Gothic Manners

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 another or from the larger interlocking context of technique. Taken together, the fifteen essays in this enlarged volume provide one of the most useful general introductions to James's work yet written. Philip Sicker Fordham University GOTHIC MANNERS Joseph Wiesenfarth. Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988. $27.50 IN HIS LATEST CONTRIBUTION to the academic study of the English novel, Joseph Wiesenfarth proposes a radically new theory of the novel's development but fails to provide it with an adequate argumentative workout. Instead of attempting to convince the reader of the truth of his theory by tackling head-on all those examples that appear to pose difficulties for it, he chooses to discuss only those eight novels, each by a different novelist, which "mark for me the clearest examples of my argument" (x). The purpose of the book seems to be therefore the unambitious one of creating a clear picture of the theory in the mind of the reader. What Wiesenfarth ought not to have forgotten is that every reader has clear mental pictures of many ideas or doctrines (such as "the world is flat") that he or she believes to be false. In any event, Wiesenfarth's theory is a dialectical one in which "the novel of manners" (Austen, Trollope) and "the new Gothic novel" (E. Brontë, Dickens) converge as thesis and antithesis to produce "the novel of Gothic manners" (Eliot, James, Hardy, Ford) as synthesis. When the twain converge for once and all—and they do so, according to Wiesenfarth, in the writing of Middlemarch—the Gothic element of "horror" disappears and its place is taken by a parallel element from the novel of manners, gauche behavior or bad manners. In other words, horrifyingly bad manners, which were a source of amusement as well as moral concern in Austen and Trollope, now perform in the previously unknown novelistic genre the function that horror itself used to perform in Brontë and Dickens. The clearest of the four examples of the new genre that Wiesenfarth presents is Parade's End, and the essay on Ford is far and away the best of the eight essays that, together with a brief introduction and conclusion, make up the book. As Wiesenfarth moves rapidly and skillfully through a tetralogy of 836 pages, the reader sees that Ford's eye, like Austen's, is on manners and yet feels the horror that certain 524 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 kinds of life-denying social conduct can generate in the soul of the Christ-like hero, Christopher Tietjens. Ford puts such conduct on display in the famous scene of the Duchemins' elegant breakfast party in Some Do Not (1924): the bad manners of the obviously deranged host seem positively benign when compared with the horrifying manners of his guests who ignore his shouted obscenities in order to continue eating and chatting. Here, as Wiesenfarth observes with absolute correctness, the reader beholds "the tradition of manners meeting the tradition of horrors head on" (166). Unfortunately, the essay on Hardy does almost as much to blur the meaning of "the novel of Gothic manners" as the essay on Ford does to clarify it. Presumably because Hardy's eye, unlike Austen's and Ford's, is not on manners, Wiesenfarth shifts the meaning of Gothic manners from "bad behavior or conduct" to "the customs, folkways, or moral code of the Germanic peoples in the Middle Ages." The Gothic manners that here oppose the hero's progress toward his goal are not what is said and done at a social gathering but rather the "consciousness," the "mind and heart" (146) of the society in which Jude Fawley lives. This redefinition Wiesenfarth takes as sufficient warrant for introducing a fairly elaborate analysis of John Ruskin's ideas about Gothic architecture (156-59). The pseudo-logic at work here seems to be that, since the city of Christminster embodies the spirit of the hostile manners that block Jude at every turn, the style of architecture in which most of the older structures in that city were built must be hostile also. Looked at in this weird light...