Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity: Inviting Extreme Reactions

WORDS SUCH AS "hate" and "love" should have no place in a review of an academic book; ordinarily, only more judicious and measured responses belong there. Wendy Graham's Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity, however, deliberately invites extreme reactions. In fact, one of the pleasures of reading it is the chance to indulge in both angry and admiring dialogue with its author, and I confess that I tremendously enjoyed doing so. My copy of the text is densely filled with scribbled marginalia: questions both rhetorical and real, corrections, additions of missing information, expressions of chagrin over dismissive asides, and also enthusiastic exclamations such as "Fascinating interpretation!" and "Very nice!"

Graham's is by no means the standard, objective-seeming scholarly work that usually issues from a university press, and I commend Columbia University Press for not editing out its lively character. This is an apostate's take on the Pre-Raphaelites, designed to irritate the communities that now worship them, but also to challenge those devotees to revise their sense of how that reverential attitude came about and of what got lost (and suppressed) along the way. Because it positions itself outside the mainstream of PRB studies, it remains to be seen how influential this volume will prove in the long run. Graham is more concerned anyway with the immediate act of shaking up the status quo. She succeeds mightily in that project, gleefully giving offense and doing so self-consciously as a political strategy in the service of emphasizing not only what she sees as the male Pre-Raphaelites' ardent homophilia, but their panicked homophobia—contradictions that led, in particular, to their embrace of the gay painter, Simeon Solomon, and then to his banishment from their circle. If there is a hero in this study, it is he.

Among potential sources of the audience's mixed dismay and delight is Graham's choice of language, which is colloquial, spicy, vigorous, and also sometimes downright insulting toward figures of the past. As Graham makes clear from the outset, the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were, in her view, a commercially minded "clique" (xiv) obsessed with establishing their "brand" (xiv), who created "paintings made to measure for nouveau riche clients" (xii), while cultivating "lackeys" (xiv) in the world of journalism in order to promote their image of avant-garde "masculine genius" (xiv). For her, "Pre-Raphaelitism was a middle-class art made for and by … the bourgeoisie" (4), and the main villain of the bunch, with their "ballyhooed charismatic personalities and outlier lifestyles" (242), was D. G. Rossetti. The "pied piper of the PRB" (140), he hypocritically crafted "the appearance of being grandly indifferent to fame," while "cynically or neurotically, actively or passively, ensur[ing] … that his reputation was burnished in the Victorian print media" (18) by devoted "minions" (138). But the PRBs are not the sole recipients here of acid putdowns, for Wordsworth is called the "Listerine of poets" and Walter Scott "the Castoria of novelists" (198). Still, such entertaining, if cruel, formulations are more memorable than Graham's attempts at academic (Freudian) verbiage, a style that does not come as naturally to her: as she writes a propos of a Victorian contemporary's comments on the critic Robert Buchanan, "I read this perseverative ideation as a sentinel of the repressive apparatus, obscuring more untoward associations" (192). (Here, the marginal note in my copy is "Ouch!")

ELT readers will probably find most interesting and useful the sections of Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity that treat Aestheticism and the reception of the PRBs by later Victorians. Her final chapter, for instance, offers a striking analysis of Henry James's response to Swinburne, where she claims that "James's derisive remarks about Swinburne partook of the queer sensibility and camp humor he"—meaning James—"is accused of reviling" (236), for James actually "envied Swinburne his clear conscience and self-indulgence" (236). Framing this volume throughout, however, is Graham's greater concern with Oscar Wilde...