Medieval Max and Zuleika Dobson

Medieval Max and Zuleika Dobson By Michael Murphy Brooklyn College, CUNY An uneasy feeling exists among critics that Zuleika Dobson is not really a novel, though no other satisfactory word has been offered in its place, as far as I know. The characters in Zuleika Dobson are indeed as stagey and stiff, the plot as unbelievable as the critics say.1 Zuleika often talks in a very stilted way, and though Beerbohm makes a self-referential joke of this at one point, it does not really change the fact that Zuleika talks like a book, or at least like someone that has read a great many more than the two "reference works" that comprise her entire library, so that she is on a conversational level with the Warden of Judas or the over-talented and over-educated Duke. Novels with much pretense to "realism" attempt to avoid this sort of inconsistency . It is clear the Beerbohm is well aware of the incongruity, but not very concerned, presumably because he is not pretending to write a realistic novel. Now look at the subtitle: "An Oxford Love Story." There is no love in this story; no lust even. The whole thing is quite passionless. In fact, there is far more passion in a Shakespeare sonnet than in the whole of Zuleika Dobson. Indeed the opening words of sonnet 129 (with a tiny variant) might serve as a subheading for the book: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust inaction." All these healthy young men are willing to die for love, but not as an Elizabethan hero might "die," expending his manhood in a surge of lust, even if he agonizes afterwards in a fire of remorse. The "love" that destroys a townful of youngsters could only occur in Oxford where almost the whole town is made up of semi-cloistered young men whose idea of heterosexual love is not from the heart or loins but only from the head—cerebral, if that is the right word; though "bookish" might be better. They are in love with the Idea of Love, and healthy sexuality is notably absent. At the moment when the Duke of Dorset almost achieves a tremor of active lust, the object of desire herself dumps a jug of cold water upon him, and effectively douses any fire in those precincts. She wants not to be desired, but enjoys and exploits the fact that she is unutterably desirable; the would-be Lover must remain eternally the youth of the Grecian Um: "O lover, lover, never canst thou kiss. . ." And yet this is Oxford, alive and young. But this Oxford is also very old, medieval. Or rather, it is unreal, like the locus of action in medieval romances, which did not represent medieval society very well either. Nobody works here, except perhaps the only plebeian student in sight, poor old Noaks who is there only for the grotesque contrast he provides, a gargoyle between the graceful Gothic arches. The Oxford of Zuleika 303 Murphy: Medieval Max Dobson is not a real town with real people. It is an insecure amalgam of two conflicting medieval ideals: the romantic and the monastic. It is a cross between an upper-class monastery and a medieval castle, each with its lovely enclosed garden. The primordial garden of the romantic tradition is portrayed in the Romance of the Rose. Like this garden, Oxford is full of privileged young men of the knightly class who resemble their medieval counterparts: they have little to do but play aristocratic outdoor games. They joust on the river with lances, wide-bladed, but unlike their medieval predecessors they cannot play the indoor games of love duets or dance carolles. There are no women to disturb their passions. For in its mentality as well as in its architecture and landscape Oxford has partially realized another medieval image, this time the image dear to the minds of the celibate scholars who gave birth to the place: the "hortus conclusus," the enclosed garden conducive to peace, study and contemplation, a monastic ideal that has had a long vogue as far from Oxford as the "seminaries" of nineteenth-century New England. The...