All right. A week or two ago, after plenty of challenging, edifying, or at last worthwhile literature, I felt a hankering for something else, a "little bit on the side" as our grandfathers called their favored brothel playmates, and so I dropped by one of our local Half Price Books (the sites of so many of my crimes) for another copy of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (discussed in an earlier post; see below). I did this despite the fact that I already had, god only knows where, three other copies of that book, but I figured I could get a copy of such a classic (read: overprinted) novel cheaply, thus obviating the need to go through box after box in my garage or storage unit.
This one was a Wordsworth Books edition, the cheapest of the cheap public domain publishers (and thanks!), and now part of their "Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural" series designed to catch browsing book-buyer's macabre eyes. That's not important; just thought I'd mention it.
However, this momentary (or so I thought) backsliding into the clutches of Victorian literature (sensation fiction, of all things!) was not, alas, to leave me unmarked. Before seven days had passed I'd reread both The Moonstone and Phineas Finn--Phineas Finn, the goddamned Irish Member himself!--and as if that weren't bad enough, I'd bought an Oxford Illustrated Classics edition (at least I got a good price for it) of The Mystery of Edwin Drood--fortunately for me, I did not read that particular opus imperfectum again, nor do I plan to until middle age.
I was only able to begin pulling myself out of this binge through a judicious and liberal application of Thomas Hardy (Far From the Madding Crown, The Woodlanders--now is clearly not the time to finally read Desperate Remedies) as shock treatment. After all, Wessex is a nice place to go if you've got to sober up.
So what is it about Victorian literature that attracts the weak among us? I think it probably has a lot to do with being able to take the whole thing as a big joke--"respectable" (and even not so respectable) fiction of the period comes off to modern eyes and ears as very near to satire of itself. To take one glaring problem with these people, they never have sex, nor seem to want to. All quote desire unquote is confined to some sort of abstracted transcendental sentimentality, usually as a device for tortured and tortuous thoughts and machinations on the part of an important to character (i.e., "I have loved him always, secretly in my heart of hearts: How thus could I betray him, guilty though he be of such enormity?" blah blah blah).
Maybe there's always some kind of gap between the fictional world produced by a culture and what was really going on in that culture, at least for the most part, but the Victorian Era in the UK and US (but esp. in the UK!) enlarged this discrepancy to alarming proportions. The fact is, we know people were fucking: fucking each others's brains out in privies, in the servants's quarters, the garret, the summerhouse, behind the folly in the park, against every smooth-barked tree, etc. We know this because a few people managed to confess to us, posterity, what they were not supposed to tell us and what they couldn't to any significant degree publicly tell each other during their lives, for example in "Walter's" My Secret Life--shockingly unfelicitous in expression, but as honest an account of a man's sex life as I've read or heard.
But sex is just the most glaring and obvious of the self-imposed blindnesses of those times. And who knows (though if it's anybody's job to tell us, it's artists's) what our blindnesses are today? Still, that's no excuse for these people, nor for the thusly compromised works of fiction that they produced. Rare is the mainstream Victorian novel that can be read as "great literature" today; mostly, they seem to be read for their social, historical, or formal significances. There are obvious exceptions: Hardy, certainly; Thackeray, maybe; Eliot, probably, by a hair.
This isn't to say that I don't think there was a lot of innovative work done by other Victorian novelists, nor that there was not a great deal of very good writing--passages from works by Dickens and Trollope et al. are among the most evocative writing in any language, ever; I'm confident of that--but all the same it's hard to read them without thinking something like, "Oh, I like that. I bet I'd really have liked this book when I was nine or ten." Always supposing one had to hand any requisite reference works, which fortunately children now do thanks to the Internet. By the way, I think people of about my age were the last people who didn't learn to read after understanding the important reference role of the WWW--at least, that's what I hope.
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