Masking the Text: Essays on Literature & Mediation in the 1890s (review)

This book collects four essays on Oscar Wilde and six more about Michael Field's Sight and Song (1892), the anthologies produced by the Rhymers Club in 1892 and 1894, the poetry of George Meredith, the art of Aubrey Beardsley, James McNeill Whistler's The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), and William Morris's Kelmscott Press. While versions of seven of these have been previously published, their revised appearance in a single volume with three fresh chapters and an introduction offers to scholars of fin-de-siècle aestheticism an important expansion of the argument made in the author's well-received Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books (2000). There Frankel argued that Wilde's aesthetic theories were most potently embodied in books that deliberately compromised their own literary status as indexed by language alone. Rather than simply being the author of texts, Frankel's Wilde is a collaborative maker of books, the creator and co-creator of material objects that have crucial nonverbal characteristics in addition to the conventional typographic elements that convey linguistic gestures. In Masking the Text Frankel uses the same theoretical framework—primarily based on the social text theories of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann—to show how other "writers and artists of the 1890s both confronted and exploited art's inseparability from the physical media in which we encounter it" (22).

The first chapter is a strategic bid to establish the primal scene of Wilde studies as Frankel is convinced they ought to be practiced. Dedicated readers of Wilde and his age are invited to acknowledge an ongoing debt to Christopher Millard, author of the Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (1914) and an avid collector of Wildeana—much of it nonliterary ephemera—that is now preserved in the Clark Library at UCLA. Paralleling Millard's attention to bibliographic minutiae and the bibliomania and passion for collecting attributed to the fictional Dorian Gray, Frankel composes a scholarly parable about the different attachments and aversions of bibliographers and critics. Frankel obviously endorses Millard's attention to the physical details of Wilde's writings, but he also recalls a critical tradition that is skeptical of this commitment to appearances and material surfaces, one that comes, so the contrary line of thought goes, with a corresponding loss of appreciation for the more enduring lessons of literature. The remaining essays are born in a principled rejection of the idea that the form of a book is incidental to its deeper meaning.

"Incarnating the Poetry of Painting: On Verse as Art-Object in Michael Field's Sight and Song" offers a stunning reading of that volume and its authors' ambitions to compose a series of depersonalized lyric poems that "objectively incarnate" the music embodied in certain paintings (Field qtd. in Frankel 63). This chapter, like most others, insists on reading all aspects of the book under inspection, including spines, covers, endpapers, title pages, and blank spaces. And even though Sight and Song is not illustrated in the conventional sense, it is shown to warrant the visual attention courted by the age's better-known illustrated and decorated books such as Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891), the various projects embellished by Beardsley, and the works produced by the Kelmscott Press. To these more familiar topics (all discussed in the present volume), Frankel adds a chapter that points the way to appreciating George Meredith as a poet eager "to demonstrate that all experience is properly speaking 'environmental' and that poetry is especially well suited to enlivening us to the tissue of a world embodied in its concrete sounds and verbal rhythms" (133). Seeking to clinch his argument with a reading of The Nature Poems of George Meredith (1898), a book featuring landscapes by William Hyde, Frankel is eager to document how one might rigorously and physically encounter a multimedia object produced by a network, not an individual. In the chapter on A House of Pomegranates, described as an...