The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain

2. THE AUTHORESS'S TALE: The Triumph of Journalism in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography

2 the Authoress’s tale The Triumph of Journalism in Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography For this reason it is important to know the possible generic sources of a given author, the literary and generic atmosphere in which his creative work was realized. The more complete and concrete our knowledge of an artist’s generic contacts, the deeper can we penetrate the peculiar features of his generic form and the more correctly can we understand the interrelationship, within it, of tradition and innovation. mikhail bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics In her recent review essay on new books about Harriet Martineau, scholar Deirdre David is positive, but pensive. Something is missing in the available accounts of this remarkable Victorian woman of letters, she writes; of the four books she reviews, “none deals quite fully enough with that aspect of her work for which the definitive reading of Martineau would need to account: she was first, last, and always a writer, regardless of what she was writingabout”(“GeorgeEliot’s‘Trump’”88).DavidissurelyrightthatHarriet Martineau was “first, last and always” a writer, and that a definitive reading of her career will so see her. But there may be good reason the book David hopes for has not yet been written. For modern readers, Martineau the writer is a more puzzling and less sympathetic figure than Martineau the feminist who advocated women’s education and opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts, the sociologist who analyzed racial and gender oppression in the United States, the successful and independent professional woman, or the political writer whose leading articles in the Daily News during the U.S. Civil War countered The Authoress’s Tale 47 the pro-South prejudices of the London Times and, according to W. E. Forster , “alone kept public opinion on the right side” (quoted in Arbuckle xii). While Martineau’s positions on women’s issues, class issues, and international politics now seem mostly admirable, many of her statements about the theory and practice of writing are difficult even to quote or reference without seeming to intend ridicule. Martineau is a theorist of composition whose Autobiography, composed and printed in 1855 but not published until 1877, asserts that revision is an unmixed evil for both style and substance (“Great mischief arises from the notion that botching in the second place will compensate for carelessness in the first” [Autobiography 114]1), and a novelist who both declares it impossible on principle for a human being to create a plot (“A mind which can do this must be, in the nature of things, a prophetic mind, in the strictest sense; and no human mind is that” [189]) and tells of declining in high dudgeon a publisher’s request that she would write a serial story because of the impossibility—again, on principle—for serial fiction to succeed as art (“Whatever other merits it may have, a work of fiction cannot possibly be good in an artistic sense which can be cut up into portions of an arbitrary length” [409]). There is an unfortunate touch of Lady Bracknell in these wrongheaded categorical declarations that make them painful reading for admirers of Martineau’s career as one of the first and greatest Victorian women of letters. It is probably not surprising, then, that Martineau’s pronouncements on writing are often passed over by scholars with the discretion appropriate to a great author’s quirks, and that commentators have tacitly agreed to ignore (or silently amend) some of her most problematic texts about writing. But in this chapter I am going to suggest that well-intended discretion may have helped to hide some of the data we most need to account for Harriet Martineau’s literary career. Martineau’s pronouncements about writing in her Autobiography , even the apparently absurd ones—especially the apparently absurd ones—show integrity and consistency to a particular set of beliefs and view of writing that were at a peak of cultural influence in the year of the work’s composition , 1855. Critics have not yet found a fully successful key to Martineau’s career as a whole in her own psychology, in her quasi-feminist politics, in her gender or in her culture, and in this chapter I will suggest that this may be because its real mainspring may have been, as Deirdre David has suggested, 48 The Authoress’s Tale in her relationship to discourse itself. If the key to Harriet Martineau’s...