Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (review)

Popular conceptions of the Victorian wedding night and honeymoon frequently turn on assumptions about sexual ignorance and its conversion to sudden, terrible knowledge. One widely circulated story of John Ruskin's ill-fated wedding night, for example, is that he was so unfamiliar with the ordinary adult female body that he was shocked to find his wife not quite as smooth and hairless as the classical statuary he admired. The marriage was later annulled. Another well-known story is that of John Walter Cross, who, while on his honeymoon journey in Venice, threw himself from a balcony into the Grand Canal below. He had recently married George Eliot, then sixty years old and twenty years his senior. If women were advised to lie back and think of England, according to another popular stereotype, men appear less prepared for stoicism in the face of unpleasant realities and more aghast at the revelations of honeymoon intimacy. One of the laudable aims of Helena Michie's book is to subject such assumptions about honeymoons to scrutiny and to dispel some of their unfounded number.

Victorian Honeymoons takes as its subject both the literal journey of the Victorian wedding tour and the metaphoric journey of identity transformation it inaugurated—a socially significant shift from individual to couple. It is also, importantly, an account of a scholar's journey, similarly literal and metaphoric. We follow Michie on combined research and vacation trips to Europe and the United Kingdom, with her family in tow while she unearths family histories in sometimes remote corners of Wales. Engaged as it is with the diaries and letters of newly married Victorian men and women, Victorian Honeymoons is at times Michie's diary-like account of her encounters with cases and the way in which her raw material forms the basis for explorations and conclusions. Her journey is thus also that of the literary scholar confronting and making sense of a delineated historical archive. Michie is far less concerned to settle questions than to keep alive their potential to disturb both what we think we know about Victorian wedding nights and honeymoons and, more broadly, the way we arrive at knowledge about this historical phenomenon.

Questions of epistemology animate the book in several ways as michie selfconsciously asks what we can know of Victorian wedding nights and uncovers the different ways that literary critics and historians approach texts and pose questions. She extends the focus on epistemology to fictional texts as well as diaries and letters. A brilliant chapter on fictional honeymoons explores the wedding night and honeymoon journey as an epistemological crisis, carnal knowledge carrying a heavy freight of knowing beyond the sexual. As an initiation into family secrets, incarceration, danger, and death, Victorian honeymoons in Middlemarch (1871-72), Daniel Deronda (1876), The Prime Minister (1875-76), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and other novels function as textual moments of epistemological emergency and are often figured in highly Gothicized terms. I could not help wishing there were further chapters like this one.

Perhaps the most unusual chapter, "Capturing Martha" is Michie's own neo-Victorian honeymoon narrative. She first offers a transcription of one Martha Rolls Macready's diary and then, with obvious enjoyment and freedom, rewrites it as a novelistic exploration of Martha's husband's "low spirits." While the extant diary and letters remain frustratingly opaque on the question of dear Edward's depression, Michie's skilled and compelling reconstruction offers the pleasures and consolations of fiction: imagined knowledge and, albeit poignant and painful, a resolution of the mystery. Her narrative is, needless to say, much more satisfying than the transcribed diary.

Suggesting that her methods differ from those of the historian in that she is prepared to read unconscious as well as conscious motive and latent as well as manifest content, Michie is scrupulously self-reflective about her theoretical moves. Nevertheless, readers looking for straightforward historical claims based on sufficient evidence might argue that Michie has made...