Racial Representations 1875-1945

BOOK REVIEWS to receive Communion at their hands." In 1883, during his annual retreat, Joseph Feeney, S. J., states that Hopkins "found himself bothered by 'old and terribly afflicting' memories" and that his rector concluded that "Father Gerard Hopkins may, at any time, go stark-staring mad." In his final years, according to one account, "most" of the Irish Jesuits considered him "more or less crazy." The most startling assertions , as usual, come from Norman White who informs us, in his essay on Hopkins and Yeats, that Hopkins "was attracted sexuaUy by his own bare feet" and that when he was in his 40*8, a friend of Katherine Tynan's thought he was "only about fifteen." Many of the other authors make connections between Hopkins and others rather than directly between Hopkins and themselves. Hopkins is related to Augustine by James Finn Cotter; to Scotus (vs. Thomas Aquinas) by David Walhout; to Wordsworth by Peter Milward, S. J.; to Tennyson (vs. Keats) by Jude Nixon; to Dante Rossetti by Francis Fennell; to Richard Watson Dixon by Todd Bender; to the Victorian linguist W. D. Whitney (vs. Max Müller) and to the Decadents (vs. the Pre-RaphaeUtes) by Linda Ray Pratt; to the second phase of the Oxford Movement by Michael AUsopp; to Whitman by Carla Valley; and to modern English, Irish, and American poets by Desmond Egan. Many important connections are made that change the direction of Hopkins criticism, though none as radical as David Downes's. Jerome Bump ______________ University of Texas at Austin Racial Representations 1875-1945 Bryan Cheyette. Constructions of 'the Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xvi + 301 pp. $54.95 BRYAN CHEYETTE'S Constructions of "the Jew' in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 is an articulate, comprehensive, scholarly examination of the "extent to which racethinking about Jews" was "a key ingredient in the emerging cultural identity of modern Britain." Focusing on English Uterary culture between Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) and T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Cheyette locates "Semitic racial representations at the centre of Uterary production and more widespread social and political discourses." Cheyette is careful to distinguish his study from earlier ones in the field, when he writes, 397 ELT 38:3 1995 Instead of a colonial or genocidal history of racism and antisemitism, this book is at pains to show the way in which racialized constructions of Jews and other "races" were at the heart of domestic liberalism. Unlike other studies of pre-war literary antisemitism," which mistakenly foreground the Holocaust, my approach is to stress the enlightened expectation that a superior "culture" can modernize and civilize even "the Jew." My aim is to understand the question of racial representations in terms of a dominant liberalism and not as an aberrant or exotic phenomenon that is, by definition, outside of mainstream society. Cheyette successfully achieves his goal in chapters devoted to the works of Matthew Arnold, Anthony TroUope, and George Eliot; John Buchan and Rudyard Kipling; George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells; Hilaire BeUoc and G. K. Chesterton; James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Cheyette's claim is that there is no single dominant representation of "the Jew" from decade to decade and from author to author; rather, he argues that Semitic representations are "indeterminate" and "fluid" during this period—that Jews are depicted in an "incommensurable" number of ways that "traverse a range of contradictory" subject positions . "Jews," he writes, are represented as both the embodiment of liberal progress and as the vestiges of an outdated medievalism; as a bastion of empire and one of the threats to empire; as prefiguring a socialist world state and as a key force preventing its development; as the ideal economic man and the degenerate plutocrat par excellence; as the modern alienated artist and the incarnation of a corrupt worldliness. For this reason Cheyette embraces the term "semitic discourse* to characterize not a "fixed, mythic stereotype" but an ever-shifting representation of "the Jew" in the literature of the period. Arnold's influential definition of "culture"—"as an erasure of the...