Joyce and the Victorians (review)

Tracey Teets Schwarze's Joyce and the Victorians examines various stories, chapters, and sections from James Joyce's main works, and Stephen Hero (1944), in the context of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She does not read Joyce as a Victorian or attempt to situate him beside Charles Dickens or the Brontës. Her objectives are not "literary" in that way. She offers no coherent interpretation of Ulysses (1922), for example, or Dubliners (1914). Such textual explication would work against her main goal of connecting specific moments of cultural history to the worlds Joyce invents. Always historicizing, and nearly always theorizing, Schwarze explores a number of cultural conditions—especially those that fall under the rubrics of colonialism, religion, or gender—in minute, Joycean detail, taking into account the perpetual but sometimes subtle shifting of attitudes and ideologies in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ireland and England. Joyce, she suggests, creates or recreates characters to match the dominant and emerging social identities of the day in much the same way that he carefully produces the physical geography of Dublin in Ulysses. Building on the work of recent scholars such as Cheryl Kerr and Robert Spoo, and dismissing the older criticism that saw Joyce create archetypal essences, she argues that Joyce constructs narratives which "expose the pervasive influence of ideological structures on subjectivity and illuminate the fissures contained within social discourse itself" (4). The rub is that a consciousness of ideology and its shaping power does not free the Joycean subject from Victorian or Edwardian nets. Schwarze excavates popular expressions of nationhood, masculinity, domesticity, self-help, social reform, and femininity from a wide assortment of contemporary media and then reads Joyce as inscribing his characters within those discourses. Though the characters may become conscious of these prevailing forces, they enact the ideologies (and reflect the modernist crisis of identity) by failing to resist them. Joyce and the Victorians is a magnificently coherent, researched, nuanced, and energetic contribution to Joyce studies. It is a welcome book.

Each of Schwarze's seven chapters begins by introducing a specific Victorian peculiarity or habit, such as the conspicuous diligence of nineteenth-century reformers of "vice" or the equally conspicuous energy that led to the advent of muscular Christianity. Some of these cultural idiosyncrasies are fascinating in themselves, and Schwarze's documentation of the "male pest" and her insights into the growing contradictions in Victorian motherhood imagery could profitably be brought into discussions of a number of writers other than Joyce. The originality and specificity of her research does not reflect a New Historicist agenda as much as it simply demonstrates tireless digging in new places. Schwarze then introduces a close reading of a short story from Dubliners, or a section on Ulysses, to illuminate the cultural influences subtending the motivations and behaviors of Joyce's characters. There is also a very fruitful comparison between Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15). It best brings out Schwarze's argument regarding internalizations. Whereas the Stephen of the first draft becomes aware of social, intellectual, religious, and artistic impediments only to emancipate himself through Romantic assertions of self, the later Stephen, attempting the same break, has all of his flights ironically grounded. Schwarze reads Joyce as maturing beyond what Stanley Fish in "Comments from Outside Economics" has called "anti Foundational theory hope" (Arjo Klamer, Donald McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow, eds. The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric. [Cambridge UP, 1988]: 27), the idea that being cognizant of our foundations (or of foundational theory) leads to freedom from those foundations. She also shifts emphasis away from the Stephen who denounces but ultimately is trapped in intellectual and artistic conventions to subtler and perhaps more restrictive social determinations. But she always convincingly traces those social discourses, no matter how subtle, to concrete characters or events in Joyce's texts.

The theoretical strength of the book, however, the consistency of Schwarze's argument...