George Moore's Quest for Canonization and Esther Waters as Female Helpmate

GeorgeMoore byA.E.(GeorgeRussell)1900 From Private Collection of Edwin Gilcher George Moore's Quest for Canonization and Esther Waters as Female Helpmate Molly Youngkin Ohio State University IN THE INTRODUCTION to George Moore on Parnassus, the collection of letters from the last portion of Moore's life, Helmut Gerber draws attention to Moore's quest for canonization with the following anecdote . In 1912, after publishing two volumes of his magnum opus autobiographical work Hail and Farewell (1911-1913), Moore wrote a letter to Edouard Dujardin celebrating its success, saying "I am a little nearer the summit of Parnassus," a statement Gerber believes Moore could write with at least "some justice."1 By 1900, Moore was fairly wellestablished in the literary world and had moved into a period in which he could capitalize on his achievements, of which Esther Waters, the story of a servant raising her illegitimate child in a society that ostracizes her for her fallen status, was one success. In adopting the mythical Parnassus as a symbol for the struggle authors face, Moore painted a picture of himself as one who had struggled to write good literature and, as a result, was finally a step closer to achieving the status of a great artist . He used the Parnassus image on a fairly regular basis to describe his hopes for literary success, and, in doing so, he evoked an image linked to a strong masculinist past, since Apollo is associated with the passage from youth into manhood, especially through the role of warrior and poet.2 Moore's use of the image of Apollo on the summit of Mount Parnassus suggests that he saw himself as part of a tradition of male authorship that could be traced back to the ancients, but a shorter yet equally significant tradition of male authorship was also at work at the end of the nineteenth century. In the late-Victorian period, novelists such as Moore, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, George Meredith, and others were working within a tradition of British male authorship that was approximately 150 years old, traceable to the early male novelists of the 117 ELT 46 : 2 2003 eighteenth century, especially Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Daniel Defoe. This tradition has been analyzed most notably in Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957), and it has been the subject of revision by a number of critics interested in the development of the novel.3 While these critics have shown that the British novel can be traced back much farther than the mid-eighteenth century, late-Victorian authors often saw their own work as growing out of the Richardson tradition. For example, Moore's autobiographical Confessions of a Young Man (1888) details his immersion in English literature upon his return to London from Paris in the early 1880s, and, as Moore's career matured, he would become increasingly interested in the history of English literature. This increasing interest in authorship and canon issues as Moore's career progressed is evidenced by articles such as "Some Characteristics of English Fiction" (1900), in which Moore lays out his own interpretation of the history of English literature, and "An Imaginary Conversation: Gosse and Moore" (1918-1919), a two-part essay in which Moore, with Gosse's assistance, tells the story of the development of the novel.4 Nevertheless, while late-Victorian authors such as Moore viewed their work as part of this shorter British masculinist tradition, the debate over authorship in the late-nineteenth century is hardly so straightforward. Influenced by several ideas—a more than century-long battle over the "gender of the novel," the flourishing of the fallen woman novel across the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the heyday of the New Woman novel in the 1890s—male authors at the fin de siècle participated in a literary marketplace where the terms "feminine" and "masculine" were central to authors' perceptions about their own work and their expectations about authorship for all writers of the period.5 Moore—with his complex feelings about the relationship between men and women and his love for the genre of autobiography and use of it as a performative art—is an...