Why "Victorian"?: Response

The NAVSA Conference both provides a showcase for the work that is currently being done in Victorian studies and offers a sustained opportunity for self-scrutiny, even at the most fundamental level. "Why do we keep the name 'Victorian studies'?" asks Amanda Anderson at the opening of her paper, delivered in a session that provoked a number of questions about the state, and the labeling, and indeed the identification of our disciplinary field.

I will put my cards face up on the table. "Victorian" is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons. At a visceral level, I'm suspicious of the period fetishism it can connote, whether this be flaunted in the bric-a-brac of a Masterpiece Theater interior, or in sing-along performances of music-hall songs, or in the retro-marketing of sepia street scenes: none of these exercise any nostalgic tug on me. Indeed, I am profoundly glad not to have been Victorian. But there are two more compelling intellectual reasons for my discomfort with the term. First, I share with Sharon Marcus the view that it poses significant limitations when it comes to discussing the dynamics of transnational cultures, whether we are thinking about transatlantic relations, about the operations of empire, or about the increasingly global exchange in ideas as well as in economic capital. The very term "Victorian" carries with it an unmistakable national, and nationalist, overtone. Writing about the "Victorian" Loyalty Islands—as Talia Schaffer shows Charlotte Yonge to have been doing over a couple of decades—is (to offer an obvious example) only one possible perspective on colonial projects in Melanesia during the nineteenth century. And second, and this is reflected in both Anderson's and Lauren Goodlad's essays, the length of a reign—even the years of a century— provides at best only the most tenuous of containers for intellectual and social movements that spill beyond it, let alone for the disciplinary problems to which such unreflective periodization gives rise.

So am I advocating a jettisoning of the term "Victorian"? In one very strategic, pragmatic way, yes: as one of the boundary lines drawn by MLA field listings, it stands as an impediment, particularly for our graduate students, to the understanding and conceptualization of transnational issues. Yet without it, if we are not ready to give up on Jamesonian historicizing imperatives—and I, for one, am not—we are thrown back either on a century-ism perhaps even more arbitrary and restrictive (in that it suggests calendar dates rather than implied mind-sets), or on some kind of foregrounding of broad movements. Moving in on "the modern"—as a counterpart to the useful baggy monster signaled by "early modern"—is one option in this latter mode. But it may not be plural enough.

For me, the importance of our period lies in the extent to which it is still contiguous, in many recognizable ways, with the formation of our own world and in the development, which it witnessed, of a number of different modernities—modernities that, as both Anderson and Goodlad ably demonstrate, draw from eighteenth-century projects and evolve into twentieth-century values and imperatives. Anderson's employment of the "two modernities" thesis, however, troubles me somewhat. And my hesitation with such a thesis doesn't stem, as might be expected, from my understanding of a work like Alfred Tennyson's Maud (1855), in which the collision of the two complicates the neatness with which any such distinction may be made, if only because the poem's tortured protagonist seems torn by both modernities at once. In other words, following the terms of Robert Pippin's Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1991), my issue is not so much with the fact that I fail to recognize the broad distinctions between a rationalist, philosophic/political post- Enlightenment ethos (albeit a self-divided one), on the one hand, and a more self-conscious, autonomous self-authorization on the other. Rather, my issue...