"The Jew" as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby, and Dreyfus

Originally published serially in Harper's from January to August 1894, George Du Maurier's Trilby is regarded as one of the most financially successful and popular novels of its day. Yet, contemporary cultural-literacy about the idiomatic name Svengali aside, until very recently the novel remained less than notable as a key historical artifact, especially in terms of its position as an important site of representations of "the degenerate effeminized Jew" of nineteenth century gender/racial discourse. Trilby was in fact only reissued by an American press as late as 1994, and only this edition includes, for the first time in its publishing history, an introduction reviewing the relationship between the text's ideological implications to the antisemitic discourse of its day. And yet, as is well established, Trilby was a publishing phenomenon of unequaled parallel; it received press attention throughout the year of its serialization, and over the following years spawned a plethora of dramas, spoofs, musicals, artwork, and consumer kitsch, all of which ultimately formed a spectacle of publicity unrivaled to that date in American publishing history. Although the novel was often regarded as "a nineteenth-century fairy tale for men and women," it nonetheless eventually became a prototype for the modern bestseller--the contemporary scramble for film and advertising rights of which was perhaps unseen until the explosion of publicity that surrounded Du Maurier's work. ¹ Yet, despite its turn-of-the-century notoriety, post-structural discussions of the text still often vie with a general lack of interest in its historical role, especially from within the growing fold of Jewish Cultural Studies. ²

Encouragingly, however, a renewed interest in the novel has grown over the past few years. Daniel Pick's above-mentioned introduction, as well as his recently published study, Svengali's Web, argue rightly that Trilby "hesitates between elitism and egalitarianism, amateurism and professionalism; between enthusiasm and horror of the marketplace in general and the merchandising of talents in particular; between popularization and vulgarization. . . . [It] instances the ambiguity of the relationship between popular, mass and elite culture as well as science across the period." ³ In his larger work, Pick addresses in detail the antisemitic culture that informs both the whole of the novel's narrative and its overwhelming popularity, but he nonetheless argues that Du Maurier's pop interpretation of the era's fascination with the unconscious, hypnotism, and personal influence remains just as essential to the work's unforeseen influence as to its contemporary historical significance. Recognizing that Du Maurier was not an overt antisemite (but, rather, a sentimentalist, liberal, Francophile, and comic cartoon-ist), Pick reminds us that "Svengali was meant to be viewed with amusement . . . but nonetheless was a joke with a twist." In this vein, "the peculiar intensity and enduring appeal" of the figure was a product of Du Maurier's singular stroke of genius in linking "the theme of mesmeric entrapment with persistent anxieties about the penetrating psychological powers of the Jews." ⁴

Pick devotes an entire chapter to the popularity of Victorian mesmeric narratives, and he associates the "sexual charge" at the heart of Trilby as potentializing the nineteenth-century attraction/repulsion to "sexual confusion and moral violation." ⁵ Obviously valid, the point must also be set in the context of Trilby's much greater success as compared to other tales exploiting Victorian repression, whether they made use of the popularity of hypnotism or not. In this manner, Pick's emphasis of the novel's unique imbrication of mesmerism, sexual power, the music hall, and "the Jew" becomes somewhat hesitant, especially in the face of authorial commentary throughout the novel pertaining to the subterranean, destructive powers of both "Jewishness" and "the Jew." Pick recognizes Anglo-American liberal ambivalence toward Jews as essential to the novel's significance but does not confront fully how the work positions the myth of Aryan dominance and the...