Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature (review)

Caroline W. de la L. Oulton's project is an ambitious one: to examine the representation of male and female romantic friendships in Victorian literature while challenging the perception that such romantic friendship was merely a screen for or displacement of "what we would now term homosexual or lesbian feeling" (1). In her introduction, Oulton announces that "long before the upsurge of gay and lesbian studies, the nineteenth century itself had hosted a long-running debate about the nature and role of friendship in its own right" (1). Yet despite this attempt to distinguish her approach from queer theory, Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature remains haunted by the persistent emergence of erotic feeling in the literary friendships she discusses. Ultimately, this study does less to prove that romantic friendship was a distinctive phenomenon from homosexual desire and more to show the inextricable connection between them.

One of the disappointing features of Oulton's study is that it appears so often unaware of the critical literature on romantic friendship, especially in the arena of queer theory. This shortcoming is particularly noticeable in her chapter on male friendship, in which she discusses the David-Steerforth relationship in David Copperfield (1850–51) without considering the groundbreaking chapter in D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988) or Mary Poovey's important analysis in Uneven Developments (1988). Further, her discussion of romantic friendship in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850) shows no awareness of Christopher Craft's important reading of the poetics of homoerotic desire in Another Kind of Love (1994). Such omissions create the impression that the "gay and lesbian studies" she invokes early on is a straw man or woman, lacking in specificity.

Oulton is on surer ground in her treatment of female romantic friendships, perhaps because there have been fewer influential readings of novels such as Ethel Arnold's Platonics (1894) or Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage (1899). Indeed, Oulton deserves credit for bringing these interesting and neglected fin-de-siècle novels back into the critical spectrum. The strongest features of Oulton's argument emerge when she considers the aspects of friendship that were unconventional or transgressive. For example, the prevailing view that such romantic friendship is a preparation for marriage, and "its centrality . . . usually displaced only by the inevitable love plot" (7), is backed up by readings of novels such as David Copperfield (in which the romantic friendship with Steerforth is supplanted by marriage to Agnes) and poems such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857) (in which the heroine's friendship with Marian Erle is eventually displaced by her marriage to Romney). Oulton's discussion of Aurora Leigh also reveals the class transgressions of the poem, which features a romantic friendship that crosses class boundaries.

Oulton is willing, however, to entertain exceptions to this pattern of friendship trumped by marriage, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) where the marriage is destroyed and the romantic friendship between Robert Audley and George Talboys remains intact. Yet Oulton's strongest reading of an individual novel is surely that of Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866), in which the "conflict between romantic love and friendship" (124) is resolved very differently than in Charles Dickens's works: in Armadale, "male friendship is shown to be ultimately more durable than heterosexual involvement, as Lydia [Gwilt] is redeemed by dying in place of her husband at the right moment" (125). Oulton's argument piques the reader's interest when she addresses the conflict, rivalry, and jealousy that inform both male and female friendships, disrupting the saccharine tendencies of the Victorians to portray same-sex friendship as a pre-sexual Eden. Notable in this respect is Oulton's discussion of Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) in which she explores the latent hostility in Esther's friendship with Ada, in which "Ada is withheld from the offices of self-sacrificing friendship that would justify Esther's representation of her as the...