Remaking Victoria

Book Reviews Remaking Victoria Remaking Queen Victoria. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xiii + 279 pp. Cloth $59.95 Paper $19.95 "REMAKING" here seems to mean a feminist refashioning of the queen as symbol and sovereign. In the nature of such collections, the thirteen wildly disparate essays range from subtle to silly, from fact to fantasy. The editors' own introduction is, inadvertently, an implicit warning. "Sir Robert Martin, author of the six-volume authorized biography of the Prince Consort"—this on the second page—is actually Sir Theodore Martin, author of the five-volume biography. A later book of his is then quoted from, and cited in the volume's bibliography, but the quotation is actually taken from Lytton Strachey, who may be reliable here but was too lazy to go to the library and invented what he didn't have handy. Later a contributor writes, invoking Strachey, "It was for Albert to supply this want [of material expression to Victorianism]. He mused, and was inspired: the Great Exhibition came into his head." The siUiness of seriously accepting such rot boggles the mind. "As a widow," the editors claim on the next page of their preface, Victoria "maintained her monarchy by making a spectacle of her absence," a striking paradox if true, but the actuality was that her failure to fulfil her queenly duties in her first decade as a widow created powerful antimonarchical agitation and was the despair of her prime ministers, one of whom, Disraeli, finally got her back to such work as remained to her. When the editors begin summarizing the thirteen essays, to conflate them into a theoretical unity, language collapses into jargon or other forms of near-meaninglessness. The aim of this collective appraisal of Victoria, it appears, is to "'remake' her diffuseness into a series of apprehensible and legible moments." One contributor, we learn, will discuss the "constitution of nineteenth-century American nationalism. ..." (I spare her identity.) Another contributor, writing largely about Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, who met Victoria once, describes, the editors' claim, Liliuokalani's "copying Victoria's glamorous excesses"—perhaps the first time that glamour has been associated with the queen, who 453 ELT 41 : 4 1998 made a virtue of dowdiness. We are to be prepared for an essay on Kipling 's "insubordinate invocation" of the image of Victoria as widow—certainly a stretching of the adjective. We are to learn about Victoria's "role as peacemaker during the [American] Civil War"—which in reality consisted entirely of rewriting in her own hand Prince Albert's memorandum modifying her government's ultimatum on the Trent affair in 1861. Victoria even becomes (as a carrier of hemophilia) "the imagined cause of European disputes" years after her death. Works happily not anthologized but referred to nevertheless include a piece of journalism that survived for a day on Victoria as "a bastard," on grounds that the Duke of Kent "knew he was sterile and wished to produce an heir to the throne by any means." The royal record shows his payment for support of an illegitimate daughter, the wild oats of his earlier years. Another work referred to is an iUustrated life "coauthored" by the Duchess of York, who "claims a 'psychic link' to Queen Victoria"—the only possible link she could have. Even her coauthorship is suspect, but she has proven despite her marital separation to be an effective pitchwoman . With that as a start, one has little hope for the contributions themselves , and indeed the first essayist quotes without understanding a line that the birth of the Prince of Wales—Victoria's second child—created "two cradles between the Crown of England and the White Horse of Hanover."The reference was to the Duke of Cumberland, the queen's uncle , who was also king of Hanover and an aspirant for her crown. The essay , on Victoria and "Englishness," dismisses the term Victorian, which means, "on a closer acquaintance, to be simply nineteenth century, or merely European"—this quoted approvingly from a 1962 essay by G. M. Young. However the author, basing her thinking on a 1987 work by Richard Stein, then traces the "popularization of...