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Victorian Studies 43.2 (2001) 314-315



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Book Review

Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy


Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy, by Sophie Gilmartin; pp. xiii + 281. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, £37.50, $59.95.

The word "pedigree" derives from the old French pied de gru (crane's foot) and it is this finely branching pattern that forms the dominant metaphor for ancestry and narrative in Sophie Gilmartin's study of blood relations. In this work, the tribulations of too many tributaries provoke confusion: bloodlines branch out too far and too finely until it is nearly impossible to discern patterns of descent authoritatively. These too fine divisions also mirror the problems of the multi-plot novel: plots and subplots split into dangerously diminutive and potentially upstart offshoots, and such branches, twigs, and twiglets threaten to usurp primacy and upset claims in narrative forms as in ancestral contests.

Overturning many truisms about "race" and national identity, Gilmartin makes a compelling argument for the ways in which Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Jewish Britons, because of their ostensibly superior claims to longevity and nobility, have been imagined and represented as potential benefactors of the younger English project of ancestry. The superlative longevity of Irish lineage makes for an interesting problem in the first chapter. Irish oral genealogies make longer historical claims than do English written ones and thereby threaten to trump English self-conceptions of historical antecedence. This greater antiquity of lineage is self-servingly problematized in the English literary imagination. In her discussion of Maria Edgeworth's The Absentee (1812), Gilmartin points out that "tracing the family line back so far that it ceases to be 'civilized,' or at least human" may produce a "sense of alarm at the spatial infinitude of the pedigree" (19). A long pedigree at some point precedes the possibility of nobility: English pedigrees are just long enough in this regard; Irish ones overstep the limit. More damagingly, the English dismiss Irish claims as unreliable because based on oral tradition. In Gilmartin's reading, Edgeworth recuperates Irish orality and actually deploys it as one of the important terms that determines Irishness: "sense versus sensibility, written versus oral, rational versus irrational" (52) are the "traditional" binaries used to distinguish nationality and written into place by the novel. The novel "intend[s] to present the best formula for an amicable political and cultural union" (52) while avoiding any overly intimate marital metaphors of union that might threaten the contamination of English identity. This interesting discussion would have benefitted enormously had Gilmartin engaged theoretical work on orality and colonialism.

Queen Victoria's notorious love of things tartan is read brilliantly in the second chapter. Gilmartin traces this ethnic love to Victoria's identification with Mary Stuart, whom she actually imitated in many details of dress, because Mary represented a "matriarchal line of royal women" from which a "genealogy of women was constructed by Victoria and by Victorian women in general" (56). Gilmartin traces this genealogy from Walter Scott's The Abbot (1820) to Charlotte Yonge's Unknown to History (1882). This chapter argues that a nineteenth-century idea of Mary Stuart was used to construct Victoria as fulfilling two related genealogical roles: she was both "successor of a ruling dynasty" and mother, "this latter role [being] itself divided between propagator of dynasty and maternal woman" (68).

Particularly challenging and evocative, the chapter on Benjamin Disraeli swiftly debunks the idea of Disraeli as an unalloyed proponent of a middle-class meritocracy. Instead of a tortured Disraeli struggling to compensate for his Jewishness, Gilmartin argues for a Disraeli who "seems to be explaining to an unenlightened English population that the Jews [End Page 314] should be looked to as a source of racial inspiration and 'natural aristocracy'" (104). This argument is nicely complicated by Gilmartin's additional point that Disraeli himself deeply undermines the idea of "natural aristocracy," perhaps most incisively in the character of Baptist Hatton, the...

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