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RÉSUMÉS / ABSTRACTS - Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens N° 61 (avril 2005)
Textes recueillis par Annie Escuret.
BURY Laurent : The Paradox of the Actress : Peg Woffington according to
Charles Reade.
In 1852, in his play Masks and Faces, or Before and Behind the Curtain
and his novel Peg Woffington, Charles Reade chose as his heroine the
British actress Margaret Woffington (1714-1760), whom he showed on
stage but especially off stage. The interest of these two works lies in the
blurring of borders between appearances and reality. At the climactic
point of the plot, the actress, a professional deceiver, pretends to be a
painted portrait. This episode summarizes Reade’s approach: is a living
art like theatre to be compared with those « dead » or lifeless arts, painting
and sculpture?
Retour
CHASSAIGNE Philippe : A New Look at the Victorian “Criminal Classes” :
A View from the Archives.
Much has been said—and written—about the Victorian ‘dangerous classes’.
In particular, interpreting the adoption of repressive legislation in the
wake of the 1860s ‘moral panics’ (1863 Garotters’ Act, 1864 Penal Servitude
Act, 1869 and 1871 Habitual Criminals Acts) as a means for the
ruling middle classes of comforting and legitimising their political and
social hegemony by labelling certain inferior social groups as a ‘criminal
class’ (or ‘underclass’, or ‘residuum’) and making them the target
of police and justice repression, has proved to be a particularly popular
and enduring line of thought (see Jennifer Davis et alii). This paper
argues that a closer look at the judicial archives shows a somewhat different
picture. It assesses to what extent this tougher line on crime and
violence suggested by the adoption of repressive legislation was actually
implemented, and which social groups, if any, were effectively the targets
of this repression. It then considers the actual meaning of this rhetoric
about the ‘dangerous classes’: a strengthening of social control, or a promotion
of social cohesion?
Retour
COATES John : Pater and the Lacedaemonian Ideal.
In his neglected essay “Lacedaemon”, Pater offers an account of ancient
Sparta which draws parallels between the training of Sparta youth and
the nineteenth century public schools. The piece epitomises the subtlety
of Pater’s prose technique and his handling of ideas.While sympathising
with, and even celebrating, aspects of ancient Sparta life and their Victorian
analogues, he demurs from them and nudges his readers into doubts
about both.
Retour
DUPERRAY Max : Strollers in London in the Nineteenth century : an Excursion
into Darkness.
This paper aims at analysing the appearance of a genre: urban wandering
and its motives. The emergence of a witness sensitive to effects introduces
the field of obscurity, a metaphor which underlies the discourse on
poverty but also leads to a generic problem: what kind of text is produced
by urban wandering? The observer disrupts the picture. He is at the heart
of a labyrinth and, in the wake of the Gothic tradition, his disorientation
combines obscurity and unintelligibility. From Charles Lamb and
De Quincey to Arthur Machen and even (a little later) Virginia Woolf,
among others, the figure of the invisible bohemian recalls Baudelaire’s
flâneur and the fictional character writing fiction. The city is “textualised”
and the Peripatetic novelist torn between alienation and contamination
becomes the origin of the Sublime, as signs prevail over their referent.
The matrix for such texts is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” with its opening
on detection. The city becomes organic; it turns into the fantastic body
of paranoid fictions which amplify and express the poetics of urban peregrinations:
an encounter of the Self and its Other.
Retour
GOULET Andrea : South Sea Daggers and the Dead Man’s Eye : Foreign Invasion
in Fin-de-Siècle Fictions.
This study looks at four fin-de-siècle texts that revolve around the central
conceit of the “optogram,” the photograph of a retinal image in a
cadaver’s eye: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Claire Lenoir (1867-1887), Rudyard
Kipling’s “At the End of the Passage” (1891), Jules Claretie’s L’Accusateur
(1897), and Jules Verne’s Les Frères Kip (1902). Starting from
the initial observation that these texts share a recurrent theme of violent
death linked to colonial travel, this paper relates their optical motif
to broader European anxieties about the irruption of a savage Other
into the domestic space of a bodily, urban, or national self. This is the
age of post-Pasteurian fears of microbial contagion, of pre-Freudian theories
of atavistic threats to civilized order, of Lombrosan anthropometry
and its identification of the criminal classes in Europe with the
“primitive” peoples of Africa, South America, Asia, and the South Seas.
These discourses—of biological vulnerability, of psychic pathology, and
of social-geographical deviance—allow us to re-read the optical theme
of the retinal membrane as symbol for the anxiety-provoking porosity of
national and civic boundaries in an age of colonial exchange.
Retour
JACKSON-HOULSTON Caroline M. : ‘With Mike Hunt I Have Travelled
over the Town’: the Norms of ‘Deviance’ in Sub-respectable Nineteenth-century
Song.
Raymond Williams’ model of competing dominant, emergent and residual
ideologies implies a linear progress from one to the other. It obscures
the existence of the sort of ‘deviant’ ideology that runs concurrently with
the dominant. This, which I would call ‘submerged’ ideology, fulfils much
of the function of Bakthin’s carnival, as a semi-licensed refuge for what is
insufficiently contained by the dominant discourse of the day. This paper
demonstrates the existence of such a submerged discourse through an
analysis of the structure and content of the popular songs of song-and supper
clubs of the middle third of the nineteenth century. These are
deliberately subversive through their parody of established song models
and tunes, and this paper explores the relation of this supposed ‘deviance’
to the respectable gender ideology of the period.
Retour
JAY Elisabeth : The Enemy Within : the Housekeeper in Victorian Fiction.
The introduction in the 1851 census of the new category of ’housewife’ as
distinct from the paid post of ’housekeeper’, suggests that the Victorian
cult of domesticity had created its own gendered ethical economy. This
paper explores some of the ways in which the figure of the housekeeper in
Victorian fiction became the site for the expression of a series of class and
gender anxieties and why Victorian writers were particularly alive to the
potential threat posed by a servant whose role was that of understudy.
Retour
JUMEAU Alain : Fallen Women in George Eliot’s Early Novels.
The Victorians placed such an importance on virginity and chastity that
they regarded a woman’s loss of chastity as “the tragedy of tragedies”.
This paper deals with this form of moral and sexual deviance as it is
represented in the early novels of George Eliot. It starts with two minor
works, Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner, where the theme is only
given secondary importance, before considering the fall of Hetty Sorrel
in Adam Bede, and of Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. In this
last novel George Eliot’s treatment of the theme is more original than in
Adam Bede. This is certainly her most committed defence of the fallen
woman. Perhaps it can also be read as an attempt at self-justification,
meant for Victorian public opinion.
Retour
KALIFA Dominique : Crime and Criminal Inquiries in France at the End of
the Nineteenth-Century.
Crime and delinquency have always been one of the major themes of
popular culture and representations which fashion social imagination. In
France, the July Monarchy (1830-1848) was a crucial moment in which
representations, figures and renewed interpretations of this phenomenon
converged. This trend has been very clearly described by Louis Chevalier
in his book about working classes and dangerous classes (Classes
laborieuses, et classes dangeureuses à Paris . . . ). However, the last third
of the nineteenth century was a new turning point: indeed following the
rapid growth of cultural industries and the development of a parliamentary
democracy, modes of representation began to change. The passion
for inquiries which was then at its height, influenced the staging, the
figures and the political assessment of criminal and delinquency cases,
which are the origin of modern conceptions of insecurity.
Retour
KILDAY Anne-Marie : Just who was wearing the trousers ? The Battle for
Domestic Supremacy in Early Nineteenth Century Britain.
Intra-marital violence is a subject often examined by sociologists, psychologists
and historians alike, albeit from a very traditional perspective.
Certainly, the image of the ‘battered wife’ is a common one when
discussions of domestic aggression arise or literature on the subject is
produced. What though, of the ‘battered husband’? Evidence from nineteenth
century Scottish and English church and court records suggest
that abusive behaviour by wives against their husbands was not uncommon,
and indeed, more often that not, the violence meted out by these
women was in a physical sense, more ‘damaging’ than that inflicted by
their male counterparts.
The intention of this paper therefore, is to examine—through a balanced
gendered perspective—the ways in which domestic violence was carried
out, the apparent reasons for this behaviour and the consequences of this
type of aggressive activity for both offender and victim, regardless of sex.
In doing this, it is hoped that the paper will shed new light on a traditionally
one-sided argument.
Retour
LEPS Marie-Christine : Normal Deviance : The Dreyfus Affair.
This paper argues that the Dreyfus affair, as a national and then international
discursive event, registers a general shift in power relations taking
place at the turn of the century, from discipline to governmentality
as the dominant mode for the exercise of power. Michel Foucault
developed the notion of governmentality in his later works to grapple
with the problematic of the government of self and others; he defined
it as a form of power operating to foster the life of the one and the
many, of each individual and of the population as a whole. Enmeshing
issues of security and nation, of population and race, the Dreyfus affair
forced governments, intellectuals, media, and what we now refer to as the
“new social movements” into wide-ranging debates and strategic interventions
that forged new relations among them. Throughout, each group
felt compelled to identify itself, to position itself in relation to this military
trial turned political scandal: feminists, socialists, workers’ unions,
anti-Semitic groups, revolutionary right-wing coalitions all needed to
“come out,” as it were, and in the process, the ever shifting norms of
the acceptable and the deviant were redrawn. Perhaps more importantly,
new modes of power and knowledge relations were being developed and
normalized. Using the Dreyfus affair as a particularly telling case of a
more general pattern, this paper presents an analytical model that could
be transferred to different disciplinary inquiries; the play of power and
resistance, the calculation of the normal and the deviant, and the determination
of identity and subjectivity, are of particular importance.
Retour
MESSENGER Nigel : The Dunghill and the Flower : Gissing’s Nether World.
This paper examines the creative dynamic behind Gissing’s most successful
slum novel, The Nether World, by speculating on Gissing’s own
‘nether world’: in particular, his social disgrace following his conviction
for petty theft at Owens College, Manchester and his sexual preference
for uneducated, working class girls. Using the concept of ‘abjection’ as
theorised by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, the paper goes on to discuss
some of the language, social settings and characters of The Nether
World, and concludes by suggesting that Gissing’s novel anticipates some
aspects of twentieth-century Modernism.
Retour
MICHAUD Stéphane : Social Deviance in England Seen through the Eyes
of a French Socialist Investigator : Flora Tristan and her London Walks
(1840).
As early as the Restoration and even more still during the July Monarchy,
many French social investigators chose to study England. They came
from all social backgrounds and political parties and analysed the most
industrialised country in Europe as the laboratory of the future. They
focused on social contrasts and on the miserable living and working conditions
of the proletariat. One may therefore wonder where Flora Tristan’s
originality lay when she undertook to write about these deviancies.
This question is all the more interesting as she was a self-taught writer,
her childhood as an orphan having provided her with but a rudimentary
education. Do her lack of culture and the difficulty she felt in dealing
with her topic objectively impair the quality of the opinions she expressed
in her book? The huge success of London Walks among Socialist groups
and the working classes proves the opposite and stresses the novelty of
her analyses. Her female condition did not restrict the scope of her understanding
of what she examined and her sense of being herself an outcast
enabled her to provide an insider’s view of the conditions of the people
she came in contact with.
Retour
NASH David : Blasphemers and Profaners. Shaping Deviance in the French
and British Traditions.
Blasphemy is an offence which is specifically identified with the creation
and discussion of discourse. Thus it is not surprising that it has regularly
been a battleground for cultural theorists and those interested in the
investigation of the creation of the modernist individual. This paper investigates
the virtues and vices of such theoretical approaches to blasphemy
and indicates some possible paradigms for the wider study of deviance.
In particular a comparison of approaches emanating from English and
French traditions is especially illuminating. The empiricistWhig progressive
model which emphasises the development of tolerance in the nineteenth
century can be contrasted with models emanating from France
which emphasise the creation of modern surveillance and the destruction
of the subject and his individual response. Ultimately both these models
have important repercussions upon how modern governments and legislators
think about verbal and written dissidence.
Retour
PAYNE Christiana : Smugglers, Poachers and Wreckers in Nineteenth-Century
English Painting.
This paper looks at the representation, in art, of three groups of people
whose activities in the countryside and on the coast aroused conflicting
reactions: moralists saw them as a threat to the social order, but they
were rarely regarded as criminal within their own communities, and their
status depended on laws which many saw as unjust, or which were subject
to change. Paintings of poachers were usually didactic in tone, representing
the poacher as guilty and ashamed; the smuggler, however, was
depicted in a much more positive light, as a heroic “free trader”; while
wreckers were sometimes shown as poor people exercising their right
to subsistence, sometimes as relics of a savage past, before the improvements
brought about by lighthouses and lifeboats. J. M.W. Turner, David
Wilkie, Edwin Landseer and Charles Napier Hemy are amongst the
artists discussed.
Retour
SAAD Mariana : Deviance in Charles Fourier’sWork: a Symptom of Civilised
Society.
This article shows that Charles Fourier considers the world around him
with the eyes of a physician and that he criticises the way society produces
its own deviants which he sees as so many signs of malfunctioning.
Resorting to patterns inspired from Vitalist medecine, Fourier demonstrates
that society exerts an oppressive control over individuals and generates
imbalance and suffering at every possible level. The novelty of
these views lies in the way Fourier transposes a “pathological” analysis
of the economic sphere to the political and private spheres.
Retour
TRAN Tri : Crime in Victorian London: the robberies in some metropolitan
districts.
During the 19th century, many Londoners had the impression of living
in a dangerous city, under the constant threat of vicious and skilful criminals.
The many articles published in the police press, as well as in more
serious newspapers, reinforced their fear. However, official statistics tend
to show that this impression was not grounded and that crime was contained
by the police and the courts after the early 1840s, although the
population of London was expanding. Using unpublished archives e.g.
Parliamentary Papers, Home Office records, and Sessions’ Papers of the
Central Criminal Court, this contribution attempts to assess the extent
of robberies, the character of the criminals and their treatment by the
judicial system.
Retour
VANFASSE Nathalie : The Textual Construction of Social Deviance in Our
Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.
During the Victorian period, social deviance became a source of growing
interest and anxiety. Charles Dickens’s novels are particularly interesting
in this respect because they present a extraordinary range of very
striking cases of norms and deviance. Our Mutual Friend, for instance,
depicts dubious riverside characters, as well as a suspicious murder and
an attempted murder. It also portrays seemingly perfect embodiments of
Victorian orthodoxy, such as Lizzie Hexam and the ideal couple formed
by BellaWilfer and John Harmon alias John Rokesmith. This paper analyses
the textual construction of social deviance in Our Mutual Friend.
It shows that the novel legitimises Victorian orthodoxy by condemning
social deviance but that it also deviates from this orthodoxy by combining
and opposing systems of norms, and by using disturbing focalisation.
It finally takes a closer look at the stylistic, semantic, syntactic and narrative
components of the discourse on social deviance in this novel.
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