The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (review)

The volumes in the Cambridge Companion series do not usually provoke questions of audience. With their elegant formats, rosters of up-to-the-minute scholars, and helpful, intelligent contributions, they are usually well designed for the fairly homogenous group of readers at which they are aimed: undergraduates supplementing a class; colleagues reviewing a topic or author; academic readers interested in the way particular critics approached their assignments. This one, however, did raise such questions. It caused me to wonder, for instance, whether the reader who needs to be informed by Deirdre David's introduction that the Victorians moved in large numbers from the country to the city could possibly be the same reader who, according to Jeff Nunokawa, knows "by heart" the novels' "promise of romance" as surely as he or she has "forgotten the details of their plots" (125). I wondered how a student learning the details of Victorian publishing from Simon Eliot would evaluate the overlapping information in Kate Flint's immediately preceding essay on readership. I was puzzled by the frequent discussions of Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, sometimes offered with the anxious implication that the Victorian novel is noteworthy chiefly for its anticipation of the more explicitly self-conscious aesthetic of modernism. I doubted Linda Shires's assertion that the fractured text of Wuthering Heights (1847) was the most useful choice for illustrating the relationship between ideology and aesthetics in Victorian fiction (given the prior need to demonstrate the way ideological disjunctions inflect the apparent seamlessness of the "classic realist" novel), as well as her hyperbolic claim that Daniel Deronda (1876) questions "the very nature of the self" (73) simply because it contains both "flat" characters and complex ones. Then I asked myself whether these last questions were, in fact, questions about audience, and I decided that they were, given that David's introduction clearly addresses someone other than the professional student of literature—someone, too, other than the reader who will nod knowingly at Nunokawa's allusions to song lyrics of the 1930s.

These allusions, along with Nunokawa's deliberate use of cliché, bear the stylistic burden of his interrogation of the status of the already-known, an interrogation toward which his essay gestures in numerous ways: "For those familiar with the course of Victorian fiction" (126); "Even the many who have never read the novel" (127); "only those who have read the novel" (138)—or, more quizzically, "novels like David Copperfield (1850) and Jane Eyre" (134)—or, in a tangle that reads like a Jeopardy question, "the famous predisposition of a sophisticated song writer whose best-known lesson in love teaches the greater glory of the birds and the bees" (134). To the essay's first sentence, which echoes Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (1976), is appended the needlessly needling note: "Those familiar with it will recognize [...]" (147). Nunokawa means to highlight the extent to which the sexual story the Victorian novel overtly tells has been so thoroughly assimilated as to seem natural, so that the critic can demonstrate, as he skillfully does, "how [sexuality] is described and organized" (126). But as they elicit approving inner nods from those who adore the lyrics of Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, these insistent invocations of those-who-already-know define the investment of the Victorian novel and its critics in what Joseph Litvak calls the class politics of sophistication: define it, that is, as a discourse in which only the initiated can participate. As, for instance, the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) successfully shows, however, Victorian fiction was in its own time hardly so exclusive. If it is today—if the "many" know the plot but have never read the book—that fact should be grist for this volume's mill, since as David points out in her introduction, the genre itself invites consideration...