Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets by Helen Davies (review)

Helen Davies’s Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets isn’t about the kind of ventriloquism that the casual reader might imagine: there are, in her book, very few dummies, bowties, or moments of groan-inducing banter between performers and grimacing wooden puppets. Rather, the book explores the interconnected dynamics of gender, power, and voice as they are manifested in both nineteenth-century and contemporary neo-Victorian novels that feature ventriloquists of various kinds. Davies aims to complicate our understanding of ventriloquism both as a practice and a metaphor, and to “position the ventriloquial metaphor as a focal point for negotiating the politics of neo-Victorian literature” (6). She notes that for much of its history ventriloquism was a practice that involved a “crucial uncertainty as to the origin of voice,” as manifested in the practice’s earliest incarnations, where the displaced voice often seemed to inhabit not a dummy but a living subject (such as a priestess of the Delphic oracle, a participant in a nineteenth-century séance, or an audience member in an early stage performance) (7, original emphasis). Davies argues that this “state of being ‘ventriloquized[,]’ of having the voice suppressed or appropriated by external forces[,] repeatedly manifests as a feminized condition” (22). This expanded understanding of how a gendered, ambiguous ventriloquism operated in the nineteenth century is important for her employment of the term as metaphor: it becomes, in her text, a way of encapsulating the ways that voice (and all that it implies in terms of autonomy, power, and subjectivity) was—and still is—variously imposed, claimed, and taken away in relationships between fictional Victorian men and women and between Victorian novelists and their contemporary counterparts.

Davies reads Victorian texts that feature ventriloquists (Henry James’s The Bostonians [1886], Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Or the Transformation [1798], Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox [1840], The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891] and De Profundis [1905] by Oscar Wilde) alongside contemporary neo-Victorian novels (Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus [1984]; Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace [1996]; Janice Galloway’s Clara [2002]; Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet [1998], Affinity [1999], and Fingersmith [2002]; A. S. Byatt’s Possession [1991]; Kathe Koja’s Under the Poppy [2010]; and Misfortune [2005] and By George [2009] by Wesley Stace). Ventriloquism, she argues, is both a recurring trope in these texts and a metaphor for the predicament that neo-Victorian authors find (or, indeed, place) themselves in, simultaneously occupying the positions of both ventriloquist and ventriloquized. On the one hand, these authors give voice to “subjects who have been largely absent from the traditional master discourse of history”; on the other, their reliance on nineteenth-century literary forms means that they risk being spoken through by the vestigial voices of the Victorians. As Davies puts it, “even as certain neo-Victorian texts are apparently rebelliously ‘talking back’ to the Victorian era and literary production, they also—in varying degrees—emulate and are indebted to the cultural artefacts of this historical period” (3).

The possibility of using their own forms to perform a genuinely subversive “talking back” to the Victorians is a major preoccupation of Davies’s book, but her articulation of the influence of the nineteenth century on the present moment via this rather Oedipal model can seem rather restrictive: the ventriloquial metaphor, as Davies employs it, characterizes our relationship with the Victorians as a fraught tug-of-war in which voice is handed down by the ancestor and either uncritically reproduced or subversively wrested away by the descendant, who, as Davies puts it, “might challenge the patriarchal, heteronormative, Eurocentric discourse of history,” but “might also repeat it” (6). Such a characterization might prompt us to ask: do we really have this kind of unfinished business with our nineteenth-century forebears? Do they exercise such power over our...