory aspect implying a musical component), they possess no meaning in the sense of any patriarchal language. And here, oddly, the sounds dispense not only with meaning but with a performer’s presence and intention, for Margrave is not intentionally present in the ghostly apparition. The sounds vibrate perhaps in the atmosphere or in the aerial library and have been unwittingly recalled into audibility. So Fenwick would not dare to provide us with notational, written equivalents of the dangerous sounds, lest we be tempted to repeat his experience. After his mimesis of the sounds, making him into a performer too, a chorus of dogs continues the mimetic response, prolonging in audibility an ecstatic contagion: I repeated aloud some words whispered to me in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper, could I remember them. As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the watch-dog in the yard, – a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus; and the howling went on louder and louder. (LI) With respect to written phenomena, the sounds repeated, louder and louder, may recall the great Grasp of Chancery. Once set in movement the phenomenon propagates itself in accord with its own innate imp that exploits human and here canine voices to continue the inexorable chain reaction. But whereas Chancery does operate within the domain of history, as an aspect of its Necessity, the episode of Derval Court occurs in a Gothic or Orphic dimension. The disruptive audible energy typifies psychic and other imps that do not operate in historical time. When Margrave shows up in Australia, Fenwick should presumably refuse to receive this monster that he recognizes as his traitorous and insidious double. Yet the musical voice, depending for its power now upon Margrave’s immediate charisma rather than his merely spectral presence, again overcomes the rational ability to resist: ‘still he charmed and spellbound me; still he was the mystical fascinator; still, if the legends of magic had truth for their basis, he was the born magician, – as genius, in what calling soever, is born with the gift to enchant and subdue us’ (LXXIV). The reflection about ‘genius, in what calling soever’, tends to legitimate the sorcerer’s craft as a calling or type of artistry like all the other more traditionally respectable ones. In recognizing Margrave as an artistic genius, Fenwick also insinuates a justification for his own otherwise reprehensible submission once more to the man.

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Among the many possible media whereby genius magically imposes its contagion, the uttered enchantments of Margrave do nevertheless constitute a case apart. In using this medium, the will of the artist meets none of the resistance from his materials that elsewhere constitutes a value in art, for the linguistic meanings of the sounds count here for nothing. The chants cut through all the rational filters of language and thought and simply use the auditory channel to overwhelm the listener, as Fenwick indicates in recalling ‘the ear that they ravished and the thoughts they confused’ (LXXXVI). No more than to the words that Tom Thurnall compares to ‘Minié bullet[s]’, can the listener oppose a logical defence. The transmission remains close to the state of pure, pre-rational and prelinguistic power that functions like the initiatory chants, discussed by Lyotard, to remove auditors from the domain of history.25 During the brewing of the elixir, another singer unexpectedly produces even more sensational effects than those of Margrave. This is the Veiled Woman, Ayesha, who is either the mother or the devoted nurse of Margrave. At first, Fenwick thinks that he understands something of her song even though sung ‘in her foreign tongue’, . . . the words unknown to me, and yet their sense, perhaps, made intelligible by the love, which has one common language and one common look to all who have loved, – the love unmistakably heard in the loving tone, unmistakably seen in the loving face. (LXXXVI) Ayesha, who will later support the head of the expiring Margrave in her lap, performs the function, according to Fradin, of ‘an Earth-mother figure’.26 So her song may resemble that sung by the earth in Zola’s novel – when ‘la terre, soulevée par le frisson des germes, chantait gaiement les noces’. But Ayesha’s song of love then modulates into something else, which in maintaining its power to charm now eludes any clear interpretation: ‘Then her voice stole on the air in the music of a chant, not loud, yet far-reaching; so thrilling, so sweet, and yet so solemn, that I could at once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchantment with the power of song’. While recalling legends, the song communicates nothing so much as a purely enchanting power or, in effect, the Orphic presence of the singer herself. Still, it is not a production of presence and power for its own sake. If not at human auditors, the song is being directed at some invisible auditors and is imposing an effect upon them. He intuits ‘the depth and the art and the soul of the singer’ and imagines that the rest of creation too must be listening in awe: [Her] voice seemed endowed with a charm to enthrall all the tribes of creation, though the language it used for that charm might to them, as to me, be unknown. As the song ceased, I heard, from behind,

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‘Our feverish contact’ sounds like those I had heard in the spaces before me, – the tramp of invisible feet, the whir of invisible wings, as if armies were marching to aid against armies in march to destroy. (LXXXVI)

The song, originally one of love, enthrals ‘tribes’ and incites ‘armies’ too. A few chapters previously, Margrave has drawn an analogy between ‘tribes’, in the usual sense of ethnic groups, and ‘ “races in the magnitude of space unseen as animalcules in the world of a drop” ’. As European travellers to supposedly primitive territories encounter both friendly and hostile tribes, so do investigators of the ‘magnitude of [non-geographical] space’ come upon the unseen ‘races’ that further resemble threatening or friendly ‘armies’: ‘ “Of these races, some are wholly indifferent to man, some benign to him, and some dreadly hostile” ’. The human investigator of these spaces is ‘ “a seeker of powers” ’ that must take precautions: ‘ “he is like all other travellers in regions unknown; he must propitiate or brave the tribes that are hostile, – must depend for his life on the tribes that are friendly” ’ (LXXXII). What Shelley’s Frankenstein similarly fears as a ‘race of devils’ may refer, Marshall believes, both to crowds (hostile tribes) and to bacilli – ‘the hosts of bacterial life’.27 It is possible then that the unseen ‘races’ of Margrave, like the animalcules observed under the microscope, allude to microbes. On the microbiological level tremendous battles are underway between the marching armies of these little imps, and the biological fortunes of humanity, as of all creation, depend on the outcome of those battles. In venturing into these hitherto unknown spaces, the traveller leaves the ideological contagion of historical power struggles behind, but only to encounter the same contagious phenomena in possibly more literal and ineluctable guises. As the song of Ayesha ceases, Fenwick hears the tramping of the armies; her song has typified the human aspiration to participate indirectly in the military encounters. Rather than frontally opposing the ‘armies in march to destroy’, the music encourages the ‘armies . . . marching to aid’. This may signify, in accord with the medical theories that Fenwick has previously proposed, the strengthening of the human system of immune defences. Whereas Margrave’s ravishing tones break down all rational defences, Ayesha’s song seems to fortify other protective barriers; the singing typifies a power that can both unmake and make. In the specific task at hand, the song accompanies the brewing of the elixir that will strengthen the life force in Margrave against the enfeebling inroads of the pestilence. The performance encourages within Fenwick as well the ‘force’ to withstand, in his own gruelling struggle, the impalpable hostile ‘races’: ‘At the charm, the wonderful charm, in the tone of the Veiled Woman’s voice, my will seemed to take a force more sublime than its own’ (LXXXVII). The Orphic song has therefore carried Fenwick beyond history and

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beyond the Gothic dimension to some region of particular sublimity. It is the heroic setting, in which armies like those of Cyrus the Great are forever marching towards semi-mythic Babylons; it is the legendary underworld in which Orpheus forever charms the devils. But besides such sublime hints, the song alludes, I believe, to the subliminal dimension of microbiology in which the bacterial ‘race of devils’ is debilitated. In its multifaceted quality, the episode provides a non-historical counterpart to the emblematic evenings that we have noticed in the library of Ruffini’s Avelings. During those evenings while the ticking clock marks the passage of historical time, the simultaneous activities – writing, sewing jackets for Crimean battlefields, consolatory or healing singing – typify facets of history. During the Australian night, the three actors are what Margrave calls ‘ “seeker[s] of powers beyond the rude functions by which man plies the clockwork that measures his hours” ’ (LXXXII). In nonhistorical time and space, there occur the distillation of a liquid potency from the earth itself, the marching of microbiological and other elemental armies, and the singing that conveys eternally Orphic aspiration. As in many moments of vision in Romantic poetry, the human adventure is not limited to what occurs in history. In their co-existence, the historical and non-historical dimensions also contaminate one another, as I have suggested, in the perception that the principle of contagion operates in both. Whether the listener’s interpretations of Ayesha’s song really bear any resemblance to what is being sung in the unknown tongue remains as mysterious as in the case of Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’. In the Wordsworthian poem too, the singing of the woman may concern legendary struggles – ‘battles long ago’ – but its chief value lies in the encouragement that the listener derives from the sounds. Finally, after the fullness of presence, the song that the Wordsworthian listener continues to treasure – The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more – may in Fenwick’s case leave behind itself only uncertainty. The singing has occurred in a private idiom known, perhaps, only to Margrave and the Veiled Woman that, far indeed from any patriarchal language, may amount only to ‘impromptu gibberish’. The glorious song also fails to achieve its purpose: the task of Margrave and Fenwick that it is sustaining ends in failure, and Margrave dies. Ayesha draws his “young head to her lap [where] it vanished from my sight behind her black veil”. While Margrave thus returns to the idyllic pre-patriarchal realm behind the maternal veil, Fenwick may return to life in the historical dimension. As our last instance of singing, the songs of Ruth on her deathbed demonstrate a use of the medium that does not relate to the tension of

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battles and the exercise of power. The listeners overhear songs that do not concern them since – although ‘the sound of [the] running waters’ of Wales are apparently in her ears (XII) – Ruth must be addressing her dead mother. She recovers thus a medium of communication suitable for the joy of childhood but inappropriate for the sort of communications required of her in adult life: They had never heard her sing; indeed the simple art which her mother had taught her, had died, with her early joyousness, at that dear mother’s death. But now she sang continually, very soft and low. She went from one childish ditty to another without let or pause, keeping a strange sort of time with her pretty fingers, as they closed and unclosed themselves upon the counterpane. (XXXV) And as she declines, the songs seem to continue in an inaudible dimension: ‘Her sweet lips were parted to sing, even after the breath and the power to do so had left her, and her fingers fell idly on the bed’. Without power in reality, the songs do perhaps reach imaginary ears – like the ‘ditties of no tone’ of the ‘Grecian Urn’. We may indeed imagine that Ruth, who in Marroni’s analysis has always been communicating in silence, continues noiselessly to sing even after she crosses the threshold into eternity.28 There in reunion with her mother the language of the mother–daughter idyll that the songs imply is restored at least in our imagination. That language, as Homans has described it, is ‘non-symbolic’ because it mentions only what is present, and it involves no conflict. Verbal symbols or signs become necessary only under the law of the father in which the speaker expresses a desire for what is now absent or a will to power.29 Employing the nonsensical terms of the ‘childish ditty’ and the mother–daughter idiom, Ruth’s singing may therefore celebrate the calm presence of achieved truth. Like Ayesha’s singing in a maternal idiom, Ruth’s song may nevertheless exert some power over those that overhear it. While contemplating a truth entirely present only to itself, it stirs the imagination of the listeners: ‘They stood around her bedside, not speaking, or sighing, or moaning; they were too much awed by the exquisite peacefulness of her look for that’. Her now inaudible singing has reduced them to silence too. The spreading silence suggests again a kind of communication that occurs when speaking and singing cease, even though the communicator has no awareness of it. The communication occurs in ‘silent-speaking words’ in Tennyson’s In Memoriam (XCV) as well and, to complicate the issue, in Arnold’s impression about the thrust of much Victorian writing. While Arnold and others convey their ideas in writing, the power is conveyed, as the previous chapter has suggested too, in what is only implied, in what the text falls silent

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about. Adapting an Arnoldian phrase, Douglas-Fairhurst describes the achievement as the ‘ability to “tell silently” ’.30 In a final example from our novels, the condition of ‘blanketing silence, like blanketing snow’ reigns, in Schor’s perception, towards the end of Bleak House.31 The novel alludes to what is unspoken, unsung, unremembered, outside of history. An occasion – ‘almost forgotten’ – of silence, idyllically enveloping mother and daughter in their own linguistic atmosphere, receives brief mention in the last chapter: I had almost forgotten Caddy’s poor little girl. She is not such a mite now; but she is deaf and dumb. I believe there never was a better mother than Caddy, who learns, in her scanty intervals of leisure, innumerable deaf and dumb arts, to soften the affliction of her child. While an affliction, the deaf and dumb condition will protect the child from many of the assaults of a noisy age. She will be spared, as poor Jo was not, from the harangues of Chadband – and of others like him amongst the associates of her maternal grandmother. Although Chadband and most of the other preachers claim to speak some eternally valid truth, the historical struggles have of course conditioned them and their language. Even if pronounced in the name of God, their discourses have attempted to subject listeners to the selfish authority of the preacher and have abused the divine gift of the word. Many of the efforts, indeed, to use speech in solemn ways to establish certainties and arrest the erosions of time fail and end by accelerating the process of decay. The misuse, which causes language itself to decay, sometimes contaminates the integrity of musically accompanied language too. Just as speakers may lie, singers like Margrave in the tarantella and like the performers of the Maria Stuarda may misuse their lyric power to propagate pestilential or counterfeit passion. Yet respect for the authority of the solemnly uttered word and for song is never entirely lost. An impression endures that, while writing necessarily engages the conflicts and flux of history, speech and song can sometimes break out of history in revelatory moments that make the eternally healing truth virtually present. The words of contrition, forgiveness and blessing, pronounced in such moments, seem invariably sincere and liberating, and the song of disinterested love, on the lips of Ayesha, conveys unmistakable conviction too. For all the misuse of scriptural passages as well, the words of the Bible can, when read aloud in other circumstances, continue to manifest their truth. Still the truth depends for its revelation upon a medium that involves temporal contingencies. The speaker must deliver the words persuasively, as a singer does in an operatic performance – creating a magic, with all the terrible risk that the magic may be fraudulent. The words produce their effect only at that instant, ‘when warm from the breath of the speaker’ or the singer. Even in such moments, of course, the

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ear conditioned by the roars of history does not literally hear the eternal truth, and afterwards doubts crowd back as in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream?’32 Or perhaps a moment of sudden silence after the performance will offer an interval of freedom in which to intuit the truth in its lingering inaudible presence.

Conclusion Money handlers and bookkeepers

Far from the moments of silent communication, the noisy surface of history speaks to Matthew Arnold at Dover in the ‘grating roar/Of pebbles’. Within the actual sound he hears the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of ‘The Sea of Faith’. Historical movements resemble ebbing and flowing tides, and with respect to that ideological sea Bulwer and Kingsley differ from Arnold, as we have observed, in detecting signs of a turn of the tide. The tides may also refer to periods of health and disease that naturally alternate in the life of the body politic as in the life of individuals. Or the pattern may, in a more complex alternation, suggest circular cycles. Not only diachronically with respect to long historical periods but also synchronically, at any moment, the cycle may be operating in all of its circularity. Various systems of dynamic interchange have provided us with examples of circulation that suggest the workings of history. One system is that whereby the soil conceivably recycles disease-ridden sewage into lifesupporting fertilizers. Perhaps only a half-cycle, this system requires as its other half the human digestive system. The human body also contains other recycling subsystems – the stimulating interactions of bacilli and antibodies and the various vital forces that flow healthily or accumulate in stagnant situations of faulty distribution. While investigating such biological processes, science composes a written version of them in a récit that takes its place in the grand récit of history. The various written texts that contribute to that grand récit participate, as another dynamic system, in a perpetual writing and unwriting; the process may imply both uncontrollable contagion and, sometimes, exhilarating liberation. As an emblem then of the feminine contribution to the dynamic making of history, there is the constant production and circulation of needlework that may involve the recycling of worn-out garments. One other system of dynamic interchange that fascinates the nineteenth century relates to the circulation of money. Although possibly less prominent in our novels than in some others, it provides a concluding metaphor of spreading contagion that helps lead, in the motif of bookkeeping, to our own summing up. In the microeconomy of the novels, the

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usual point is the failure of money, often because criminally accumulated, to circulate healthily. But even when not criminal, the various financial transactions tend not only to damage the general economy and individual purses but to cause moral harm to those who participate in them. Not simply a neutral instrument, money appears to function in the financial transactions of power as itself a metaphor of the historical contagion. Evidently as contaminating as the air we breathe, it can corrupt all that touch it. With respect to literal health, one may have expected the possessors of wealth, who are forever defeating the poor in a theoretical class war, to exemplify a superior robustness. The state of disease generally characterizes poor and marginalized groups, and indeed the poorer districts of cities appear in our novels as the breeding grounds of disease and immorality. Even at the end of the twentieth century, as Hays argues, ‘disease is configured in cultural terms’ and considered less as a medical pathology than as a problem of the poor. He cites a report of 1995 of the World Health Organization that individuates in poverty ‘the world’s deadliest disease’ – ‘the most ruthless killer and the greatest cause of suffering on earth’.1 Our novels portray, however, a more complex situation. In a sort of Bakhtinian reversal, the diseased poor possess power too in their ability to disseminate a contagion like that bred in Tom-all-alone’s to the upper levels of society – ‘Verily, . . . Tom has his revenge’ (XLVI). As in the more notable case of Our Mutual Friend, financial speculation is a feverish activity, and capital accumulated by the rich is equated not with strength and health but disease-breeding filth. Perhaps because money is even more corrupting when hoarded than when circulated, the hoarders of whatever social class suffer punishment. This principle applies most obviously to the outright thieves, who remove money from circulation and never, in our novels, derive any final benefit from their depradations. In Old Saint Paul’s, more egregiously than the highwaymen, these thieves include Judith and Chowles. Although the plague conditions permit them to amass an enormous treasure in money, precious objects and clothing, the treasure eventually destroys them. The infected clothes, as we have seen, have no market value, and in refusing during the fire to abandon the other objects, they suffer a fate worse than combustion. A flow of molten metal engulfs both them and their treasures, making them literally identical with their gold and silver in a common state of liquid indifferentiation. In Two Years Ago as well, an illgotten treasure proves fatal for its possessor. Mrs Harvey can make no use of the purloined fifteen hundred pounds, which, while poisoning relationships among herself, her daughter and Tom, lies hidden in the cave. The discovery of the theft causes her to succumb to the cholera, a phenomenon that parallels the fire in reducing all of its victims, in Girard’s analysis, to at least a metaphorical indifferentiation. The forging embezzler, Richard Bradshaw in Ruth, does not die, but his father temporarily expels

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him from the family, and no advantage ever accrues to him from the fortune uselessly stolen from Benson. Like outright thievery, swindling too inhibits the useful circulation of money. The confidence artists in Lavinia try to entice Mr Jones into various investments, of which the most promising involves construction of a rail line in the Papal States. ‘ “Learn this” ’, the supposed Count Fortiguerra grandly assures his accomplice, the little chevalier, ‘ “that to tempt an Englishman, who has been in business, there’s no lure so great as a speculation in railways” ’ (I:xii). But while this scheme and others fall through, the criminal predators in Bleak House may fare a bit better. Compared to a boa constrictor,2 Vholes gets away with his ingestion, gulp by gulp, of the money that Richard invests in him, although an unsavoury impression accompanies him wherever he goes. His gains may also damage the economy since the money is removed from metropolitan circulation and transferred to the apparently idyllic enclave of the Vale of Taunton. In his mind, the transfer launders the dirty money, which now maintains his aged father and spares his three daughters from having to enter the sordid labour market as ‘shirt-makers’.3 In our minds, the dirty money comes instead to corrupt the innocence of the idyllic Vale or to show again the illusory quality of zones protected from historical Necessity. Then there are the Smallweeds, whose appalling physical and moral infirmities seem not to interfere with the grim satisfaction that their nastily gained booty affords them. Their strategy also differs from that of the other thieves and parasites in that it begins with investments that they themselves make rather than investments teased out of others. They disguise their swindling perhaps behind the mask of generosity, as if their primary activity were supplying the financial needs of their clients, rather than the usurious recovery of those loans. Usury again serves, in any case, rather to withdraw money from circulation than to recirculate it. We welcome finally the frustration of the Smallweeds in their efforts to blackmail Sir Leicester and to extort some benefit from the latest version of the Jarndyce will. Besides the dysfunction of the system of circulation, the novels demonstrate the morally tainting sordidness of most financial transactions. The respectable investors in the charitable industry like Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle obtain a heavily resented power over their victims but seem morally defeated themselves. Mrs Pardiggle demonstrates an especially wily efficiency in the game whereby she gives her little sons money that they must pass on to her charities. Her money comes back to her with redoubled interest in that she gains moral credit – but only in her own mind – both for her generosity to her sons and for their directed generosity to others. The suspicious employment of charity for personal credit occurs in I promessi sposi too when Renzo offers his last coins to the begging mother. His generosity, as we have seen, amounts really to an investment in providence, for which he expects repayment with interest.

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Yet the recipients of charity can sometimes emerge as the apparent victors. As the virtuoso debtor, Skimpole manages to transfer a guilty impression of being in the wrong onto those that bail him out and so to proceed with irresponsible, profitable innocence through life. Cheerfully accepting all financial contributions, of which he professes not to know the value, he offers no gratitude or loyalty in return, as Esther discovers in the vitriolic remarks about Jarndyce in his memoirs. So the investors in charity gain nothing from him, unless there be some entirely private satisfaction in helping out an undeserving parasite. Certainly his principal benefactor, the Jarndyce that is so squeamish about any handling of money, cannot derive even that satisfaction. For as his dealings with Esther testify too, Jarndyce already identifies himself as the debtor. His charities spring, like the half-crowns that Snagsby keeps furtively pressing upon Jo, from a guilt that must also remain concealed. He lives in dread lest, in coming to light, his clandestine generosity lead to public recognition of him as a possessor and handler of money. Skimpole happily pockets both charity and bribes without distinguishing much between them, and charity and bribery are sometimes associated elsewhere too. As an act of generosity towards Paolo, Lavinia wishes to bribe a dignitary of the church in order to overturn a wrongful judgement regarding an inheritance. In both Ruth and Bleak House bribery occurs in connection with Parliamentary elections, while the bribers try stoutly to present themselves as public benefactors. Despite moralistic claims, an impression nevertheless prevails that when money changes hands in such affairs, as often in charitable transactions too, corruption attaches to both ‘him that gives and him that takes’. Both sides may suffer at least a moral defeat, which does not necessarily disturb them. Some individuals try to preserve a moral purity by refusing to take money. Paolo would renounce his rightful inheritance altogether rather than become embroiled in proceedings that involve bribery, legal fees and other transactions reminiscent of Chancery. When his circumstances become straitened, however, he accepts the expediency of taking steps to gain the inheritance of his wicked uncle. Allen Fenwick also finds the preservation of his financial purity an arduous task. He dislikes the feetaking aspect of his medical practice and frequently avoids requesting any fee. When the patient is Lilian, the idea of being paid so distresses him that he refuses even to see the proffered money: ‘I could not have taken her mother’s gold. So I did not appear to notice the hand held out to me, and passed by with a quickened step’ (X). But the money will not go away, and when it arrives the next day as ‘double the amount of the fee prescribed by custom’, enclosed in an envelope, he rejects it violently: ‘I flung the money, as an asp that had stung me, over the high wall’ (XI). Still the world suspects him of being corrupted by the gold of Lilian’s family. Mrs Poyntz warns him that if he marries the dishonoured girl, ‘ “the World will . . . say, . . . ‘Miss Ashleigh had money. A good match to the man who liked

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gold better than honour’” ’ (LVII). To preserve at least his private sense of honour, he can only ask Lilian’s mother so to tie her fortune legally that it will never come to contaminate him: ‘ “I cannot touch her fortune – I cannot, – never can! Take it while you live; when you die, leave it to accumulate for her children, if children she have; not to me; not to her” ’ (LVIII). Possessed of a private fortune, Dr Pascal similarly avoids exacting payment from many of his patients and seems indeed to have little idea of the value of money. This scorn for money brings trouble, however, when he buys expensive gifts of jewellery for Clotilde and then, having ignored the warning signs, finds one day that his banker has failed and absconded. For a time he and Clotilde enjoy their poverty, as when reduced – romantically in their minds – to eating only potatoes and grapes. For Clotilde’s sake he must at last swallow his pride and attempt to collect some of the debts owed him, but naturally no one finds it convenient to pay. Unable to humiliate himself to the point of asking help of his mother, he must finally send Clotilde away. Practically if not morally, the sordidness of financial concerns has defeated him. The prospect of taking gold provokes the instinctive anxiety of Gaskell’s protagonists too. After Bellingham has saved poor Tom from drowning, Ruth will accept only a minor sum to employ on behalf of the lad: ‘when she saw some gold between the net-work [of Bellingham’s proffered purse] . . . she did not like the charge of such riches’ (II). Her training has not taught her to fear Bellingham’s sexuality, but she does oddly know enough to fear the contagion of his gold. In Gaskell’s estimation too, according to d’Albertis, her subsequent ‘lapse’ derives less from her loss of virginity than from her fall into financial dependency.4 The financial question comes particularly to involve, as in the novels of Bulwer and Zola, the issue of accepting money from a mother. The Bensons must decide on Ruth’s behalf whether to take the fifty pounds with which Bellingham’s mother has wished to pay her off. Their acceptance of the sum involves a moral compromise that they would prefer not to acknowledge fully. To Faith Benson’s hesitant, ‘ “I suppose it is [Ruth’s]” ’, her brother answers: ‘ “I suppose it is; and being so, we must not think who gave it to her. It will defray her expenses. I am very sorry, but I think we must take it” ’ (XII). At the end, however, Benson seeks to redeem himself for that initial moral compromise when he indignantly refuses the offer of Donne (Bellingham) to provide for Leonard: ‘ “He shall never touch a penny of your money. Every offer of service you have made, I reject in his name” ’ (XXXVI). But the furiously unforgiving vindictiveness with which he would load the entire weight of guilt upon Bellingham scarcely redeems him in any Christian sense. Whether they give, take or reject money, many characters submit to a bookkeeping mentality whereby quantifiable accounting contaminates all human intercourse. This happens most notably in Bleak House – for

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example, when Chadband admits to moral failings for which the disbursement of actual sums of money can quantifiably compensate. Informed that a cabman insists upon an additional eightpence for his fare, he decides to pay the sum: ‘ “I remember a duty unfulfilled yesterday. It is right that I should be chastened in some penalty. I ought not to murmur. Rachael, pay the eightpence!” ’ The sum could easily have been, doubling the amount, ‘ “one and fourpence; it might justly have been half-a-crown. O let us be joyful, joyful!” ’ The transaction has amounted to a pleasant bargain, and the narrator points out ‘Mr Chadband’s habit – it is the head and front of his pretensions indeed – to keep this sort of debtor and creditor account in the smallest items, and to post it publicly on the most trivial occasions’ (XIX). Skimpole seems to impose this habit upon those who deal with him too as a quantifiable item. Richard maintains that Skimpole ‘ “does me more good than anybody” ’: ‘ “he is worth – not to say his sordid expenses – but thrice his weight in gold” ’. In the meanwhile Skimpole is keeping as a utilitarian his own ‘accounts’ that always show a balance of pleasure in his favour: ‘he had been shedding delicious tears of joy and sympathy’, Esther reports, ‘at intervals for six weeks, on my account [my emphasis], had never been so happy as in hearing of my progress; began to understand the mixture of good and evil in the world now; felt that he appreciated health the more, when somebody else was ill’ (XXXVII). The habit of accounting seems to infect the good characters like Jarndyce too, who observes carefully, as we have seen, the debtor/creditor status of his relationship with Esther. As housekeeper Esther also works quite literally as bookkeeper for much of her time, and the most important instrument of her calling, after the keys, is her accounting book. In keeping the household accounts, she is, I believe, also keeping strict account of herself. The wild, irresponsible, subversive – possibly spendthrift – double of herself must not be allowed to squander resources and must be called to daily account. The accounting may thus amount to a preliminary recounting of her own story, the reductive first draft of the narrative that will much later be elaborated into the narrative that we read. The broom that one might otherwise have thought it appropriate to associate with the housekeeper is the instrument chiefly of the crossing sweeper Jo. Unfortunately his piously employed broom cannot efficaciously counteract contagion like that emanating from the ‘berryin ground’. But Jo may emerge as one of the figures that the utilitarian, quantifying, bookkeeping mentality least corrupts. The half crowns that Snagsby, to appease his own obscure guilt, gives him do not offer any covetous pleasure to Jo. And Lady Dedlock’s gold sovereign, which he would find it difficult to exchange, remains essentially puzzling to him. He puts it in his mouth, but of course it has no useful quality as nourishment. Indeed it is worse than useless when the suspicious constable asks him to account for his possession of it, and he cannot plausibly do so. For him, as

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for almost none of the other characters, gold cannot even represent a temptation to be rejected. He exists outside the framework in which money operates as a potent element of corruption. As a corollary, men and women living within that framework – wherein the eminently corruptible Skimpole may, absurdly enough, be worth ‘thrice his weight in gold’ – will find Jo himself worth nothing, or ‘nothink’. Not only gold but most of the other instruments of power that we have been considering naturally remain irrelevant within the dimension of Jo’s existence. The narrator speculates, for example, upon the irrelevance of writing to him, although he regards its mysteries, as we have seen, with some superstitious awe: ‘To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!’ Amongst the other linguistic discourses, that of religion is particularly unable, for all Chadband’s thundering, to touch his intelligence: ‘It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think, at odd times) what does it all mean.’ The ‘nothink’ of his repeated statement, ‘ “I don’t know nothink” ’, does not then signify ‘no think’, for he may consciously ponder the nullity of his condition. If the fury of existence ‘means anything to anybody, how comes it’, he may ask himself, ‘that it means nothing to me?’ (XVI). In addition to his own thoughts, the torment comes from the police with their constant injunctions to ‘move on’. While excluded from the social context, he must always be restlessly ‘Moving On’ (the title of Chapter XIX) and has not therefore found any haven of repose outside history. Indeed he functions as not only a victim but an emblem of history itself despite the irrelevance of most of the historical discourses to his own mental conceptions. Like money, bacilli and the other counters of the historical ‘moving on’, his fate is to be in perpetual, aimless, futile circulation. The disease that has struck him and that he carries as a contaminating presence wherever he circulates makes him an emblem in particular of the blind, pervasive inevitability of the circulating historical contagion. Of course Jo is only one among many possible emblems in the novels for the condition of being in history, and our own bookkeeping need not yet declare the bankruptcy of hope for the human condition. But before seeking to calculate a final balance, it is useful to assess further, in terms of subsequent considerations, the weight of what Jo represents. His condition implies the world-view that Cecil Helman finds to have increasingly prevailed in the last century and that he terms ‘Germism’. In this view rational liberal thinking possesses no power to guide behaviour or the course of events; the only power is that of instincts and contagious forces. ‘Germism’ has become, says Helman, ‘a way of talking, thinking – a set of beliefs, even a folk religion’, and metaphors of contagion that we no longer recognize as metaphors riddle our language. The ‘capricious

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“forces” ’ of contagion rule our lives as a replacement for ‘devils or Divine grace’. Besides actual diseases these capricious factors are economic – ‘market forces, inflation, high interest rates’ – or ideological – ‘nationalism, the people’s will’. Escaping intelligent control, these forces have reduced us to helplessness in the ‘sickroom that is modern society’. Our mental processes themselves, we believe, have ceased to function freely because the ‘image of contagion has subtly shaped how we understand the mind and its emotions’.5 For all our apparent sophistication we go through life uncomprehendingly at the mercy of the contagious influences, as if we were so many deceptively elaborated complications of the simple Dickensian Jo. In the mental dimension of existence, the ‘Germism’ of Helman takes the form of what Aaron Lynch and the practitioners of the ‘science of memetics’ call ‘thought contagion’. Although they cannot be observed under a microscope, philosophical and other opinions resemble self-replicating germs. Called memes, they engage in a Darwinian struggle for survival in which only the fittest flourish and propagate themselves.6 Fitness does not involve the moral superiority of a meme or its correspondence to objective truth, but only whether it finds a residence in many human brains. To measure the fitness or success of a meme, the memetic researcher simply counts, like Bentham with his calculations of pleasure, the number of individuals that evidently entertain the meme. Seeking then to understand how the especially successful memes are transmitted, the researcher defines ‘an epidemiology of ideas’. Investigation proceeds in accord with two paradigms: ‘how people acquire ideas’ and ‘how ideas acquire people’. Like biological viruses with respect to human bodies, the ideas or memes need human minds in which to live and reproduce themselves. The mind of the human host is thus ‘parasitized’.7 Memetics suggests an effort to make the phenomenon of mimesis, which interests Girard, into a more strictly materialistic mechanism that can become the object of inquiry of an exact science. It also makes still more emphatic the primacy of biological factors to all others. Rather than in the political or cultural dimension, the truth of life exists on the biological level. What counts in terms of the earthly environment is the Darwinian history of the human species as it evolves like all species towards extinction. But on an even more fundamental level of significance than the human species, there is the struggle for survival of microbes. The future of all forms of life – itself a possibly ephemeral impurity in the inanimate vastness of the universe – is being fought out on this microbiological level. Whether or not the so-called higher forms of life can survive the seemingly wily ability of viruses to evolve new ways of proving their own superiority remains dubious. In the meanwhile, in memetic theory, all of our intellectual and political history reduces to secondary manifestations of the history of viruses. Our philosophical debates, our military battles, our books themselves – such as the novels that we are studying – are the symp-

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tomatic results of viral contagion or of immune responses to that contagion. Memeticists and others who may hold such a view do not, however, appear to despair. They continue to write books and to debate issues in a way that implies some sense of freedom or some unwillingness simply to give in to the superiority of the viruses. Something is gained from our ability to lift the activities of microbes to the level of consciousness, and in this we demonstrate our superiority after all to poor Jo. A rational sort of freedom probably can, in the view of Pearson in Viroid Life, coexist with the impression that viral contagions condition us. He points out, to be sure, that ‘philosophy is not simply a tribunal of reason’. Yet it does in part remain that rational tribunal even while ‘it is also a battleground of infections and sicknesses’. In Pearson’s perception germs and viruses are also ‘life-giving entities’ and indeed essential to life, which they are enabling to evolve in interesting new directions. The evolution on the biological level can continue to inspire narrative as well. Although Lyotard lamented in 1979 the post-modern failure of the traditional grands récits to carry conviction,8 those traditional narratives were being immediately replaced, according to Pearson, by a new ‘quasi-Hegelianism’. The new grand récit narrates the rise of the machine. While finding this narrative inaccurate, Pearson goes on to propose his own correction of it. The boundaries between biology and technology and those between organisms and machines collapse in accord with ‘a machinic mode of evolution’. The new narrative is that of the ‘machinic’ tendency of organic life, which has indeed a long history.9 It is interesting to consider, in returning to our novels, the respects in which they may have intuited and anticipated the implications for more recent writers of the contagious phenomena. Of course the intuitions and anticipations do not exist in their texts as aspects of authorial design; the novelists have not, in a sort of parody of the ‘providential aesthetic’, plotted to make precisely these intuitions emerge. They emerge instead for us in our manner of reading the texts. In our Darwinian reading we discover what seems in retrospect to constitute a narrative thread that continues from the nineteenth-century texts on into our own narratives. We realize, for example, the poignant fragility of high Victorian hopes, like those that Mill associates with the ‘salt of the earth’ and Arnold with a ‘saving remnant’, for the prevalence of sweet reason. While the relationships of power may cease to be established on the basis that physical might makes right, the new regime does not institute the desired liberal debate to produce what is right. The pervasive trope of contagion in our novels reflects the sense of impotence before the forces that mould human thinking and human destinies. Yet a kind of debate continues, and the novels imply that creative responses to contagion are still possible. With regard, on the pessimistic side, to the mind’s freedom to think its own thoughts, our novelists have

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already advanced far towards the positions of Helman and the memeticists. The novels make abundantly clear that the Miltonic phrase – ‘the mind is its own place’ – does not apply to the masses of people. Although few human minds may be so unillumined as Jo’s, most give unresisting hospitality, in the implication of the novels, to the memes of prejudice and unexamined public opinion. I promessi sposi points out sadly that even one of the best minds, that of the Cardinal Borromeo, succumbs to certain prejudices of the moment during the plague. The cardinal cannot resist the mass hysteria that perceives in untori (poisoners), the agents that spread the contagion. On the more hopeful side, however, there are minds like that of Gaskell’s Benson who take their stand with Christ against the world. And Kingsley’s enlightened Tom Thurnall slowly but surely counteracts the prejudices characteristic of the historical moment and persuades many of the people of Aberalva to think as he does. Sanitary conditions rather than the will of an inscrutable providence are responsible for the propagation of the cholera. The memeticist would point out that, in the competition between the meme of prejudice and the meme of enlightened opinion, the Darwinian factor of amoral fitness (rather than truth) determines the result. But even if amoral, fitness must relate to certain objective factors as well that enable the hosts of the enlightened meme to survive and flourish at the expense of the others. The novelists anticipate and resist not only the bleaker implications of what would come to be called memeticism but the threat that contagionist perceptions pose to narrative itself. Narrative requires some sense of teleology. If life involves primarily contagion – the dimension of insensate microbes – it will be necessary to find there too some apparent pattern of purpose that can suggest, or substitute for, an intelligent authorship. Pearson seems to succeed in this respect although the particular terms of his success can obviously be challenged. The difficulty is arduous for our novelists too. Lacking the equanimity that Pearson derives from the intervening years of scientific debate, they must confront with dismay the spectacle of life reduced primarily to the level of microbiology. The spectacle is faced bravely in episodes of pestilence and only partially exorcized when the story returns to the metaphorical pestilence, and the ghosts of microbes, in the more familiar dimensions of history. Without a convincing faith in pre-existing, providential purpose or causality in life, and with a vision of apparently blind microbiological activity, the novelists nevertheless manage to continue the narrative. They do this sometimes by relying on a device that complements, while differing from, the ‘providential aesthetic’ that we have already considered. Whereas the ‘providential aesthetic’ involves inserting traces of teleology to be recognized only in retrospect, this other device inserts nothing and allows the material in itself to produce – or not to produce – such ‘traces’ (in the sense of the Spuren of Ernst Bloch10). Instead of beginning with an author, the story begins without an author, and the plot involves a quest for an author, in

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Pirandello fashion, who may or may not be found. The author, if found, would be able to make the teleological traces emerge from the material, if indeed they are there. Even if the quest ends in failure, it has, in constituting a story, made narrative possible. Haunted not by microbes but by other ghostly presences, Pirandello’s play naturally provides a paradigm of the situation in which various characters search, after the apparently uncaused fact, for an author. In our novels, characters like the swordsman, needlewoman, physician, nurse – among the others – may also require an author to give shape and sense to the comedy. Their individual stories must become parts of a larger narrative that can follow, as narratives do, a coherent pattern leading towards an appropriate denouement. But the author, if found at all, has not been there designing the action from the beginning and will only emerge, as a kind of reporter-bookkeeper, while the story is underway. So the dramatized narrators and authorial surrogates within our stories and the undramatized narrative voices that control, imperfectly, the vision in all the novels constitute wishful hints of an author still to be found. Never fully reliable, omniscient or confident, the narrators bespeak the desire rather than the certainty within the spectacle of authorization. The examples of two authorial surrogates may illustrate the situation. In Ruth, Benson, who is not in control of Ruth’s story from the beginning, must invent, after the fact, a cause for her pregnancy and become the providential figure in her life. But events elude his control, especially when Ruth returns to Bellingham at the end, and his attempt at her funeral to draw out the teleological significance of her life succeeds only in part. On the more purely biological level, the Darwinian Dr Pascal seeks similarly to perceive an authorial principle in the genetic developments that he studies, and unplanned patterns of meaning do emerge for him. The particular story that involves Clotilde escapes, however, his teleological schemes. The problem is not, as for Benson, to account for a pregnancy but to account for Clotilde’s failure to become pregnant when he believes that she should. In this crucial moment of la vie – the spectacle that never concludes and always recommences – the hidden author utters no word, and Pascal’s faith and health disintegrate. Still the inability to find an author, as I have suggested, can itself become a story. The case of Le Docteur Pascal is especially complex because of the theories of Zola that lie behind it. Zola has indeed specified in Le Roman expérimental the method by which traces of the natural author might be found within the material of life. The human, as opposed to natural, author should begin from a position of unobtrusive submission to the objective reality that he reports. He should, with respect to our principal metaphor, simply contract and replicate the historical contagion. Or in Zola’s own metaphor of the experimental scientist, he will not control but only ascertain and narrate in constative language what happens in his experiments. Faithfully reporting the ways in which genetic traits, or genes themselves,

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are transmitted from generation to generation, his bookkeeping also prefigures the memetic researcher’s methodical observation of the proliferation of memes. The real author of the spectacle, who is not the bookkeeper, resides amidst the biological properties of life and may be identified with vitality itself rather than with any conscious intelligence. Zola is somewhat less Darwinian, however, than the memeticist in that preordained laws rather than random natural selection evidently govern for him the hereditary transmission of life. At a certain point he may therefore succeed in the arduous Pirandellian quest to detect or construct the author of those laws – the un-self-conscious, authorial intelligence expressed in the programming of genetic codes. And in learning at this point to recognize those codes, the experimenter may well formulate larger authorial aspirations for himself, which take him beyond a purely passive relationship to his material. The knowledge that he gains will enable human programmers not only to understand but eventually to direct and regulate, in the author’s name, human behaviour and indeed all aspects of the human environment: Être maître du bien et du mal, régler la vie, régler la société, résoudre à la longue tous les problèmes du socialisme, apporter surtout des bases solides à la justice en résolvant par l’expérience les questions de criminalité, n’est-ce pas là être les ouvriers les plus utiles et les plus moraux du travail humain?11 Yet Zola also foresees, as Malinas points out, a danger in the audacity of the sages that would assume such authorial control over human destinies.12 Since humanity may lack after all the wisdom to use the power of the new knowledge beneficially, Dr Pascal is made, in speaking certainly for the author, to recant his earlier utopian hopes for the scientific endeavour. He confesses to Clotilde the advisability of leaving nature to its own courses: ‘ «Le doute m’a pris, je tremble à la pensée de mon alchimie du vingtième siècle, je finis par croire qu’il est plus grand et plus sain de laisser l’évolution s’accomplir» ’ (VIII). It will be as well not to find the author of the evolutionary narrative. So while traces of the absent author turn up, the novel itself narrates a finally unsuccessful search. Anxiety about his relationship to the author of the historical spectacle undermines, in another sense, Manzoni’s confidence in his human narrative power. He begins by positing the objectivity of the historical reality within which some authorial, patterning power, not necessarily to be identified with God, is hidden. His own task involves an intuition of the brooding pattern and a faithful translation of its logical and moral core (or sugo) into the fictional mode. His novel then becomes a ‘supplement’, in the term that Procaccini adopts from Derrida, to history, which otherwise conveys no compelling coherence.13 But unfortunately for himself, Manzoni comes to fear that the supplement bears all too clearly the signs

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of his own authorship and now replaces history. His narrative has failed to bring out the teleology within history itself. With La storia della colonna infame he therefore attempts more strenuously to remain objectively loyal to factual history. Still, as Verdicchio has shown, the attempt fares no better.14 The authorial identity, which could underwrite historical coherence from within the material, remains either a mirage or the arbitrary perspective of a particular human author. To avoid the imposition of an obtrusively personal perspective, Manzoni and the other novelists sometimes employ defamiliarizing points of view that may permit surprising traces of the hidden author or absent cause to emerge. The perspective is often that of the ‘disenfranchised’ members of society – among whom, in reference to Dickens, Palmer lists ‘children, women, the destitute, criminal, sick, deformed, insane’. In giving voice to those, who like Jo at the inquest have not been allowed to present their evidence in official accounts, Dickens ‘decenters’ and revises history.15 Gaskell and Kingsley too, Stitt believes, ‘give an articulate voice (not just a cry) to those whose words were seldom read’,16 and Manzoni, according to Hughes, accomplishes a similar achievement: with ‘his commitment to il popolo minuto, . . . [Manzoni] portrays a dimension of history seldom previously studied’.17 All but literally, Di Benedetto maintains further, Manzoni brings into his writing not just the words but the inflections of the vocal sounds of humble people as they gather in groups – ‘una voce sommessa e profonda, caratterizzata dal ronzio, dal mormorio, dal brulichio, bisbiglio . . . [che] può essere anche la voce della gente che soffre per la carestia o per la peste’.18 Interestingly enough, the novelists thereby devise subtle manifestations of Bakhtinian ‘polyglossia’. They also anticipate Foucault, who ‘has written his books’, as Said states, ‘in solidarity with society’s silent victims, to make visible the actuality of discourse and to make audible the repressed voice of its subjects’.19 The task of bringing into visibility and audibility what has been forgotten and overlooked may be related as well, I would venture to add, to literary scholarship more generally. In the present context, the usually neglected voices of writers like Ruffini, Ainsworth and Bulwer may prove valuable contributions to the polyglossia. In the social mission of our writers, however, there emerges an aspect of the narrative that counters the searching or the passive waiting for revelatory traces of an author hidden in history. Besides objective reporting or bookkeeping, our novels have, like the work of Foucault, much to do with the active unmaking and remaking of the Zeitgeist. In their complexity, the narratives sometimes tell – as we have seen with respect to double writing or writing/unwriting – two stories at once. While the author may seem as ‘absent’ as Spinoza’s ‘cause’ in the one story, a guiding authorial presence emerges very discernibly in the other. In this other story, which some of the novelists have even considered the primary one, the narratives propose the teleological programmes of their human authors.

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The novels carry on didactically in this other dimension the memetic activity of proselytism, spreading their ideas in a way that may be considered a conscious employment of the contagious phenomenon.20 Excepting possibly Ainsworth, the novelists explicitly intrude at times into their stories to denounce pestilences like that of Chancery and to offer their healing remedies to a sick age. In an age also conceived as unbelieving, the intentions of Kingsley and Bulwer, most specifically, include the promotion of religious faith. As Andrew Brown has recently demonstrated, Bulwer so prized the religio-philosophical tendency of his story that he became reluctant towards the end of the instalment publication to allow it to speak for itself. To hammer his message home, he composed a supplementary chapter that Dickens, who was bringing out the story in All the Year Round, succeeded only with difficulty in convincing him to suppress.21 Besides the atheistic materialism of science, Bulwer’s target is the power of the ‘world’ embodied in Mrs Poyntz, who presumably dwells, as a ‘Parca’, close to the contaminating core of the Zeitgeist. The hypocritical, intolerant moralism of the ‘world’ similarly arouses the antagonistic tendency of Gaskell in Ruth, another novel conceived in the spirit of a nobly moral crusade. The terribly negative reactions to the novel distressed Gaskell to the point of consternation, as if despite her best efforts the individual authoress were impotent in the struggle against entrenched historical prejudice.22 While these tendentious aspects, as I have suggested with respect to our own way of reading, do not constitute the main force of the narratives, they remain significantly indicative of the Zeitgeist. The dialectical struggle of opposing forces essentially characterizes the age, and the totality requires both the upholders and the opponents of historical prejudice. From a broad, imaginative perspective, it also appears that the furious opponents are sometimes secretly allied. D.A. Miller has interestingly analysed, for example, the symbiosis between the cultural outlaw and the representatives of law in Oliver Twist, whereby, we might add, one side has come to double the other.23 The distinct opposition between health and disease may break down too, in that the way in which the terms are applied can suffer a Bakhtinian reversal. Whereas most of the novelists tend to locate health with religious faith and disease with atheism, Zola’s vision reverses the terms, as if to unwrite in this respect some of the earlier narratives. A value that does not suffer reversal may be that of freedom, but the desired realm of freedom must be defined and won in the context of historical necessity. So freedom exists in a symbiosis with necessity. The eight novels that provide the basis for this study seem both in their manifold repetitions and in their manifold reversals of patterns and motifs clearly to belong to the same historical moment. In the ‘historical aesthetic’, as Ermarth defines it, the consciousness of living in that moment conveys to its inhabitants an awareness of their unity in a common medium – even if, sometimes, a common disaster. As expressions of that

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moment, the eight novels figure here not as distinct and discrete stories but as portions of the same larger narrative or grand récit. The impression that they all convey of a spreading contagion has implied a phenomenon that not only infiltrates each individual work but also penetrates the permeable boundaries between them. As the same types of characters and situations turn up in the various stories, it thus becomes possible to discern the mimetic mechanism of doubling operating across the fictional boundaries too. The various physicians, for example, may unknowingly double one another as they go about their characteristic activities. This perspective gives less importance to the total plot than to other components of the narrative. For what is discerned, as it were from the watchtower, is primarily a ubiquitous present moment of inconclusive, simultaneous, repetitive activities. Of course memory pervades this moment too, and ominous hints are not lacking of an impending future catastrophe. The contagion may culminate in the final collapse or breakdown into undifferentiation that Girard prospects – and that The Last Man of Mary Shelley foresees for the year 2100. Meanwhile our novels offer only partial resolutions; the interacting contagion and counter-contagion, the weaving and unweaving, the tensions of the perpetual power struggles that constitute history itself, continue. In the balance that the novels, as accounting books, may propose, the condition of humanity in nineteenth-century history does not appear precisely desperate. While neither divinely authored nor teleological in itself, history seems somehow to exemplify patterns that may result from the collective organizing activities of human beings. As they go about their work, the needlewomen and the physicians and the writers, even if they raise a certain havoc, may be helping to undo that havoc. Their efforts tend at least to reinforce patterns that make the spectacle of history more comprehensible. The hope endures as well of wresting from the patterns of Necessity temporary enclaves of freedom. Although the occasionally privileged locations – the nursery, the sick-room, the scholarly citadel, the opera house, the dissenting chapel – seem inevitably precarious, vulnerable or already flawed, the longing for them belongs to our humanity. With the coherence of their patterns and their respect for human longings, the novels end, in my own bookkeeping as well, with a favourable balance. They enable readers living amidst the contagion of our later century to recognize analogous patterns and reassuring principles of coherence in our own historical medium. The mimetic principle implies, indeed, that we imitate as well as inherit the desires, the power instincts, the humanity of our ancestors. A danger, of course, is that while seeing ourselves as imitating our ancestors, we make them imitate us. The contagion of our age thus seeps back into theirs as Arnold feared would happen if he were able to confront the scholar-gipsy. Or, as in the case of Esther Summerson and Jarndyce’s letter, the meaningful coherence and the

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power that the novels exemplify for us has emerged after the fact in the moment of our reading. Yet such a danger, if it really is that, is inseparable from the critical endeavour. The danger of misreading one’s sources is similarly inseparable from the endeavour to write history. Historical novelists like Manzoni have often feared that they were creating rather than reporting history, but the writing of history requires narrative creativity. Among the most significant historical texts are novels like ours. After whatever happens, chaotically, outside the covers of books, history occurs more convincingly in the secondary narratives than in the primary records of historical archives. As critics and historians of a later age aspire to recreate the history of an earlier period, they will inevitably do so, at third hand, in different terms. They will create new contexts, new combinations of polyglossia, in which to study events and pursue analogies that could have occurred to no one living within the period under consideration. In the present study it has thus seemed profitable to create the context of the particular eight novels, in which patterns of human interaction not so clearly observed before do seem really to operate. The choice of novels has represented an act, I trust, of intelligent freedom and has not certainly been arbitrary. The hope in such studies is not simply to create new truth but to recover something of original truth. But since there is, one finally supposes, no absolute, original truth, the fictions of both novelists and critics offer, beyond truth, hints of a humanly authorized freedom.

Notes

1 History as contagion 1 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell UP: 1994, p. 33. 2 Charles Kingsley, Health and Education, London: Macmillan and Co., 1882, p. 22. Kingsley goes on, pp. 23–5, to cite approvingly Gladstone’s ‘Juventus Mundi’ which describes the training of a Greek youth in Homer’s day as ‘an education fit for a really civilized man’: it is a ‘scheme of notable discipline of mind and body, indeed a lifelong education’. 3 G.H. Lewes, ‘Training in Relation to Health’, Cornhill 9, 1864, 219. 4 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, New York: Mentor Books, 1959, pp. 78, 90. 5 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 31. For Schlegel and Novalis, Sontag also notes, ‘the ideal of perfect health is only scientifically interesting’, and sickness ‘belongs to individualizing’. 6 [Harriet Martineau], Life in the Sick-Room: Essays, by an Invalid, 3rd edn, London: Edward Moxon, 1849, p. 1. In giving up her diary, which seemed to encourage ‘morbid self-consciousness’, Martineau intended in Life in the SickRoom to demonstrate ‘moral health in physical illness’ according to Shelagh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism, Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995, p. 191. 7 [Edward Bulwer], The Student: A Series of Papers, 1, London: Saunders and Otley, 1835, 308, 310. The ‘august’ moralist that Bulwer does not identify is Sir Thomas Browne, who writes in Religio Medici, 2: 11: ‘For this world, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live, but to dye in’ (Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Letter to a Friend &c., and Christian Morals, ed. W.A. Greenhill, M.D. Oxon. [1881], Peru IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1990, p. 115). Bulwer may also have been thinking of Jeremy Taylor, whose Holy Dying he had cited at the beginning of his essay. Taylor makes similar points, as in the statement: ‘if you please in charity to visit an Hospital, which is indeed a map of the whole world, there you shall see the effects of Adams sin’ (Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying, ed. P.G. Stanwood, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, p. 42). More recently, Cecil Helman discusses our contemporary impression of living amidst disease and refers to ‘the sickroom that is modern society’ (Body Myths, London: Chatto and Windus, 1991, p. 37). 8 Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1978, p. 59. 9 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, p. 178.

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10 Haley, The Healthy Body, pp. 6–8. 11 R.J. Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to An Epidemic, London: Croom Helm, 1976, pp. 177, 206, 213. Morris provides a good overview of the germs/miasma debate on pp. 170–84 and a useful description of the positions of the various religious groups on pp. 129–55. For another recent summary of the nineteenth-century conflict between believers in germs and ‘miasmists’, see J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998, pp. 149–53. 12 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, New York: Anchor Books, 1978, pp. 110, 134. 13 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House [Et dukkehjem], trans. James McFarlane, in Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987, p. 33. 14 Donald E. Hall, Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, p. 181 (where ‘vicious and profligate sisterhood’ is cited from E.M. Sigsworth and T.J. Wyke), and pp. 189–95. 15 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980, p. 5. 16 Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, p. 48. 17 Steven Connor, ‘Space, Place and the Body of Riot in Barnaby Rudge’, in Charles Dickens, ed. Steven Connor, London: Longman, 1996, p. 216. 18 Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 137–8, 103, 87, 95, 129–31. 19 Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris: Galilée, 1990, pp. 15–16. 20 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 11. Rosemary Jackson also discusses the Gothic as an aspect of ‘fantastic’ literature that ‘threatens to disrupt or eat away at the “syntax” or structure by which order is made’; it makes ‘a violent attack upon the symbolic order’ and ‘erodes’ it (Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Methuen, 1981, pp. 103, 177). 21 Mirto Golo Stone, ‘Contro la modernità e la cultura borghese: I promessi sposi e l’ascesa del romanzo italiano’, MLN 107, no. 1, 1992, 114–16, usefully summarizes recent studies by Guido Baldi, Robert S. Dombroski and Augusto Simonini. Stone’s own point, however, is that the novel expresses not the bourgeois culture of the early nineteenth century, as has generally been thought, but an anti-bourgeois tendency that was also characteristic of that moment in Lombardy. In contrast with such views, Carol Lazzaro-Weis believes that it ‘is a characteristic of the historical novel in general’, including I promessi sposi, to deal not so much with the particularities of some historical moment as with the ‘universal and timeless human emotions’ that may operate in all periods of history (‘The Providential Trap: Some Remarks on Fictional Strategies in I promessi sposi’, Stanford Italian Review 4, 1984, 103). Ruth Newton and Naomi Lebowitz also emphasize the degree to which I promessi sposi is a novel about the human spirit in ‘the turmoil of history’; the idea of history is more important, however, than the particular turmoils of any precise moment (Dickens, Manzoni, Zola, and James: The Impossible Romance, Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990, pp. 24–6, 40–4). Angelo Marchese, L’enigma Manzoni: La spiritualità e l’arte di uno scrittore ‘negativo’, Roma: Bulzoni, 1994, p. 59, similarly believes that the novel treats the human condition of existence in history – ‘essere nel mondo – in una condizione, cioè, inestricabilmente naturale e storica’ – but while the period happens to be the seventeenth century the focus

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is upon the relationship of the century to something beyond time – ‘che rimanda continuamente al di là del tempo, con una nostalgia di assoluto e di perfetto’. Goethe hoped that an eventual German translator would omit the passages of purely seventeenth-century historical information. See Peter Johann Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823–1832, ed. Eduard Castle, 1, Berlin: Deutsches Verlagshaus Bong & Co, 1916, pp. 209–10 (conversation of 23 July 1827). William J. Palmer, Dickens and New Historicism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 6, also cites Doctorow and Dickens to the effect that ‘when you write about the past, you are always reflecting on your own age’. Manzoni himself had of course wished to remain scrupulously faithful to the historical truth of his seventeenth-century material but seems implicitly to confess in his treatise Del romanzo storico, begun a year after finishing I promessi sposi, that he had set himself an impossible task. See Steven C. Hughes, ‘Manzoni as Social Historian: The Structural Dilemma of I promessi sposi’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 207–9. Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, New York: Ballantine Books, 1978. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 236, points out that plagues inevitably accompany not only wars but also religious pilgrimages. Until the twentieth century, soldiers also died far more frequently from infectious diseases than as a result of enemy actions (McNeill, pp. 259, 284). In associating war and pestilence, however, Kingsley finds that war ‘is more cruel even than pestilence’: whereas pestilence kills off, in the Darwinian struggle for survival, the least fit, war ‘issues in the survival of the less fit’ and so tends to ‘deteriorate generations yet unborn’ (‘The Science of Health’, Health and Education, p. 6). Although Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 67, finds that the association of military metaphors with infectious disease does not come into wide use until the 1880s, with the identification of bacterial agents, I believe the practice begins much earlier. Samuel Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, l. 23. In the same years that witnessed the decay of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, Thomas Mann’s first great novel, Buddenbrooks, also locates, in the terms of its subtitle, the Verfall einer Familie. In discussing the interconnection of warfare, economic crises and the diffusion of epidemics, Paolo De Magistris, Dalla peste alla festa: Storia di terrori e di speranza: La devozione per Sant’Efisio, Cagliari: Edizioni Della Torre, 1993, pp. 63–4, also points out the relevance of troop movements during the Thirty Years’ War to the plague in Milan. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, p. 284. René Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, p. 138. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, pp. 60, 74–82, discusses the frequency with which epidemic diseases are not so much literally as metaphorically associated with social and political disorder in the writings of Plato, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Burke, etc. J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, reminds us, p. 96, that in seeing the human body as a microcosm many Renaissance writers like Paracelsus found that disease in human bodies mirrored not only social disintegration but disorders in the heavens. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985, p. 82, hints at a connection between the Chartist fiasco of April 1848 and the spread of cholera in October 1848, as these phenomena enter Alton Locke. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, pp. 137–42.

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31 In an anonymous article of 1841, Antonio Gallenga also describes the moment as ‘a Levelling Age’ but interprets the phenomenon less negatively than does Dickens’s Sir Leicester: ‘we mingle and rush together like fluids seeking their level. . . . The spirit of revolutions is nothing more than rushes of this great stream tending to unite us’ (‘The Age We Live In’, Fraser’s Magazine 24, July 1841, 11). Franco Moretti, Atlante del romanzo europeo, 1800–1900, Torino: Einaudi, 1997, p. 48, finds that the levelling process required by the construction of the modern state also involves language, as all jargons and local dialects are reduced to a single language. The language of the nineteenth-century novel contributed most importantly to this development. 32 Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, pp. 83–4. Vrettos also points out, p. 84, that ‘Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued that “ ‘contagion’ and ‘contamination’ became the tropes through which city life was apprehended” ’. 33 Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 139. 34 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen, 1981, p. 131. 35 Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 39; René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, p. 96. 36 Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 41. 37 Terence Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell: ‘We are not angels’: Realism, Gender, Values, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 75–6, points out the overtones of Cinderella and her prince. 38 In Dalla peste alla festa, pp. 95–101, De Magistris discusses, for example, the institution of ‘feste di ringraziamento’ with carnivalesque features that celebrated, as annual recurrences, the end of plagues. 39 Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988, pp. 81, 89–94. 40 Pater, The Renaissance, p. 152. 41 Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele [1929], London: Flamingo, 1995, pp. 131, 132–3. 42 Quoted in John Farley, Gametes and Spores: Ideas about Sexual Reproduction 1750–1914, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982, p. 63. 43 Baudrillard, La Transparence du Mal, p. 168. 44 In the failure of their immune systems to protect them from earthly diseases, the Martians may be said to repeat the experience of the Native Americans at the time of the European conquest. Cecil Helman, Body Myths, p. 43, points out that the natives of the New World were ‘conquered by microbes rather than weapons’; the imported diseases killed 90 per cent of the population. The difference of course is that the Martians are the invaders and so perhaps deserve the fate resulting from the native diseases. 45 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, [Paris]: Gallimard, 1975, pp. 199–200. Romano Canosa, Tempo di peste: magistrati ed untori nel 1630 a Milano, [Roma]: Sapere 2000, 1985, p. 13 and passim, has shown that the Milanese senate was able, during the plague treated in Manzoni’s novel, artificially to intensify the climate of mass hysteria in a way that permitted it to exercise an iron-clad discipline and virtual dictatorship over the city. In a similar association of the plague with discipline, John Bender finds that a principle of absolute order governs Defoe’s account of the plague (‘The City and the Rise of the Penitentiary: A Journal of the Plague Year’, in Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backscheider, Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, pp. 334–5). In a still more recent study, Sheldon Watts traces in the response to plagues in the fifteenth century the

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affirmation of an ‘Ideology of Order’ (Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, New Haven: Yale UP, 1997, pp. 15–25). Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp. 258–9. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. xii. Ibid., p. 49. In ‘A Defence of Poetry’ Shelley discusses ‘sympathy’ and ‘love’ as the capacities of the imagination that are the basis for all moral action. While one might think that, in contrast to Vrettos, Shelley contemplates only the positive operations of sympathy, he believes in the moral value of sympathy even with apparent wickedness. Douglas-Fairhurst focuses in terms of ‘sympathy’ his discussion of the discourse of influence with respect to Tennyson – Chapter 3, ‘Tennyson’s Sympthy’, pp. 182–269. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, pp. 4, 85. Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 95, refers to the ‘infectious missionary character of Gaskell’s book, the powerful effects of which were attested to by Josephine Butler’. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, p. 122. Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Everlasting No’, Sartor Resartus, 2: 7. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, p. 148. Like the plague and other epidemic phenomena, the spread of syphilis has also been associated with warfare. J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease, p. 63, points out that syphilis appeared first in Italy in the mid-1490s in connection with the invasion of Italy by the armies of Charles VIII. By 1499 syphilis was reported all over Europe. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 16. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 133, indicate that the dangerous emanations from the slums to the respectable quarters of the city at night were thought to include both prostitutes and germs. In connection with the plague in London of 1665, however – according to Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London [1924], London: Bracken Books, 1994, p. 99 – the report spread that venereal disease offered its victims immunity at least from the plague, which proved naturally to be untrue. Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp. 130–1, discusses the connection between the two events: ‘As if to point out that blame belongs with those men who are the spoilers and the soilers, Gaskell has her heroine contract typhus from her original seducer. . . . I see the plague that Bellingham spreads as a metaphor of sexual taint through which Gaskell engages with the public discourse of prostitution as a “social evil” and anticipates the arguments of later feminists for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts’. To consider Bellingham’s impregnation of Ruth as equivalent to the transmission of disease may recall the citation of Rudolph Leuckart above (see note 42) regarding the way in which all pregnancies are triggered. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, pp. 133–4, observes that even if not from the east such a disease ‘inevitably comes from somewhere else’ and is linked to ‘foreignness’. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, p. 13. Moretti, Atlante del romanzo europeo, pp. 121–2, observes that between West End and East End, Dickens also locates for his middle class a third London, comprising a wide triangle defined by Islington to the north, Soho to the west

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Notes to pages 22–6 and the City to the east. Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Religion, Cultures, Communities, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000, pp. 75–102, also discusses the symbolic use in literary works of the north–south axis. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ed. Alethea Hayter, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 109. Munthe, The Story of San Michele, pp. 121–2, describes his terror of the millions of rats in the streets of Naples during a cholera epidemic and the horror of the ‘immense pit on the Camposanto dei Colerosi’, into which, probably, hundreds of still-living bodies were thrown along with all the rotting corpses. The living and dead were indistinguishable from one another. Ibid., p. 81. Timothy Peltason, ‘Esther’s Will’, in Bleak House: Charles Dickens: New Casebooks, ed. Jeremy Tambling, Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 209, points out that the motif of the East Wind was ‘central enough to Dickens’s early conception of the novel [to have] figured in several of the titles that he considered for it’. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, pp. 173–6, discusses in this respect Henry Rider Haggard’s She (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Jackson, Fantasy, p. 72, considers Dracula the paradigmatic subversive Gothic text because it lends itself to structuralist rather than ‘merely thematic’ reading. David Faulkner, ‘The Confidence Man: Empire and the Deconstruction of Muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 189. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 3. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, pp. 44–5. Haley, The Healthy Body, p. 9. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 140. Ibid., p. 145. Although his conception differs somewhat from mine, Palmer, Dickens and New Historicism, refers to history as both a ‘horizontal line of facts and events’ and a ‘vertical pit’, in which the disenfranchised masses are trapped (like Dickens’s Stephen Blackpool in the Old Hell Shaft) and risk being eliminated from history (p. 4); Dickens tries to understand, ‘from the bottom up, the truth of his times as expressed in the voices of the streets’ (p. 9). Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–1895, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 2. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1973, p. 116. Ainsworth takes his Solomon Eagle from Defoe’s Journal, in which the narrator distinguishes his own view of providential intervention from Solomon’s. Whereas Solomon (actually a Quaker musician and shoemaker named Eccles) preaches a naively Old Testament view of an angrily intervening God, the narrator believes that the plague derives from ‘natural Causes’ and is propagated as a ‘Contagion’ or ‘secret Conveyance of Infection imperceptible and unavoidable’. Yet in his ingenious interpretation, the narrator still finds that the plague constitutes a divine ‘Judgement’ upon sinful humanity even though God has been pleased in this case to employ ‘the ordinary Course of natural Causes’ (Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year [1722], ed. Paula R. Backscheider, Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 153). Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, p. 131, mentions that even Hippocrates, who wrote treatises on epidemics, explicitly denied that the ‘wrath of God’ could be a cause of plagues. The article of Franco Triolo, ‘Manzoni and Providence’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and

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Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 245–57, is especially to the point in defending Manzoni from the traditional accusation of having portrayed a naively Old Testament view of a directly intervening, judgemental providence. F.D. Maurice, Theological Essays [1853], 5th edn, London: Macmillan, 1905, p. 210. Christopher Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease’, in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays from Victorian Studies, ed. Patrick Brantlinger, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989, pp. 93–123. Ibid., p. 112. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 102. Munthe, The Story of San Michele, p. 226. See, for example, Roy Jay Nelson, Causality and Narrative in French Fiction from Zola to Robbe-Grillet, Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1990, p. 13. Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction, New Haven: Yale UP, 1974, pp. 78–80, usefully summarizes the views of Boris Tomashevsky and Boris Eichenbaum regarding ‘story’ and ‘plot’ (corresponding respectively here to histoire and récit). According to the Russian critics, Scholes concludes, ‘the art of fiction is, then, most apparent in the artificial rearrangement of chronology which makes a story into a plot’. Quoted by Larry H. Peer, ‘Mimesis in Manzoni’s Literary Theory’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 89. Clareece Godt, ‘From History to Story: Manzoni and the Chroniclers of Milano’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 180. Massimo Verdicchio, ‘Manzoni and the Promise of History’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 218. Alfonso Procaccini, ‘I promessi sposi: “ ‘Ho imparato . . .’ ” ’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 125. Triolo, ‘Manzoni and Providence’, p. 250. Emile Zola, Le Roman expérimental, 2nd edn, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880, pp. 3–4. Ermarth, The English Novel in History, p. 80. Ibid., p. 86. Some four thousand people died on this particular night in September according to Nath. Hodges, M.D., Loimologia: or, An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, 2nd edn, London: E. Bell and J. Osborne, 1720, p. 20. Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London, p. 238, finds this figure somewhat exaggerated. Munthe, The Story of San Michele, p. 121. Jeremy Tambling also associates Benjamin’s angel of history with the allegorical figure with pointing finger painted on the ceiling of Tulkinghorn in Bleak House (Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, p. 78). ‘The Age We Live In’, p. 3. The extent to which, according to Gallenga’s long and interesting article (pp. 1–15), the mental and physical steam controls us or we can control it remains ambiguous. As a metaphor it implies that history is impelled less by an absent cause than by a palpable force. The narrator of Two Years Ago summarizes (X) Gallenga’s tragedy of ‘Fra Dolcino and Margaret’, which I shall discuss further in Chapter 6.

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95 As the chapter title ‘In Chancery’ suggests, the fog also typifies the condition of ‘being in Chancery’, which James Buzard further takes to signify ‘being “in” culture as such’: ‘Being in Chancery means longing to get out, to attain a position “beyond culture” ’ (‘ “Anywhere’s Nowhere”: Dickens on the Move’, in Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds, ed. Anny Sadrin, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd and New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1999, p. 120. 96 Ermarth, The English Novel in History, p. 95. 97 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 146, discuss the case of Freud’s patient, called the Rat Man, who, in seeing a rat at his father’s grave, imagines the rat to have devoured the father’s body and further associates the rat with a syphilitic penis. 98 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 18. 99 While evidently haemophiliac, Charles has not inherited the condition but has acquired it as the result of a mutation (Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, p. 129). 100 Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 7. 101 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 20. 102 Pearson, Viroid Life, p. 15. 2 Providence amidst pestilence and fire 1 Thomas Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1985, p. 98. 2 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000, p. 42. 3 For a discussion of Bulwer’s version of a doctrine of the imperfect and his reasons for believing that what was missing here, like God and the soul, must be present elsewhere, see my Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 199–210. 4 Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000, pp. 161, 273, 281. 5 Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Guida ai Promessi sposi: I personaggi, la gente, le idealità, Milano: Rizzoli, 1999, points out, pp. 20–1, that Renzo’s faith in providence does not characterize his predecessor in Fermo e Lucia, the earlier version of the novel. It is a trait that Manzoni has invented for I promessi sposi. 6 According to the truly Catholic conscience, Triolo maintains, good and evil belong entirely to a providential plan of which human beings remain ignorant (Franco Triolo, ‘Manzoni and Providence’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 252). John Gatt-Rutter deals interestingly with the question of God’s silence or God’s ‘voice’ in the novel (‘When the Killing Had to Stop: Manzoni’s Paradigm of Christian Conversion’, The Italianist 10, 1990, 17–18, 24). Manzoni offers ‘a Pascalian representation of a God who can be intuited but not observed within his creation’ (p. 33). For Angelo Marchese, L’enigma Manzoni: La spiritualità e l’arte di uno scrittore ‘negativo’, Roma: Bulzoni, 1994, pp. 43–74, the God of Manzoni is the ‘Deus absconditus’ of Pascal and Jansenism, involving ‘la scommessa pascaliana che Dio c’è anche nella sua vistosa assenza’ (p. 71). 7 Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, New York: Ballantine Books, 1978, p. 104. 8 The novel is not precise about the exact number of victims, but Kingsley implies that the death toll was much higher than was actually the case for any particular community in Cornwall. Although the entire registration district of Bideford had 46 deaths, no smaller localities, like the one that Kingsley describes, had

Notes to pages 44–8

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more than ‘some half-dozen deaths’ (Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain [1894], 2 vols, London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd, 1965, 2: 851). The likening of the spreading epidemic to a dragon or other predatory beast is perhaps unavoidable in fictional accounts, as we may notice in much more recent novels too. Regarding an outbreak of cholera in 1830, Jean Giono thus observes in Le Hussard sur le toit (1951): ‘The cholera was now stalking like a lion over towns and woods. After a few days’ respite, the people in the ravine were again attacked by the contagion’ (trans. Jonathan Griffin, London: The Harville Press, 1995, p. 215). And in another fictional treatment of the plague of 1665–66 (the one that Defoe and Ainsworth treat), Mary Rose Hayfield writes, typically, that ‘the plague could bare its fangs and bite deep anywhere’ (Burns Yet the Candle, Powys: Beloved Warwickshire Products, 1994, p. 272). In Shelley’s The Last Man too, the episodes involving the siege of Stamboul treat plague and fire as equivalent phenomena (II:i,ii). In Wells’s The War of the Worlds, a parallelism is implied in that one of the most lethal weapons of the Martians is fire (an incinerating laser-like beam) while the still more lethal instrument that destroys the Martians is contagious disease. As noticed by Philip Rand, ‘The Last Days of the Second Empire: The Parisians and La Débâcle’, in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Essays, ed. Allan Conrad Christensen, Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2004, p. 225, similarly spectacular conflagrations, occurring as virtuoso set pieces in the works of our novelists, include the ‘cleansing and regenerative’ burning of Paris in the last chapter of Zola’s La Débâcle and the destruction of Pompeii in Bulwer’s novel. Curtish Dahl has studied such aesthetic moments in ‘Bulwer-Lytton and the School of Catastrophe’, Philological Quarterly 32, 1953, 428–42. Dr Hodges, who figures as a character in Ainsworth’s novel, attributes the blame in his own published report less to God or the stars than to the self-appointed spokesmen for heaven: ‘the Mischief was much more in the Predictions of the Star-Gazers, than in the Stars themselves’ (Nath. Hodges, M.D., Loimologia: or, An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, 2nd edn, London: E. Bell and J. Osborne, 1720, p. 5). Whereas this horrifying funeral pyre of written documents is supposed actually to occur, the first chapter of Bleak House concludes with the narrator’s hypothesis of a desirable version of such a pyre: ‘If all the injustice [the court] has committed, and all the misery it has caused, could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre, – why, so much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!’ Andrew Blake, Reading Victorian Fiction: The Cultural Context and Ideological Content of the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 82. Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984, pp. 63, 68. Morton mentions, p. 9, that ‘Meredith, Swinburne, Browning, Kingsley each believed that he could be an individualist, a strenuous optimist, and a Darwinian all at once’. David Baguley, ‘L’anti-intellectualisme de Zola’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 17, no. 42, 1971, 127–9, discusses the disillusionment of Dr Pascal with all his intellectual, scientific activity and his nostalgia for ‘la vie élémentaire’. Although Wordsworth is not mentioned, Zola’s attitude may remind us of the Wordsworthian ‘grand elementary principle of pleasure’ and the distinction in ‘The Tables Turned’ between ‘spontaneous wisdom’ and the ‘meddling intellect’. Pascal ceases to experiment with life (to ‘murder to dissect’) and begins really to live during his love affair with Clotilde. According to Baguley’s citation of Henri Barbusse, Zola, Paris: Gallimard, 1932, p. 265, ‘Zola fut une force de la nature, non un homme à idées’.

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Notes to pages 49–55

17 There are, Pearson points out, ‘means other than sex for transmitting genes, such as infections and symbiotic complexes’: cells have ‘evolved by acquisition, not of inherited characteristics . . ., but of inherited bacterial symbionts, in which . . . merged beings that infected one another were reinvigorated by the incorporation of their permanent “disease” ’ (Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 132, 124, citing I. Margulis and D. Sagan, What Is Life?, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995, p. 90). 18 Rita Schober, ‘ «Le Docteur Pascal» ou le sens de la vie’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 25, no. 53, 1979, 66, and Sven Kellner, Emile Zola et son œuvre, Dole: Les Deux Colombes, 1994, p. 210, point out that Pascal’s credo is copied almost word for word from Renan’s L’Avenir de la science (1890). Without specific reference to Zola, Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, pp. 56–8, refers to other sages that intuited a spirit (esprit) behind the scientific endeavour. What Zola calls ‘la vie’ can presumably be identified with Fichte’s ‘vie divine’ and Hegel’s ‘vie de l’esprit’. The same spirit of life motivates both the scientific pursuit of knowledge and the political pursuit of moral justice, legitimizing them and causing them to coincide. 19 Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries, Etc., in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, 5, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1953, 82–4. 20 Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision, San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1975, pp. 106, 110. 21 Derrida, Le toucher, pp. 278–9. 22 Ibid., pp. 292–3. 23 With specific reference to Artaud’s Le Théâtre et la peste, René Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, p. 149, finds such understandings of the process of physiological decomposition ‘medically mythical but esthetically powerful’: Artaud ‘interprets the physiological process as a dissolution of organs, which may be a kind of melting away, a liquefaction of the body or, on the contrary, a desiccation and a pulverization. The loss of organic differentiation . . . patterns the pathological symptoms on the breakdown of culture, producing an overwhelming impression of disintegration’. In Le Roman expérimental, 2nd edn, Paris: G. Charpentier, 1880, p. 18, Zola too draws a specific comparison between the phenomena that Bernard studies in the ‘milieu intra-organique’ and the phenomena that occur in the ‘milieu social’. 24 Zola had known nothing of the episode in Bleak House and expressed stupefaction when informed about it by J. Van Santen Kolff. He had studied the medical literature concerning the phenomenon but he confessed to Kolff that ‘pour mon compte, je ne crois pas du tout à la combustion spontanée, je veux dire la combustion totale’ (see Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 1655–6 n). 25 With respect to fire as an image not only of contagion but of counter-contagion, Fenwick has recommended kindling fires in the room in which one of his patients has died and which he imagines to be filled with noxious ‘effluvia’: ‘ “You had better shut up the chamber for at least some weeks, burn fires in it, repaint and paper it, sprinkle chloroform” ’ (X). 26 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen, 1981, p. 19. Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, pp. 54–63, distinguishes two important versions of the ‘récit de légitimation’: the ‘récit de l’émancipation’ features humanity as the hero employing science in the practical struggle for liberty, while the ‘récit spéculatif’ concerns moral and

Notes to pages 55–9

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intellectual liberation. The practical and idealist stories should naturally interpenetrate. In his opposition to ‘romanciers idéalistes’ (Le Roman expérimental, pp. 22–3), Zola seems to privilege Lyotard’s first type of ‘récit’, although there is clearly a strong, unacknowledged component of idealism in Zola’s own thinking. With respect to Jameson’s desire ‘to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity’, Zola professes an apparently contrasting wish to regain ‘territoire’ from ‘indéterminisme’ so as to subject ever more areas of human experience and understanding to the laws of scientific determinism. Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic, pp. 96–7. R.J. Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to An Epidemic, London: Croom Helm, 1976, pp. 183–4, discusses Chadwick’s alienation of the local authorities and communities that would have to pay higher rates for public health measures. Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, p. 17. Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 25–6, points out that Florence Nightingale too thought that national hygiene was a moral imperative and wrote in a letter to Benjamin Jowett that it was ‘a religious act to clean out a gutter and to prevent cholera’. While Tom Thurnall performs such secular versions of religious acts in Two Years Ago, Gaskell wished the protagonist of her Cousin Phillis to do likewise. In a letter to her publisher George Smith of 10 December 1863 (in John Chapple and Alan Shelston, eds, Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 259–60), she outlines her intention of concluding the novel with Phillis’s survival of an epidemic of typhus fever. Phillis would then be found ‘making practical use of the knowledge she had learnt from Holdsworth and, with the help of common labourers, levelling & draining the undrained village’. But the episode remained unwritten because the publisher wished to conclude the novel within 1863 without the proposed additional numbers. Edwin M. Eigner and Joseph I. Fradin, ‘Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens’ Jo’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24, 1969, 98–102, have shown that the chimney sweeper Beck in Bulwer’s Lucretia anticipates Dickens’s Jo. Embodying like Jo a denunciation of the respectable classes, Beck is termed ‘this age in youth, this living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes of science and the deaf ears of wealth’ (Lucretia, II:vi). Francesco Di Ciaccia, La Parola e il Silenzio: Peste carestia ed eros nel romanzo manzoniano, Pisa: Giardini, 1987, pp. 42–3. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, p. 129, discusses Zola’s conviction, modelled on that of Claude Bernard, that the experimental scientist cannot be ‘a man of compassion’ and properly demonstrates an ‘antisentimental’ and ‘toughminded aggressiveness’. Earlier in the century physicians were widely considered much too eager to perform autopsies and dissect the cadavers both of executed criminals and of the proletarian victims of pestilential epidemics. The poor resented the prospect of being dissected as an indignity perpetrated on them by the powerful members of society and suspected physicians, in their grim desire for bodies to dissect, even of murdering their poor patients (Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp. 34–7; Morris, Cholera 1832, pp. 102–4). In a long discussion of Florence Nightingale and her immense popularity and

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Notes to pages 59–68

her inspirational power for contemporary womanhood, Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988, finds that Nightingale ‘was misrepresented by her contemporaries’ who made her ‘into the myth they desired’ (p. 165). Bulwer uses similar terms of bondage and freedom to describe his own experience in ‘On Ill Health and Its Consolations’, in The Student: A Series of Papers, 1, London: Saunders and Otley, 1835, 301: the ‘human heart’, he has found, ‘hath a strange power of turning prison into nutriment’ and ‘after the first bitterness of the physical thraldom, [we] feel that despite of it we are free!’. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 148. Exodus 12:5: ‘Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats’. Romano Canosa, Tempo di peste: magistrati ed untori nel 1630 a Milano, [Roma]: Sapere 2000, 1985, pp. 11, 111–17, believes, however, that this plague differs from most others in that the witch-hunting for the untori was craftily manipulated by the Senate so as to create a climate of terror (‘un terrore di stato’) that served the Senate’s own desire for power. More than any other Italian plague, this was ‘una peste “politica” ’ in which, along with the contagion, the dictatorial power of the Senate could be felt to be operating everywhere. According to Massimo Verdicchio, ‘Manzoni and the Promise of History’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 216–18, the exigencies of the fictional form prevented Manzoni from narrating accurately the story of the plague within the plague (the ‘witch hunt for the untori that literally spread like another plague’). The account in the Storia della colonna infame comes closer to providing an adequate narrative of the history not of facts but of ‘man’s anger, fears, errors’ – ‘ “la storia dello spirito umano” ’ – in which human beings were wilfully committing injustices (p. 221). Marshall, Murdering to Dissect, p. 242. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 148. Isaiah, 53: 6–7, also implicitly associates the sacrificed lamb with the scapegoat: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth’. My A European Version of Victorian Fiction: The Novels of Giovanni Ruffini, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, pp. 138–40, includes a discussion of the Samson motif in three of Ruffini’s novels. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, [Paris]: Gallimard, 1975, p. 70, comments on the possibility that torture and martyrdom empower the sufferer in that the tortured and condemned prisoner ‘se trouvait héroïsé’ by the crowd. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, p. 100. While not discerning all the possible parallels with ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, other critics have at least commented on the device of the moon shining through the stained glass. See Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 115; Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 327; and Shirley Foster, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 104–5. I discuss the parallels between Ruth and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and other poems by Keats more fully in ‘ “Ruth . . . Sick for Home”: The Keatsian Imagination in the Novel of Elizabeth Gaskell’, in Configuring Romanticism, ed. Theo D’haen, Peter Liebregts and Wim Tigges, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003, pp. 105–22.

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46 George Watt suggests that Mrs Mason, in frustration caused by her son’s restlessness, makes a scapegoat of Ruth, but it is, furthermore, ‘almost as if society needs a supply of outcast figures’ and fixes obsessively for this purpose on the fallen woman (The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel, London: Croom Helm and Totowa NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984, pp. 34–8). In ‘The Rise of the Fallen Woman’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35, no. 1, June 1980, 34, Nina Auerbach has similarly observed the characteristic use of the fallen woman as a scapegoat in Victorian fiction. 47 Keats’s poem mentions, stanza VIII, ‘St Agnes and her lambs unshorn’ in reference to the practice on that occasion of sacrificing lambs whose wool would be spun and woven by nuns. Michael D. Wheeler, ‘The Sinner as Heroine: A Study of Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth and the Bible’, The Durham University Journal n.s. 37, June 1976, 157–8, points out the many passages in the novel that associate Ruth with the lost or strayed sheep of Christ’s parable of the Good Shepherd. 48 Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992, p. 122, points out the parallel between the earlier episode of crowning and this scene, which figures the ‘desexing of [a] fertility goddess’. With respect to the hair-cutting, Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp. 117–19, similarly mentions the traditional association of ‘luxuriant hair with a luxuriant sexuality’ and suggests that Ruth expresses no regret for her shorn hair because she has no sexual awareness. 49 Francesco Marroni observes in La fabbrica nella valle: Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell, Bari: Adriatica, 1987, the heroine’s ‘inconfessata vocazione al martirio’ (p. 113) and concludes: ‘Ruth recita fino in fondo, e coerentemente, il suo ruolo di vittima innocente’ (p. 117). 50 W.R. Greg, ‘False morality of lady novelists’, The National Review 8, January 1859, 166–7. Charlotte Brontë and E.B. Browning too, among the early readers, expressed strong dissatisfaction about the apparently unnecessary killing off of Ruth (Foster, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 105). Recent responses to Greg’s and Brontë’s criticism include those of Alan Shelston, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998, pp. xiv, xix; Matus, Unstable Bodies, pp. 113–14; Terence Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell: ‘We are not angels’: Realism, Gender, Values, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 86–8; and Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 98. The last two critics find the death not only perversely cruel but in some sense willed by Ruth herself. Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester pp. 129–32, believes, however, that ‘Gaskell needed to kill Ruth, not to punish her but to free her’, and that death paradoxically saved her from a life of repression and Christian salvation. 51 In discussing analyses by Freud, Frye, Girard and others of literary representations of scapegoat rituals, William A. Johnsen – Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf, Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2003, pp. 12–18 – notes that as the scapegoat comes to be perceived as an innocent victim he or she arouses sympathy and thereby gains power over others. In our nineteenth-century context, the pattern operates with especially interesting ambiguity for Johnsen, pp. 39–41, 55–8, in plays by Ibsen. 52 Cited, Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris: Galilée, 1990, p. 168.

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3 Swordsmen and needlewomen 1 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford UP, 1985, p. 325. 2 In Michel Foucault’s own terms – Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, [Paris]: Gallimard, 1975, p. 203 – the important matter is not that the prisoner really be watched but ‘qu’il se sache surveillé’: ‘il inscrit en soi le rapport de pouvoir dans lequel il joue simultanément les deux rôles; il devient le principe de son propre assujettissement’. 3 Ibid., p. 210. 4 Many poems of Keats portray the eye as a weapon, a figure for the strong creative imagination or for destructive vision, and suggest ocular battles between conflicting views of truth, as I have discussed in ‘Newtonian and Goethean Colours in the Poetry of Keats’, in Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods, ed. C.C. Barfoot, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 53–62. 5 Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, p. 77. 6 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988, pp. viii, 2, 17. The sense of a diffusive presence of ‘the police’ may, Miller believes, reduce the significance of the actual police officers in nineteenth-century novels. 7 Donald E. Hall, Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 109–12. Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 224–6. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985, p. 47. Alison Milbank considers Lady Dedlock in particular (among the women of our novels) as ‘the object of the gaze of others’, especially of men presumably, ‘rather than her own centre of subjectivity’ (Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 100). Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 55–6, sketches a tradition that involves Wordsworth, D.G. Rossetti, Pater, but especially Ruskin: ‘women . . . exist not to observe but to be observed; as such, they are “poem,” “image,” “type,” and their emblematic status is transformed into narrative only through the (male) artist’s imagination. For Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, a woman’s only story is her beauty made into narrative, that is, when she is seen by a man’. 8 Hall, Fixing Patriarchy, p. 125. Hall also refers, p. 180, to the ‘deep-seated and complex male fear of groups of women spreading sickness’ in the context of the enactment of the Contagious Diseases Acts. 9 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that virtually all nineteenth-century women were in some sense held captives in men’s houses (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale UP, 1984, p. 83). 10 In reality, as opposed to Ainsworth’s version, the king angrily punished Rochester for his abduction of Elizabeth Malet by sending him to the Tower. 11 While the wand of Margrave is to be taken as a genuine instrument of power, Bulwer must have been aware of the danger of its appearing ridiculous too. In 1850 Bulwer had produced at Knebworth House the farce by Elizabeth Inchbald, Animal Magnetism (1789), in which just such a wand figures prominently. In the farce only the foolish old Doctor, a role acted at Knebworth by Charles Dickens, actually believes in its efficacy as an instrument that can cause women to fall madly in love with whoever wields it. The wand supposedly enables the man holding it to transmit his will magnetically through ‘the animal

Notes to pages 78–84

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fluid’ ‘which spreads throughout all nature’ – a will to which the women in the play pretend to succumb (Mrs Inchbald, Animal Magnetism: A Farce in Three Acts, in The British Drama 10, London: John Dicks, 1872, 118–28). Milbank, Daughters of the House, pp. 81–2. For Milbank not only the labyrinthine Bleak House but also the Court of Chancery, with its administration of decaying houses everywhere, constitute Gothic structures (Alison Milbank, ‘The Victorian Gothic in English Novels and Stories, 1830–1880’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 157). John Kucich, Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981, pp. 98, 100, characterizes Tulkinghorn’s ‘violation’ of Lady Dedlock and ‘penetration of his victim’s limits’ as ‘psychological rape’. With more specific reference to Jasper and Rosa in Edwin Drood, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia UP, 1985, p. 188, discusses Dickens’s presentation of the excitement of a man who is able by the focusing of his will to subjugate a proud and resisting woman. Kucich, Excess and Restraint, p. 100. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, p. 144, observes the degree to which the activity of ‘detecting is an erotic experience’ for another important fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Milbank, Daughters of the House, p. 100. During the rains that keep all the guests indoors, the Welsh inn of Ruth is also compared to the ark (V), a point that Angus Easson develops at some length in ‘Noah’s Ark and Birds’ Nest: Domestic Space in Ruth’, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, ed. Francesco Marroni and Alan Shelston, Pescara: Tracce, 1999, pp. 91–4. The narrator of Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year – ed. Paula R. Backscheider, Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 86 – locked himself within his house, in a similar effort to avoid contagion ‘during that most violent rageing of the Pestilence . . . for about a Fortnight, and never stirr’d out: But I cou’d not hold it’. Besides a skilful swordsman, the Earl of Rochester in Ainsworth’s novel is also a very clever confidence artist who frequently disguises himself in surprising and convincing ways. Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000, p. 188, believes that the vampire functions as a powerful metaphor in Bleak House, but he does not mention this instance of it. John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987, pp. 258, 261–2, 269. See also Alexander Welsh, ‘Blackmail Studies in Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House’, Dickens Studies Annual 11, 1983, 29–33. The genealogical tree was published for the first time in 1878 at the beginning of Une Page d’amour and then corrected and enriched with new names in 1893 for Le Docteur Pascal. It was always supposed to serve as a unifying matrix for the entire cycle of the Rougon-Macquart novels, suggesting the parallel between the history of the family and the history of the epoque (see Henri Mitterand, Passion Emile Zola: Les Délires de la vérité, Paris: Textuel, 2002, p. 111). Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 131 and note, has summarized considerations that now make ‘the “tree” model of evolution . . . highly ambiguous’ and unsatisfactorily anthropocentric: ‘Evolutionary trees were introduced as the standard iconography for phylogeny in the 1860s by Ernst Haeckel, and have served to buttress an anthropocentric view of life, based on the ladder of

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progress and a cone of increasing diversity, in which evolution gains a “moral” meaning as it slowly but surely becomes imbued with consciousness after a history of upward striving and vertical perfection that culminates in “man” ’. In some sense the tree is also ‘an oppressive colonial image’. Catherine Toubin and Yves Malinas, ‘Les Clés et les portes (Essai sur la symbolique du Dr Pascal)’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 17, no. 41, 1971, 16. Ibid., pp. 18–20. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989, pp. 79–82, finds that Pascal steadfastly avoids recognizing, in his ‘hubris’, his own implication in the hereditary ills – the ‘dégénérescence’ – of his family. I believe, however, that in this and many other scenes he does indicate a lively sense of the weight of heredity upon himself. As a ‘study of self-righteousness’, Gaskell’s Bradshaw is seen by Edgar Wright, ‘Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell’, in Victorian Novelists Before 1885, ed. Ira B. Nadel and William E. Fredeman, DLB 21, 1983, 180, not in relationship to Gradgrind but rather as ‘clearly influenc[ing] Dickens’s caricature of Mr. Bounderby in Hard Times a year later’. Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 123, mentions the possible comparison of Bradshaw with Gradgrind or Bounderby. George Watt, The Fallen Woman in the NineteenthCentury English Novel, London: Croom Helm and Totowa NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1984, p. 36, further connects Mrs Bradshaw and Mrs Gradgrind. In noting that Dickens began to publish Hard Times immediately after the appearance of Ruth, Felicia Bonaparte in The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992, p. 47, similarly speculates on Mrs Bradshaw as a source for Mrs Gradgrind. These critics overlook, however, the resemblances between the father–son configurations in the Bradshaw and Gradgrind families. Of interest too, I believe, is the likeness between the situations of Jemima Bradshaw and Louisa Gradgrind, both girls under paternal pressure to marry a much older man closely associated with the father. The stories contain a further resemblance as well – between the aristocratic Bellingham-Donne and Harthouse, who sexually menace the heroines of the two novels and whom Bradshaw and Gradgrind sponsor in the respective Parliamentary elections as candidates for the liberal-utilitarian party. Laura Fasick, ‘Charles Kingsley’s Scientific Treatment of Gender’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 99. Robert Bernard Martin, The Dust of Combat: A Life of Charles Kingsley, London: Faber and Faber, 1959, pp. 115–16. Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography, XVII. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 136. Guenter B. Risse, ‘Epidemics and History: Ecological Perspectives and Social Responses’, in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988, p. 40. Defoe’s account too – Journal of the Plague Year, p. 40 – emphasizes the concern during this plague about clothes and bedding, which could not, by municipal order, be carried off the premises of infected houses or re-sold. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977, p. 238, refers to the belief that wool and textiles could carry contagion as a ‘folk experience’, and as an apparently early example of biological warfare, p. 251, he mentions Lord Amherst’s endeavour to spread smallpox among enemy Indian tribes in America by distributing infected blankets to them. As reported, however, by Daniel M. Fox – ‘The Politics of Physicians’ Responsibility in Epidemics: A Note on History’, in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox,

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Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988, p. 89 – some garments were thought to offer protection against contagion: physicians in France in the seventeenth century invented ‘a robe of fine linen coated with aromatic paste that prevented the venomous atoms in air from adhering to the doctor and his clothing’. Widely used in Italy, this robe apparently worked – probably, Fox suspects, ‘because it repelled fleas’. Verina R. Jones has studied the significance of silk in Manzoni’s novel in a chapter of Le Dark Ladies Manzoniane e altri saggi sui Promessi Sposi, Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1998, pp. 20–8. Besides the historical accuracy of the depiction of the silk industry, she observes the ‘valenze mitiche che affiorano qua e là nel testo in concomitanza con la filatura e il girare dell’aspo’ (p. 21). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale UP, 1984, p. 642. The defensive veil is also paradoxically related to what turns out to be the power of these women. In the analysis of Foucault, power always depends upon its ability to conceal itself. See, for example, the discussion of this point in Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 216. Cynthia Northcutt Malone, ‘ “Flight” and “Pursuit”: Fugitive Identity in Bleak House’, Dickens Studies Annual 19, 1990, 119, comments on this passage in terms of an opposition between duty embodied in the speaker and beauty embodied in the doll, an opposition that is repeated between Esther (who addresses herself as ‘ “my plain dear” ’ [XLIV]) and Ada (called ‘my beauty’ [XLV]). Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 88. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989, pp. 68–9, finds that tales of spinning are ‘parables of women’s silence’ in which spinning as communication is ‘antithetical to writing’. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 230. Malone, ‘ “Flight” and “Pursuit” ’, p. 108. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 474. John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell UP: 1994, p. 28, discusses veiling in connection with the mask and the Victorian interest in staging ‘misrepresentations of the self’ as a way of constructing ‘psychic depth’. Gerhard Joseph, Tennyson and the Text: The weaver’s shuttle, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992, p. 120, and Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 526, mention the connection between the Latin verb and the English term ‘text’. Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 93–4, offers an interesting discussion of the handkerchief which bears Esther’s name: after serving as the shroud for a baby thus identified as Esther herself, the handkerchief ‘assumes its own itinerary, accreting significance only as its minimalist text circulates among various bearers’. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 523, remark interestingly that ‘just as interlacing and entwining belong to the female realm, so does unravelling, which is done at night not only by Penelope but also by nature herself, so as to insure the eternal freshness of things’. Michael Ragussis, Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction, New York: Oxford UP, 1986, p. 98, treats Esther’s resemblance to her mother as a veil, and, p. 102, refers to the biblical trope. Helena Michie, ‘ “Who is this in Pain?”: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 22, Winter 1989, 207, discusses her successive unveilings.

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42 Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Social Issues, 1837–1883, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983, p. 114. 43 T.J. Edelstein, ‘They Sang “The Song of the Shirt”: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress’, Victorian Studies 23, Winter 1980, 185–210, summarizes much of the evidence regarding the deplorable working conditions for seamstresses. Monica Correa Fryckstedt, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth’: A Challenge to Christian England, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1982, pp. 143–7, discusses Gaskell’s treatment of the dressmaking establishment as highly topical and devoid of exaggeration. Robin B. Colby, ‘Some Appointed Work To Do’: Women and Vocation in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, p. 4, gives statistics from the 1851 census about the number of Englishwomen employed in various fields: while 140,000 were domestic servants, 134,000 were employed in the clothing, shoemaking and silk industries, and only 11,000 were teachers. Colby finds, however, p. 12, that Gaskell, unlike Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, often presents women’s labour as empowering and enriching. Another exception to the grimness usually associated with female labour is found in the experience of the community of cooperative shirt-makers organized by Edith Simcox, which existed successfully for eight years (see Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1978, pp. 21–3). 44 Joseph, Tennyson and the Text, pp. 115, 119–20. See also Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 101, regarding unalienated domestic labour. 45 W.R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, The National Review 14, April 1862, 436, observes for example: ‘In great cities, thousands, again, are toiling in the ill-paid métier of sempstresses and needlewomen, wasting life and soul, gathering the scantiest subsistence, and surrounded by the most overpowering and insidious temptations’. In commenting on how familiar and widespread the trope of the fallen seamstress was by the time of Ruth, Shirley Foster, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Literary Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, refers, p. 102, to the evidence collected by Michael Wheeler in an unpublished PhD dissertation (‘Elizabeth Gaskell’s Use of Literary Sources in Mary Barton and Ruth’, University of London, 1975) and to the documentation in Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population . . . (1842) of the sexual and physical perils faced by seamstresses. 46 Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies, New York: Oxford UP, 1987, p. 30. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, p. 77. Mariana Valverde, ‘The Love of Finery and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse’, Victorian Studies 32, Winter 1989, 184. 47 Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 84. 48 Michie, The Flesh Made Word, p. 41, discusses women in other novels, especially by Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, who seek to control with their needlework the ‘web’ of others’ destinies. 49 Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, pp. 178–80. 50 Jacques Donzelot, La Police des Familles, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977, pp. 79–90. Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995, p. 88. 51 See note 37 above. 52 Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–1895, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 122. 53 As another point of comparison between Ruth and Hard Times, Jemima’s spying,

Notes to pages 106–13

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designed to detect sexual guilt, may remind us of Mrs Sparsit’s relentless spying upon Louisa. Recent discussions of the pointing fingers include those of John Schad, The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors: Some New Language, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 158 (who finds the finger pointed at the reader or other interpreters); Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 71 (who similarly points ‘to the semiotic role of iconography in Dickens’s code of communication’); and Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, p. 83 (who discerns, in the moment of the death of the figures pointed at, the production of a ‘central truth’ hitherto ignored, a development that applies to Krook too at ‘The Appointed Time’ [Tambling’s emphasis]). Welsh, ‘Blackmail Studies in Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House’, pp. 27–9. Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris: Galilée, 1990, p. 77. Ibid. Ermarth, The English Novel in History, p. 134. In her conclusion, pp. 210–26, Ermarth also maintains that as a general rule nineteenth-century women exist outside of ‘neutral, historical, public time’. Yet in consideration, for example, of the public activities and power of the social queens, I find that women both submit to and contribute to history in ways analogous to those of the men. Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 118. Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, p. 78, finds that, like other allegorical figures in the novel, this instance of the pointed finger induces paralysis and dumbness. It points to Miss Barbary as marked for paralysis, death and dust. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, London: Little, Brown and Co., 2000, discusses the contagious nature of the way in which thoughts, opinions, ideas are diffused. The tipping point is similar to ‘the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point’, and epidemics of disease as well as epidemics in the field of public opinion always take off from the critical tipping point (p. 12). Langland, Nobody’s Angels, pp. 90–4. Poovey, Uneven Developments, too, pp. 169–72, discusses Florence Nightingale as an exponent of domestic aggression and notes that the ‘domestic ideal always contained an aggressive component’. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Tübingen: Neske, 1960, p. 242, refers to ‘ein Geflecht von Beziehungen, darein wir selber schon einbezogen sind’. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, I:viii, II:vii, x.

4 Physicians, nurses and patients 1 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, p. 133, is here describing the attitude of the influential headmaster Hely Hutchison Almond. 2 Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 59. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Social Issues, 1837–1883, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1983, p. 74. Jacques Donzelot, La Police des Familles, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1977, pp. 155–71. 3 Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, p. 11. Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, p. 13. Roy Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, p. 62. In the introduction to

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Notes to pages 113–17 Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 7, the editors observe that ‘scientific discourse has been especially crucial in constructing reality as something [women] can embody but not know’. Epstein, Altered Conditions, pp. 28, 55. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, pp. 103, 122. Ibid., p. 104. Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992, pp. 40–1. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province, III: viii. Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing, London: Routlege, 1992, pp. 59–60, also discusses the connection between Bichat and Larivière: ‘[Larivière’s] eyes are lancets which, like Bichat’s, work in the name of truth by cutting through preconceptions and lies. They vivisect. But he reaches a psychological truth rather than a medical or moral one. Truth and action here stand absolutely isolated from belief, including, it seems, a belief in science. Larivière “practices goodness without believing in it” ’. Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp. 132, 136. Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 82–3, also comments on the Bichat-inspired doctors of Foucault’s La Naissance de la clinique who love to anatomize after the death of their patients. Rothfield, Vital Signs, p. 41, summarizes this aspect of Bichat’s position as follows: ‘Although the truth of life only becomes evident in death, when the anatomist disarticulates the body, illness is already a form of dissection’. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 160–1, 198, 225–30, discusses the employment of mesmerism by some physicians and the opposition to the practice by others. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, p. 87. Helsinger et al., The Woman Question, pp. 72–3. Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 39. Judd, Bedside Seductions, pp. 54–79, 10. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 164–98. Epstein, Altered Conditions, p. 8. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, pp. 38, 49–51. Scientists now legitimize and explain their research, according to one of Lyotard’s examples, through television interviews that constitute narratives tending to create the épopée of science. Peter Brook, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 51, 60–1, discusses the psychological mechanisms whereby narrative texts, evidently including those of science, engage the narratee in a dialogue, ‘tak[ing] hold on’ the narratee and prompting a complex process of resistance to and collaboration with the narrator that may finally produce ‘conviction’ about what is ‘true’. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, frequently discusses, for example, pp. 96–9, the impression in the nineteenth century that narratives could be contagious to the point of producing symptoms of disease in readers. But the matter is considered more fully in Chapter 6 of this study. Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, pp. 45–7. Ibid., pp. 15, 54–6, 63. Epstein, Altered Conditions, p. 73, citing Jean Starobinski. Bulwer’s Allen Fenwick provides an interesting personal instance of the difficulty of translating extreme physical pain into words: ‘Every bone, sinew, nerve, fibre of the body, seemed as if wrenched open, and as if some hitherto

Notes to pages 117–25

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unconjectured Presence in the vital organization were forcing itself to light with all the pangs of travail. The veins seemed swollen to bursting, the heart labouring to maintain its action by fierce spasms. I feel in this description how language fails me. Enough that the anguish I then endured surpassed all that I have ever experienced of physical pain’ (XXXII). Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, pp. 50–89, discusses at length the complex collaboration between analysand and analyst in the therapeutic production of a narrative, which is indeed a model for the relationship, involving transferences, between narrator and narratee in all sorts of narratives. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 6–12. Epstein, Altered Conditions, pp. 35, 73, 185, 186. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 5. Epstein, Altered Conditions, p. 165. Epstein’s indication, p. 158, that the Greek term epidêmos may indicate the arrival of a foreigner is interesting but dubious. Rothfield, Vital Signs, pp. 40, 37, 189. Zola, Le Roman expérimental, p. 2. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, [Paris]: Gallimard, 1975, p. 206. Letter to Louise Colet of 9 December 1852, in Correspondance, ed. Jean Bruneau, 2, Paris: Gallimard, 1980, 204. Rothfield, Vital Signs, p. 40. Unpublished letter of 27 May 1876 to Minetta Miglietti. Edmondo De Amicis, ‘Giovanni Ruffini’, Pagine sparse, Naples: F. Bideri, 1915, pp. 163–4. Dario Carraroli, ‘Giovanni Ruffini’, Rivista minima 12, 1882, 328. Of course there are some situations, especially in Ruth, in which men perform nursing functions, and the attractive protagonist of Ruffini’s last novel Carlino of 1870 is a male nurse. According to the narrator of Ruth, the same situation obtained when the epidemic broke out in Eccleston ‘in the low Irish lodging-houses’: ‘The poor creatures died almost without the attendance of the unwarned medical men, who received their first notice of the spreading plague from the Roman Catholic priests’ (XXXIII). Cecil Helman, ‘Introduction’, Doctors and Patients: An Anthology, ed. Cecil Helman, Abingdon, Oxon.: Radcliffe Medical Press, Ltd, 2003, p. 11. In the course of a chapter dealing with the theme of shipwreck in Dickens, William J. Palmer, Dickens and New Historicism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 99–100, discusses the importance of the metaphor of shipwreck in Bleak House, but he does not, curiously, mention the actual shipwreck of Woodcourt. Kingsley’s physician Tom Thurnall also suffers shipwreck but instead of rescuing others is himself rescued by the heroine. Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London [1924], London: Bracken Books, 1994, p. 329. The beloved Jacopo did not live long enough to begin a medical practice. Mazzini’s closest friend and associate in the Giovine Italia, he was arrested in Genoa in 1833 and committed suicide in prison, apparently in order to avoid the danger of giving evidence, under torture, against his friends. For a more complete discussion of the physician in Ruffini see Chapter IV, pp. 97–125, of my A European Version of Victorian Fiction, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Like Tom Thurnall, Thomas Wakley was a boxer and devotee of strenuous

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Notes to pages 125–33 muscular activity. Always uncompromising and belligerent, he published blistering attacks against the medical corporations for their nepotism, their poor administration of hospitals, their cynical protection of their own privileges and their thorough corruption. He seems like Thurnall to have taken on the whole establishment (see Roy Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860, p. 45). Although Fenwick does not mention Darwin, James L. Campbell, Sr., believes (Edward Bulwer-Lytton [Boston: Twayne, 1986], pp. 123–4) that Bulwer has probably intended with his treatment of Fenwick’s scientific activity especially to discredit Darwinism. In 1871 Bulwer would refer more specifically to his disapproval of Darwinism in connection with The Coming Race (see my Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 174–81). Regarding ‘exhausted soil’, one may recall the proposals that Christopher Hamlin discusses in ‘Providence and Putrefaction’ for the recycling of sewage as an aspect of the natural economy of matter. See notes 78 and 79 in Chapter 1, above. Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, pp. 22–3, summarizes in this respect the findings of Charles Rosenberg. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–1895, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 187, describes with reference to the Harvard physician Dr Edward H. Clarke another curious example of faulty distribution in women of the vital principle: ‘women’s brains compete with their reproductive organs so that too much blood to one means too little for the other. A woman who thinks is liable to damage her ovaries. . . . Women must choose between babies and thought’. The implication, according to Sally Shuttleworth, is that rather than attempting to exert any mental discipline upon themselves, women should simply allow their minds to be dull: ‘any exertion of the mind, whether of intellectual effort, or fierce emotion, might prove fatal . . . in creating a stoppage of menstrual flow’ (‘Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era’, in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 57). In 1859 Pasteur showed that disease-causing germs actually lived everywhere in the air about us (see Cecil Helman, Body Myths, London: Chatto and Windus, 1991, p. 31). Nancy H. Traill, Possible Worlds of the Fantastic: The Rise of the Paranormal in Fiction, Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996, p. 34, observes that under the influence of positive science a belief in the supernatural as its own separate territory gave way to scientific or pseudo-scientific theories of the paranormal. Marie [Mulvey-]Roberts, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 190. In Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paris: Galilée, 2000, Derrida also discusses Biran at length, pp. 161–82, but finds that he does not propose such a narrative of logical development. Biran seems like Zola to limit himself to observing effects for which the underlying cause or significance remains unknown: ‘Biran prétend suivre l’exemple du physicien, en ne s’intéressant ni aux essences ni aux causes premières, seulement aux «effets» et aux «phénomènes» ’ (p. 163). Rothfield, Vital Signs, p. 65. Dr Ternel also resembles the ‘personnage médical’ that Foucault describes as the essential figure of the nineteenth-century asylum, who is less specifically a scientist than a man of great wisdom and probity. Foucault seems to base this ideal personage upon Philippe Pinel (with whose name Ternel’s happens to rhyme) who published his Traité médicophilosophique sur l’aliénation mentale in 1801. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 1999, pp. 623–4.

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47 Rothfield, Vital Signs, pp. 63–4. 48 Both the brother and the older son Oswald of Ruffini’s companion Cornelia Turner, with whom he lived in Paris for twenty-four years, were committed to this institution. Donizetti was confined there between February 1846 and June 1847. The principal physicians, who may thus have something to do with Ruffini’s Dr Ternel, were Dr Jean-Jacques Moreau de Tours and Dr Jean Mitvié. See William Ashbrook, Donizetti and his Operas, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982, pp. 193–8, who also briefly mentions, p. 592, Ruffini’s collaboration with Donizetti in 1845 in connection with the librettos of Maria di Rohan and Dom Sébastien. Ruffini had composed the libretto for Don Pasquale in 1843. 49 Apropos the deranged Lilian, it is interesting to recall that Bulwer had his own estranged and evidently deranged wife Rosina confined for three weeks in the summer of 1858 in Inverness Lodge, Brentford, about three years before A Strange Story. 50 J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998, p. 119, comments with reference to Foucault on the way in which an evolution in psychiatry makes the observation of the psychiatrist a ‘paradigm of modern civilization’s gaze’. 51 Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, pp. 64–7. At the climax of Balzac’s story, however, the mad patient dies as a result of the shock of recognition. 52 Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, p. 87 (see note 9 above). 53 Rothfield, Vital Signs, p. 64. 54 Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, p. 72, observes that the Paris that so bores Lady Dedlock is that of Haussmann’s modernizations. 55 Matthew Josephson, Zola and his Time, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929, pp. 345, 360. 56 In the post-modern condition, as Lyotard discusses it, La Condition postmoderne, p. 14, the idealism has been lost and, ceasing to be an end in itself, knowledge is produced as an item to be sold and consumed. 57 Derrida, Le toucher, p. 279. 58 Regarding the tree, see note 21 to Chapter 3 above. 59 A popular conviction held that physicians approved government policies to reduce surplus population by encouraging epidemics because epidemics furnished them with so many cadavers to dissect (Robert John Morris, Cholera, 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic, London: Croom Helm, 1976, pp. 95–128). 60 In ‘The Science of Health’, in Health and Education, London: Macmillan and Co., 1882, p. 10, Kingsley discusses the ‘laws of hereditary health’: ‘much valuable light has been thrown on this mysterious and most important subject during the last few years. . . . And I doubt not that in a generation or two more enough will be known to be thrown into the shape of practical and proveable rules’. Foucault also considers at some length this aspect of the science of the later nineteenth century: ‘l’analyse de l’hérédité plaçait le sexe (les relations sexuelles, les maladies vénériennes, les alliances matrimoniales, les perversions) en position de «responsabilité biologique» par rapport à l’espèce’; of particular importance was ‘la théorie de la «dégénérescence» ’. In what Foucault describes as a particular concern of the bourgeoisie ‘le souci généalogique [de l’aristocratie] est devenu préoccupation de l’hérédité’, which is related, as the case of Dr Pascal may quite perfectly illustrate, to ‘un autre projet: celui d’une expansion indéfinie de la force, de la vigueur, de la santé, de la vie’ (Histoire de la sexualité, 1, Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 2000, 156, 157, 165).

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61 See note in Emile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pleiade, 1967, 1660. 62 Epstein, Altered Conditions, p. 8. 63 The historical, as opposed to fictional, Hodges – Nath. Hodges, M.D., Loimologia: or, An Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665, 2nd edn, London: E. Bell and J. Osborne, 1720, p. 22 – reports that the quack remedies were generally more fatal than the plague itself; hardly anyone that trusted to them survived. 64 The repetition of the initials in the pattern, Faust/Fenwick, Mephistophiles/Margrave, may be more than coincidental since Bulwer’s narrator associates himself with ‘Faust, the tired seeker of knowledge’, whose life is, however, blasted more seriously by ‘the frivolity of woman’ (Mrs Poyntz, who signs herself M. Poyntz) than by the operations of ‘the Fiend’: ‘We need no Mephistopheles to accomplish these marvels every day!’ (LXVII). Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady, New Haven: Yale UP, 1998, pp. 167–8, oddly refer to Margrave as a physician (which he certainly is not) who suffers from chronic gout (which he does not appear to do) and claim too reductively that the elixir of life and of youth is ‘the elixir of gout’. 65 Josephson, Zola and his Time, pp. 361–2, discusses Pascal’s ‘serotherapy’ in relation to discoveries about hypodermic injections that Dr de Fleury has reported to Zola in 1892; Pascal seems thus to anticipate the findings of Babès, Brown-Séquard and Chéron regarding ‘dynamic therapy’ that would not actually be published until the following year. Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, p. 203, indicates why Pascal’s idea of injecting nervous substances into patients should not be criticized in that the practice resembles contemporary experiments that implant ‘préparations lyophilisées d’organes divers pour le traitement des affections chroniques dites «dégénératives» ’. 66 As Lyotard points out, p. 56, Fichte too used the term Life in a mythic, idealist sense for the spirit behind the whole scientific endeavour. 67 Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, London: Faber and Faber, 1960, p. 78, defines the death of Pascal as Socratic and probably indicative of the death that Zola would have wished for himself. 68 Malinas, Zola, p. 168. 69 Renée Ternois, ‘Le stoïcisme d’Emile Zola’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 9, no. 23, 1963, 289–98. Rita Schober, ‘ «Le Docteur Pascal» ou le sens de la vie’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 25, no. 53, 1979, 64–5, finds that both Clotilde and Pascal escape the prison of heredity; Zola replaces a sombre fatalism with a faith, contradicting his original plan, in the possibility for counteracting genetic determinism. Malinas, Zola, observes instead (in 1985) that Clotilde, p. 183, and Pascal, p. 167, both succumb to the family neuroses and pathologies in ways that demonstrate even Freudian patterns, because of Zola’s knowledge of the precursors of Freud, p. 175. Zola seems finally to be a scientific pioneer, well in advance of his times, in the estimation of Malinas, pp. 213–17, not least because of his prophetic anguish regarding the ethical dilemmas that medicine will confront in terms of its power to manipulate and terminate life. Sven Kellner, Emile Zola et son œuvre, Dole: Les Deux Colombes, 1994, p. 212, notes in more perfunctory fashion that many scientists approved, while some did not, of Zola’s theories when they were first published. Foucault remarks in an interview published in Power/Knowledge (ed. Colin Gordon, Harvester Press, 1980) that Zola has a poor grasp of nosology and evolutionism (reprinted in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, pp. 70–1). 70 Vrettos, Somatic Fictions, p. 42. 71 Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, p. 26, comments on Nightingale’s

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remark by adding that all women are fundamentally patients since nineteenthcentury culture admonishes them (as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale UP, 1984, p. 54, have also maintained) to be ill. Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 6. Ibid., p. 33. The historical Dr Hodges reports of the nurses in Loimologia, pp. 8–9: ‘What greatly contributed to the Loss of People thus shut up, was the wicked practice of the Nurses (for they are not to be mentioned but in the most bitter Terms): These Wretches, out of Greediness to plunder the Dead, would strangle their Patients, and charge it to the Distemper in their Throats; others would secretly convey the pestilential Taint from Sores of the infected to those who were yet well; and nothing indeed deterred these abandoned Miscreants from prosecuting their avaritious Purposes by all the Methods their Wickedness could invent’. See also Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London, p. 108. T[homas] V[incent], Gods Terrible Voice in the City, [London]: Printed in the Year 1667, p. 29, imagines the terrors of those stricken ‘when their doors have been shut up, and fastened on the outside with an inscription, Lord have mercy upon us, and none suffered to come in but a Nurse, whom they have been more afraid of, then [sic] the Plague itself’. The passage from Hodges, note 74 above, continues: ‘although they were without Witnesses to accuse them, yet it is not doubted but Divine Vengeance will overtake such wicked Barbarities with due Punishment’. Ibid., p. 34. Henry Gaulter, The Origins and Progress of the Malignant Cholera in Manchester, London: [Manchester printed], 1833, p. 138. Poovey, Uneven Developments, p. 166 (see note 12 above). Judd, Bedside Seductions, pp. 14, 54. Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550–1860, p. 58, similarly notices the relative indifference of the male medical establishment in the nineteenth century ‘to preventative as distinct from curative, medicine and to environmental medicine’ and finds that this is ‘a legacy still with us today’. Ibid., pp. 24–9. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, p. 24. Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 15. Poovey, Uneven Developments, pp. 165ff. Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, p. 57, also considers the heroic Nightingale and Edwin Chadwick too as ‘in many respects anti-doctors’. Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 22, comments on the mid-Victorian view of the nurse as a Christ-like, redemptive figure, who is herself ‘immune to moral pollution’. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, pp. 54–5. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, p. 26. In an interestingly emblematic scene in chapter XX, for example, Jemima prefers to have Ruth rather than Mr Farquhar help her to wind a skein of wool. Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 92. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 41. Judd discusses interestingly here the nurses in the life of De Quincey. Ibid., pp. 41–6. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, pp. 21–3. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1982, pp. 171, 179. Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, London: Faber and Faber, 1993, p. 333. Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s

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Notes to pages 148–61 Demon, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992, pp. 90–1, similarly believes that the storm is occurring within Ruth and that Gaskell uses events in nature ‘to explore what beyond a certain point she can no longer explore in Ruth’. While Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 97, finds that Ruth does not use nursing as a means for being ‘reunited with her callous lover’, Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 127, is sure that Ruth does continue to love Bellingham. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, p. 27. Judd, Bedside Seductions, pp. 26, 29. Bulwer, ‘On Ill Health’, in The Student: A Series of Papers, 1, London: Saunders and Otley, 1835, 304–5. As Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 96, points out, the question is repeated when Bucket collects Esther and begins a final search for this woman: ‘Where is she? Living or dead, where is she?’ (LVI). Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, pp. 79–108. Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, pp. 91–2. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, p. 92. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 336. Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 130, discusses the ‘subtext’ of Ruth’s death as narrating not at all the ‘peaceful death of a redeemed sinner’ but rather the re-entry into a passionate, demonic dimension. After Ruth’s death, Bellingham will claim that he did not consciously recognize Ruth when in his delirium he asked about the lilies in her hair. But the point is that she has believed herself to be recognized and so has been forced back, or accepted back, into the role of his helpless beloved. Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 337. Terence Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell: ‘We are not angels’: Realism, Gender, Values, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 94–5. Daniel M. Fox, ‘The Politics of Physicians’ Responsibility in Epidemics: A Note on History’, in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988, p. 86.

5 Mothers, daughters and lovers 1 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978, pp. 109, 138. 2 Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, pp. 7, 21. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989, p. 28. 3 In such a reading of ‘Goblin Market’, the mother–daughter relationship is replaced by that of the two sisters, who live idyllically isolated from the market place in their ‘nest’ – ‘Cheek to cheek and breast to breast/Locked together in one nest’. Lizzie enacts in their intimacy the more maternal role. 4 Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992, p. 128. 5 René Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1988, p. xii. 6 Homans, Bearing the Word, pp. 12–13. Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering, pp. 126–7. 7 As a fallen woman and maternal figure for Lucia, Gertrude is analogous to Lady Dedlock with respect to Esther Summerson. Verina Jones, Le Dark Ladies

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Manzoniana, Roma: Salerno, 1998, maintains, p. 97, that on the textual level Gertrude and Lucia are constructed as ‘antitetiche e identiche al tempo stesso: i due personaggi sono per molti versi l’una l’immagine speculare in negativo dell’altra’. Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Guida ai Promessi sposi: I personaggi, la gente, le idealità, Milano: Rizzoli, 1999, pp. 104–5, gives further examples of how the use of the same linguistic formulae identifies them with one another. Gertrude also asks questions about Lucia’s sexual responses to Renzo – ‘domande, che facevano stupire e arrossire l’interrogata’. The effect is to make Lucia confess particulars about her own sexuality that she has not previously recognized, and the episode thus exemplifies the aveu that occupies according to Foucault ‘un rôle central dans l’ordre des pouvoirs civils et religieux’: ‘l’aveu est devenu, en Occident, une des techniques les plus hautement valorisées pour produire le vrai’; ‘l’aveu a été, et demeure encore aujourd’hui, la matrice générale qui régit la production du discours vrai sur le sexe’ (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1, Saint-Amand: Gallimard, 2000, 78, 79, 84). The woman seated beside a well or a fountain is often associated with the inspiring nymph Egeria. She may also represent a danger for the male protagonist, as in the cases of Lucy at the Mermaid’s fountain in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor and of Minna beside the Gothic well in L.E. Landon’s ‘Bride of Lindorf’. Bulwer’s works frequently include a setting called ‘the haunts of the nymph’ which is also a psychological location or condition of perilous enchantment (see chapter ‘Leaving the Haunts of the Nymph’ in my Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976, pp. 75–111). Borrowed indirectly from Bulwer’s Zanoni, the same setting comes up again in the form of a ruined nymphaeum with its version of an Egeria in the opera L’ispirazione by Sylvano Bussotti (see my ‘Bulwer, Bloch, Bussotti and the Filial Muse: Recalled and Foreseen Sources of Inspiration’, Mosaic 26, no. 3, 1993, 44–7). Emile Zola, La Curée, II. Clotilde’s doll, like that of the little Esther Summerson, is evidently another doubling figure. Matthew Josephson, Zola and his Time, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1929, p. 340, describes the behaviour of Mme Zola during the period in which Le Docteur Pascal was being planned in a way that makes her seem very similar to Félicité. Zola informed Edmond de Goncourt in March 1890 of his intentions regarding his married protagonist: ‘je ferai un savant marié avec un femme rétrograde, bigote, qui détruira ses travaux à mesure qu’il travaille’ (quoted in notes to Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 1569). The dedication of the novel further associates the author’s wife and mother: ‘A la mémoire de MA MERE et à MA CHERE FEMME je dédie ce roman qui est le résumé et la conclusion de toute mon œuvre’. The printed dedication was not the only one. Josephson, Zola and his Time, p. 364, quotes the dedication that Zola addressed to ‘ma Clotilde’ in the copy given to Jeanne: he had written the book so that their children would know some day how much he had adored their mother. Nathan Kranowski, Paris dans les romans d’Emile Zola, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968, p. 144, reports the observation of Denise Le Blond-Zola that Jeanne inspired the heroines of four of Zola’s novels – L’Argent, Fécondité, Travail as well as Le Docteur Pascal. It is also possible that Zola’s Clotilde may owe her name to Clotilde de Vaux, the very young mistress of Auguste Comte (see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989, pp. 80–1). Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 96–7. Even more than in the other novels, the mother–daughter relationship in Bleak House may be, as Al Hutter observes, at ‘the thematic core’ of the work – ‘The

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High Tower of his Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Reader of Bleak House’, Criticism 19, 1977, 311. Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001, p. 226, points out that Dickens’s wayward women correspond to Simone de Beauvoir’s description of pictures, statues or actresses on stage that are always representing ‘someone not there – that is, the character she represents, but is not’. It apparently does not usually occur to the viewer to notice the discrepancy between the actress and her role and to register the absence of the represented woman. Cynthia Northcutt Malone, ‘ “Flight” and “Pursuit”: Fugitive Identity in Bleak House’, Dickens Studies Annual 19, 1990, 108, 119. There may be even more than three faces, as suggested by Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, p. 109. In the doublings of mother/daughter and mistress/maid must be included Lady Dedlock, Rosa, Hortense, Jenny, Esther, Charley and even Caddy Jellyby and Ada Clare. Schor, Dickens, p. 110, refers to Esther’s acquisitions of doubles as ‘an attempt to fill the empty space at the narrative’s heart’. Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 71. Schor, Dickens, p. 114, observes that the ‘adulterous mother resists the contagion of contact with the daughter, as if equally deadly to both’. It would appear that they cannot ‘exist in the same narrative space’. Dever, Death and the Mother, pp. 84–5, comments upon Esther’s offering of ‘a rhetoric of forgiveness’ being met by her mother’s acceptance only of ‘a rhetoric of disavowal’ and upon Esther’s participation since her birth in ‘a fiction in which she plays the role of a corpse’. Girard, ‘To Double Business Bound’, p. 56. Ibid., p. 40. The opera is based on Ruffini’s apparently imperfect recollections of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda. In ‘On Feminist Utopias’, Women’s Studies 9, 1982, 245, Anne K. Mellor points out that Frankenstein cannot devote his attention to his beloved Elizabeth or think of marriage while he is conducting his experiments. His scientific work proves indeed fatal to her. Ainsworth’s novel does not actually mention his age and implies greater maturity, but the historical figure would then have been eighteen. Judith refers to the rich ‘Mistress Mallet’ [sic] (IV:vi). The historical Rochester had abducted Elizabeth Malet, who had refused to marry him, in 1665. She would forgive and marry him in 1667. Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, remarks, p. 120, that Benson, whose ‘relationship to Ruth parallels Bellingham’s in every way’, is her husband in spirit while Bellingham is husband in the flesh. I have mentioned the hint of a cause/effect relationship between the original seduction and the later typhus fever (see Chapter 1, note 57). Rather than the effect, however, Bellingham’s physical contagion of Ruth may be seen as the repetition in another medium, as Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 128, implies, of his previous act of seduction and impregnation. Goldie Morgentaler, Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like, Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, p. 94. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia UP, 1985, pp. 164–93, discusses very interestingly the triangles in David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood in which the homosexual elements of the male rivalries are more pronounced. Ibid., p. 25. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political

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Economy” of Sex’, in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 174–5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 115. Timothy Peltason, ‘Esther’s Will’, in Bleak House: Charles Dickens: New Casebooks, ed. Jeremy Tambling, Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 218, points out that Jarndyce has also made a present of little Charley to Esther, as a transaction that assigns a woman not to a man but to another woman. Schor, Dickens, p. 121, confesses that Jarndyce’s ‘denial of his sacrifice rings more and more hollow, as I grow older’. In the baffling psychological complexity of the moment, we might refer the hollowness either to Jarndyce’s generous disingenuousness (since he bravely pretends to be happy while he actually despairs) or to his more sinister, but perhaps unadmitted duplicity (since he claims to be ceding power when he is actually gaining it). John Kucich, Excess and Restraint in the Novels of Charles Dickens, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981, pp. 146–7. As Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, p. 163, points out, Félicité seems to diagnose her son’s condition at this stage as one of demonic possession, an explanation that belongs to the psychiatry of an earlier century. But after the discussion with his mother Pascal may come to share that view of himself: ‘Dès ce jour, Pascal fut possédé’ (VI). René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, pp. 1–5. W. Arens, The Original Sin: Incest and Its Meaning, New York: Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 137, 147, 152. Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 61. Foucault finds, more generally, that since the eighteenth century ‘la famille . . . naisse «incestueuse» ’: ‘l’inceste . . . occupe une place centrale; il y est sans cesse sollicité et refusé, objet de hantise et d’appel, secret redouté et joint indispensable. . . . Il est aussi ce qui est continûment requis pour que la famille soit bien un foyer d’incitation permanente de la sexualité’ (Histoire de la sexualité, 1:143, 144). Angelo Marchese, L’enigma Manzoni: La spiritualità e l’arte di uno scrittore ‘negativo’, Roma: Bulzoni, 1994, p. 106, believes that there has always been not only an opposition but ‘una segreta attrazione’ between Fra Cristoforo and Don Rodrigo too. Fra Cristoforo sees Don Rodrigo as the ‘double’ of the aristocrat that his youthful self, ‘Lodovico’, had killed and with whom he must continually try to make peace. Against the many critics that have perceived the ending of Manzoni’s novel as idyllic, Marchese (ibid., p. 55) maintains that the novel demonstrates ‘un consapevole superamento di ogni tentazione idillica, anche nel “lieto fine” ’. The point, which Marchese often repeats, relates to Manzoni’s negative view of an all-permeating history that does not permit an incontaminated Eden to exist (see, for example, pp. 91, 124, 147, 169). Francesco Marroni, La fabbrica nella valle: Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell, Bari: Adriatica, 1987, p. 59, refers to ‘uno scenario che ha il calore di un abbraccio materno. Si tratta della (ri)conquista di una dimensione idilliaca – probabilmente mai esistita’. Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, pp. 28–31, 43–5, summarizes theories of Freud, Luce Irigaray and others. Schor, Dickens, p. 116. If as Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, p. 31, suggests, the tragedy of Euripides contains a subtext of sympathy between Clytemnestra and Electra, Bleak House contains a subtext of mother–daughter hostility.

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44 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 25–6. Luce Irigaray, ‘When the Goods Get Together’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken, 1981, pp. 107–11.

6 Writers and readers 1 Darwin is paraphrased here by Greg Myers, ‘Science for Women and Children: The Dialogue of Popular Science in the Nineteenth Century’, in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989, p. 183. 2 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, p. 97. 3 Allon White, ‘The Struggle over Bakhtin: Fraternal Reply to Robert Young’, Cultural Critique 8, Winter 1987–88, 231. 4 Richelieu: or, The Conspiracy, II:ii. It is not always realized that Bulwer is the coiner of the famous phrase. 5 Angelo Marchese, L’enigma Manzoni: La spiritualità e l’arte di uno scrittore ‘negativo’, Roma: Bulzoni, 1994, pp. 291–4. In the episodes involving his arrival in Milan, Renzo may be related, Marchese also believes, pp. 279–82, to Bakhtin’s impression of the ‘fool’. His uncomprehending vision of the city and its inhabitants, during the revolt, may de-familiarize the reality of things for us too, and we may indeed compare the illiterate Renzo’s view of Milan to Jo’s view of London, as Dickens’s narrator tries to imagine it (XVI). 6 In a chapter entitled, precisely, ‘Carta, penna e calamaio’, S. Nigro, La tabacchiera di don Lisander, Torino: Einaudi, 1996, pp. 68–75, discusses the role of writing in Manzoni. Verina R. Jones, in an essay entitled ‘Analfabetismo, alfabetizzazione, oralità e scrittura’ (included in Le Dark Ladies Manzoniane, Roma: Salerno, 1998) considers writing especially as ‘strumento di oppressione’, p. 33. 7 Gregory L. Lucente, ‘The Uses and Ends of Discourse in I promessi sposi: Manzoni’s Narrator, His Characters, and Their Author’, MLN 101, 1986, 52. 8 Mary Ambrose, ‘Error and the Abuse of Language in the “Promessi Sposi” ’, MLR 72, 1977, 62–72. 9 Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, p. 31. 10 Shelagh Hunter, Harriet Martineau: The Poetics of Moralism, Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995, p. 192. One may recall Tennyson’s reference in In Memoriam (v) to the therapeutic value of the mechanical aspects of versifying: ‘But, for the unquiet heart and brain,/A use in measured language lies;/The sad mechanic exercise,/Like dull narcotics, numbing pain’. 11 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 216. 12 One is also tempted to see in the motif of replication, which also occurs in the replication of Bleak House itself, a sardonic prophecy of the Bleak House critical industry. Far more than any of the other novels considered in this study, Dickens’s work continues to generate hundreds of critical texts and responses to those texts every single year. Novels sometimes include within themselves, we know, models for the way in which they will be read. 13 Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 204–5. 14 Carolyn Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998, p. 95, who also finds, p. 100, that episodes in Bleak House literalize the argument of Paul de Man regarding

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the ‘signifier [that] precedes, and indeed shapes, changes, and even creates its referent’. Jean Baudrillard, La Transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris: Galilée, 1990, p. 77. A Strange Story also mentions a fatal lawsuit that has continued for generations. The suit, Mrs Ashleigh tells Fenwick, is one that her late husband ‘had inherited from his father. It killed his father’ (XVI). With regard to Nemo’s unwitting correspondence, in the form of the copied legal document, with his former mistress, it is possible, according to Brenda Ayres, that he has also written the letters that Kenge sends to the young Esther. He would thus be ‘unaware that he is corresponding with his own daughter’ (Ayres, Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels: The Subversion of Domestic Ideology, Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1998, p. 144). Alison Milbank, Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 95. Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, p. 165, finds in Pascal’s response to the letter confirmation of the immaturity revealed in his frequent inability to make decisions for himself. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, pp. 184, 216. Like Wordsworth, Fenwick has grown up in the Lake District, and the episode of his casting the wand into Lake Windermere recalls the boat-stealing episode from The Prelude, as well as Sir Bedivere’s casting of Excalibur into the water in ‘The Passing of Arthur’: ‘I stole from the house by the back way’, Fenwick reports, ‘in order to avoid Lilian. . . . I came to a creek, to the bank of which a boat was moored, undid its chain, rowed on to a deep part of the lake, and dropped the wand into its waves. It sank at once; scarcely a ripple furrowed the surface, not a bubble arose from the deep. . . . The placid waters had closed over the tempter to evil’ (LXI). This is the most important epistolary episode in a novel that contains, in the count of Ayres, Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels, p. 143, about thirty allusions to letters, apart from the hundreds of letters written by Mrs Jellyby. During her first day at Bleak House, a maid that she has not previously seen brings a basket with the keys to Esther’s room: ‘For you, miss, if you please,’ said she. ‘For me?’ said I. ‘The housekeeping keys, miss.’ I showed my surprise; for she added, with some little surprise on her own part: ‘I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss.’ (VI) The situation described in the closing lines of A Strange Story distinctly resembles that involving David and Agnes at the end of David Copperfield. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 186, discusses the sense in which both Derrida and Foucault wish at the same time to deconstruct one text and enact a new one. I discuss the relationship between the two stories more fully in ‘Writing and Unwriting in The Caxtons, “My Novel,” and A Strange Story’ in The Subverting Vision of Bulwer Lytton: Bicentenary Reflections, ed. Allan Conrad Christensen, Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2004, pp. 206–10. Alfonso Procaccino, ‘I promessi sposi: “ ‘Ho imparato . . .’ ” ’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 130, believes that the manuscripts and Manzoni’s other sources for descriptions of the plague constitute metaphors for a degenerate and corrupt condition that can serve, presumably in Manzoni’s own text, as basis for rebirth and regeneration. Steven C. Hughes, ‘Manzoni as Social Historian: The Structural Dilemma of I

324

29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Notes to pages 221–37

promessi sposi’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 208, observes that Manzoni’s ‘balancing act’, between invention and documented historical information, ‘determine much of the structure of the book’. When Lucia returns home finally at the beginning of the last chapter, for example, the narrator describes the reunions neither with her mother (‘se le immagini il lettore’) nor with Renzo (‘si rimettono anche quelli all’immaginazion del lettore’) (XXXVIII). Giuseppe Pontiggia, ‘Manzoni e l’Anonimo: Reticenze e omissione nei «Promessi Sposi» ’, in Manzoni Europeo, a cura di Giuseppe Pontiggia, Milano: CARIPLO, 1985, pp. 9–57, discusses what he considers Manzoni’s brutal and contradictory handling of the anonymous source of his story, whereby Manzoni makes of the ‘anonimo’ the ‘complice involontario di ciò che non si vuol dire’. The silence of Manzoni becomes most dramatically intense in the chapters dedicated to Gertrude, the Signora di Monza. Audrey Joffe, Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991, p. 131, mentions the degree to which the word ‘know’ echoes throughout Esther’s narrative and the novel generally. Jeremy Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 91–2, speculates in particular that De Quincey’s description of Piranesi’s stairs has inspired Esther’s nightmare. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, p. 76, notes that when one player says, ‘ «Dis ou fais ceci, sinon tu ne parleras plus», on entre dans la Terreur, on détruit le lien social’. See also pp. 102–3. Faith Benson is distressed, for example, when Ruth ‘looked tearful and sad’ rather than uttering ‘ “one good, hearty ‘Thank you,’ now, for all I have been planning to do for her” ’ (XII). Dever, Death and the Mother, pp. xi, 1. Joffe, Vanishing Points, pp. 133, 137. The confession is, like the one that Gertrude extorts from Lucia, an example of the sexual aveu that Foucault considers ‘une des techniques les plus hautement valorisées pour produire le vrai’ (see above, Chapter 5, note 8). Michael Slater, Dickens and Women, London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd, 1983, pp. 256–7. Slater argues convincingly, pp. 166–8, that Esther may be based on Georgina Hogarth. Michael S. Kearns, ‘ “But I Cried Very Much”: Esther Summerson as Narrator’, Dickens Quarterly 1, no. 4, December 1984, 128. Regarding the Byronic references in James’s story that relate this heroine to the others under present consideration, see my ‘Sick Mothers and Daughters: Symptoms of Cultural Disorder in Novels by Manzoni, Dickens, Kingsley, Bulwer-Lytton, James’, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 4, no. 7, 1999, 18, 30. Lavinia has not, in fact, recollected the words of the curse quite accurately, for what Edgardo actually sings is: ‘Ah! Ma di Dio la mano irata vi disperda’. Christensen, A European Version of Victorian Fiction, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996, p. 39. Felicia Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester: The Life of Mrs Gaskell’s Demon, Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1992, p. 129, discusses the protests of Charlotte Brontë and others regarding Gaskell’s conviction that it was necessary to kill Ruth at the end of the story. Regarding the determination of authors to kill their heroines, one may also recall the public dismay that accompanied the death of Dickens’s Little Nell and the comments of Scott upon his own ‘murderous’ practices: ‘of all the murders that I have committed in that way, and few men have been guilty of more, there is none that went so much to my

Notes to pages 237–43

44 45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

61

325

heart as the poor Bride of Lammermoor; but it could not be helped – it is all true’ (John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 2nd edn, 10, Edinburgh: Cadell, Murray and Whittaker, 1839, 191). Megan Perigoe Stitt, Metaphors of Change in the Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Scott, Gaskell, and Kingsley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 192. The reference is to A Historical Memoir of Frà Dolcino and His Times, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853, published under Gallenga’s usual pseudonym L. Mariotti. Probably she is also the daughter of a viscount, but the story does not indicate whether her brother Lord Scoutbush has inherited the family title from their father or from some more distant relative. She is never styled in the novel as the Hon. Lucia. Tambling, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State, p. 92. Wordsworth, The Prelude, VI. Tambling, ibid., also mentions the ‘unfathered vapour’. Robert Bernard Martin, The Dust of Combat: A Life of Charles Kingsley, London: Faber and Faber, 1959, p. 203, believes Vavasour to be modelled not so much on Shelley as on the Spasmodic poets that Kingsley considered the successors of Shelley. Vavasour is, in fact, described at one point as ‘looking out consciously and spasmodically for views, effects, emotions, images; something striking and uncommon which would suggest a poetic figure’ (X). Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 94, points out that Mrs Gaskell spent her honeymoon in Wales and that in her letters the terms ‘Welsh’ and ‘wild’ become synonymous. The passage is quoted at greater length above in Chapter 2. Rachel was the stage name of Elisa Félix (1821–58) who excelled especially in impersonations of malignant passion. She and Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906), who similarly played roles like Medée, Phèdre and Lady Macbeth, were viewed as rivals on the Parisian stage and aroused fierce partisanship in the 1850s. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 329. An interesting discussion of Mrs Oliphant’s analysis of Collins occupies much of pp. 324–31. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, X. Bonaparte, The Gypsy-Bachelor of Manchester, p. 78. Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 77–8, 91 (regarding the book-burning), and pp. 81, 95 (regarding Josephine Butler). Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, p. 48, also discusses the influence of Ruth on Butler. Sante Matteo, ‘Manzoni’s Twenty-Five Readers: The Other Betrothal in I promessi sposi’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 135–58. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Moments of Decision in Bleak House’, in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p. 60. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, p. 123. With respect to Dickens, Janet L. Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture, Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985, p. 9, also finds that the Bible becomes a ‘locus of hermeneutical instability’. But even if biblical meanings cannot be reliably interpreted, the biblical terminology associates the novel with an ethos, however problematic now, of authoritative power. Besides the references to King David and various patriarchs and their concubines that we have noticed, there are, as Rita Schober, ‘ «Le Docteur Pascal» ou le sens de la vie’, Les Cahiers naturalistes 25, no. 53, 1979, 71–2, points

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Notes to pages 243–58

out, stylistic parallels with other biblical passages, notably the Song of Solomon. Schober mentions that Zola was also criticized for appropriating the New Testament vocabulary of Christianity for his own un-Christian purposes. 62 In the context of all the biblical echoes in our novels, ‘The place where I shall lie down’ may allude to the 23rd Psalm: ‘He maketh me to lie down in green pastures’. The continuation of the psalm, ‘he leadeth me beside the still waters’, seems incidentally to be echoed in its turn in the passage from Revelation 7:17, quoted above, that Benson reads at Ruth’s funeral regarding the Lamb that ‘shall lead them unto living fountains of waters’. 7 Speakers, singers and listeners 1 The title of Vincent’s tract derives, as he indicates, from Micah 6:9. See especially his long sub-titles and p. 99. 2 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 45. 3 Francesco Marroni, ‘Cousin Phillis: Illness as Language’, in Elizabeth Gaskell: Text and Context, ed. Francesco Marroni and Alan Shelston, Pescara: Edizioni Tracce, 1999, p. 42. See also discussion in Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995, pp. 35–9, of this aspect of Cousin Phillis. 4 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, pp. 89–110, usefully discusses the various philosophical positions. See also Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 199. 5 Alfonso Procaccini, ‘I promessi sposi: “ ‘Ho imparato . . .’ ” ’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 123. Manzoni changes the word ‘stile’, for example, to ‘dicitura’. 6 Matthew 24:35. 7 Cited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002, pp. 97–8, from Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, A Fragment (1837). 8 Even before this initial attempt in lying words to constitute a marriage, a significant uttered word has brought into being Ruth’s union with Bellingham. The latter invites her into the inn: ‘ “say, yes – say it ever so low, but give me the delight of hearing it. Ruth, say yes” ’. And Ruth replies: ‘Low and soft, with much hesitation, came the “yes”; the fatal word of which she so little imagined the infinite consequences’ (IV). There is then a spoken contract between them. 9 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994, pp. 3–14, 22–32. 10 Ibid., p. 124. 11 Terence Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell: ‘We are not angels’: Realism, Gender, Values, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, p. 76, believes that Mrs Gaskell should not have given so much significance, as she herself appears to do, to the matter of whether the marriage ritual, which is only ‘a form of words’, was performed or not. In a sense the Bensons’ lie about the marriage ritual having occurred is only ‘a form of words’ too and has less significance than the truth conveyed in actions prompted by ‘natural spontaneity’. Gaskell indeed approves, according to Wright, of that spontaneity in Ruth. 12 Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, p. 125. 13 The last chapter of Our Mutual Friend, entitled ‘The Voice of Society’, is interestingly organized in terms of Lightwood’s efforts to locate the authentic

Notes to pages 258–69

14

15 16

17

18

19

20 21

22 23

24

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voice among all the discordant pronouncements of the world regarding Lizzie Hexam. The problem of finding for Leonard a surrogate for a legitimate father may remind us of Said’s discussion of periods of cultural transition in which men and women seek to replace ‘a failed idea or possibility of filiation’ with a new ‘affiliation’ that can ‘reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order’ (The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 19). Joseph I. Fradin, ‘ “The Absorbing Tyranny of Every-day Life”: Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16, June 1961, 10. Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, pp. 181–2, believes that Clotilde does not pronounce these words in despair. He adduces evidence, in terms of the references to the calendar in the novel, that may indicate that Clotilde has now been pregnant for enough time to make her suspect that pregnancy. So she has reason to hope that the child will arrive and that Pascal will soon recall her. Annette Leddy distinguishes between two Manzonian narrators, a Catholic one and a more convincing and reliable one interested in psychological realism. It is this latter narrator who emphasizes the non-miraculous aspect of the conversion of the innominato, portraying it accurately as ‘the coming to consciousness of a repressed Catholic consciousness’ (‘The Conversion of Manzoni’s L’Innominato; Or, The Repressed Catholic Consciousness of a Criminal’, Carte Italiane: A Journal of Italian Studies 2, 1980–81, 29). Franco Triolo, ‘Manzoni and Providence’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 251, believes that Manzoni himself openly ‘chuckles’ about the popular superstition that there was something miraculous about the conversion of the innominato. Steven C. Hughes, ‘Manzoni as Social Historian: The Structural Dilemma of I promessi sposi’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 206, points out that the Cardinal Borromeo, not Lucia, is portrayed as bringing the conversion to fruition, in an encounter for which Manzoni had documentary evidence. Manzoni’s ‘archival conscience’ prompted him with respect to the historical personalities to narrate only events that could be documented by evidence. So he probably repented the importance that his narrative had accorded to Lucia in the conversion episode and thereafter increased the ‘proportion of “pure” history’ in the rest of the novel. In this case, Margrave falls asleep on a carpet on which a dervish possessed of the secret of the elixir, whom he is pursuing, has recently reposed. ‘The curse of the Dervish’s carpet’ or ‘a taint in the walls of the house’ will bring on an illness more serious than Lilian’s initial affliction: ‘ “the Pest of the East had seized me in slumber” ’. Michael D. Wheeler, ‘The Sinner as Heroine: A Study of Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth and the Bible’, The Durham University Journal n.s. 37, June 1976, pp. 153–5. In the writing of the scientific work, Faber tells Fenwick, ‘ “your will was devising an engine to unsettle the reason and wither the hopes of millions!” ’. It has been ‘ “a book conceived by your intellect, adorned by your learning, and directed by your will, to steal from the minds of other men their persuasion of the soul’s everlasting Hereafter” ’ (LXXI). Flaubert, Madame Bovary, II:xv. His full name was Giovanni Mario (b. Matteo), Marchese di Candia, and he and his companion, the soprano Giulia Grisi, resided in Paris where Ruffini came to know them well. He created the role of Ernesto in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, for which Ruffini had written the libretto. Michael Allis, ‘Elgar, Lytton, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 84’, Music & Letters 85,

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26 27

28

29 30 31 32

Notes to pages 269–81

no. 2, 2004, 198–238, argues interestingly that the various musical episodes in A Strange Story – the Persian chant, the tarantella, and the singing of Ayesha – have consciously inspired Elgar to compose and develop thematic equivalents for them in the quintet. If this is the case, however, the quintet possesses a literary programme and so cannot be considered purely abstract musical form. Initiatic chants convey in their repetitions, according to Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, p. 41, no sense of passing time but only ‘une temporalité à la fois évanescente et immémoriale’ and belong to a culture that does not need to recall its past. Fradin, ‘ “The Absorbing Tyranny of Every-day Life” ’, p. 9. Marie [Mulvey-] Roberts, Gothic Immortals: The Fiction of the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, London: Routledge, 1990, p. 198, identifies Ayesha with ‘nature’. Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature, Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, p. 242. The ‘race of devils’ in Shelley’s Frankenstein (III:iii) refers to the potential progeny of the monster, if Frankenstein should create a female mate for him. Frankenstein speculates ‘that future ages might curse me as their pest’ if he permitted this ‘race of devils’, which might go on to exterminate ‘the whole human race’, to come into existence. The devilish race thus foreshadows the ‘pest’ that does indeed exterminate the ‘human race’ in The Last Man. Francesco Marroni, La fabbrica nella valle: Saggio sulla narrativa di Elizabeth Gaskell, Bari: Adriatica, 1987, pp. 113–17, discusses many interesting instances in which Ruth is ‘stupefied into silence’ or remains eloquently mute, like the sheep dumb before her shearers. Often in such occasions tears take the place of words. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, pp. 6–8. Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives, p. 124. The phrase from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is: ‘we have told silently upon the mind of the country’. Hilary M. Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, p. 116. Commentators on Keats’s ode often point out that ‘waking dream’ probably echoes Hazlitt’s 1818 lecture ‘On Chaucer and Spenser’, which also contains other phrases relevant to the argument here: ‘Spenser was the poet of our waking dreams; and he has invented not only a language, but a music of his own for them . . . lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world from which we have no wish ever to be recalled’ (see note in Miriam Allott, ed., The Poems of John Keats, London: Longman, 1970, p. 532).

Conclusion: money handlers and bookkeepers 1 J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998, pp. 304–6. 2 His name also suggests, of course, a kind of rodent. According to The Oxford Universal Dictionary, the French voler can signify the winning of all the tricks in a card game, while to go the vole means to try all shifts and run all risks in the hope of a great gain. There may be an association too between Vholes and Vale, as in Vale of Taunton. 3 The three charming daughters function as a motif in Bleak House: the daughters of Vholes are Emma, Jane and Caroline; Skimpole refers to his Beauty daughter, his Sentiment daughter, his Comedy daughter; the landlady of the inn at which Esther and Bucket rest during the pursuit of her mother has ‘three fair girls’ who make a great fuss over Esther. 4 Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, p. 84.

Notes to pages 284–89

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5 Cecil Helman, Body Myths, London: Chatto and Windus, 1991, pp. 30, 35–7, 33, and pp. 29–47 passim. 6 Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, New York: Basic Books, 1996, p. 2. 7 Ibid., pp. 9, 17–18, 27. 8 Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979, p. 63. 9 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 1, 3–4, 124, 133–7, 148. 10 Ernst Bloch, Spuren, 2nd edn, Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1969, pp. 88–9, includes a ‘Spur’ perceived in Bulwer’s Zanoni. In Bloch’s philosophical theory, such ‘Spuren’ are the hints or traces of ‘the inspiring energy that occasionally redeems ordinary life’ and ‘inspire[s] hope of a better world’ (see my ‘Bulwer, Bloch, Bussotti and the Filial Muse: Recalled and Foreseen Sources of Inspiration’, Mosaic 26, no. 3, 1993, 42). 11 Zola, Le Roman expérimental, p. 22. 12 Y[ves] Malinas, Zola et les hérédités imaginaires, Paris: Expansion Scientifique Française, 1985, pp. 213–14, 217. 13 Alfonso Procaccini, ‘I promessi sposi: “ ‘Ho imparato . . .’ ” ’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 125. 14 There is, argues Massimo Verdicchio (‘Manzoni and the Promise of History’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 228), ‘unavoidable deceit inherent in historical writing, in the rhetoric and ideology of history. . . . Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infame necessarily alters and hides the truth because, in the last instance, the truth that it would be revealing is its own deceit’. 15 William J. Palmer, Dickens and New Historicism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 3–4. 16 Megan Perigoe Stitt, Metaphors of Change in the Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Scott, Gaskell, and Kingsley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 188, naturally includes Scott too among the authors that give voice to the seldom heard. Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, p. 5, observes that Gaskell’s desire to write ‘the fiction of those denied a voice within Victorian society led her to an awareness of her own silencing’. 17 Steven C. Hughes, ‘Manzoni as Social Historian: The Structural Dilemma of I promessi sposi’, in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, ed. Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, New York: Peter Lang, 1986, p. 209. Arguing against the opinion of Gramsci regarding Manzoni’s benevolent but detached condescension towards his humble protagonists, Angelo Marchese, L’enigma Manzoni: La spiritualità e l’arte di uno scrittore ‘negativo’, Roma: Bulzoni, 1994, p. 306, descries ‘la totale «medesimezza dell’autore» con i suoi umili personaggi’. 18 Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Guida ai Promessi sposi: I personaggi, la gente, le idealità, Milano: Rizzoli, 1999, p. 19. Lionel Trilling uses similar auditory terms – ‘a culture’s hum and buzz of implication’ – to explain ‘what I understand by manners’; the novel of manners makes us hear the ‘hum and buzz’ that ‘make the part of a culture which is not art, or religion, or morals, or politics’ but that modifies and is modified by the other ‘departments of culture’: ‘in this part of culture assumption rules, which is often so much stronger than reason’, assumption being related perhaps to our understanding of contagion (Trilling, ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel’, in The Liberal Imagination [1950], Garden City NY: Anchor Books, 1953, pp. 200–1).

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Notes to pages 289–90

19 Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London: Faber and Faber, 1983, p. 216. 20 According to Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, London: Little, Brown and Co., 2000, pp. 255–9, the memetic process can be consciously and intelligently planned and set in movement for good ends. Less Darwinian than Lynch, Gladwell offers another interesting account of ‘epidemics’ of ideas, opinions, fashions. The epidemic mechanism permits a few people to control many and to change the world. 21 Andrew Brown, ‘The “Supplementary Chapter” to Bulwer Lytton’s A Strange Story’, Victorian Literature and Culture 26, 1998, 157–82. 22 Of course Ruth did make its impact on the Zeitgeist and encouraged, for example, the eventually successful campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts (see d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions, p. 81). 23 D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988, pp. 5–11.

Bibliography

The primary subjects of this study Ainsworth, W. Harrison, Old Saint Paul’s [1841], London: Dent, 1968. Bulwer Lytton, Edward, A Strange Story [1862], Berkeley: Shambala, 1973. Dickens, Charles, Bleak House [1853], ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Gaskell, Elizabeth, Ruth [1853], ed. Alan Shelston, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Kingsley, Charles, Two Years Ago [1857], London: Macmillan, 1889. Manzoni, Alessandro, I promessi sposi [1840], Milano: Mondadori, 1995. Ruffini, Giovanni, Lavinia [1860], 2 vols, Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1861. Zola, Émile, Le Docteur Pascal [1893], in Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5, Tours: Gallimard, 1967, 913–1220.

Other works published before 1900 Bacon, Sir Francis, Viscount St Albans, Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion & Disswasion [London: Humfrey Hooper, 1597], reprinted, London: Haslewood Books, 1924. Berkeley, George, Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries, Etc., in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop, 5, London, etc.: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1953. Browne, Sir Thomas, Religio Medici, Letter to a Friend &c., and Christian Morals, ed. W.A. Greenhill, M.D. Oxon [1881], Peru IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1990. [Bulwer, Edward], ‘On Ill Health and Its Consolations’, in The Student: A Series of Papers, by the author of ‘Eugene Aram,’ ‘England and the English,’ &c. &c., 1, London: Saunders and Otley, 1835, 299–311. Chadwick, Edwin, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain [1842], ed. M.W. Flinn, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1965. Creighton, Charles, A History of Epidemics in Britain [1894], 2 vols, London: Frank Cass & Co., Ltd, 1965. Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year [1722], ed. Paula R. Backscheider, Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992. Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province [1857], ed. Édouard Maynial, Paris: Garnier, 1958. [Gallenga, Antonio], ‘The Age We Live In’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 24, no. 139, July 1841, 1–15.

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Index

Acton, William 257–8 Ainsworth, William Harrison 23, 44, 80; see also Old Saint Paul’s Allis, Michael 269 Althusser, Louis 27 Ambrose, Mary 204 Amherst, Earl of 308–9n31 Arens, W. 191 Arnold, Matthew 274–5, 277, 285; scholar-gipsy 1–2, 35, 38, 291 atmosphere 6, 33, 101 Auerbach, Nina 148 Babbage, Charles 249, 250 Bailin, Miriam 115, 145, 147, 149, 150 Bain, Alexander 19 Bakhtin, Mikhail: polyglossia 289; symbolic reversal 1, 35, 255, 278, 290; texts 201 Baldwin, Peter 57 Balzac, Honoré de 21, 134, 174 Baudrillard, Jean 7, 17, 24, 70–1, 107–8, 109, 206–7 beauty 2–3, 152, 182–3, 185 Beauvoir, Simone de 74 Beer, Gillian 37 Bell, Vikki 191 Bellini, Vincenzo 268 Benjamin, Walter 32 Berkeley, George 50 Bernard, Claude 29, 118, 136 biblical texts: Bleak House 144; contagious 190; Le Docteur Pascal 243; healing 201; incest 191; Lavinia 234, 243; Ruth 243, 252, 256–7; and science 215–16 Bichat, M.F.X. 116, 129, 131, 137, 248 Blake, Andrew 48 Bleak House (Dickens) 8; benign

influence 19–20; bookkeeping 281–2; bribery 280; Chancery 33, 57–8, 81, 205–7, 270; charity 111–12, 280; clothing 97; contagion 31, 33, 63, 86; dancing school 13–14; disease 58, 185, 199; doubling 79; fires 218, 301n13; fog 32–3; forgiveness 202–3, 244, 264; gender power 78, 86, 102, 107, 199–200; Gothic novel 78, 82, 170; illegitimacy 21; keyholders 83, 85, 212, 223–4, 282, 323n23; letters 210–12, 226, 291–2, 323n22; matricide 198–9; mirror images 168, 225; money exchange 282–3; mother–daughter relationship 89, 149–50, 167–70, 200, 226, 275; narrator 122, 222–8; Necessity 31, 108; needlewomen 96, 97, 98–9, 103; nursing 144, 145; pen power 202–3; physicians 98–9, 121–3; prayers 264; preachers 250–1, 282; providence 55–6; public health 57; replication 322n12; retribution 41–3; rivals 98–9, 169, 185–6, 190, 210–12, 223; scapegoat 57, 62–3; sewage 21; social disintegration 12; spontaneous combustion 51–2, 54; swordsmen 79, 81–2, 90, 103; texts 199, 205, 207, 208–9, 228–9; triangular relations 185–8, 226–8; watchfulness 73, 105–6; winds 86–7 Bloch, Ernst 286 body: contagion 117–18; disease 115–16; equilibrium 137–8; health 129–30; language 117; mind 2; plague 120–1; speaking through 248 Bonaparte, Felicia 111, 156, 242 bookkeeping 281–2, 287, 291–2 boundary blurring 7–8, 16, 24

344

Index

Brontë, Charlotte 142, 143, 237 Brook, Peter 134 Brown, Andrew 290 Browne, Sir Thomas 293n7 Browning, Robert 38, 74 Bulwer Lytton, Edward 290, 315n49; The Last Days of Pompeii 301n11; ‘On Ill Health and Its Consolation’ 3, 149, 304n35; Lucretia 303n31; see also A Strange Story Butler, Josephine 5–6, 242 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 230, 231, 236, 240 Carlyle, Thomas 95; Sartor Resartus 20, 26, 92–3, 112 Carraroli, Dario 120 causality 25–6, 27, 29, 35, 37, 46, 128–9 Chadwick, Edwin 4, 56 chanting 271, 328n25 charity 111–12, 279–80 Chartism 12 Chauvet, M. 29 Chodorow, Nancy 156 cholera 116, 278; causality 26; epidemics 4, 18, 58, 137; Kingsley 44, 56; as moral infection 174, 278; psychology 20, 247–8; sanitation 181; Two Years Ago 23, 167, 246–7 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 50–1 clothing 93–4, 96, 97, 241 Clytemnestra 198, 199–200 Collins, Wilkie 242 commodification 74, 101, 102 Connor, Steven 6 contagion 4, 7, 8, 12–13, 28; antidotes 138–40; as battlefield 72; Bleak House 31, 33, 63, 86; body 117–18; disease 4, 121; history 20, 125; morality 5, 13, 69, 157, 162; Necessity 28; Old Saint Paul’s 31–2, 139; I promessi sposi 220–1; Ruth 156, 242, 257–8, 286; sexual sin 257–8, 297n57; texts 190, 208–9, 242; touching 40, 50–1; transmission 93–4, 101, 241; Two Years Ago 286 Contagious Diseases Acts 4, 5, 242, 330n22 contamination 13, 66, 119, 123, 242 Crimean War 11, 59, 90–2, 144, 146, 235, 240, 244, 267 culture 6–7, 8, 252–5; dikes 72, 74, 80, 95, 100–1, 105, 111; medicalization 113

Curran, Stuart 50 curse 86, 262–3 d’Albertis, Deirdre 19, 242, 281 dancing 13–15, 19, 47 Darwin, Charles 37–8, 48, 201 daughters/fathers 158–9, 170; see also mother–daughter relationship Defoe, Daniel 245, 296–7n45, 298n75, 307n17, 308–9n31 De Quincey, Thomas 22, 23, 139, 150, 223, 240 denegation 225–6, 227–8 Derrida, Jacques 29, 40, 50–1, 132, 206, 217, 248–9, 288 Dever, Carolyn 168, 224 Di Benedetto, Vincenzo 289 Di Ciaccia, Francesco 58 Dickens, Charles 15–16, 93, 289, 297–8n60, 298n72; David Copperfield 320n30, 323n24; Edwin Drood 24, 320n30; Great Expectations 5, 22; Hard Times 88; Little Dorrit 74; Oliver Twist 290; Our Mutual Friend 25, 278, 320n30, 326–7n13; see also Bleak House discipline 18, 72–3, 75, 90, 105, 110–11 discourse 4, 7–17, 38, 48, 116–18, 128, 205, 207, 210, 216–17, 229, 233, 283, 289 disease 1–4, 11, 16; beauty 152, 185; Bleak House 58, 185, 199; body 115–16; contagion 4, 121; Girard 18; hereditary 34–5; as invasion 44; language 248; poverty 278; Two Years Ago 3, 23 disintegration: family 258; social 12, 16, 75, 157, 220; verbal commitments 259–60 Le Docteur Pascal (Zola) 9; Biblical texts 243; Bichat’s theories 116; curse 86; dancing 14; fires 46–7, 48, 136–7, 142, 218; God 48–9; hereditary disease 34–5; illegitimacy 21, 63–5; keyholders 85–7; lovers 84–5, 137–41, 147; marriage ceremony 252, 260–1; money 281; mother—daughter relationship 200; motherhood 156, 164–5, 260–1; patients 136, 147; patriarchy 191; pen power 204, 217–19, 287–8; pestilence 46–7; physicians 58–9, 136, 147; reconciliation 192, 195; rival suitors 189–92, 218–19; scapegoat 64–5;

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43 44 45

Index spontaneous combustion 51, 52–3, 54; swordsmen 90; teleology 287–8; triangular relations 188–92; watchfulness 86; winds 86–7 Donizetti, Gaetano 133, 231–2, 266, 267–8, 315n48 Donzelot, Jacques 105 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 13 doubling: Bleak House 79; maternal 162, 163–4, 168; mimesis 13, 18, 35, 159, 160; women 79 Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert 6–7, 32, 249, 275 Ehrenreich, Barbara 5 Elgar, Sir Edward 269 Eliot, George 21, 110–11, 116 Eliot, T.S. 3, 244 English, Deirdre 5 epidemics 4, 22, 94, 158, 295n28, 298–9n76, 301n9 Epstein, Julia 114, 117 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds 8; causality 25; discipline 110–11; fogs 32–3; historical aesthetic 27, 30, 290; providence 39 eroticism 13–14, 147, 148, 156–7 exploitation 94, 99 families 258, 278–9 fashion 107–8, 206–7 Fasick, Laura 91 fathers/daughters 158–9, 170 Faulkner, David 24 Fielding, Joseph 37, 76 fires 50, 51; Bleak House 218, 301n13; Le Docteur Pascal 46–7, 48, 136–7, 142, 218; Old Saint Paul’s 44–6, 47–8; Promethean 85; spontaneous combustion 51–3, 54–5; A Strange Story 53–4; texts 218–19; unmaking 141–2; see also Great Fire of London Flaubert, Gustave 21, 114, 118, 119, 125, 134, 267–8 Fleury, Maurice de 137–8 forgiveness 202–3, 244, 264 fortress-storming 76–8, 80–1, 88–9, 161 Foucault, Michel: contagion 28; discipline 75, 90; discourse 205, 289; medical gaze 114; plague 17–18; power 7, 187–8, 212, 309n33; sexuality 162; Surveiller et punir 72–3; vigilance 77

345

Fox, Daniel M. 154 Fradin, Joseph I. 260, 271 Freud, Sigmund 170, 300n97 Gallenga, Antonio 32, 237, 296n31 Gamp, Sairey 142, 143 garment industry 94, 99 Gaskell, Elizabeth 8, 43; see also Ruth gaze: male 74; medical 114, 119, 127, 131, 134; nurses 143; patriarchy 114; transgressive 114 gender 8, 110, 147, 255–6 gender power 78, 86, 102, 107, 110, 199–200 germs 249, 283–4, 294n11 Gilbert, Sandra 96, 97, 105–6, 144–5 Gilman, Sander L. 15–16 Girard, René: contagion 28; on Crime and Punishment 13; cultural system 252–5; danse macabre 15; disease 18; doubling 35, 160; indifferentiation 278, 291; mimesis 35, 158, 267, 284; plague 11–12, 61, 220; scapegoat 69, 70; violence 11–12, 63, 115 God 201; Le Docteur Pascal 48–9; plague 41; power 26, 77, 178, 245–6, 298n75; voice 245–6, 300n6 Goethe, J.W. von 2, 9, 295n22 Gothic fiction 7–8, 78, 82, 170 Great Fire of London 23, 44–6, 47–8 Gubar, Susan 96, 97, 105–6, 144–5 guilt 147, 162, 278 Haggard, H. Rider 23 hair cutting 64, 65, 68, 94–5, 305n48 Haley, Bruce 3 Hall, Donald 5, 6, 22, 74 Hamlin, Christopher 26 Hays, J.N. 278 healing 121, 132, 143, 201, 242–3, 265–7 health 2, 23; body 129–30; equilibrium 137–8; hereditary 315n60; Vrettos 113; women 4–5, 130, 145 Helman, Cecil 121, 283–4, 286 Helsinger, Elizabeth K. 99, 113 Hirsch, Marianne 198 history 27–8; aesthetics of 27, 30; contagion 20, 125; Dickens 289; Ermarth 32; Jameson 32, 35–6, 48; Manzoni 292; I promessi sposi 29; providence 61; women 311n58 Hogle, Jerrold E. 8

346

Index

Homans, Margaret 97, 204, 274 Homer 10–11, 41 Hugo, Victor 25 Huxley, T.H. 20, 129 Ibsen, Henrik 5, 22 ideas/power 274–5 identity 6–7, 97, 141, 150 illegitimacy 21, 63–5, 67–8, 166–7, 258–9 imagination 72, 73, 91 incest 21, 86, 140, 165, 191 Inchbald, Elizabeth 306–7n11 intertextuality 9, 234 Irigaray, Luce 74, 200 Italian politics 91–2 James, Henry 24, 230 Jameson, Fredric: causality 27, 35, 46; contagion 28; history 32, 35–6, 48; inexorable form 30, 36; Necessity 28, 29, 112, 212; pessimism 55; on I promessi sposi 13; social disintegration 75 Jesus Christ 121, 123, 144, 249, 260 Joffe, Audrey 226 Johnson, Samuel 11 Joseph, Gerhard 99 Judd, Catherine 115, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147 Kafka, Franz 121 Kant, Immanuel 8 Kearns, Michael 228 Keats, John 45–6, 73, 74, 138, 306n4; ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ 68, 164, 304n45, 305n47; Lamia 73–4; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ 268, 276, 328n32 keyholders 83, 85–7, 212, 223–4, 282, 323n23 Kingsley, Charles 2, 48; Alton Locke 12, 93, 94, 99; cholera 44, 56; language 237; providence 38–9; sewage 27; Yeast 26; see also Two Years Ago Kucich, John 78, 79, 83, 188, 255 Lacan, Jacques 156, 170, 198, 225–6 Ladies’ National Association 5–6 Langland, Elizabeth 105, 111–12 language 117, 203–4, 237, 248–9, 296n31, 312–13n19 Lavinia (Ruffini) 8, 221–2; Biblical texts 234, 243; clothing 93, 96; Crimean

War 11; dancing 14; guilt 147; illegitimacy 21, 166–7; language 248; lesbianism 14, 21, 78, 231; letters 229–34, 241; lovers 147–8, 150–2; mother–daughter relationship 166–7; music 266–7, 269; narrator 233; needlewomen 99, 101–2; nursing 59, 146, 151–2; patients 119–20, 124; pen power 119, 127, 202, 204; physicians 124, 133–4, 135, 155; poetry 234–6, 266–7; politics 91–2; prostitution 101; providence 39–40, 202; reconciliation 192–3; rivals 172–4; sacrifice 65, 124; scapegoat 65; scientists 116, 133–4, 155; swindling 279; swordsmen 90 Leonardo da Vinci 3 lesbianism 14, 21, 78, 231 letters: Bleak House 226, 291–2, 323n22; Lavinia 229–34, 241; I promessi sposi 213; A Strange Story 209–10, 212, 239 Leuckart, Rudolph 17 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 188 Lewes, G.H. 2 libido 16–17, 147–8 love 84, 148–9, 156, 192, 260 lovers 159–67; Le Docteur Pascal 84–5, 137–41, 147; Lavinia 147–8, 150–2; I promessi sposi 213; Two Years Ago 66–7; see also rivals Lucente, Gregory L. 204 Lynch, Aaron 284 Lyotard, Jean-François 55, 117, 118, 128–9, 141, 271, 285 Maine de Biran, F.P.G. 132, 314n45 making/unmaking 91, 93, 136–7 Malinas, Yves 85, 288 Malone, Cynthia 97 manner/matter 247, 251, 255–6, 266 Manzoni, Alessandro 23, 26, 29, 40, 292; see also I promessi sposi Mario, Giovanni (Marchese di Candia) 232, 268 marriage: Le Docteur Pascal 252, 260–1; Old Saint Paul’s 254–5; I promessi sposi 252–3; Ruth 255–6, 258–9, 326n11; A Strange Story 109, 260; Two Years Ago 259–60 Marroni, Francesco 68, 248, 274 Marshall, Tim 62, 272 Martineau, Harriet 3, 149, 204–5 martyrdom 66–7, 236–7

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Index matricide 198–9 Matus, Jill L. 257–8 Maurice, F.D. 26 medical perspective 21, 113, 118 medicine, heroic 115, 135, 151 memetics 284–5, 290 Meredith, George 51 Michelangelo 40 microbes 17, 24, 109 Milbank, Alison 78, 79, 82, 208–9 Mill, J.S. 285 Miller, D.A. 74, 75, 290 Miller, J. Hillis 243 Milton, John 45, 65 mimesis: conflicting 267; doubling 13, 18, 35, 159; eroticism 13–14; Girard 35, 158, 267, 284; memetics 284–5; negative 205; sounds 270 Mitchell, Silas Weir 115, 134 money exchange 277–8, 280–1, 282–3 morality 5, 13, 69, 157, 162, 174, 278 Morgentaler, Goldie 185 Morris, R.J. 4, 6 Mort, Frank 22 mother–daughter relationship: Bleak House 89, 149–50, 167–70, 200, 226, 275; Le Docteur Pascal 200; Lavinia 166–7; Old Saint Paul’s 156–7, 158–9, 200; I promessi sposi 158–9; A Strange Story 109–10, 158–9; Two Years Ago 167, 178–81, 198, 199–200, 278 motherhood 142, 156, 281; Bleak House 89, 167–8; Le Docteur Pascal 89, 164–5, 260–1; doubling 162, 163–4, 168; Ruth 164, 197–8 Munthe, Axel 16–17, 18, 28, 32, 49, 147 music 266–8, 269 narrative see récit narrator: Bleak House 122, 222–8; Lavinia 233; I promessi sposi 219–22, 288–9; Ruth 43 Necessity 72; Bleak House 31, 108; Jameson 28, 29, 112, 212; Ruth 258; A Strange Story 270 needlewomen 95, 235, 277, 310n43; Bleak House 96, 97, 98–9, 103; Lavinia 99, 101–2; I promessi sposi 95, 96; Ruth 99–101, 109, 112; A Strange Story 102–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 34 Nightingale, Florence 59, 115, 142, 143, 303n30

347

nurses 46, 142–4; atonement 146, 147; Bleak House 144, 145; Crimean War 59, 144; eroticism 147, 148; gaze 152; Lavinia 59, 146, 151–2; love 148–9; patients 142–3, 145; physicians 115, 142, 143–4; I promessi sposi 143 Old Saint Paul’s (Ainsworth) 9; clothing 94, 241; contagion 31–2, 139; dancing 15; divine power 26, 77, 178, 245–6, 298n75; fortress-storming 76, 77–8, 80–1; Great Fire of London 23, 44–6, 47–8; marriage 254–5; mother–daughter relationship 156–7, 158–9, 200; nursing 46; physicians 123–4; plague 12, 42–3, 142, 254–5; prayers 264; providence 42–3; reading 242; rivals 176–8, 193–4; sexuality 156–7; swordsmen 75; triangular relationships 160–1, 176–8; watchfulness 142, 176–8, 254 opera 266, 267, 269, 275 opium 22, 139, 239 Orpheus 272–3 Other 24, 29 Paget, Sir James 12 pain/language 312–13n19; see also suffering Palmer, William J. 289 Panopticon 73, 76, 105, 111, 118–19, 134 Pasteur, Louis 129–30 Pater, Walter 2–3, 16, 23, 33 patients: Le Docteur Pascal 136, 147; Lavinia 119–20, 124; nurses 142–3, 145; physicians 125, 134, 136, 194; I promessi sposi 119–20; voices 248 patriarchy 107, 114, 156–7, 191, 200 Pearson, Keith Ansell 35–6, 285, 286, 302n17 pen power 202, 216, 235, 244; Bleak House 202–3; Le Docteur Pascal 204, 217–19, 287–8; Lavinia 119, 127, 202, 204; I promessi sposi 203; Ruth 204; A Strange Story 202, 203, 210 pestilence 58–9, 143, 286; Le Docteur Pascal 46–7; retribution 41–2; Ruth 43–4; Trojan War 10–11; winds 157–8; see also plague phallic symbolism 78, 163, 210, 306–7n11 photography 205, 235

348

Index

physicians 2, 9, 21, 60, 120, 291; Bleak House 98–9, 121–3; Le Docteur Pascal 58–9, 136, 147; Lavinia 124, 133–4, 135, 155; nurses 142, 143–4; Old Saint Paul’s 123–4; patients 125, 134, 136, 194; as priests 120–1, 124–5; reconciliation 194; as scholars 214–17, 228; scientists 133–4, 154–5; suffering 127; Two Years Ago 2, 3, 28, 113, 125–7 Pirandello, Luigi 287–8 plague 9, 22; archbishop 157; body 120–1; burials 33; carnival 15; eroticism 156–7; Foucault 17–18; Girard 11–12, 61, 220; God 41; libido 16–17, 147–8; Munthe 32; Old Saint Paul’s 12, 42–3, 142, 254–5; I promessi sposi 12, 58, 286; retribution 41–3; social unrest 61–2; war 295n23; see also contagion; pestilence Poe, E.A. 15, 80 police 74, 306n6 Poovey, Mary 115 poverty 278 power: discipline 18, 72–3; divine 26, 77, 178, 245–6, 298n75; Foucault 7, 187–8, 212, 309n33; gender 78, 86, 102, 107, 110, 199–200; healing 265; ideas 274–5; language 203, 296n31; narrative 288–9; nurses/patients/ physicians 155; singing 266–7; texts 212; see also pen power prayers 60, 264, 265 preachers 245–7, 250–2, 262, 265, 282 Procaccini, Alfonso 288 I promessi sposi (Manzoni) 9; charity 279–80; contagion 220–1; fortressstorming 76, 161; healing 143, 242–3; history 29; Jameson 13; language 204; letters 213; lovers 213; marriage 252–3; mother–daughter relationship 158–9; narrator 219–22, 288–9; needlewomen 95, 96; nun 96–7, 143; nursing 143; patients 119–20; pen power 203; plague 12, 58, 286; priests 120–1; providence 40, 55; readers/audience 248; reconciliation 195–6; religious vows 96–7, 196, 261–2; rivals 170–2, 195–6, 264; sacrifice 65–6; sexuality 161–2, 318–19n7, 319n8; swordsmen 75; triangular relationships 161–2; violence 75, 77; words 261–2

prostitutes 4, 5, 95, 99 prostitution 21–2, 101 providence 26; aesthetics 36, 37, 286; Bleak House 55–6; Ermarth 39; history 61; investment 279; Kingsley 38–9; Lavinia 39–40, 202; Manzoni 40; Old Saint Paul’s 42–3; I promessi sposi 40, 55; Ruth 55, 287; A Strange Story 38–9, 263; Two Years Ago 56; Zola 47 psychology 20, 247–8, 265 public health 57 public opinion 68, 111 Ragussis, Michael 98 readers 201–2, 242, 248 realism 21, 118 reality 8, 204 récit 29–30, 55, 61, 70–1, 116–18, 141, 149, 154–5, 220, 277, 285, 289, 291 reconciliation 192–6, 200 religion: Bleak House 111; Bulwer Lytton 290; faith 132–3; science 38–9, 48, 126, 132–3, 133–4, 140, 155, 247; vows 96–7, 196, 261–2 replication 204, 322n12 rhetoric 248, 249 ritual 252–5 rivals: Bleak House 98–9, 169, 185–6, 190, 210–12, 223; Le Docteur Pascal 189–92, 218–19; Lavinia 172–4; Old Saint Paul’s 176–8, 193–4; I promessi sposi 170–2, 195–6, 264; Ruth 181–5; A Strange Story 53, 159–60, 162–4, 174–5, 196–7, 248; Two Years Ago 178–81, 194–5, 238–9 Roberts, Marie 132 Romanticism 3 Rosenberg, Charles 117–18 Rossetti, Christina 156 Rothfield, Lawrence 21, 118, 133 Rozerot, Jeanne 166 Rubin, Gayle 188, 200 Ruffini, Giovanni Domenico: Carlino 313n31; Vincenzo 92; see also Lavinia Ruskin, John 38 Russian formalists 29 Ruth (Gaskell) 5; biblical texts 243, 252, 256–7; bravery 59–60; bribery 280; commodification 101; contagion 156, 242, 257–8, 286; copyists 204; dancing 14; families 258, 278–9; funeral sermon 251–2; hair cutting symbolism 68; illegitimacy 67–8,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 41 42 43 44 45

Index 258–9; marriage 255–6, 258–9, 326n11; martyrdom 68–9, 236–7; money exchange 281; motherhood 164, 197–8; narrator 43; Necessity 258; needlewomen 99–101, 109, 112; nursing 119, 145–6, 148, 152–4, 155, 183; pestilence 43–4; prayers 264–5; providence 55, 287; public opinion 68, 111; recognition 318n105; reconciliation 193; rivals 181–5; scapegoat 68; sexuality 148; singing 273–4; triangular relations 183–5; typhus fever 22; watchfulness 106–7; will drafting 207–8 sacrifice 63, 65–6, 124 Sadrin, Anny 169 Said, Edward W. 24, 205, 206, 210, 289 St Luke’s Hospital 15–16 Sainte-Beuve, C.-A. 119 sanitation 4, 12, 21, 44, 56, 181, 286 scapegoats 57, 62–5, 68–70, 261 Scarry, Elaine 72, 80, 91, 93, 95, 117, 136–7 Schnitzler, Arthur 70–1 scholar-gipsy 1–2, 35, 38, 291 Schopenhauer, Arthur 28 Schor, Hilary M. 6, 169, 200, 275 science 4, 6, 117; Biblical texts 6, 215–16; Lyotard 128–9; religion 38–9, 48, 126, 132–3, 133–4, 140, 155, 247; A Strange Story 125, 127, 154, 228 scientists 116, 133–4, 154–5 Scott, Sir Walter 319n9, 324–5n43, 329n16 Sedgwick, Eve 188, 200 sewage 20–1, 24, 26–7, 57, 277 sexual sin 21–2, 147, 257–8, 297n57 sexuality 14, 101–2; Old Saint Paul’s 156–7; I promessi sposi 161–2, 318–19n7, 319n8; Ruth 148; A Strange Story 162–4 Sheets, Robin Lauterbach 99, 113 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein 210, 272; The Last Man 12, 42, 157, 291, 301n10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 49, 50, 157–8, 238, 297n49 singing 260–1, 266–8, 275–6; Ruth 273–4; A Strange Story 269–70, 272–3, 274 Slater, Michael 228 slavery 90–1, 94 Smiles, Samuel 6–7, 31

349

Sontag, Susan 3, 248 Southey, Robert 235 Spinoza, Baruch 27, 289 spirituality 182–3 spoken words 249–55; authority 275–6; body 248; contract 326n8; contrition 264; curse 86, 262–3; ritual 252–5 spontaneous combustion 51–3, 54–5, 302n23, 302n24 Stallybrass, Peter 24–5, 93–4 Stitt, Megan Perigoe 237–41, 289 Stoker, Bram 23 Stone, Mirto Golo 294–5n21 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 67 A Strange Story (Bulwer Lytton) 2, 8; Bichat’s theories 116, 137; curse 262–3; dancing 14–15, 19; fires 53–4, 218; fortress-storming 88–9; immortality 130–1; letters 209–10, 212, 239; marriage 109, 260; medicine/faith 131, 215–16, 218, 263; money exchange 280–1; mother–daughter relationship 109–10, 158–9; Necessity 270; needlewomen 102–4; pen power 202, 203, 210; phallic symbolism 78, 210; prayers 60, 265; providence 38–9, 263; rivals 53, 159–60, 162–4, 174–5, 196–7, 248; science 125, 127, 154, 228; sewage 24; sexuality 162–4; singing 272–3, 274; spontaneous combustion 51–2, 54; suffering 127; triangular relationships 159–60, 162–3; veiling 89; vital principle 37–8, 127–32, 137, 214–17, 228; watchfulness 73, 103–4, 106 suffering 3, 127, 144 swordsmen 75–8; Bleak House 79, 81–2, 90, 103; Le Docteur Pascal 90; Old Saint Paul’s 75; I promessi sposi 75; Two Years Ago 90, 245, 246–7 sympathy 18–19, 297n49 syphilis 22, 34 tailoring 92–3, 97, 99 Taine, Hippolyte 6–7 Tambling, Jeremy 114–15, 150, 223, 240 teleology 10, 287–8, 289 Tendenzromane 243 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 48, 70; Idylls of the King 5; ‘The Lady of Shalott’ 74, 99; Maud 1; In Memoriam 40, 274

350

Index

Ternois, Renée 141 texts 97; Bakhtin 201; Bleak House 199, 205, 207, 208–9, 228–9; cancelled 212; contagion 190, 208–9, 242; contamination 242; double 217; infectious 241; power 212; replicated 204; Two Years Ago 234; written/spoken 245–6 Toubin, Catherine 85 touching 40, 50–1 triangular relationships: Bleak House 185–8, 226–8; Le Docteur Pascal 188–92; Old Saint Paul’s 160–1, 176–8; I promessi sposi 161–2; Ruth 183–5; A Strange Story 159–60, 162–3 Trilling, Lionel 26 Triolo, Franco 29 Trojan War 10–11 truth 255–6, 266 Tuchman, Barbara W. 11, 41 Two Years Ago (Kingsley): benign influence 19; cholera 23, 167, 246–7; contagion 286; cowardice 59; Crimean War 11; disease 3, 23; gossips 110; language 249; lovers 66–7; marriage 259–60; martyrdom 66–7; mother–daughter relationship 167, 178–81, 198, 199–200, 278; physicians 2, 3, 28, 113, 125–7; poetry 237–41; preachers 262; providence 56; reconciliation 194–5; religion/science 38–9, 132–3, 155, 247; rivals 178–81, 194–5, 238–9; sanitation 44, 56, 286; sewage 20–1; slavery 90–1, 94; swordsmen 90, 245, 246–7; texts 234; watchfulness 107 typhus 4, 22

violence 11–12, 63, 75, 77, 115, 261–2 Virchow, Rudolf 115–16 vital principle 37–8, 127–32, 137, 140, 214–17, 228, 314n41 voices: God 245–6, 300n6; marginalized people 289; patients 248; silenced 217, 231; violence 261–2; see also spoken words Vrettos, Athena 4, 12, 18–19, 67, 113, 115, 142, 201

Uglow, Jenny 148, 153 unmaking/making 72, 75–8, 141–2

Yeats, William Butler 128–9

vapours 32–3 Vargish, Thomas 37, 39 Veeder, William 99, 113 veiling/unveiling 89, 96–8, 101–2 venereal disease 4, 5, 22, 34, 43, 257–8 Verdi, Giuseppe 267 Verdicchio, Massimo 29, 289 Vienna, Congress of 1 Vincent, Thomas 245, 250, 267

Wakley, Thomas 125 Walkowitz, Judith R. 6 watchfulness: Bleak House 73, 105–6; Le Docteur Pascal 86; Old Saint Paul’s 142, 176–8, 254; Ruth 106–7; A Strange Story 73, 103–4, 106; Two Years Ago 107 Wells, H.G. 17, 32 Welsh, Alexander 107 Wesley, John 247 Wheeler, Michael D. 264–5 White, Allon 24–5, 93–4 Wilde, Oscar 19, 80, 242, 243, 249, 267 winds 86–7, 157–8 women: blamed 5; commodification 102; deaths of characters 79–80; doubling 79; health 4–5, 130, 145; history 311n58; vital principle 314n41 words: binding/unbinding 253; curse 262–3; disintegration 259–60; duelling with 262; germs 249; music 267–8; I promessi sposi 261–2; written 283; see also spoken word Wordsworth, William 48, 239, 240, 273 Wright, Terence 153–4

Zola, Émile: causality 29; La Curée 164–5; decay 11; La Débâcle 301n11; Le Docteur Pascal 9, 34–5; incest 165–6; marriage 260; Nana 22; providence 47; Le Roman expérimental 118, 287–8; Rougon-Macquart family 9, 34–5, 63–5, 84–5, 136, 141, 219, 307–8n21; testament philosophique 141; see also Le Docteur Pascal

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