In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 441-469



[Access article in PDF]

Historical Difference As Immortality in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel

Ted Underwood


A remarkable number of mid-nineteenth-century historical novels open by comparing historical imagination to the reanimation of the dead. Often the comparison is embodied in a frame story that focuses on a particular grave or ruin, and then precipitates the narrative into the past through an experience of temporal double vision that seems to rebuild the ruin or throw open the grave. The prologue to Théophile Gautier's Romance of a Mummy (1858) follows two European explorers into the depths of an Egyptian tomb, where they break open a sarcophagus and unwrap a mummy so lifelike that she seems only to be sleeping. The marvelous preservation of the tomb makes the explorers feel that the "dead civilisation" itself is stirring to life around them: an illusion that bridges the gulf between the prologue and the novel proper, which narrates the mummy's life in ancient Egypt. 1 Sometimes the frame story is autobiographical: Edward Bulwer's introduction to The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) explains the book as a consequence of the author's own experience of historical vision. Wandering amid the "disinterred remains" of Pompeii, he was filled with "a keen desire to people once more those deserted streets, to repair those graceful ruins, to reanimate the bones yet spared to his survey, to traverse the gulf of eighteen centuries, and wake to a second existence—the City of the Dead!" 2 In the "Proem" to Romola (1862-63), George [End Page 441] Eliot varies the convention of double vision by inverting the perspective. Instead of letting a modern traveler glimpse the past life superimposed on present ruins, she revives a fifteenth-century Florentine and describes the reactions of this "Shade" as he surveys the present state of his city from the hill of San Miniato. 3

All of these introductory gestures invoke death to dramatize a gulf of social and cultural change that separates the reader from the setting of the tale. Cultural change is what the Florentine shade sees from San Miniato. What is petrified in Pompeii, and demands resuscitation, is not bodily life but (to quote the novel's last sentence) "a social system which has passed from the world for ever" (6:227). One of the earliest descriptions of historical fiction as resurrection—Walter Scott's "Dedicatory Epistle" to Ivanhoe (1819)—establishes the terms of the metaphor: "Within these thirty years, such an infinite change has taken place in the manners of Scotland, that men look back on their fathers' habits of society, as we do on those of the reign of Queen Anne." Because of this rapid pace of change, the writer of a Scottish historical novel can "select for the subject of resuscitation by his sorceries, a body whose limbs had recently quivered with existence." But for an English subject of comparable cultural remoteness, one must dabble "amidst the dust of antiquity, where nothing [is] to be found but dry, mouldering, and disjointed bones." 4 Here the decomposition of a corpse into "disjointed bones" figures calendar time, which introduces gaps and obscurities into the historical record at an even pace. Death itself figures a less steady change in "manners" and "habits of society": this axis allows the recent Scottish corpse and the ancient English one to be compared in the first place. [End Page 442]

Any story set more than a few generations in the past is a story about the dead. But not all such stories call attention to the fact by introducing their characters first as corpses. Nineteenth-century historical novels frequently do so, because they are not just historical but historicist fiction: they conceive of history not as a sequence of events, a site of classical authority, or a mirror in which to view universal human dramas, but as a field of social and cultural differences. 5 Historicist fiction dwells on the deadness of the past to emphasize its difference, because the remoteness of "a...

pdf

Share