Sex and Death in Victorian Literature Edited by Regina Barreca Assista11t Professor of E11glislz U11iversity of Colllzecficut, Storrs ~ MACMILlAN
«>Regina Barreca 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-46727-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1990 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sex and death in Victorian literature I. English literature, 1837-1900. Special themes. Sex relations - Critical studies 2. English literature, 1837-1900. Special themes. Death - Critical studies I. Barreca, Regina 820.9'353 ISBN 978-1-349-10282-2 ISBN 978-1-349-10280-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10280-8 8 7 6 5 4 02 01 00 99 98 3 97 96
Contents Notes on the Contributors vii 1 Introduction: Coming and Going in Victorian Literature Regina Barreca 1 2 'You did not come': Absence, Death and Eroticism in Tess James Kincaid 9 3 Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophiles and Necrofilles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction Robert Tracy 32 4 Tennyson's Sword: From 'Mungo the American' to Idylls of the King Gerhard Joseph 60 5 'Beckoning Death': Daniel De ronda and the Plotting of a Reading Garrett Stewart 69 6 Against Completion: Ruskin's Drama of Dream, Lateness and Loss Mary Ann Caws 107 7 Controlling Death and Sex: Magnification v. the Rhetoric of Rules in Dickens and Thackeray Carol Hanbery MacKay 120 8 Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism Regenia Gagnier 140 v
vi Contents 9 The Plot of the Beautiful Ignoramus: Ruth and the Tradition of the Fallen Woman Hilary Schor 158 10 'Death-in-Love': Rossetti and the Victorian Journey Back to Dante Robert Zweig 178 11 Death and Sex from Tennyson's Early Poetry to In Memoriam Sylvia Manning 194 12 The Double Death of Eurydice: A Discussion of Browning and Mythology Robert Steiner 211 13 The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights Regina Barreca 227 14 Dialogue with the Dead: The Deceased Beloved as Muse Elisabeth Bronfen 241 Index 260
Notes on the Contributors Regina Barreca is author of Punch Lines: Comedy and Subversion in Women's Writing. She is editor of Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy and editor of the critical journal LIT. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Elisabeth Bronfen is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Munich. She is the author of a book on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson and is currently writing a book on the representations of feminine death. Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, French and English at the Graduate School of City University of New York. Among her many books on poetics and contemporary writing are The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction, and most recently, The Art of Interference: Stressed Reading in Visual and Verbal Texts. Regenia Gagnier, author of Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, is completing a study of subjectivity, value and the uses of literacy in the lifewriting of Victorian working-class, public and boarding school, and canonical literary subjects. She is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. Gerhard Joseph is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He is author of Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal and various articles on nineteenth-century and medieval subjects. He is currently working on another book, Tennyson and Silence. James Kincaid is the author of books on Dickens, Tennyson, Trollope, and of several editions. He is now Aerol Arnold Professor at the University of Southern California. He is completing a study on Victorian pedophilia. Carol Hanbery MacKay, Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, is author of Soliloquy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and editor of Dramatic Dickens. She has written several articles
viii Notes on the Contributors on Ann Thackeray Ritchie as well as the critical introduction to The Two Thackerays. Her major work in progress is a study of Victorian novelists as thwarted dramatists. Sylvia Manning is author of Dickens as Satirist and Images of the City: London in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century British Literature. She has written on Dickens, Tennyson, Thackeray, and other Victorian authors. She is a Professor of English and Vice-Provost of the University of Southern California. Hilary Schor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. The author of several reviews and articles on Victorian literature, she has completed a book on Elizabeth Gaskell, and is at work on a study of female narrative in the novels of Charles Dickens. Robert Steiner, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the author of five novels, most recently Dread and Matinee. He is currently at work on a comparative study of Finnegan's Wake and the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Garrett Stewart is Professor of English and Film at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Dickens and the Trials of the Imagination and Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction, as well as of numerous articles on fiction and film narrative. Robert Tracy is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley where he specialises in Victorian and Irish literature. He is author of Trollope's Later Novels and has translated Osip Mandelstan's early poems in Stone. He is at work on further translations from Mandelstan, and on a study of nineteenth-century Irish writers. Robert Zweig has completed a full-length study of Dante and the Victorians. He has written on both Italian and English literature. He is an Assistant Professor at Borough of Manhattan College.