Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T23:08:35.547Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RULE BOHEMIA: THE COSMOPOLITICS OF SUBCULTURE IN GEORGE DU MAURIER'S TRILBY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2010

Kimberly J. Stern
Kimberly J. Stern*
Affiliation:
Longwood University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1895, the Critic published an anecdote about two young ladies discussing the popularity of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894):

“What is this ‘Trilby’ everybody is talking about?” asked one of these. “Oh,” replied the other, “it's a book – a novel.” “They say it is awfully bad,” said the first young person. “Yes, I've heard so; but it isn't so at all. I read it clear through, and there wasn't anything bad in it. I didn't like it either; there is too much French in it.” “French?” commented the first young woman; “well that's it, then – all the bad part is in French.” “I hadn't thought of that,” mused the other one, “I suppose that's just the way of it.”

The dialogue provides an illuminating glimpse into the controversy surrounding the publication of Trilby, a novel that brazenly celebrates a heroine who possesses “all the virtues but one” – chastity (35; pt. 1). Although Trilby was successful enough to inspire a spate of songs, literary parodies, and stage adaptations, its depiction of Paris's bohemian underground flouted mainstream Victorian values. The Connecticut Magazine charged Du Maurier with inspiring “comparative indifference” to sexual virtue, and readers everywhere worried that young people, like those depicted in the above vignette, would be unable to distinguish virtue from vice after reading the novel (“A Free Lance” 105).

Type
Articles
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , September 2010 , pp. 547 - 570
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Agathocleous, Tanya. “London Mysteries and International Conspiracies: James, Doyle and the Aesthetics of Cosmopolitanism.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26.2 (June 2004): 125–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Collini, Stefan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 26–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auerbach, Nina. “Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud.” Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981): 281–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K.The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Breckenridge, Carol A. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Cosmopolitanism. Ed. Breckenridge, Carol A., Pollock, Sheldon, Bhabha, Homi K., and Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. “‘Dirty Pleasure’: Trilby's Filth.” Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life. Ed. Cohen, William and Johnson, Ryan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 155–81.Google Scholar
Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century Novels. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Cheah, Pheng, and Robbins, Bruce, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.Google Scholar
Du Maurier, George. Trilby. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Ed. Henry, Nancy. Iowa City: The U of Iowa P, 1994. 143–65.Google Scholar
“A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters.” Connecticut Magazine 1 (Jan.-Dec.1895): 103–06.Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-semitism in Literary Anglo-America. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gaye, Arthur. “Modern School Books.” Eclectic Magazine 52 (1890): 477–83.Google Scholar
Gracombe, Sarah. “Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness, Jewishness, and Culture.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 58.1 (June 2003): 75–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grossman, Jonathan. “The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby.” Studies in the Novel 28 (Winter 1996): 525–42.Google Scholar
Henley, W. E.Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons: 1890.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. To Perpetual Peace. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003.Google Scholar
Kofman, Eleanore. “Figures of the Cosmopolitan: Privileged Nationals and National Outsiders.” Innovation 18.1 (2005): 83–97.Google Scholar
“The Literature of Bohemia.” Westminster Review N.S. 23.1 (Jan. 1863): 32–56.Google Scholar
“The Looker-on.” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 163.962 (Dec. 1895): 905–27.Google Scholar
“The Lounger.” Critic 32.689 (4 May 1895): 332–33.Google Scholar
“The Need of Sound Logic in Fiction.” Critic 32.695 (15 June 1895): 429–31.Google Scholar
Nord, Deborah. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1803–1930. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. “The School of Giorgione.” The Renaissance. Berkeley: U California P, 1980. 102–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Walter. “Two Early French Stories.” The Renaissance. Berkeley: U California Press, 1980. 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potolsky, Matthew. “Decadence, Nationalism, and the Logic of Canon Formation Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 67.2 (June 2006): 213–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. Introduction. Du Maurier vii-xxi.Google Scholar
“Trilbyana.” Critic 42.667 (1 Dec. 1894). 381.Google Scholar
Van Der Veer, Peter. “Cosmopolitan Options.” Etnográfica 6.1 (2002): 15–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Varouxakis, Georgios. “‘Patriotism,’ ‘Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Humanity’ in Victorian Political Thought.” European Journal of Political Theory 5.1 (2006): 100–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth. Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001.Google Scholar