CARLYLE AS FETISHIST: this oldest of charges against Carlyle holds the key to his new importance as cultural critic. Carlyle’s earliest reviewers singled out for disapproval the indiscriminate admiration Carlyle seemed to feel for idols chosen according to an obscure logic of personal need or affinity. In the Quarterly Review of September 1840, for example, William Sewell1 complains:

I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.

* * *

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

— Hardy, “In Tenebris II,” Poems of the Past and the Present

CRITICS HAVE TOO OFTEN dismissed the Gothic elements in Thomas Hardy’s writings as superficial trappings to be found mostly in his minor fiction.1 The aim of this article is to show that the diffusion of Gothic motifs in the whole of Hardy’s literary production is something both intentional and fruitful. The Gothic is indeed a vital part of Hardy’s artistic vision, and it adds to the aesthetic value of his works. His major novels and his poetry are as rife with Gothic lore as his early “minor” fiction.2 This propagation of Gothic elements is central to the dialectic between impregnation and dispersal contained in the etymology of the word “dissemination” (meaning both “sowing” and “scattering”).3

Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour.

— Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906)

“HE CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and its relationship to late-Victorian social formations. A wide territory has been staked out. Moving beyond earlier universalizing Freudian readings, Carol Senf sees the anxiety the novel expresses about gender roles as indicative of Stoker’s difficulty in accepting the rise of the New Woman. Talia Schaffer and Christopher Craft read the homosocial relations in the novel in the light of sexological discourses of inversion and the emergence of the homosexual as a “type of life” (Foucault 43); Stephen Arata, noting Stoker’s frequent use of racial metaphors, has seen the text as expressive of a “reverse colonization” in which “the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic” (“Occidental Tourist” 624) is brought back to a town house near Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the empire.

Castration . . . is the seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.

— Charles Bernheimer, “Fetishism and Decadence: Salomé’s Severed Heads”

When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and — for reasons familiar to us — does not want to give up.

— Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”

DESPITE FREUD’S AUTHORITATIVE DECLARATION, contemporary critical theory deploys a conceptual plasticity of the fetish, which refutes the notion of any single narrative of origin.1 Many recent discussions of the fetish have pointed to the limits of the explanatory powers of classical psychoanalysis2 and have been critical of the theoretical importance invested in a narrative of causation which figures women’s bodies as “lacking” or mutilated, according to “the fact” of their “castration.” Focusing on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, this essay will argue that despite Bernheimer’s claim,3 the Freudian fable of castration need not be taken as the singular, phallic, “seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination.” To do so merely reiterates the gender and sexual hierarchies of classical psychoanalysis and denies the ambiguity of some fetishistic imagery produced in the fin de siècle.

“To tell you the truth, Stein,” I said, with an effort that surprised me, “I came here to describe a specimen. . . .” “Butterfly?” he asked, with an unbelieving and humorous eagerness. “Nothing so perfect,” I answered, feeling suddenly dispirited with all sorts of doubts. “A man!” “Ach so!” he murmured, and his smiling countenance, turned to me, became grave. Then after looking at me for a while he said slowly, “Well — I am a man, too.”

— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(ellipsis in original)

ETHNOGRAPHIC TRAVEL ACCOUNTS AND THE COLLECTING of objects — whether body parts or cultural products — functioned together in the Victorian era as a means of “knowing” other peoples and places to a degree not previously possible. It is true that travelers had long been involved in the appropriation of foreign peoples and their cultural products: we need only think of Christopher Columbus or James Cook returning to Europe with Native Americans or Pacific Islanders and their handicrafts in tow.1 But the importance of both writing about and collecting foreign peoples took on new urgency at a time when scientific organizations and newly-forming disciplines were seeking not only to classify and catalog races but also to determine the moments and means of their differentiation. The historical development of a racialized humankind as the object of intense scientific inquiry, along with the general growth of scientism and the professionalization of scientific disciplines in the Victorian period, resulted in an intense need for raw materials that could be transformed or interpreted into scientific data about non-Europeans. To a considerable extent, anatomists, natural historians, armchair ethnologists, and anthropologists created this data about race based on the information supplied by travel narratives and by the objects — including skulls, skeletons, and cultural artifacts — sent or brought to Europe by travelers to Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

JANE EYRE, CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S QUINTESSENTIAL NOVEL of “hunger, rebellion, and rage” (34),1 has been in recent years the subject of a number of important critical discussions about food, privation, and the social production of the female bourgeois body. These analyses, generally indebted to the theories of social practice and disciplinary individualism Foucault outlines in Discipline and Punish, tend to focus on issues of anorexia, female desire, and women’s agency, reading Jane’s intriguing concerns with food as either a rejection of adult female sexual development or as an articulation of other, more abstract desires for psychic or intellectual fulfillment (Hoelever, Michie).2 Although it seems inevitable that this “cult text of feminism” (Spivak 243) would produce such readings, I wish, in this essay, to shift our focus slightly, to suggest that the novel’s obsessive circlings around the issues of food and hunger are centered not so much around the nurturance and development of a specifically female or feminine body, but rather around the peculiar fate of the often ungendered3 yet extraordinarily vulnerable child’s body — a body largely understood, in nineteenth-century social discourse, to be strangely perishable and infinitely prone to danger and decay. Brontë’s frightening portraits of childhood starvation and neglect in the Lowood School chapters of Jane Eyre can be read as dramatizing the laws of Malthusian economics, speaking powerfully to a range of mid-nineteenth-century social anxieties regarding the relationship between the overproduction of unwanted children and the threat of mass starvation on a national scale.

FOUCAULT WAS PROBABLY RIGHT WHEN he argued in the first chapter of Madness and Civilization that the asylum replaced the lazar house at the end of the Middle Ages, but he exaggerated in claiming that leprosy had disappeared from the western world. The decline of leprosy in early modern Europe did not mean that fear of it vanished or that Europe lost all contact with the disease. From the sixteenth century it became involved in the debate about the origin of syphilis, which at first was widely believed to be a new form of leprosy. A later, converse theory claimed that leprosy was a common terminal stage of syphilis, particularly in hot climates (Leprosy in India 353). This was given circulation and respectability at the turn of the nineteenth century by William Jones when he wrote that “The Persian, or venereal, fire generally ends in this malady” (qtd. in Crook and Guiton 91). The Collected Works of this distinguished Orientalist were published in 1799 and widely discussed. Britain’s steady colonial expansion in the late eighteenth century had brought renewed contact with leprosy and the consequent fear of its reintroduction into Europe. Although the disease had remained available to writers as a figure for horror throughout the early modern period, it was to take on renewed force in the century or so following the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798).

IN MASCULINE DESIRE:The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, his study of the role of male same-sex attraction among Victorian aestheticist writers, Richard Dellamora refers to Elaine Showalter’s claim that Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of a series of writers who tried to reclaim male literary dominance from women writers in the wake of George Eliot’s death in 1880. Dellamora proposes instead what he thinks a more likely source of creative anxiety: “Insofar as he may appear at times to regard literary creativity as a male prerogative, his anxieties are better referred to a celibate homosocial environment than to the creative ascendancy of Victorian women writers” (56). But these two anxieties may not be entirely separate. Recent critical studies have shown that the mid-Victorian novel, whether written by women or men, was a form dominated by domestic and marriage plots, by the depiction of the bourgeois family and the construction of gender roles as principles of social regulation. Thus the emergence from the shadow of Eliot and the turning of aestheticist literature and art toward various alternative constructions of gender and desire — not merely new claims of masculine prerogative but also articulations by women writers of positions resistant to Victorian gender regularities — would be intimately connected.

IT IS TIME to assess where contemporary biographies of Victorian novelists are heading. With two more books about George Eliot, still others on Jane Austen, and another on Anthony Trollope, we see redundancy everywhere. As for other major figures, the Brontës have finally quieted down with Juliet Barker’s monumental biography; Dickens has settled in with Peter Ackroyd and Fred Kaplan, and whoever is waiting in the wings for another stab at his life is probably wise to await the completion of the magnificent Oxford University Press edition of the letters, now passing Volume 11.

The following abbreviations appear in this year’s bibliography:

BSN Browning Society Notes. DAI Dissertation Abstracts International. N&Q Notes and Queries. NCL Nineteenth Century Literature. RES Review of English Studies. VLC Victorian Literature and Culture. VP Victorian Poetry. VS Victorian Studies

An asterisk* indicates that we have not seen the item. Cross references with citation numbers between 51 and 70 followed by a colon (e.g., C68:) refer to William S. Peterson’s Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: An Annotated Bibliography, 1951–1970 (New York: Browning Institute, 1974); higher numbers refer to Robert Browning: A Bibliography 1830–1950, compiled by L. N. Broughton, C. S. Northup, and Robert Pearsall (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1953).