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Quarreling with the Father
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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Quarreling with the Father Questions of authorization of the individual subject in the Victorian age have been haunting me for a long time: particularly while studying latenineteenth -century fiction I have repeatedly been struck by the peculiar position of the individual situated at a historical junction when, on the one hand, he or she appears to be fully legitimized, and on the other the scope for individuality to develop and achieve self-realization seems to be shrinking (Villa ). Indeed, the pressure of cultural and economic imperatives that enjoin social conformity, and the curbing of the most pronounced aspects of self-assertion by means of internalized norms rather than by an appeal to outmoded notions of authority based on hierarchy and coercion, played a crucial role in the very same democratic transformation of British society that, at the same time, stood for freedom from traditional constraints. Full democratization was indeed a long way off in the s, when the young Robert Louis Stevenson started his literary career, but there is no doubt that to avant-garde writers of the late Victorian generation the perplexities generated by such contradictory imperatives were part and parcel of their experience of modernity. Given the nature of social and cultural trends that authorized a vertiginous unmooring of the self from well-established conformities and social pieties while enforcing new measures for the standardized containment of individual subjects, it is no surprise that many imaginative writers among those placed, like Stevenson , on this turbulent border of modernity reacted to such a veritable Scotland and the South Seas double bind by developing and expressing a degree of ambivalence toward social transformation. In view of such conceptual premises, it was perhaps inevitable that the one critical contribution to the father-son relationship in Stevenson that I found most helpful in tackling my subject should be Steven Mintz’s chapter on the Stevensons in his valuable book on the Victorian family. Mintz—who is an historian—has little to say as to Stevenson’s literary production, but his reading of the biographical material provides an invaluable framework for any reassessment of Stevenson’s fictional harping on fathers and father substitutes. The problems faced by the Stevensons in working through the intergenerational transition are, to Mintz, fairly typical of their social class at the time: the field of religion, for instance— apparently free from “base and selfish motives” (Mintz : )—was often subconsciously chosen by the Victorians as a comparatively “safe” arena onto which to displace and disguise more personal and thorny bones of contention; mild consequences of the bitter and soul-rending crises between son and father were far from uncommon, and such domestic quarrels hardly ever resulted in radical breaks within Victorian families . And with compromise more common than ultimate disruption, such rebellions seem to have been a somewhat standardized element in the son’s negotiation of a degree of personal independence compatible with the reassertion of intergenerational continuities. One of the most interesting points made by Mintz, however, has to do with ambivalent attitudes toward economic and professional success. According to Mintz, the erosion of the ideological-religious basis of the patriarchal family implied that paternal authority was increasingly “rooted in emotional bonds and money” (Mintz : ). This in turn called for new complex ways of establishing the son’s capacity for (economic and emotional) independence while preserving his allegiance to the family and its values. On the one hand, the very pressure put by Victorian fathers on their sons—to pursue an economically rewarding profession—clashed with their desire to secure their children’s emotional subordination. On the other hand, the sons’ desire to achieve professional success, though perfectly in line with the bourgeois expectations of their fathers, was ultimately guilt-ridden since the very same achievement of economic independence was bound to weaken domestic bonds. Thus Stevenson’s qualms about his own intense, meretricious interest in cash (as in his famous letter to Gosse: “We are whores . . . whores of the mind, selling to the public the amusements of our fireside as the whore sells the pleasures of her bed,” [54.166.200.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:40 GMT) Ltrs : ) are both a reflex of the late-Victorian man of letters’ unease at the mass-marketability of his books, and a consequence of his own con- flictual quest for financial and moral independence. There was at least one further reason for Stevenson’s ambivalent attitude toward the erosion of the father’s authority, which...