Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

The year's most important book specifically on the subject of Victorian poetry is surely W. David Shaw's Origins of the Monologue: The Hidden God, which I reviewed at greater length in an earlier issue of Victorian Poetry. The "hidden God" of Shaw's title is "the God of 19th-century agnostic theology, the Kantian God of Sir William Hamilton, H. L. Mansel, and T. H. Huxley," and Shaw's study is designed to "show how the author of dramatic monologues is created in the image of this Protean God, a magician of negative capability." As Shaw rightly points out, his "book is the first to trace the rise of the monologue to the dangerous legacy of agnostic theology, and the first to link the enigmatic poet behind the masks to nineteenth-century theories of Socrates' agnostos theos or unknown God" (p. 3).

Despite the definite pronoun given to the unknown God, however, Shaw's approach to the dramatic monologue does not find its origins in a single Victorian discourse, but in a rather complex blend of discourses, including Victorian Romanticism, especially the legacies of Coleridge's "conversation poems" and Keats's "negative capability," and in Victorian classicism, as well as in post-Kantian philosophy and "agnostic theology." Consequently Shaw does not offer a single heuristic approach to Victorian monologues, but approaches them from a variety of angles. He is particularly good, I think, in discussions of how the dramatic monologue differs from monologue in plays, in his readings of casuistical monologues, in his characteristically erudite representation of the multitudinousness of the Victorian culture informing the monologue, and of the subversive challenge to Victorian ideals enabled by the monologue form. As usual in Shaw's criticism, the general arguments are invariably supported by careful, intricate, utterly persuasive readings of poems ranging from the inescapable "My Last Duchess," "Andrea del Sarto," and "St. Simeon Stylites" to little-known poems by such lesser luminaries as Edward Thomas. Though Shaw's emphasis is squarely on the Victorian period, he also sees the monologue as a genre extending back to Chaucer and forward to Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell, and his close readings include brilliant analyses of such works as Lowell's "The Mills of the Kavanaughs," Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo," and even the Earl of Rochester's "Upon Leaving His Mistress." Ultimately, Shaw's argument is too complex and multifaceted to attempt a monolithic theory of the monologue, but it fruitfully complicates our understanding of the genre, and in the process provides a rich harvest of original and suggestive readings.

Women and British Aestheticism, a collection of essays edited by Kathy Psomiades and Talia Schaffer, "aims to demonstrate that women's participation in aestheticism was widespread, significant, and controversial and that recognizing this participation will reshape our views of both aestheticism and the history of women's writing" (p. 1). The collection, given more coherence than most such collections by the editorial framing and especially by the references of various essays to one another, admirably achieves its aim. Part of the strength of the collection is that it views aestheticism broadly as a cultural phenomenon extending beyond the high literary sphere and into the affairs of everyday life. The result, a revision of gender assumptions separating "masculine" high art from "feminine"management of daily life, enables important essays on Gertrude Jekyll's garden writing by Barbara Gates and on the politics of pigments and fabric dyes in painting and fashion by Alison Matthews. In addition, the collection includes a number of fine essays on uncanonical novels and poetry by largely forgotten novelists, such as Ella Hepworth Dixon and Ella D'Arcy, who, Margaret Stetz convincingly demonstrates, attempted in their novels to offer an "'inside' critique" (p. 31) of aestheticism that would "rescue women themselves from the consequences of an exoticized and demonized vision of female sexuality that had established itself as a cliché in aesthetic literature" (p. 31...