Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel (review)

Timothy Carens's Outlandish English Subjects in the Victorian Domestic Novel joins a growing discussion over the impact of the imperial enterprise on Victorian domestic culture. The author uses the term "outlandish" in a more literal sense than is usual: the "outlandish character" who makes an appearance in the domestic novel represents colonial otherness, whether by coming to stand for savagery in need of civilization or by representing an untamable cultural exteriority that cannot be appropriated to English social conventions without destabilizing them. Carens's point is by now a relatively familiar one: the "outlander" serves an ambiguous role, encouraging the cementing of cultural boundaries, yet simultaneously rendering those boundaries permeable by his very ability to cross them. Invoking Sigmund Freud's notion of "the uncanny" as a touchstone, Carens argues that "the uncanny" other "offers an effective theoretical approach to Victorian imperial discourses because it not only recognizes the construction of differences that serve to define Englishness and justify empire, but also explains its ambivalent uncertainty" (3). In other words, in admitting colonial otherness as a tool of satirical analysis applied to the domestic scene, Victorian fiction writers cannot prevent its troubling presence from calling attention to, in Carens's words, "the problems that admit the necessity of using it" (20).

Carens offers extended readings of a somewhat unusual group of well-known novels—Wuthering Heights (1847), Jane Eyre (1847), Bleak House (1852–53), The Moonstone (1868), The Egoist (1879)—and a lesser-known work by George Meredith, Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894). Wuthering Heights would seem to lend itself most easily to discussion in Carens's terms, dominated as its narrative is by the destabilizing/stabilizing force of the gypsy child/English landlord Heathcliff. Carens indeed sets his discussion appropriately in a complex historical context riddled with the often conflicting claims of Evangelical missionary discourse, an emerging evolutionary anthropology, and Victorian race theory. Discussing the symbolism of "Juggernaut roles" in Jane Eyre and The Egoist, for instance, Carens aligns contemporary anthropological discussion of savagery's subsistence under the thin veneer of civilization (most famously expressed in E. B. Tylor's "doctrine of survivals") with British fascination with the spectacle of devout Hindus crushed under the wheels of a giant car, the Juggernaut. Carens then convincingly traces how both Charlotte Brontë and Meredith exploit the critical possibilities of the metaphor in their novels' indictments of conventional patriarchy.

In connecting contemporary discourse on empire with domestic fiction, Carens resorts to a schematic interpretation of the fiction. While he acutely notes that Jane Eyre thematizes female "prostration" before patriarchal authority in a way that makes Jane resemble a "heathen" tempted by Juggernaut, this interpretation leaves out an important element: the novel's insistence on the pleasures of submission. In emphasizing how the novel dramatizes the dangers of power, Carens loses sight of the fact that the novel is also in love with it. Indeed, one might argue that Jane Eyre equates love with submission to power (hence the uneasy compromises of the ending, with Jane returning to a blind Rochester who then miraculously regains his sight, almost as if Brontë cannot decide whether to castrate him or not because she wants him to remain both "manly" and reduced). Emphasizing the novel's ambivalence about submission would have reinforced Carens's overall point by identifying the novel as a peculiar cultural artifact that powerfully manipulates its readers rhetorically, conditioning them to accept Jane's ambivalence and thus the appeal of submission to a higher power in spite of her willingness to speak forthrightly against self-suppression. It is hard to understand the nature of Helen Burns's sway over Jane if one does not see her as appealing to the pleasures that submission brings but doing so in terms of conventional—if highly martyr-like—Christianity. This is an instance in which a conventional distinction between Western and Other is suspended. Without a more acute psychological analysis of the...