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  • Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature
  • Todd Starkweather
Carolyn W. De La Oulton. Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. 168 pp.

In Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature, Carolyn W. De La Oulton sets up her study against the backdrop of the large body of Victorian scholarship produced within feminist and gay and lesbian studies. The necessity that compelled Oulton to initially situate a study of romantic friendship amongst the critical works of Martha Vicinus, Lilian Faderman, and Eve Sedgwick might seem obvious to contemporary scholars. Yet Oulton wants to challenge that necessity and [End Page 372] (re)consider romantic friendship as a phenomenon that is more fluid and dynamic than unstated, pre-Freudian homoerotic desire.

Divided into five chapters, aside from the introduction and conclusion, Oulton’s study deftly situates the variants of romantic friendships located in all forms of Victorian literature. Indeed, I found the clear, tight organization of the book one of its strengths. Chapter 1, “Ennobling Genius: Writing Victorian Romantic Friendship,” provides an overview of where and in what modes romantic friendship occurred. Oulton scans an array of texts, both fiction and nonfiction, that contribute to and complicate notions of romantic friendship in an effort to create a narrative of how such relationships developed into strictly same-sex affairs, though not sexual affairs, and then how those relationships were represented by Victorian satirists and, eventually, seen through the prism of the Fin de Siecle. Rather than having two or three central texts at the heart of its examination, “Ennobling Genius” sets up the progression of how the rest of following four chapters situate their subjects, textual and theoretical.

Given the copious amount of critical attention that male relationships have received in Victorian literature, Oulton wisely begins her second chapter, “Extraordinary Reserve: The Problem of Male Friendship,” by focusing on romantic friendships among boys and men. She rightly asserts, at the start of the chapter, that “romantic friendship among young men in the nineteenth century is associated largely with institutions of which it was a tradition, namely the major public schools and Oxford and Cambridge Universities” (33). Thomas Hughes and his Tom Brown novels, of course, get mentioned in the chapter’s initial pages, yet the chapter focuses on three immensely divergent texts that have little to do with public schooling or university life: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Oulton soundly synthesizes and synchronizes this immense poem and the two vastly different novels and draws intriguing conclusions about how male romantic friendships “stress the sense of control or influence exerted by the object of passionate friendship” (69).

Chapter 3, “A Right to Your Intimacy: The Ends of Female Friendship,” logically picks up with romantic female friendship as its subject. While asserting differences in how female and male romantic friendships are represented, Oulton notes that such relationships among women were not “so uniformly different from their male counterparts. In fact, a number of similar conventions govern the pattern of male and female relations before the final years of the century” (72). Indeed, one of the more promising contributions that Romantic Friendship in Victorian Literature makes is in how it demonstrates that the conventions of romantic friendship among both sexes shared similar traits and were subject to larger trends in Victorian life and society. “A Right to Your [End Page 373] Intimacy” takes on a greater number of texts to form its core subject and, as the preceding chapter does, combines both poetry and a wide range of fiction. Oulton almost turns the initial half of her book into a study on romantic friendship in Dickens by again privileging one of his novels in chapter 3. I initially greeted her assertions about the romantic friendship between Esther Summerson and Ada Clare in Bleak House with skepticism. Yet, Oulton, through a careful reading of selected passages, makes a convincing case that the relationship between the two is far more fraught with rivalries and tension than many have previously considered.

As Oulton transitions into her final two chapters, devoted to how romantic friendship was satirized, mostly by Thackeray, and how its representation became even more...

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