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Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels (review)

2000; Indiana University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vic.2000.0072

1527-2052

Jill L. Matus,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Reviewed by: Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels Jill L. Matus (bio) Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, by Pamela K. Gilbert; pp. viii + 207. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, $54.95, £35.00. Since the early 1980s, with Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar, the sensation novel has moved increasingly into the critical limelight and (represented almost exclusively by Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1862] or Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White [1860]) onto course lists for the Victorian novel. Cultural studies, with its tendency to disturb distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, and its focus on popular and [End Page 503] transgressive writing, has fueled this interest and has found in the sensation novel a fertile source for discussions of class, gender, and power relations. Writing about the sensation novel usually entails an engagement with contemporary Victorian reactions to it. Most recent critics have therefore turned to the rich cache of cultural anxieties found in the alarmist and vituperative rhetoric of their Victorian counterparts, who saw in this fiction evidence of every evil and encouragement of every vice. In Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels, Pamela Gilbert culls the culinary metaphors from this discourse, showing through a smorgasbord of apt quotations how images of food, consumption, ingestion, and addiction governed Victorian views of popular fiction. Instead of confining their literary diet to wholesome fare, the readers of popular fiction were deriving illicit reading pleasures from “poisoned stimulants” (19) and becoming transmitters of disease through the adulterated products they consumed. Reading, in this formulation, becomes a form of substance abuse that corrupts the (female) body and in turn endangers the national and imperial character. Commenting simply that it is “curious how frequently popular literature is constituted as a risk specifically to the imperial subject,” Gilbert misses the opportunity here to link discussions of popular writing to the wide range of discourse that moves inevitably from a local instance to the general imperilment of English identity itself (72). Reviews in the periodical press on the subject of popular fiction reveal the serviceable deployment of a very familiar Victorian rhetoric of anxieties about the health of the nation. We recognize it from debates about a slew of Victorian problems: the spread of cholera, the extension of the franchise, the increase in wet-nursing, the education of women. What Gilbert does usefully provide is a brief historical account and some wonderful anecdotes of the way in which books became literally associated with disease and taint, even to the extent of being “inoculated with pus” to see if they could harbor contagion (55). The late 1870s, a moment of contamination panic, saw the publication of such articles as “The Spread of Contagious Diseases by Circulating Libraries.” Like other promiscuous bodies in public circulation, books were subject to surveillance and inspection, a “disinfecting oven” being invented to cleanse texts suspected of being carriers (56). Gilbert’s particular interest is in the way works by women authors such as Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Ouida, three popular novelists with successful long-term careers, were both gendered and genred in this context. Her book focuses on two texts by each author, an early one that established the author as a writer of sensation fiction, and a later one in which the author attempted to write herself out of the category in which she had been placed. Her claim is that these authors remained uncanonical because of their status as popular fiction writers. While Gilbert’s discussion of the novels is perceptive, I am not always convinced that the paired texts demonstrate this claim. Gilbert astutely historicizes the category “sensation,” arguing that it did not simply spring into being in the 1860s, and noting that it started out as a rather “indiscriminate label for popular literature, usually by women, that seemed in any way transgressive” (81). In the following decades, it was redefined and specified in a way that restricted it largely to domestic crime melodrama. Genre, Gilbert suggests, is a social construction, less a matter of intrinsic textual characteristics and more a question...