The Sexual Politics of Urban Life

BOOK REVIEWS the world of London society the underworld of whites on whom Gray finally takes vengeance in Dantean fashion. The free expression of repressed ambitions is signified in Park's rapid rise in the Church hierarchy, from prisoner to landed aristocrat without his "superiors" ever learning his origins: the wish-fulfillment of a Cockney lad turned "decadent" turned Canon. Yet with all Gray's references—collected helpfully in McCormack's notes—to his "deep ['anthropological'] interest in the black man" and his confessions that "although he was a white man he was black inside," the story cannot be reduced to either a personal story of unworthiness or corruption, a satire on the Church, or a psychodrama of racism and domination. This collection offers unusually intimate access to an articulate mind of the time, its daily activities, and its larger world. In one of his more charming aesthetic pieces, on the relation of walking to consciousness, Gray writes of the ideal walking companion: "You could walk to the gallows with lots of men with whom you could not walk on Exmoor. The companions must not be too much interested in one another; they must have a common object, not a mutual." The Selected Prose of John Gray offers the kind of access to another that one might get on a long walk: some scattered views on the state of the world, some hint or slippage of personal vulnerability or ecstacy. Reading Gray reminds us of Wilde's judgment that it is only the minor poets who are really interesting. Regenia Gagnier ________________ Stanford University The Sexual Politics of Urban Life Judith R. Walkowitz. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. xiv + 353pp. Cloth $35.00 Paper $15.95 THE 1988 CENTENNIAL of the "Jack the Ripper" murders brought forth yet another heap of slavering retellings, new solutions, recycled gossip, and lurid exposés. Needless to say, City of Dreadful Delight by historian Judith Walkowitz is not one of them. She does, however, make a significant contribution towards understanding the continued resonance of a century-old unsolved crime. Her argument is that the journalistic response to "Jack the Ripper" originated the vocabulary—the language, images and concepts—for discussing sex crimes, serial killing, and the unconsciously imbibed "knowledge" that all women have about urban danger, dark streets, late hours, and the approach of strangers. 351 ELT 36:3 1993 The Ripper story, which forms only one chapter of a richly detailed book, is fully located amid the feminist and sexual debates of London in the 1880s. The book's interest for literary scholars is enhanced by Walkowitz's perception of history as a narrative with fictive qualities, which makes use of symbols, allegories, characterizations, connotations and subtexts in creating the "facts." Thus she applies techniques of discourse analysis and literary interpretation to the primary sources deployed by historians in addition to furnishing information about historical events and public consciousness that we can use to contextualize our study of literature written in the decades surrounding the turn of the century. While the subject of Jack the Ripper and the narratives constructed to depict and explain the five unsolved crimes of murder and sexual mutilation committed on women in or near Whitechapel during ten weeks of 1888 supplies the rationale for City of Dreadful Delight, only the penultimate chapter is directly about the Ripper crimes. Walkowitz begins by analyzing the urban scene and its dwellers. The prevailing mental map of the city as a public space freely occupied by urbane males, she proposes, destabilized in the 1880s. Respectable women claimed space in the urban landscape: they shopped in the new department stores, came to work as typists and telephonists, ate at teashops, visited museums and libraries, used public transportation. The contention over the Contagious Diseases Acts (repealed in 1886) made prostitutes' presence visible, even to the formerly sheltered; and despite the presence of "respectable" women, the old social/sexual reading of the female on a public street remained potent. Even women who defensively adopted ultra-restrained clothing and manners found themselves vulnerable to harassment from men of their own and other classes...