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  • Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction by Francesco Marroni
  • Laura Green (bio)
Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction, by Francesco Marroni; pp. 241. Rome: John Cabot University Press; Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010, $35.00.

The world of the Victorian literati was a small one. Of the two generations of novelists discussed in Victorian Disharmonies, for example, Charles Dickens was the publisher of Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell, as well as being a friend of and collaborator with Collins; George Gissing and Thomas Hardy became friends, and both were admirers of [End Page 553] Dickens. As Franco Moretti and other critics interested in the digital analysis of text have argued, critics have tended to reproduce and even exaggerate the insularity of this literary field, with our focus on a relatively small number of authors in relation to the number who were, over the course of the nineteenth century, published and read. The title and subtitle of Francesco Marroni’s study suggest that he will consider a wider literary field. The impression, however, is misleading. Marroni’s focus is on the small group of Victorian novelists mentioned, and his burden is thematic. He argues that “the Victorians felt continually besieged by the specter of disharmony and, in response to this dominant fear, transformed their lives into a tireless search for order”—a search whose difficulty the authors in Marroni’s study confront (11).

The “disharmony” to which Victorian culture responded so strongly includes, as laid out in Marroni’s introductory chapter, such familiar instigators of unease as disorderly crowds and revolutionary movements; the lengthening of geological time and the growth of evolutionary science; and the democratization of the cultural and political fields, particularly with regard to gender and class. In Marroni’s first chapter, on Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the French Revolution and its crowds become not a historical example but rather a metaphorical instance of social disharmony, giving dramatic form to a larger struggle between good and evil: “Dickens assumes the French Revolution as a pre-text to provide his readers with a verbal representation of disharmony as an enactment of Evil” (51–52). History similarly provides a backdrop for this Manichaean struggle in Gaskell’s gothic tale, Lois the Witch (1859), discussed in chapter 4. Lois the Witch takes place in Puritan, witch-hunting Salem, where “the trope of the crowd as a dangerous class does not open up a historic vision but is often merely a background to accentuate the solitude of characters who are exposed to the temptations of Evil” (121). For both Dickens and Gaskell, historical events offer the occasion for parables of (overwhelming) disharmony countered by (limited) order, but history itself does not promise or necessarily evince a coming triumph of social harmony.

Gender is the more specific axis of disharmony in three chapters centered on victimized women: in Collins’s novel The Dead Secret (1857) (serialized by Dickens in Household Words); in Gaskell’s novella Cousin Phillis (1863–64); and in her supernatural tales. Both Collins and Gaskell depict tragic conflicts occurring “in a culture that is not ready to accept the forces of change, especially if they involve an open-minded and progressive approach to the sphere of femininity” (119). The works discussed in the final two chapters, Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897) and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), while also invoking “the contradictions and complexity of the marriage theme” (179), push beyond it to represent the breakdown of Victorian cultural harmony in toto: “In the end,” Marroni writes, Jude and Sue “realize that the coordinates within which to seek their harmonious convergences no longer exist: what exists is solely a void from which voices arise declaring their condemnation without appeal” (187).

Marroni, the head of the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies at the Gabriele d’Annunzio University of Pescara-Chieti (Italy), has translated and edited his study from the original Italian. The approach is that of structuralist narratology; for the English or American reader, at least, Marroni’s vocabulary, with its “lexeme[s]” (15), “narrative nuclei” (138), and heavily hyphenated formulations (“a linguistic-structural and epistemic-cultural...

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