A Drama in Muslin: George Moore's Victorian Novel

211 A DRAMA IN MUSLIN: GEORGE MOORE'S VICTORIAN NOVEL By Judith Mitchell (University of Alberta) A. Norman Jeffares has described George Moore's A Drama In Muslin (1886) as "unreasonably neglected."·1- This is indeed the case; Moore's third novel is known, if at all, for its "Irish-ness" (ably discussed by Jeffares himself) and for its "Huysmanesque" style (particularly in the "correspondances" passages borrowed almost directly from A Rebours). In view of the latter, and considering Moore's reputation as a somewhat rabid French-influenced realist, it is perhaps astonishing to discover that the predominant impression the novel makes on the reader is overwhelmingly Victorian. From the very first scene, with its "white dresses ... [fluttering] through the verdurous vistas like the snowy plumage of a hundred doves" and "the sunlight glancing along the little white legs, proudly and charmingly advanced,"3 the whole conception of the novel echoes the typical Victorian "society" novel. There is not a single plot, but several: the novel follows the fortunes of five of the young ladies who, in the opening scene, are just leaving the convent, and parallel to these events are the political fortunes of the Irish Land League, Briefly, the plain heroine of the novel, Alice Barton, along with her beautifui sister Olive, the angelic Violet Scully and the sensual May Gould, all go with their mothers to Dublin for the "season" and attend the Lord-Lieutenant's "Drawing-Room" in order to try to find husbands for themselves. The fortunes of these young women in the marriage-market, and particularly those of Alice, constitute the main events of the plot. Olive and Violet, the belles of the season, vie for the attentions of the "little Marquis," Lord Kilcarney. He falls in love with Violet, whereupon Olive attempts to elope with Captain Hibbert, her former suitor. May becomes pregnant by the disreputable Fred Scully, who then deserts her. Cecilia Cullen, the other conventgirl , is a hunchback and never enters the marriage-market at all. Instead she becomes fanatically religious and finally re-enters the convent as a nun. In contrast to these upper-class social concerns is the plight of the poverty-stricken tenants, who refuse to pay their rents and threaten the landlords with violence. Alice observes all of these things and draws her own conclusions from them, finally rejecting both the marriage-market and the Irish upper class by marrying a country doctor and moving to middle-class Kensington, where she pursues a writing career. It can be seen from even this sketchy outline that A Drama in Muslin is nothing like the typically bleak Naturalist novel, and even less like the cynical Symbolist 4 Rebours. Its chief preoccupations - love, courtship and the marital fortunes of young ladies - are the preoccupations of Trollope, Meredith and Jane Austen rather than Zola or Huysmans . In this paper I would like to examine two elements in particular which help to give the novel its Victorian flavour: the narrator (including his relationship to the reader and to Alice, the'main character) and, briefly, the novel's "moral" or overall message. 212 To begin with, what J. Hillis Miller calls the "determining principle" of the form of nineteenth century fiction, the omniscient narrator, is very much in evidence. Unlike the effaced, almost perfectly neutral narrator in A Mummer's Wife or the flippant, worldly narrator in A Modern T,over, the narrator in A Drama in Muslin freely theorizes, comments on the events, speaks directly to the reader, and is strongly biased in favour of the main character. The point of view, while it is predominantly Alice's, is shifted at various points to Mrs. Barton, Olive, the Marquis, and even momentarily to minor characters such as May and Cecilia . On the very first page of the novel, the narrator directly addresses the reader in describing one of the girls: "You see her at the end of a gravel-walk, examining the flower she has just picked . . ." (p. 1, my italics). This form of address (with variants, such as "let us look") occurs at several other points in the novei as well, usually as a distancing device when the narrator wants to...