Modernism and Naturalism PDF

MODERNISM AND NATURALISM IN B RIT IS H
AND I RISH FICTION, 1 8 8 0 –1 9 3 0
This book argues that the history of literary modernism is inextrica-

bly connected with that of naturalism. Simon Joyce traces a complex
response among aesthetes to the work of Émile Zola at the turn of the
century, in the process recovering naturalism’s assumed compatibility
with impressionism as a central cause of their ambivalence. Highlight-
ing a little-studied strain of reflexive naturalism in which Zola’s mode
of analytical observation is turned upon the authors themselves, Joyce
suggests that the confluence of naturalism and impressionism formed
the precondition for so-called stream-of-consciousness writing. This
style served to influence not only the work of canonical modernists
such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf but also that of lesser-known
writers such as George Moore, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton.
simon joyce is the Margaret Hamilton Professor of English at the

College of William and Mary. His previous books include Capital
Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (2003)
and The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007).
MO DERNISM A ND
N AT U R A L I S M I N B R I T I S H
AN D I RISH FICTION,
1880 –1 9 3 0
SIMON J OYCE
College of William and Mary
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, ny 10013-2473, usa
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© Simon Joyce 2015
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First published 2015
Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc
A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Joyce, Simon, 1963– author.
Modernism and naturalism in British and Irish fiction, 1880–1930 / Simon Joyce.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-107-08388-2 (hardback)
1. Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain. 2. English fiction – History and criticism. 3. English
fiction – Irish authors – History and criticism. 4. Naturalism in literature. I. Title.
pr888.m63j69 2014
823 .9109112 – dc23
2014034066
isbn 978-1-107-08388-2 Hardback
isbn 978-1-107-44574-1 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
Acknowledgments page vii
Introduction: A modernism on all fours 1

1 How Zola crossed (and didn’t cross) the English Channel 28
2 Portraits and artists: Impressionism and naturalism 53
3 A naturalism for Ireland 84
4 Photo-sensitivity: Naturalism, aestheticism, and the New
Woman novel 119
5 The voice of witlessness: Virginia Woolf and the poor 151
Afterword: Nietzsche contra naturalism (contra Nietzscheans) 180
Notes 190
Index 211
v
Acknowledgments
I’ve come, perhaps unfairly, to think of this book as a darker counterpart

to its predecessor, The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. This is partly to
do with the subject matter, of course: it’s not always easy, and probably not
advisable, to deal with naturalism lightheartedly. To reuse the joke with
which I invariably begin presentations from this project (a line that most
people mentioned here have heard at least once), it can feel like a dirty job;
but for reasons I can’t quite recall now, I once felt like somebody had to do
it. Incredibly, I thought at the time that it would be a quick and easy job
to argue for naturalism’s formative influence on what I understand literary
modernism to have been.
The work has taken a number of detours and redirections over the
years, and encountered some delays. Most obviously, I suffered a major
health crisis toward the end of writing it that added at least a year to
the labor, and threatened to render it wasted. Although they’ll probably
never read these words, then, my first thanks are to a dedicated network
of doctors, nurses, specialists, surgeons, and therapists, without whom this
book almost certainly wouldn’t exist. Under these circumstances, it hasn’t
always been easy to write about a literary form that is itself so obsessed with
heredity and deterioration. I am very thankful to acknowledge how easy
my chairs, colleagues, deans, and administration at the College of William
and Mary made it to take medical leave and to resume where I’d left off,
which kept the delay to a minimum. Among many others in Williamsburg,
I should single out Arthur Knight, who was tirelessly thoughtful and kind
as a friend, neighbor, and colleague during that difficult chapter of my life.
At greater distances, Stephanie Foote and Chris Foss, as well as old friends
in Texas and California, took on the selfless work of keeping my spirits up,
for which I’ll be forever grateful.
The earlier parts of the project are associated, for the most part, with
sunnier summers. I first conceived of it as a book rather than a hunch at
an NEH Summer Seminar on “The Decadent 1890s” at UCLA’s Clark
vii
viii Acknowledgments
Library in 2009, under the erudite and generous direction of Joe Bristow.
Friends from the seminar have now heard me talk about these matters
more than anyone should, and I want especially to record my thanks to
Lisa Hager, Kristin Mahoney, Diana Maltz, Beth Newman, and So Young
Park, especially for helping me think about naturalism, aestheticism, and
the New Woman. The book took an Irish detour thanks to a summer’s
teaching in Galway and an “Irish Aestheticisms” conference, also organized
by Joe Bristow at the Clark. That experience helped me to reconnect with
my old friend Joe Valente and to find a network of exciting Irish Studies
scholars who helped me rethink the role of naturalism in the Revival: I
owe thanks especially to Greg Dobbins, Alison Harvey, and Tina O’Toole,
as well as the two Joes. Finally, I tested the propositions of the volume
about modernism and naturalism at a Modernist Studies Association sem-
inar in 2011 and benefited enormously from the help of two longtime
co-conspirators there, Varun Begley and Barry Faulk.
A generous research leave in 2011–12 gave me the time and space to do
most of the heavy lifting. William and Mary has continued to be a model of
providing help when it’s needed and keeping out of the way when it’s not.
For the former, and sometimes the latter, I’m especially grateful to Elizabeth
Barnes, Susan Donaldson, Antoine Krieger, Rich Lowry, Deborah Morse,
Suzanne Raitt, and Bob Scholnick. At just the right time, Ray Ryan passed
through town, and has been just the kind of editor with whom faculty love
to work by making straightforward and simple what so often feels like a
torturous process.
Nearer still, actually at home, my wonderful family has given immea-
surably more of the same. Jenny Putzi remains my best reader and my true
love, and has shared all these ups and downs with me while still, somehow,
brightening all the days and making everything better. Raising kids together
while writing about naturalism hasn’t always been an easy combination;
parenting too often resembles a Zola-esque hunt for patterns of hereditary
transference that can feel egotistical and self-indulgent at times, as if our
children’s stories can only be our own with minor variations. In writing
this book, then, I’m most grateful to Sam and Charley for the lessons
they teach me about what Andrew Solomon has called apples that fall far
from the tree. I can’t picture them any other way, or imagine loving them
any more than I do. Beyond their courageous capacity for self-definition,
they’ve given me a boundless strength and an unqualified belief that the
best and most beautiful times are always ahead of us.
May the road rise with you all.
Introduction
A modernism on all fours
Discussions of naturalism in Britain frequently take their bearings from

two connected events, each illustrating moments in an unfolding response
to the work of the French novelist Émile Zola. The first is the prosecution
of publisher Henry Vizetelly in 1888 and again in 1889, under recently
expanded obscene publications legislation, for issuing cheap translations of
Zola’s novels; the second is the invitation issued by the Authors’ Club for
the French novelist to speak in London in September 1893, during which
time he was also feted by the capital’s Lord Mayor. The apparent dissonance
between these events was widely noted. As George Gissing pointed out in
a letter to his friend Eduard Bertz:
[Zola’s] reception in England had been very remarkable. The other day
someone wrote to the Times, to draw attention to the fact that only a year or
two ago a London publisher was imprisoned for issuing Zola’s works. And
in truth the change of opinion is strange enough. All the papers now speak
of him with high respect – even the most conservative. And, most comical
of all, he is received by the ‘le Lor’ Maire’!1
Along similar lines, the Francophile fiction writer Hubert Crackanthorpe
could dismiss a belated assault on French naturalism and a plea for English
reticence, issued by Arthur Waugh (Evelyn’s father) in the unlikely space
of The Yellow Book, by pointing to Zola’s recent public embrace: “It is not
so long ago,” Crackanthorpe retorted,
since a publisher was sent to prison for issuing English translations of cele-
brated specimens of French realism; yet, only the other day, we vied in doing
honour to the chief figure-head of that tendency across the Channel, and
there was heard but the belated protest of a few worthy individuals, inade-
quately equipped with the jaunty courage of ignorance, or the insufferable
confidence of second-hand knowledge.2
Crackanthorpe’s meaning would seem to be explicit: that only idiots
with the strength of other people’s convictions would still hold to the
1
2 Introduction: A modernism on all fours
condemnation of Zola’s work on moral grounds. And yet his essay is far
from a ringing endorsement of Zolian naturalism: it insists, for instance,
that “Art is not invested with the futile function of perpetually striving
after imitation or reproduction of Nature,” and that the “attitude of objec-
tivity, or impersonality towards his subject, consciously or unconsciously,
assumed by the artist, and which nowadays provokes so considerable an
admiration, can be attained only in a limited degree.”3 Gissing was even
less a fan of Zola’s, and didn’t himself attend when the Frenchman was cele-
brated by the Authors’ Club, reporting acidly to Bertz that Zola’s reception
had been “a joke”: “I am sorry to say that none of the leading authors took
a part in his welcome. It was in the hands of a lot of new and young men,
who are members of the Authors’ Club and who constitute a marvelously
organized society for mutual advertisement” (180–81).
If we begin with Gissing’s rather ungenerous remarks about what he
termed the eighty “men of letters” assembled to toast Zola in London,
we might be able to assess the significance of the event in another way,
and to question the assumption of a progressive acceptance of Zola and
naturalism in Britain. As a representative version of that narrative, we might
consider Peter Keating’s account of the Vizetelly trials and his reading of
the publisher’s own lack of courage, in changing his plea to Guilty and
hoping to exploit the apparent ambiguities of the settlement: this arose,
according to Keating, from a perceived lack of allies, at a time when
“the Society of Authors was still struggling to establish itself” and when
Vizetelly “probably knew better than anyone how little support he would
have got.”4 To interrogate such an assessment, though, we might compare
the petition signed by around 150 authors, Parliamentarians, critics, and
educators protesting Vizetelly’s imprisonment with what we know of the
attendance at the Authors’ Club banquet. The petition was supported
by six MPs (including Sir Charles Bradlaugh), in addition to an array
of literary figures, including many names that are recognizable today:
Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, George Du Maurier, Walter Besant,
A. W. Pinero, Sir Henry Irving, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen, Robert
Buchanan, Oscar Browning, Frank Harris, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and
John Addington Symonds, among others. It also included a significant
sampling of figures who represented various strands of the literary avant-
garde, including Havelock Ellis, Mona Caird, Olive Schreiner, Arthur
Symons, Grant Allen, and George Moore.5 By way of contrast, a partial list
of the eighty attendees at the 1893 dinner, as reported in the Times, featured
only a handful of these same names (Besant, Moore, Harris, Browning),
one MP, and few other names – Jerome K. Jerome would be the standout –
that are still familiar.6
It is not the numbers alone that tell the story here, for, as Besant conceded
when he organized the dinner, September was not an ideal time given that
many authors would not have been residing in London.7 What’s more
telling is Gissing’s verdict – one that feels appropriate coming from the
author of New Grub Street (1891) – that the diners were “new and young”
and out to advertise themselves by attending. If this judgment is to be
trusted, those present saw themselves first and foremost as literary workers;
hence their desire to use the occasion for “mutual advertisement” – and this
is also, perhaps, why so few names still resonate. By the same token, among
the writers who stayed away were those who saw themselves primarily as
artists, with the aestheticist wing of British writing having by this point
largely abandoned the cause of Zola. For the sake of comparison, we might
note those who turned out for a visit by the poet Paul Verlaine two months
after Zola’s, including Symons (who played the part of host, along with
the painter Will Rothenstein), Gosse, Crackanthorpe, Ernest Dowson,
Herbert Horne and his mistress Muriel Broadbent, Selwyn Image, and
Edith Cooper (one half of the poetic duo “Michael Field”).8
As we shall see, the image of Zola as a professional prose-writer is
one with which this aestheticist wing would have concurred, typically
either to give him grudging credit or to disparage his literary output.
Keating provides a catalog of such dismissals and backhanded compliments,
including Symons’ imagining of Zola as having “tried to build in brick
and mortar inside the covers of a book” and Henry James’ admiration
of “the young builder [who] stood there in his sturdy strength, with no
equipment save his two hands and, as we may say, his wheelbarrow and
his trowel.” I shall return to these assessments in Chapter 1 and tease out
the slightly different emphases in their respective assessments; for now,
though, it is enough to concur with Keating’s conclusion that at a time
when “the novel was having claimed for it a new kind of high seriousness,
the description of Zola as a bricklayer was a calculated snub, to be added
to the other common insults that he was a mere journalist, a reporter
without imagination, a materialist, a pessimist, and a peddler of filth.”9
To the extent, then, that he sought common cause with the professional
writers of the Authors’ Club, such an alliance would do little to boost
Zola’s standing either among the aesthetes of the 1890s or the wider public:
indeed, by identifying himself as a laborer in words, he only reinforced the
general judgment of him as not an artist, and just as importantly failed to
dislodge the impression of him as selling smut for profit that had circulated
during the Vizetelly trials. In this sense, the scenes that have been read as
offering contrasting views of Zola’s reception might not be so dissimilar
after all.
In both, ideas of literary greatness are counterposed with commercial
celebrity and novelistic output, in a manner that foreshadows the denun-
ciations of Victorian bulk and mass taste by key modernist thinkers in
the early twentieth century: to be a literary worker or craftsman, whose
production might be assessed in volumes or by sales figures, was thus by
definition to lack greatness, in precisely the sort of judgment that Virginia
Woolf would come to pass upon the likes of Arnold Bennett.10 With hind-
sight, we can recognize how differing systems of value – honorifics and
reputations, sales figures, shifting ideas about literary tradition and canon
formation – were coming into competition, with naturalism situated at the
center of overlapping debates about aesthetics and morality that dominated
the late 1880s and early 1890s. In this book, I propose reading British and
Irish responses to naturalism, and especially to Zola’s work, as an early but
important skirmish in the struggle to define a literary modernism that we
typically think of as occurring in the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. In that struggle, I will be suggesting, naturalism did not simply play
a negative role, as one among a series of others (realism, idealism, popular
literature) against which modernism came to define itself, but also played
a positive and active role in shaping the forms within which modernist
fiction in particular would be written.
There are three connected reasons that the story I am telling about
naturalism’s imbrication with modernism will seem an unfamiliar one.
First, the term “naturalism” itself tends, for reasons I will outline, to be
an operative one almost anywhere on the global map – France, Germany,
the United States, Ireland – except in Britain, where literary debates either
deployed substitute terms that functioned to minimize its importance
(such as “East End” or “slum” fiction) or used “naturalism” and “realism”
interchangeably; other synonyms we’ll encounter include “New Realism,”
“neorealism,” and “documentary,” and their sheer proliferation is itself
testimony to a reluctance to use the more accepted term. The association
with realism represents a second obstacle to understanding naturalism’s
role in the story of modernism, because it inevitably consigns naturalism
to a place in the Victorian prehistory against which the modern struggled
to emerge. Finally, that association in turn helps to identify naturalism with
a particular methodology of writing and with privileged thematic tropes –
environmental determinism, urban squalor, the absence of agency, among
others – rather than the formal and stylistic categories – such as narrative
self-consciousness, fragmentation, or unreliability – on which modernism
traditionally has been thought to have launched itself. Running parallel
to the dismissal of Zola as a grubby hack writer with no sense of style
and nothing to offer the British literary avant-garde, these three factors
combined to produce an image of naturalism as modernism’s antithesis,
and not (as I shall be arguing) one of the key forces contributing to its
emergence.
This tendency has persisted in spite of significant and welcome efforts
to modify our understanding of literary modernism through the so-called
New Modernist Studies. A notable exception to this rule is Douglas Mao,
who usefully considered naturalism in relation to modernism in his Fate-
ful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature,
1860–1960, in which Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde line up alongside
Theodore Dreiser, Zola, and Joyce.11 In their helpful summation of the
New Modernist Studies, Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz highlight two fea-
tures that ought to make it hospitable to the positing of a naturalist influ-
ence, especially as I will be defining that term here: first, they suggest, the
period boundaries of modernism have shifted in order to accommodate
“artifacts from the middle of the nineteenth century and the years after
the middle of the twentieth as well as works from the core period of about
1890 to 1945”; at the same time, they highlight a “vertical reconsideration”
that has sought to redraw the boundary lines between modernism and mass
culture, in part by questioning the long-standing view of the former as “a
movement by and for a certain kind of high (cultured mandarins) as against
a certain kind of low.”12 As Fredric Jameson has suggested, moreover, natu-
ralism has persistently represented that “low” in the critical imagination, as
a form of writing seemingly “obsessed with content as such, or so the mod-
ernist stereotype has it,” and as such emblematic of “a more proletarian and
underclass kind of designation,” as against “some more idealist and ethereal
matter, involving etiquette and good taste, grooming, keeping the proper
forms, and so on” that have come to define modernist formalism.13 To
situate naturalism at the heart of the modernist enterprise thus involves a
rethinking of how categories such as form and content have been deployed,
as well as the shadowy class valences that cling to them.
As a literary form, naturalism has proven unusually difficult to define,
for reasons that the chapters of this study help to elaborate. It has never
been clear, for instance, whether it represents a distinctive genre or merely
a subset of a wider category such as realism. There is similar critical dis-
agreement as to whether it takes its character from a set of interrelated
thematic tropes (such as poverty, pathology, or environmental determin-
ism), or from a way of handling those tropes (which might have more
to do with an adoption of scientific detachment, or a mode of plotting
that would emphasize an inevitable narrative of causality and decline).
My approach throughout this study has been to understand naturalism in
terms of a set of problematics that are themselves situated at the intersec-
tion between content and form. So, for instance, I stress that naturalism
simultaneously insists upon documenting the lives of the lower classes and
reflects upon the ethical problem of doing so from a perspective of relative
authorial privilege; as a consequence, the version of naturalism I an outlin-
ing here contains a robust capacity for autobiographical self-reflection and
representation. Another defining problematic concerns naturalism’s aim to
reproduce aspects of the material world as accurately and unflinchingly as
possible, with the attendant difficulty that to do so threatens to place it
outside of normative understandings of what literature is and does; in this
sense, naturalist writers, beginning with Zola, often actively repudiated
elements of conventional novelistic practice as artificially “literary,” and
in the process rethought the uses of even fundamental techniques such as
metaphor and symbol. By selecting an approach that eschews as far as pos-
sible habitual authorial impulses of selection and condensation (whether in
the sense of the representative detail or of using imagery to compress and
sharpen our understanding of larger processes), naturalists were forced to
concern themselves with how else to totalize meaning, at the risk of merely
multiplying empirical examples and details ad nauseum; that problem in
turn fed back into the first, of whether totality has to be imposed from
outside by the application of a prior authorial agenda or set of beliefs that
would call into question the stance of investigative objectivity and leave
the writers open to accusations of bad faith. The authors I focus on all
considered these issues with greater or lesser urgency, and yet found little
consensus about how to handle them. The need to address them, as formal
or methodological problems and also as practical questions about thematic
presentation, helps to link these otherwise disparate writers as engaged in
a shared project that has direct consequences, I will suggest, for the way
that we understand the early history of literary modernism.
Naturalism in the global literary market

In an 1892 essay surveying the increasing hegemony of the novel in the
literary marketplace, Edmund Gosse made a plea for other topics beyond
the tired clichés of romantic love. As a model provider of new subjects,
Naturalism in the global literary market 7
Gosse recommended the novels of Zola, in which work emerges as the cen-
ter of the fictional enterprise, “the very hero of his piece, a blind and vast
commercial monster, a huge all-embracing machine, in whose progress the
human persons are hurried helplessly along, in whose iron wheels their pas-
sions and their hopes are crushed.” And yet, when seeking to trace a Zolian
influence upon British fiction, Gosse found little to document, beyond
Thomas Hardy – and only then by identifying Tess of the d’Urbervilles
somewhat narrowly as a “study of Dorsetshire dairy-farms” – and “the
experiments of Mr. George Gissing and Mr. George Moore.”14 Arguably
the leading edge of global novelistic practice over the previous two decades,
naturalism seemed to Gosse to have largely bypassed Britain.
Assuming that the presupposition is a truthful one, the task of figuring
out why that might have been has engaged a number of literary critics and
historians in recent years.15 Arguing for what he termed “the avoidance of
naturalism” by British writers of this period, David Trotter makes his case
on strangely nationalist grounds, adding the name of the best-selling “New
Woman” novelist Sarah Grand to the two Georges mentioned by Gosse.
(This means, incidentally, that two of the three – Grand and Moore – were
actually Irish-born). “Gissing, Moore, and Grand all seem half-persuaded
by Zola’s determinism,” Trotter writes, “and by the plausibility of genetic
explanations. But in the end they refuse apocalypse; partly, I think, because
apocalypse seemed like a foreign invasion . . . The revaluation of English-
ness that was in progress at the time undoubtedly reinforced the determi-
nation of British writers to steer clear of naturalism.”16 This strikes me as a
dubious line of argument, even if we set aside the marginal nationalities of
the very writers he presumes to be involved in some putative “revaluation
of Englishness.” There is, to begin with, the oddity of grounding a case for
resistance upon something so unreflective and unreconstructed as Franco-
phobia, in the form of Trotter’s “fear of foreign invasion.” Why, we might
ask, were “British” novelists even “half-persuaded” by a French counter-
part if they were under the sway of such narrowly parochial interests – or
otherwise engaged in contemplating their own national character? At the
very least, this might suggest the need to consider as well a counteracting
strain of Francophilia that actively encouraged artistic “invasions” in this
period, by impressionists, decadents, and symbolists as well as by Zolian
naturalists.
While sharing much of its narrow nationalism, Peter Keating’s
The Haunted Study usefully challenges the idea that British writers practiced
“avoidance” when it came to naturalism. After identifying George Moore as
the most “slavish” of Zolians, Keating insists that the Irishman’s distinction
should not be taken to mean that Zola’s model “had little lasting effect in
Britain,” and what follows catalogs much of the British novelistic canon
at the turn of the century: Gissing, Hardy, Kipling, Stevenson, Bennett,
Maugham, and Joyce are all mentioned as writing under the influence
of naturalism, in addition to lesser-known figures (today, at least) such
as Hubert Crackanthorpe, Arthur Morrison, and Compton Mackenzie
(115–16). As such, the question might be redefined, away from the unhelp-
ful “Why was there no British or English naturalism?” (since there actually
was) to the more interesting “Why has it been so hard to recognize it as
such?” Why, for instance, does Virginia Woolf settle upon “materialists” as
her collective term of abuse for the unholy trinity of Bennett, John Galswor-
thy, and H. G. Wells when “naturalists” would have suited her case as well?17
Or we might ask why the explicit naturalism of a novel such as Morrison’s A
Child of the Jago (1896) gets categorized (most notably by Keating himself )
according to more minor period classifications like “Cockney” or “slum”
fiction?18 As one telling indication of the lacuna of British naturalism, we
could note how Morrison’s work stirred up a considerable critical response
that echoed the ways in which Zola had been received a decade earlier, and
yet when Morrison’s main antagonist H. D. Traill sought to discredit him
he was forced to invent the vague neologism “New Realism” to do so; Traill
would stick with the term even after Morrison challenged the idea that he
was any sort of realist (new or otherwise), and even though Traill’s own
response linked Jago with Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in a
form of guilt by association.19 The roll call of those who have avoided the
term “naturalism” in Britain gets longer all the time.
Keating offers two useful hints as to why this should be. The first sug-
gests a misrecognition (perhaps intentional) of what Zola was actually
doing, so that Francophile intellectuals and aesthetes in Britain could per-
suade themselves that naturalism was actually consistent with other, more
experimental components of the Parisian avant-garde. Having flirted with
it on the misplaced ground of stylistic innovation, Keating suggests, they
just as quickly dropped it when a better option came along: thus, “its
influence was strongly felt throughout this period,” but mainly as a “narra-
tive method” that would be supplanted (again, through importation from
France) by symbolism once its stylistic limits became evident (116–17).
In many ways, this account adapts Virginia Woolf’s distinction between
Edwardians and Georgians, identifying figures such as Conrad, James,
Arthur Symons, and Woolf herself with a progressive formalism that had
by now jettisoned as hopelessly jejune most of the figures on the previous
list who still betrayed a naturalist influence. While hoping to avoid the
Naturalism in the global literary market 9
reinscription of such a binary, I find Keating’s idea a suggestive one for two
reasons: first, because it raises the possibility of seeing – and of writers in
the period as having seen – naturalism as a literary style, and not merely a
set of thematic tropes or a method for handling them; and second, because
it speaks to what I view as a distinctive feature of British and Irish natu-
ralism at the turn of the century, which was its capacity to absorb, reflect
upon, and modify what was being learned simultaneously through experi-
menting with styles of literary impressionism, a term that more accurately
denotes what the “modern” writers Keating mentions were doing than
symbolism.
Keating’s second suggestion for why naturalism is invisible as a term in
British literary circles has to do with what he sees as its distinctive feature:
the ways that it resonated with and fed into an empiricist sociology that was
being developed by researchers like Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree.
It is easy to see how the two movements dovetailed, especially over the issue
of the social environment as a determining factor in the lives of the poor,
but Keating’s argument is that the sociological influence produces some
notable distortions within British naturalism: on one hand, its empirical
methodology and impulse toward minute units of classification militated
against drawing out “sweeping generalizations,” a practice of self-limitation
that enabled works by Morrison, Gissing, and others to be grouped together
under the more narrow rubric of East End or slum novels; on the other
hand, Keating sees the epicenter of sociological interest as rapidly shifting
up the social scale, to the suburban middle-class professionals who would
become the focus for Edwardian realists such as Wells and Galsworthy –
and also for Forster and Joyce (318–20). Read together, Keating’s suggestive
ideas diagram a British naturalism that was bifurcated into two streams,
neither of which exactly looked like Zola or what came to be thought of as
naturalism in other national literatures (the American one, for instance):
either a premature protomodernism that Keating sees as quickly morphing
into symbolism or a self-limiting set of sociological investigations that
flowed into early-twentieth-century realism. Because, as its title suggests,
my own work is more interested in naturalism’s relation to modernism –
and also, because I have written about the second option before20 – I will
be much more concerned with the first, protomodernist variation here, but
I want to think a little more about Keating’s categories for a moment.
In an insightful rethinking of current models of global literary history,
Christopher Hill studies global variants within naturalism in order to cri-
tique an emergent orthodoxy that views literary forms as disseminated
outward from a center in Western Europe. He identifies this model of
diffusion with recent work by Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, point-
ing out that for the latter in particular, temporal movement would seem to
be regulated by a centralized “Paris Mean Time.”21 For an example of such
thinking, we might highlight Casanova’s discussion of “neorealism,” which
reads like another synonym for naturalism here: “Because neorealism in
its national and popular versions excludes any form of literary autonomy
and makes literary production a function of politics,” she argues, “it is not
surprising to find that, despite certain variations, the same realist (or ‘illu-
sionist’) assumption is common to emerging literary spaces and to those
that are subject to political censorship.” If this represents a first stage of lit-
erary evolution, a second normally follows, but only after certain national
conditions have been attained: “Formal preoccupations, which is to say
specifically literary concerns, appear in small literatures only in a second
phase, when an initial stock of literary resources has been accumulated
and the first international artists find themselves in a position to challenge
the aesthetic assumptions associated with realism.”22 Casanova’s two-state
model highlights in the starkest terms the ways that naturalism has been
thought of as pure content or a literary “form” in name only, because it
explicitly precedes any consideration of “formal preoccupations,” which
she sees as a luxury reserved for a later historical moment.
Christopher Hill sees in this global model an implicit Eurocentrism
that is equally (and more overtly) operative in Moretti’s model of world
literature, whereby “in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary
system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside of Europe),
the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but
as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or
English) and local materials.”23 Of course, the case of naturalism – which
was, as we have seen, dominant in one of those two centers but practically
invisible in the other – might already function as a troubling anomaly
here, but Hill approaches the question of its global migrations from the
other end, pointing out that there is a self-identified naturalism in South
America and East Asia that is effectively simultaneous with its supposed
European first wave. Moreover, what marks these national variations as
distinctive, in his argument, is not exactly some “local” accommodation
at each country of arrival so much as what occurs in transit. While native
naturalisms “appeared quickly in some places distant from Paris,” Hill
claims, two factors helped to dictate the precise form it took: “the asso-
ciation of the naturalist novel with other genres of . . . ‘social knowledge,’
which themselves were moving around the world at the same time, and
the travels of earlier forms of European fiction,” including Romanticism
Realism/naturalism 11
and realism (1202). What is fascinating about this idea is how closely its
model of twinned “fellow travelers” maps onto the bifurcated image of
British naturalism that emerges out of Keating’s study. By genres of “social
knowledge,” Hill means discourses that helped to legitimate naturalism as
a mode of social analysis, including criminology, neurology, psychiatry, and
the empirical sociology that operated in tandem with the “slum novels”
of Morrison and Gissing; by the same token, more experimental artistic
forms (such as impressionism or symbolism) with which British writers
confused French naturalism would seem to be an instance of two or more
overlapping imports, albeit ones that arose more or less simultaneously.
As a starting point for assessing the apparent anomaly of British natural-
ism, the more internationalist dimensions of Hill’s thesis strike me as more
promising than arguments about national character, in part because they
counter any temptation toward national chauvinism by insisting upon a
negative balance of trade. (In many ways, it is hard to think of another recent
period, besides the fin de siècle, during which British literature imported
as much, and exported so little.) In setting aside the more narrow –
as Keating suggests, self-consciously narrow – variant of the slum novel
in favor of a naturalism that is more closely in line with our understanding
of literary modernism, I shall suggest multiple fellow traveling discourses
and styles, including period debates concerning decadence, gender and the
“New Woman,” the nature of human psychology, and Celtic Irish culture.
Formally, I am interested in recovering a style of naturalism that was felt
to be consistent with more overtly aestheticist modes of writing in the
1880s and 1890s, among which impressionism will take center stage. In
order to do so, however, I first need to displace and decenter a term that
consistently impinges upon, and at times overwrites, critical discussions of
naturalism: realism. If what needs restoring is a sense of naturalism as a
central component within modernism (one that’s admittedly often crudely
materialist and self-debasing), then what we need first to unthink is the
traditional viewpoint that sees it as occupying the same position within
the trajectory of realism – as the cliché would have it, as a “realism on all
fours.”
Realism/naturalism
“The French school of naturalism,” Christopher Hill writes, “encountered
the greatest resistance in countries that already had a history of fiction
concerned with precise description of everyday life – provisionally ‘real-
ism’ – such as England and Russia” (1204). Writing of another case of
exceptionalism, however (the Irish one this time), Joe Cleary has proposed
that naturalism has been studied mainly in those territories – and here he
names Britain alongside America and Northern Europe – that were domi-
nated by Protestantism and an advanced capitalist economy; since realism
traditionally has been thought to embody those same values in literary
form, this would seem to reverse Hill’s equation and imply that realism has
functioned as a prerequisite for naturalism and not the resistance to it. At
the very least, Cleary suggests, a native naturalism will look very different
in places that “in contrast to England or France . . . did not have a strong,
internationally distinguished realist tradition,” and here Ireland joins the
United States as an instance where naturalism and modernism were able
to flourish together.24
Since the modernism/naturalism connection is the larger topic of this
book, I will return to Cleary’s thesis in Chapter 3. For now, though, I want
to ask about the implication that realism’s presence or absence helps to
determine naturalism’s form – and thus might be the privileged exemplar
of Hill’s fellow traveling discourses. As I have suggested, the question
of realism invariably precedes or overtakes any discussion of naturalism,
which is typically pictured in one of two ways: either it hypostatizes realism,
pushing its presuppositions to a logical conclusion, or – and the line can
be blurry, often a matter of emphasis – it stands in a critical relation to
it, either by exposing the fallacy of its guiding principles or by betraying
them. (Georg Lukács is, as we shall see, the prime exponent of this latter
thesis.) But these either/or propositions, like the one I just teased out of
Hill and Cleary, suggest it is worth reconsidering whether it makes sense
to tie naturalism so tightly to realism’s coat-tails. In thinking about the
case of Britain (and, I would argue, Ireland) two objections arise, the
first practical and the second philosophical. In practical terms, Cleary’s
suggestive argument for a modernist naturalism in Ireland starts from the
long-standing observation that there was no robust realist tradition there,
as is presumed to have been dominant in mainland Britain – but what if
that is not actually the case? Work in Victorian studies has for some time
questioned the traditional narrative that reads the nineteenth century in
terms of the consolidated hegemony of realist fiction. As just one example,
here is Nancy Armstrong on the transformation of the visual field around
the middle of the century: “In describing the production of a new visual
order, my argument assumes there is no work of Victorian realism pure
and simple about which we now care all that much. The novels of Mrs.
Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, and Mrs. Humphry Ward are the first that
come to mind of a second tier of fiction that more than occasionally strives
for a documentary effect.”25
That final phrase “documentary effect” suggests that Armstrong really
means naturalism here, and her avoidance of the term might be taken
as symptomatic of the larger pattern of substitution that I have been
tracing within British literary studies more generally. Yet there is also a
strategic and polemical value to using “realism” here, given its habitual
deployment as practically a synonym for the Victorian novel tout court:
in this sense, to say that there is no “pure” realism to be found in the
nineteenth-century canon is to point out that none of the usual suspects –
Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, et al. – actually exemplify a British realism
in the way that, say, Balzac does for France. Armstrong’s argument goes
further, though, in defining a new visual aesthetic associated with the rise
of photography as having attained a higher form of hegemony that could
encompass “non-realist” forms such as the Gothic or fantasy as well: the
idea, put simply, that we visualize the diegetic world of novels while we
read them as if they were photographic representations. To the extent that
it trumps the more limited techniques of fictional realism, then, a form of
naturalist description that rendered material life in such visualizable terms
becomes, in Armstrong’s provocative account, the central development
of nineteenth-century fiction.26 It is as if one paradox – of a diffuse and
generalized realism without “pure” embodiment – gives way to an identical
one concerning naturalism, which takes over as a new norm, but one that
is fully identifiable only with forgotten minor writers.
If this approach suggests that we might decenter realism by substituting
naturalism for it, in a switching of traditionally major and minor categories,
the more philosophical objection installs another term at the heart of
our understanding of the nineteenth century – idealism, which bases its
understanding of literature and good literary practice on the assumption
that the work is able to uplift and improve the lives of its readers. In a critical
rethinking that was initiated by Naomi Schor’s work on George Sand, it
is idealism, rather than realism, that is increasingly being recovered as the
dominant mode in nineteenth-century European literature and criticism:
thus, in Schor’s formulation (and with her emphasis), “it is only in the process
of reconsidering idealism as it has functioned in nineteenth-century aesthetic
debates that one becomes aware that in what we might call the paradigm
of representation the term that now appears dominant (realism) was in fact
subordinate. Whereas in twentieth-century critical theory idealism appears,
if it appears at all, as a reaction to realism, in the nineteenth century the
opposite was true.”27 This rethinking has significant implications for how
we think about naturalism and the critical debates that it precipitated. Most
immediately, as Sharon Marcus has argued, we should recognize idealism as
the often-unstated position of British critics and reviewers who were hostile
to Zola and naturalism, in part because they viewed it – and what Marcus
sees as its thematic analog, lesbian sexuality – as emerging out of a different
critical and philosophical tradition.28 In this sense, restoring idealism to
the center of Victorian literary debates helps us to better understand both
the hostile Francophobia of such reviewers, and also the simultaneous
Francophilic appeal of naturalism – at least initially – to British aesthetes
who were shopping for alternatives.
In an echo of Nancy Armstrong’s decentering of realism, the line of
argument that follows from Schor’s rediscovery of idealism’s hegemonic
dominance posits naturalism, far more forcefully than realism, as its pri-
mary antagonist. This is the theoretical context in which Toril Moi’s recent
work recovering the radicalism of Henrik Ibsen’s drama has tried to shift
the focus away from the stale critical binary of realism versus modernism,
within which naturalism has tended to fall (when it appears at all) within
the former category. Thus, in Moi’s account, “Realism – the representation
of reality in writing and art – is neither modernism’s opposite nor its his-
torically necessary predecessor. If any one entity occupies that position, it
is idealism,” she goes on to suggest, and idealism was entirely compatible
with a great deal of what was labeled realist art in the nineteenth century.
Only that which stood in explicit opposition to idealist aesthetics, a “kind
of realism [that] came increasingly to be called ‘naturalism,’” occupied
the other pole in the “culture wars” of the 1880s, Moi claims. The cen-
tral question for debate, then, was “precisely whether anti-idealist realism
(not realism in general) could be art.”29 As a recharting of the central
divide within literary history, Moi’s work doubly displaces realism, substi-
tuting for it first idealism (as modernism’s antecedent opponent) and then
naturalism (as the first and most sustained challenge to an idealist hege-
mony); in the process, it might be seen that naturalism and modernism
converge, at least on the philosophical ground of a shared anti-idealism.
As Moi herself acknowledges in relation to a figure such as Ibsen, this
view of naturalist drama as a foreshadowing of High Modernism is in many
respects a return to an older viewpoint, one that’s visible, for instance, in
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s 1978 survey Modernism, A Guide
to European Literature 1890–1930. In a series of lectures and essays shortly
before his death, Raymond Williams also noted how writers such as Ibsen
had been erased from current understandings of modernism, or turned
into its opposite: naturalist dramas, he declared in “Theatre as Political
Forum” (1988), had constituted “the first phase of Modernism,” but the
term had degenerated into one of abuse, to the extent that “There is hardly a
new dramatic or theatrical movement, down to our own day, which fails to
announce, in manifesto, programme note or press release, that it is rejecting
or moving beyond ‘naturalism.’”30 Like Moi, Williams wanted to restore
that original sense of a radical challenge to prevailing ideology and dramatic
aesthetics, but also to understand how this downgrading of naturalism had
occurred: after all, as he argued in a 1985 lecture on “Cinema and Socialism,”
the “leading principle of Naturalism, that all experience must be seen within
its environment – indeed often, more specifically, that characters and actions
are formed by environments, as socialists still usually say – was intended as
a radical challenge to all received idealist forms.” Partly on account of its
own limitations, however, and partly due to a shift in modernist aesthetics
themselves, Williams sees naturalist drama as in effect having become its
opposite. In what he terms “a bitter irony,” then, it “came to be understood
as the very thing it had challenged: mere reproduction; or reproduction as
a setting, a cover, for the same old idealized or stereotyped stories.”31
In drama, this dialectical somersault occurred quite gradually, as theatri-
cal modes such as symbolism and expressionism emerged in response to the
impasse of naturalism. As Williams suggests, the decisive blow may only
have come with the political metatheater of Bertolt Brecht. In relation to
naturalist fiction, and especially Zola, the turnaround occurs much more
quickly, however. At least in the eyes of the British avant-garde, the French
novelist went from being a progressive ally to an outmoded reactionary in
the space of half a decade, as the paired scenes with which I began suggest.
With some notable exceptions, the consensus had already formed by the
mid-1990s that Zolian naturalism did not pose the challenge to idealism
that it had promised (indeed, Arthur Symons accused the novelist of a “dis-
torted idealism”), and – at a moment when symbolism was increasingly in
vogue – instead harnessed its narrow sociological insights to a regressively
mimetic aesthetics.32 Naturalism was already being read as a variant of real-
ism at this point, one that was naı̈ve in its insistence on doing something
new and almost unreadable to the extent that it resisted key components
of what was thought to be good literary style in the period.
This notion of naturalism as anti-style (or essentially style-less?) has stuck,
and is possibly the central factor in the history that Toril Moi and Raymond
Williams trace through which it has come to represent the polar opposite
of modernism. Fredric Jameson has described the dynamic in terms of a
split between content and form in which the latter term always wins out,
in part because the criteria are themselves the product of a high modernist
moment; as a consequence, a still-dominant version of modernism (even
though it is increasingly under attack from the New Modernist Studies)
defines itself by invoking as its contrasting other “the miserabilisme and the
nostalgia de la boue of some naturalist rummaging around in alleyways,”
preferring “a kind of ‘content’ closer to Henry James than to Zola.”33 As I
shall detail in Chapter 1, there is a rich irony here, James having been one
of the more acute readers of Zola in the 1890s. It is nonetheless true that
naturalism has been approached almost entirely as a set of thematic tropes,
as at best (in Zola’s own preferred term) a “method” rather than a form –
and it is this, more than its gravitation toward the lower end of the social
scale, that has enabled it to be dismissed as antithetical to the modernist
project.
Oddly, the most powerful critical voice linking naturalism with mod-
ernism was that of one of its fiercest detractors, the Marxist critic Georg
Lukács. In essays such as “Narrate or Describe?” (1936) and “The Ideology
of Modernism” (1962), Lukács deftly diagnosed what he understood to
be the shortcomings of both movements, each of which is found wanting
when measured against the yardstick of classical realism. We can usefully
isolate three components of the realist ideal for Lukács:
(i) characters are revealed to exist in a dynamic relationship to the larger
social world, within which they stand as figures for something larger
than themselves;
(ii) that dynamic works itself out in terms of decisions and actions on
the part of the characters, as the manifestations of the potential for
society to be reconstructed on a new basis;
(iii) preferred modes of social transformation will be indicated narratively,
in terms of a discernible authorial perspective that is used to establish
principles of selection.
In the first instance, we might say that for Lukács naturalism pushes the
typicality of characters too far in the direction of the average, in foreswear-
ing the category of the hero entirely as a holdover from Romanticism. At the
same time, the idea of the social totality also fades away, as texts are marked
by a local specialization, essentially a sequence of micro-investigations into
discrete topics: alcoholism, coal mining, department stores, railways, and so
on. To the extent that Zola might imagine these texts as interlocking units
in a greater project (the Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty volumes that
represented much of his life’s work), the larger whole would be, for Lukács,
a merely descriptive totality, a synchronic world that is frozen in time
and isolated in its discrete historical contingency: Second Empire France
and nothing else, and with nothing to tell us about our own historical
moment.
To the extent that naturalism details a world and situates an “average”
protagonist within it, it threatens to foreclose upon the possibility of the
latter exerting any influence upon – much less actively transforming – the
former. Zola’s own stress upon forms of determinism, environmental as
well as hereditary, would seem to preclude heroic action of the kind that
Lukács sees as defining classical realism, by denying even the appearance of
free will and agency. If this is the basis of naturalism’s alleged pessimism, as
characters are forced to submit to a brutalizing determinism that typically
takes the form of an inexorable downward spiral, the sense of resignation is
equally evident in its distinctive author-function. Its tropes of the detached
analytical observer or experimental scientist suggest a powerlessness in the
face of contingent circumstance, or alternatively of a method of writing
that forbids the sort of authorial interventions that might serve to indicate a
particular perspective on the action being described. In this sense, Lukács’
critique echoes the dominant aesthetic response to Zola that emerged
out of the 1890s: that the novelist had repudiated the process of selection
that was imagined as the essence of literary creativity, multiplying repetitive
examples, clauses, details, and scenes on the basis that to place any emphasis
would be to shortcut the process of documenting life itself. As we shall
see, to the extent that this did not quite describe the experience of actually
reading Zola, the typical recourse was to accuse him of not living up to his
own principles, on account either of a hidden political agenda (which was
the favored argument of Francophobic and idealist critics) or of a covert
idealism.
To his credit, Lukács does neither of these things, taking Zola – as I
will suggest Henry James did, although to very different ends – more or
less at face value. At his most generous, as in his 1940 essay on “The Zola
Centenary,” Lukács can sympathetically understand the direction Zola
took and trace it back to a transformation of the social position of the
author in the nineteenth century: “The writer no longer participates in
the great struggles of his time,” Lukács recognizes, “but is reduced to a
mere spectator and chronicler of life,” so as a consequence we can view his
or her novels as “merely attempts to find a method by which the writer,
now reduced to a mere spectator, could again realistically master reality.”34
Here, he comes closest to acknowledging the impossibility of still writing
as a classical realist, in the manner of Balzac, Tolstoy, or Dickens, and
recognizing that different modes of responding to the alienation of literary
labor – whether by identifying one’s work precisely as work, as Zola does,
or by imagining a magical autonomy for art – are all that remains. While
I will be engaging with and contesting many of Lukács’ arguments about
naturalism, I also want to underscore that he was a diligent and insightful
reader of it, one whose lifelong thinking about the naturalist project is
perhaps second only to Zola’s own. Among his most profound insights
was to see High Modernism as responding to precisely the same set of
impulses and crises, often by making what he viewed as essentially the same
mistakes.
If we return to the three components of classical realism detailed above,
we can chart those responses and see how for Lukács they paralleled those
offered by naturalism. His clearest statement of their interrelationship
appears in the essay “The Ideology of Modernism,” where he explicitly
advances the thesis of “a continuity from Naturalism to the Modernism
of our day – a continuity restricted, admittedly, to underlying ideologi-
cal principles.”35 In almost every respect, a modernism that is dependent
upon interior monologue to convey subjective impressions of the world
operates as naturalism’s negative image, so that where, for instance, char-
acters in the latter repudiate realist heroism and typicality by being too
average, modernist protagonists are instead defined by what Lukács terms
a “morbid eccentricity.” As “the necessary complement of the average,” this
renders modernist protagonists equally incapable of standing for anything
beyond themselves (31). Such figures, moreover, have even less interaction
with a larger social world, one that modernist novels can indicate only
on the basis of their alienation, so that their felt isolation in effect gets
generalized as a “universal condition humaine.” In modernism, each per-
son, Lukács suggests, “may establish contact with other individuals, but
only in a superficial, accidental manner; only, ontologically speaking, by
retrospective reflection. For ‘the others,’ too, are basically solitary, beyond
significant human relationship” (20).
If naturalism’s determinism tips the scale toward the environment at the
expense of character, then, High Modernism goes to the other extreme,
but in doing so equally misrepresents what for Lukács is a dynamic and
dialectical relationship. In the case of naturalism, the result is a loss of
agency, with characters unable to resist the movement of forces beyond their
control that include a genetic inheritance that precedes and predetermines
them. Modernist literature, for which Kafka’s work functions as Lukács’
key example, similarly arrives at inaction and paralysis, but it is a stasis
that is produced out of its emphasis upon a subjectivity that is never
quite finished with the recording of sensory experience or ready to make
concrete decisions. Here again, we might see the deferral of decisive action
The question of style: Naturalism/impressionism 19
as consistent with naturalism’s seeming capacity to extend the recording
of details and the enumeration of interchangeable events indefinitely; in
both instances, we are left with the world as it is, and not as it might be
reimagined and remade. This, finally, stems from the distinctive persona
of the high modernist author, who refuses (just as the naturalist does) to
articulate a principle of selection that would “enable the artist to choose
between the important and the superficial, the crucial and the episodic.”
As a consequence, Lukács argues for “the basically naturalistic character
of modernist literature,” in a sweeping generalization that encompasses
symbolism, futurism, constructivism, and surrealism: for him, each in
its own way demonstrates the “principle of naturalistic arbitrariness” by
withholding a “hierarchic structure” that might foreground what ultimately
matters most, the ways that individuals respond to and exert a reciprocal
influence over their social environment (33–4; emphasis in original).
The question of style: Naturalism/impressionism

I find the parallels that Lukács draws between naturalism and modernism
to be compelling for the most part, in particular for how he helps us
to understand some of the better-known problems of modernism – its
potential for solipsism, for instance, or for resigning itself in the face of
crushing forces at work in the world – as the inheritances of a literary
mode from which it tried so hard to distance itself. These parallels look
different, however, and less immediately pejorative, if we deemphasize
Lukács’ preferred comparison of both movements with realism, either by
questioning its presumed hegemony or by insisting that it represented (even
for Lukács himself ) an impossible point of comparison. For him, as June
Howard has argued, “modernists and naturalists are writers for whom the
historical opportunity to correlate individual action and social meaning in
a single, unified figure has closed,”36 so it makes little sense to beat each
with the stick of a classical realism whose own time had already come and
gone. It would also help to historicize this relationship a little more fully,
recognizing that Zola did not morph into Kafka overnight and that the
impossibility that Howard notes here was more readily recognizable to the
latter than the former; in this context, Jennifer Fleissner’s recent emphasis
on naturalist compulsion as an impulse to order and control that is never
satisfied, and thus endlessly repeated, might speak to its understandable
inability – within its own historical conjuncture – to accept the ultimate
futility of its project (at least from the Lukácsian standpoint of a Utopian
realism).37
In “Narrate or Describe?” especially, Lukács gives the sense that we move
suddenly and inexorably from naturalism to its modernist Doppelgänger, so
that the “investigation of social phenomena through observation and their
representation bring[s] such paltry and schematic results that these modes of
composition easily slip into their polar opposite – complete subjectivism.”38 But
that reversal does not occur without mediation, and it is in this context
that I want to introduce a third term: impressionism. On the face of it, this
would seem much closer to modernism than naturalism, to which in many
respects it might feel antithetical: especially in its pictorial sense, impres-
sionism might be understood as moving us toward the pole of subjective
perception and away from the kind of quasi-scientific observation that
grounded Zola’s conception of naturalism, or as anticipating the more sin-
uous forms of interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness fiction that
become the defining hallmarks of a particular brand of High Modernism.
In the 1880s and 1890s, however, impressionism and naturalism were often
used almost interchangeably, or at least to designate two faces of a single
project. To take one suggestive example of the former case, we find the
poet Lionel Johnson disparaging Arthur Symons’ 1892 collection Silhouettes
as “Parisian impressionism,” but meaning the insult to indicate the preva-
lence of gin shops, mud, buses, and lower-class women in the poems;
commenting on Johnson’s terminology, Karl Beckson notes that it “reveals
how ‘impressionism’ had become identified with ‘naturalism,’ which in
France, inspired by Zola, depicted the sleazy realities of urban life.”39 In
similar terms, Holbrook Jackson’s study The Eighteen Nineties (1913), which
has the benefit of being written in close proximity to the events it describes,
recognized the shared endeavor connecting impressionism and naturalism,
noting how “the faculty of looking at life with photographic vision” that he
found in writers as varied as Tolstoy, Shaw, and Ibsen was “the outcome of
that impulsion towards frankness which produced the Impressionists.”40
In their different ways, each of the authors I focus on in this book
located him- or herself in the spaces where naturalism and impressionism
converged. Zola was famously an early champion of impressionist painters
and a devoted friend of Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne before a public
break in the late 1870s. Given what I suggested earlier about the tendency to
see naturalism as primarily about thematic content or as anti-style, it may
be surprising to read in Chapter 2 that he defended Manet largely on formal
grounds, at times going so far as to deny the relevance of the paintings’
subjects altogether. On arriving in Paris for an aesthetic education in
the early 1870s, George Moore also inhabited both sides of the divide,
becoming intimate first with the impressionist painters and then with
Zola’s inner circle of naturalist writers centered in Médan; in Chapters 2
and 3, I trace Moore’s persistent attempts to hold them together in a form
of coalition long after the Zola/Manet split became public knowledge.
In many ways, Moore provides a template for the other British and Irish
authors I discuss: Arthur Symons, who was one of Zola’s fiercest critics in
London but who also (as Lionel Johnson’s criticism indicates) continued
to write in recognizably naturalist modes throughout the mid-1890s; the
New Woman novelist George Egerton [Mary Chevelita Dunne Bright],
who wrote in both modes but was also insightfully aware of a debilitating
gender politics connecting them; James Joyce, who is well known as an early
disciple of Ibsen’s and as an experimentalist with impressionistic narrative
form; and finally Virginia Woolf, who would seem the most hostile to
naturalism, and yet adopted many of its defining characteristics on those
occasions when she felt compelled to write about the poor.
If there is a connecting thread here, it is that each of these writers per-
forms a similar kind of inversion of naturalism’s analytical effort at recording
and documenting the material world. Nancy Armstrong’s helpful descrip-
tion of this process links the familiar interiority of High Modernism with
the reconfigured visual field that she sees as emerging from the nineteenth
century’s engagement with photographic reproduction: “No less dependent
on a visual definition of the real than Victorian realism,” she writes, “mod-
ernism nevertheless located whatever it considered authentic in nature or
culture within an invisible domain on the other side of the surface one
ordinarily sees. Indeed, it was in order to lay claim to this greater realism
beyond the conventional that modernism reduced the category of realism
to a caricature of its former self – a futile attempt at documentary fidelity
to the object world” (11). Once again, that last sentence indicates that
Armstrong has something like naturalism in mind as the master category
of realism; in which case, we might recognize modernism as engaged in a
desperate effort to distance itself from the very impulse that helped to give
it birth, but to do so by drawing a narrow distinction between the visible
and invisible. What unites such efforts is much greater than what divides
them, and can be enumerated in Lukács’ terms: like naturalism, the form
of modernism that Armstrong has in mind here was essentially descriptive
in its ambition, eschewed mechanisms of selection and hierarchies of sig-
nificance as much as possible, was just as interested in ordinary characters
as the extraordinary or eccentric, but in either case resisted older modes
of heroism. D. H. Lawrence would caricature just such modernist writing
(with Joyce and Dorothy Richardson in mind) as “self-consciousness picked
into such fine bits that the bits are most of them invisible”: “oh, Lord,”
he imagines a stereotypical modernist thinking, “if I liked to watch myself
closely enough, if I liked to analyse my feelings minutely, as I unbutton my
gloves, instead of saying crudely I unbuttoned them, then I could go on to
a million pages instead of a thousand. In fact, the more I come to think of
it, it is gross, it is uncivilized bluntly to say: I unbuttoned my gloves. After
all, the absorbing adventure of it! Which button did I begin with?”41
It is easy to imagine Lukács nodding in agreement with Lawrence’s
assessment. What it is mocking (somewhat belatedly, it should be said) is
what hostile critics in the 1890s would have diagnosed as a neurotic form
of introspection linked to a culture of decadence and the phenomenon of
the New Woman, as I shall discuss in Chapter 4. One striking version of
this critique appeared in 1894, in the first issue of The Yellow Book, as a
preemptive effort to take the sting out of cultural conservatives’ predicted
reaction by including one of their number in the magazine. The essay was
the one on “Reticence in Literature” that I mentioned earlier as provok-
ing a disdainful response from Hubert Crackanthorpe. As he would later
recount, Arthur Waugh was a known opponent of “anything like realism,”
and was invited to contribute to The Yellow Book in order to “drop a sort
of propitiatory garland into the arena, to catch the eye of the prim and
prudent,” in an effort either to generate controversy for the new magazine
or to inoculate it against attacks (and probably both).42 As was the case
with Lukács, though, if we can only bracket its combative tone, we may
recognize an insightful analysis emerging from Waugh’s essay. Initially, he
argued, writers in the 1890s had sought to imitate the robust muscularity
of Zola by going “out into the fields” to show “the coarser passions of
the farm-hand” – or, in a reference to George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife,
those of the traveling actor.43 Afterward, having found nothing new to
stimulate and advance the naturalist project, they effected a turn inward,
with “the mind thrown back upon itself” in an introspective movement
that sought to lay bare “passions and sensations hitherto dissociated with
literature, hitherto, perhaps, scarcely realized to their depth and intensity”
(212–13). In one mode, he suggests, “they employ all their art to render vice
attractive, in the other, with absolutely no art at all, they merely reproduce,
with the fidelity of the kodak, scenes and situations the existence of which
we all acknowledge, while taste prefers to forget them” (217).
The two are shown to be imbricated as a literary practice, however: a
sensuous impressionism borrowed naturalism’s photographic frankness in
order to chart the unseen world of the emotions, just as naturalism found
itself rejuvenated by the discovery of new material for analysis. Tellingly, it
is the writer’s own inner self that is subject to scrutiny here, in a manner
that anticipates what for Lawrence would be the self-indulgence of a strain
of high modernist writing. As an intermediary step in the movement
between naturalism and modernist stream of consciousness, the fictions
that I am identifying as impressionist here situate themselves somewhere
between two contrasting poles: on one hand, as Armstrong suggests, it is the
invisible world of inner consciousness rather than the material social world
that forms their thematic matter; on the other hand, they subject that inner
world to just the forms of detached observation and analysis that naturalists
brought to the outer world, striving for what Arthur Waugh termed “the
fidelity of the kodak.” Chapters 3 and 4, on Irish and New Woman fiction,
respectively, will detail how this process worked, focusing particularly on
work by Moore, Joyce, and Egerton. Here, though, I want to think a little
further about what this inward movement – Waugh’s “mind thrown back
upon itself” – entailed.
After all, naturalism has traditionally been faulted for its erection of a
high wall separating the omniscient (and implicitly privileged) space of
narration from the social location of characters who are typically under-
privileged and inarticulate. As a consequence, naturalist texts either have
to restrict themselves to what they imagine such characters could say and
think or risk the bad faith of putting more complex ideas into their minds
and mouths. Determinism, as June Howard has noted, is applied to every-
one in naturalism except the author, even though following its “determinist
ideas to their logical conclusion, readers and critics may reasonably ask how
anyone can get outside the fabric of causality.”44 Breaking what she terms
an opposition between characters who function merely as signs, on one
hand, and narrators or authors who hold power as the “producers of signs,”
on the other, the introspective movement toward self-analysis posits the
author-position as itself an object of analysis (105). The shift is very similar
to one that James Buzard has identified in the Victorian novel as respond-
ing to the central problem of ethnographic representation (of speaking for
an Other, invariably less privileged, from an Archimedean vantage point
of analytical distance) with what he terms “autoethnography.” But where
Mary Louise Pratt in particular uses the latter term to designate a process
of speaking back, especially in the ways that colonial subjects represent
their masters back to themselves, Buzard is more attentive to its reflexive
quality: “As metropolitan autoethnography,” he suggests,
the nineteenth-century novel anticipates modern fieldworking ethnog-

raphy in reverse, by construing its narrator’s (and many characters’)
desired position vis-à-vis the fictional world it depicts as that of an
insider’s outsiderness – “outside enough” to apprehend the shape of the cul-
ture . . . yet insistently positioned as the outsiderness of a particular inside,
differentiating itself from the putatively unsituated outsideness of theory or
cosmopolitanism as conventionally represented.45
What I take this to designate is a carefully poised balance between a position

within a culture that enables the analyst to understand that which he or she
is studying (as opposed to the necessarily externalized perspective of the
professional anthropologist) and one that is sufficiently “outside” to allow a
critical distance. As Buzard’s insistence upon particularity makes clear, the
precise terms and stakes underwriting any such bifocal perspective always
need to be specified and subjected to self-reflexive scrutiny.
Buzard’s formulation is immensely helpful for understanding the liter-
ary moment I am describing. The Irish and New Woman fictions that
are the focus of Chapters 3 and 4 are defined by just this combination of
an authorizing “insider” position that understands the dynamics of colo-
nialism and/or gender relations and an analytical distance from which that
authority is subject to question. Importantly, in both instances autoethnog-
raphy is infused with the situated subalternity that interests a critic such as
Pratt, writing from the other side of that “unsituated outsideness” that can
be taken as a hallmark of realist or naturalist narration; and yet, the intense
pressure to precisely and dispassionately analyze the position of the author,
especially in Moore and Egerton, reveals a sustained engagement with the
ethics of naturalism. Like Joyce, Moore was acutely aware of the distance
that still separates the Irish intelligentsia from the preferred subjects of
their fiction, whether the Western peasants with whom Moore struggles
to empathize in a text such as The Untilled Field (1903) or the urban
petite bourgeoisie of Dubliners (1914); both authors accordingly strain to
differentiate their own authority from a force of shared loathing, the Irish
Catholic clergy. In the case of New Woman novelists such as Egerton and
Sarah Grand, the complexity of the authorial position emerges from their
insistence on one hand that women possess a vastly superior capacity for
observation and analysis, and on the other that prevalent social condi-
tions limit and determine their ability to make those skills matter. In each
instance, although in very different configurations, forms of intellectual
privilege are alloyed with the material experience of economic, cultural, or
national dependence.
I have chosen to label this form of writing “impressionist” for a number of
reasons. First, as I have already suggested, it was the term most widely used
in the period itself, often in confusion with what we might now distinguish
as naturalism or symbolism. In some respects, the inevitable analogy with
painting can be misleading here, given that impressionist art was largely
played out in France by 1905, when art critic Charles Morice publicly asked
if it was finished; in Britain, however, the lag-time of importation meant
that it was still active as a term of discussion as late as 1910, when Roger
Fry’s celebrated exhibition of “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” – that
famous moment on or about which, for Virginia Woolf, “human character
changed” – introduced London audiences to work by Van Gogh, Cézanne,
and Seurat, all of whom were dead by 1906.46 In relation to fiction-writing,
moreover, debates about what a “literary impressionism” might resemble
continued through the teens, with Ford Madox Ford’s “On Impressionism”
(1914) a belated contribution to discussions that had been initiated in
the 1890s by writers such as James and Conrad.47 While it is tempting
to assimilate work by Moore or Egerton into the more forward-looking
category of “stream-of-consciousness” fiction, and thereby link them more
directly with a Woolfian modernism, to do so would be to misrepresent
what I take to be their central achievement, which was to harmonize the
depiction of internal states of mind with a descriptive (and still noticeably
naturalistic) account of the social world within which their protagonists
moved. We are not yet, then, in the solipsistic realm of pure subjectivity
that Lukács derided as a naturalistic modernism, or that Lawrence mocked
as self-indulgent navel-gazing.
In Chapter 2, I will recount some of the history of literature’s engagement
with pictorial Impressionism, beginning with Zola’s often surprisingly for-
malist praise of Manet. But I also concur with Jesse Matz’s sense that think-
ing only in terms of inter-art relationships and borrowings is unhelpful,
and with his insightful rereading of the differences between impressionism
in painting and in fiction. Whereas painters placed a premium on imme-
diate sensation and perception, for Matz impressionist authors worked to
shift “experience in the opposite direction . . . from the realm of sensuous
perception back toward that combination of (or middle ground between)
sense and thought always at work in the ‘aesthetic.’”48 Again, the goal is to
attain a balance between the “subjective” and “objective,” the perceiving
subject and his or her social world, and Matz argues that it is precisely in
order to forestall the dangers of solipsism that a writer such as Conrad, in
his manifesto-like Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), promotes
“solidarity” as the final aim of literary impressionism. Art is, for Conrad,
“a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the vis-
ible universe,” and yet doing so requires that “the artist descends within
himself ” [sic] in an introspective movement that nonetheless seeks to get
at “the subtle but invincible, conviction of solidarity that knits together
the loneliness of innumerable hearts.” If its appeal amounts to what the
Preface terms “an impression conveyed through the senses,” for Matz this
is conclusive evidence that Conrad doesn’t view sensual experience and the
impression as synonyms: to be effective, sense perception has to be shaped
into that which is held in common, “the latent feeling of fellowship with
all creation.”49
Conrad’s Preface ends with a poignant example, however, and one that,
as Matz argues, positions the novelist in the act of “disclaim[ing] the
theory he has been proposing” (145–6). It imagines a situation of leisurely
contemplation, a painterly scene in which “stretched at ease in the shade
of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a laborer in a distant field, and
after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at.”
The gap between this relaxed and casual act of perusal and the physical
work of the observed, who might be “trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to
uproot a stump,” marks this as a scene fraught with the very dangers with
which naturalism habitually flirts: condescension, or projection, or simple
misreading, but in any case a writerly effort that is born in the optimism
of solidarity but quickly risks degenerating into misunderstanding and
alienation (147). Sure enough, the end result is a failure, though one in
which Conrad recognizes some positives, “if in a brotherly frame of mind,
we may bring ourselves to forgive.” Surprisingly, it is the laborer’s failure
that’s being forgiven and not ours, in a manner that only intensifies the
sense of authorial condescension: “We understood his object,” the passage
concludes, “and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the
strength – and perhaps he had not the knowledge” (148). The physical
labor is largely irrelevant, then, as finally the authorial observer moves on
and forgets. The action was only the pretext for the more important work,
as Conrad sees it, of trying to grasp its significance, which is why ultimately
“our” understanding outweighs “his” lack of knowledge – and yet, it is hard
to see any actual solidarity being forged here.
Conrad’s parable is reminiscent of the compulsive component that Jen-
nifer Fleissner has highlighted within naturalism, its capacity to try and
fail, and then try differently and fail all over again. This might sound like
Samuel Beckett, but what it refuses to abandon as worthless is Conrad’s
goal of understanding our relationship to others, especially when they live
radically different lives and yet must be connected to us in some larger
model of social totality. Where Lukács sees naturalism as indistinguishable
from Beckett or Kafka, I read it instead through and in connection with the
kind of literary impressionism that Conrad is imagining, with the obvious
stylistic differences being less crucial than a shared ethical commitment. In
that spirit, my final chapter uncovers a naturalist impulse even in Virginia
Woolf, the modernist who perhaps more than any other would seem to
be its negation. Like Conrad, she is well aware of the likelihood of failure,
insisting in a 1929 essay “Three Pictures” that “if my father was a black-
smith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be pictures to
each other”; as soon as each starts to imagine the other, however, cultural
forms and prejudices (including figuring blacksmithing as “picturesque”)
intervene, and as a result “[w]e are both quite wrong in our judgments no
doubt, but that is inevitable.”50 The near-certainty of failing having been
acknowledged, however, there are moments in most of Woolf’s novels in
which she precisely tries to picture to herself the lives of the underprivi-
leged (often domestic servants and the homeless), and it is at such moments
that her descriptive language and style of characterization most comes to
resemble naturalism.
In Chapter 5 I document such moments, Woolf’s persistent questioning
of how and whether to write them, and if they can ever work or not,
from her involvement with the Women’s Cooperative Guild before World
War I to a 1940 lecture, “The Leaning Tower,” delivered to the Brighton
Workers’ Educational Association. Not surprisingly, she found irresolvable
aesthetic and ethical problems whenever she tried to write about the poor;
perhaps more surprising, especially given the prevailing view of her as a
snob or her husband’s characterization of her as “the least political animal
that has lived since Aristotle invented the term,”51 she found trying and
failing preferable to abandoning the task altogether. Her depictions of
lower-class figures such as Mrs. MacNab from To the Lighthouse (1927),
who “must have had” what the novel imagines as “visions of joy” either
“at the wash-tub” or “at the public-house, drinking; turning over scraps
in her drawers,” make for uncomfortable reading, but it is essentially the
same discomfort that we get when reading Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877). As
Woolf’s novel seems to despair of getting closer than such guesswork, the
housekeeper “turn[s] to her work again,” keeping a deserted house clean
as the text marks the passage of empty time. Like Conrad’s laborer, her
body – said to be “bowed down. . . . with weariness”– might be read as a
literal manifestation of what I am terming a modernism on all fours, one
that keeps returning in different forms (and without resolution) to a set of
problems first posed by naturalism, its nominal opposite.52
chapter 1
How Zola crossed (and didn’t cross)

the English Channel
When Zola addressed the Authors’ Club in London in September 1893, it

was not exactly as a famous (or even infamous) novelist, or as an advocate for
the cause of naturalism. Instead, he arrived representing French professional
authorship, the Société des gens de lettres, and at the invitation of the English
Institute of Journalists on the occasion of its annual conference. At that
event, Zola delivered a talk on the issue of journalistic anonymity, and
it was in the company of newspaper writers that he was received by the
Lord Mayor of London. In his role as a visiting dignitary, he also toured
the Whitechapel slums and the London underground.1 The Authors’ Club
dinner, which had been hastily arranged when news of Zola’s visit became
known, was likewise an occasion for thinking about writing as a profession.
Besides being a prolific novelist, Walter Besant, who served as vice-chair for
the dinner, is now best known for his contributions to period debates such
as “The Art of Fiction,” in which his 1884 lecture provoked better-known
responses from Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the 1890
“Candour in English Fiction” exchange with Thomas Hardy and Eliza
Lynn Linton in the New Review. The “Art of Fiction” talk coincided with
Besant’s work to help found the Society of Authors, with the principal
aim of protecting and retaining copyright, and it shows him making an
argument for fiction writing as more an art form than a mechanical process.
In the later essay, he argued that the scope of controversial subjects open
to novelists was partially circumscribed by the Philistine force of “Average
Opinion,” which set up “bounds and hedges beyond which, if he chooses
to stray, it is at his own peril.”2
It is easy to imagine how the Vizetelly trials of the previous two years
had helped to shape this position, with the threat of imprisonment for
indecency representing perhaps the most extreme of those bounds, but
Besant is also cautious not to represent public opinion as simply repressive
or misguided, like the fictional “Mrs. Grundy” who served so often as
the target of authorial anger. Instead, echoing his emphasis on the rules
28
How Zola crossed (and didn’t cross) the English Channel 29
of novel-writing in “The Art of Fiction,” Besant concluded that if the
representation of adulterous love was felt to be “outside the social pale
and . . . destructive of the very basis of society,” that was “not a law laid
down by that great authority, Average Opinion, but by Art herself, who
will not allow the creation of impossible figures moving in an unnatural
atmosphere” (113). In the ideal world that Besant imagined, the writer
of fiction was both a worker, with rights that would best be safeguarded
by a form of guild union but also subject to the wider dictates of the
marketplace, and at the same time an artist. Keeping in mind this desire to
merge the two helps us to understand Zola’s own speech at the 1893 dinner,
at which he began by expressing relief that “it is no longer the journalist
that is feted, but the novelist.”
If this might seem to signal a shift to more aesthetic concerns, however,
the Frenchman also knew his audience and emphasized the labor that went
into writing fiction. He openly acknowledged the lingering mistrust of
the British public and critics arising out of the Vizetelly trials, recalling a
remark from the previous night’s address about having “come to conquer
England.” “Will you allow me to reply,” he went on,
that I am aware what I ought to think of my conquest? In the midst of all

these plaudits, all these ovations, I well understand that the opinion of your
critics has not changed in regard to my works. Only now you have seen
their author, and have found him less black than report made him out to
be. (Laughter and cheers.) Then, too, you have said to yourselves – “Here
is a man who has fought hard and worked much;” and this grand nation of
workers, as you are, has, in me, honoured work (Cheers).
This feels very much like a case of preaching to the choir, and even though
Zola would introduce a minor note of discordance by characterizing his
novels as “works of a different order in art to your own [that] may have
affronted you,” he swiftly returned to a presumed common ground, flat-
tering his audience for being “too wise not to recognize them as soon as
you understood what they contained of effort and of sincerity.”3 And with
this, Zola was on his way back to Paris, at which point, according to Ernest
Vizetelly, the publisher’s son, attacks upon his writing recommenced; the
novelist, he wrote, “had scarcely quitted England when the fanatics once
more raised their heads,” with new attacks coming from the Bishop of
Worcester, the headmaster of Harrow public school, and the Bishop of
Truro.4
If we shift our attention back to the trials of the senior Vizetelly, we can
see that they shaped an abiding negative image of Zola and naturalism that
30 How Zola crossed (and didn’t cross) the English Channel
the London visit five years later could not erase. The publisher had been
prosecuted under a relatively new and underutilized law, an 1868 clarifica-
tion of the 1857 Obscene Publications Bill that sought to extend its scope
beyond the importing of pornographic materials. When the original law
was upheld as applying to an anti-Catholic pamphlet, the judge addressed
the issue of intent in a ruling known as Regina v. Hicklin, which now
defined the test of obscenity as “whether the tendency of the matter . . . is
to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral
influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall.”5 As
Joseph Bristow points out, in a discussion of how the law would be adapted
for homophobic ends, the ruling shifts the focus from intent to reception,
which is how the scope of the law now potentially extended itself to canon-
ical works of literature – indeed, as Bristow shows, the clarification had
been sought in part because of concerns in Parliament that it might ensnare
works such as Dryden’s translations of Ovid or Restoration comedies (22).
During the first Vizetelly trial, the Times summarized that the current state
of legal thinking held that “the object of the publication had nothing to do
with the matter.” It also quoted the Recorder’s opinion that the defendant
had less justification than the author of the anti-Catholic pamphlet, on
the basis that the translations of Zola “had been published for the sake of
gain” and “was deliberately done in order to deprave the minds of persons
who might read the books.” As the Times editorialized the same day, the
Hicklin test might contain some ambiguity in its effort to police the line
“between prudery and prurience,” but “if the line is not to be drawn so
as to exclude translations of such works of ZOLA as ‘La Terre’ and ‘Pot
Bouille,’ it is plain that it cannot be drawn at all.”6
Vizetelly’s part in the crime as the publisher was the pursuit of profit,
as emphasis was repeatedly placed upon both his own investment in Zola’s
work and the cheap price of his editions, which was thought to indicate
the intent to market them to those with a predisposition toward depravity:
according to the Times, he “knew that prosecutions of the kind were rare
and not very readily undertaken by the authorities, and he knew that
if he escaped prosecution he would probably make a large profit by the
venture.” In this, he was in effect abetted by Zola, whose work was said by
the prosecution to have no artistic merit, no passages (in the words of the
prosecution) “which contained any literary genius or the expression of any
elevated thought.” Again, the Times agreed, and confirmed the circularity
of the argument by diagnosing the texts’ presumed readers: since “their
literary merit, such as it is, is not sufficient to induce even the most hardy
of students to wade through their overflowing nastiness,” therefore “the vast
majority of those who read them read them for their filth alone, and unless
such readers are utterly corrupt already, they cannot but be corrupted in
the process.” In a very real sense, the emphasis on writing as material labor
that grounded Zola’s successful appearance at the Authors’ Club dinner,
with its implicit de-emphasizing of aesthetic merits or literary technique,
had helped to convict Vizetelly (and by extension, Zola himself ) just four
years earlier.
The terms in which the prosecution would be couched in turn had been
set by a Parliamentary debate from May 1888, culminating in unanimous
support for criminal action, even though, as Ernest Vizetelly insisted, it
was a nearly empty House of Commons.7 The bill’s sponsor began by
highlighting Alfred Vizetelly’s rash (and misleading) boast to W. T. Stead
of the Pall Mall Gazette that he sold 1,000 copies of Zola’s novels each
week, and had sold over a million in all on the English market.8 Raising a
familiar image of a degenerate France, especially in contrast to the rising
power of Germany, where Zola’s novels had not been sold, Samuel Smith
MP would rhetorically ask, especially in light of what he saw as the “failure”
of the Elementary Education Act, if Parliament “need wonder that they
were rearing in London a population which, to a large extent, would
prove a source of weakness to the nation” (6–7). This clichéd specter of a
demoralized Britain, hollowed out at its center and no longer fit to compete
on the global stage, was picked up in the wider press coverage of the Vizetelly
trial. The Whitehall Review, for instance, spelled out the social implications
by distinguishing the morally uplifting literature available in the respectable
lending libraries from works such as Zola’s, “distributed in cheap issues,
unexpurgated, or in careful selections of the most indecent parts, specifically
for the corruption of young people.” The Morning Advertiser, meanwhile,
extended the implication of nefarious intent to the French author himself:
his books, it editorialized, “have great merits, no doubt, but their merits
do not redeem them from the imputation of ministering to the lowest
passions of human nature, and it is difficult to imagine that any man or
woman can be better for their perusal.”9
In many ways, the question of what kind of writer Zola was ran like
a fault line through the trial and surrounding debate, and it may be that
it was this question – rather than any moral or criminal culpability on
the part of either him, the press, or the courts – that was felt to have
been decided by the time of his 1893 visit to London. The defensive
strategy was to implicitly claim his position in the literary canon simply
by affiliating him (even at his most risqué) with unimpeachable figures
such as Chaucer and Shakespeare. A similar tactic was pursued when
Vizetelly’s counsel insisted that Zola had recently been made a Knight of
France’s Legion of Honor, as if such company automatically precluded
his being a hack writer or worse. Tellingly, the comment came after an
exchange in court that directly addressed the ambiguities of Zola’s authorial
status. As reported in the Times, Vizetelly’s lawyer noted in extenuation
of his client’s Guilty plea that “He would remind his Lordship that these
works were works of a great French author.” At this point, the prosecuting
Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke, who would find himself on the
other side of these debates when defending Oscar Wilde seven years later,
sought to rephrase the characterization, labeling Zola “a voluminous French
author,” while the Recorder chimed in with “a popular French author.”
It is at this moment in the trial that Vizetelly’s counsel weakly alludes
to the assessment of others, terming Zola “an author who ranks high
among the literary men of France,” as evidenced by the Legion of Honor
distinction.10
One question being begged here is whether one nation is obliged to
respect another’s honorifics – and indeed, if such conveyed respect might
risk sullying the British or greater Western canons by association. Newspa-
pers obliquely worried, for instance, about where the impulse to prosecute,
once initiated, might end, with the Whitehall Review making reference
to the National Vigilance Association’s failed effort to indict Boccaccio’s
Decameron in translation (21). Perhaps mindful that Vizetelly had tried
to forestall his accusers by sending an open letter to the Solicitor for the
Treasury, accompanied by a private pamphlet titled “Extracts Principally
from the English Classics” that digested passages from Shakespeare, Dry-
den, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Byron, and others,11 the Morning Advertiser
sought to disarm the argument, opining that
The fact that there are classic writers in our own language who have written
works as objectionable in form as “Nana” or “La Terre,” if for the sake
of argument we admit it to be a fact, has really but little bearing on the
question . . . The contention that if we are to suppress the vicious novels of
our time we must, to be consistent, make a clean sweep of a large portion of
English literature cannot be maintained, and it is not seriously maintained
even by those who put it forth. (23)
We might wonder about the force of a counterargument that relies so

much on dismissing the original thesis out of hand, as both untenable and
irrelevant, but we can also recognize that what is being insisted upon in such
statements is Zola’s unworthiness to be considered a writer with literary
merits. As the Star editorialized against a similar hypothetical defense
that might place him in company with Chaucer, Rabelais, and Boccaccio,
“M. Zola’s ‘La Terre’ has none of the charm, the humour, the style which
redeem the works of the authors named” (22). In such assessments, and
especially the assault on his style, the press would echo the judgment of
prominent aesthetes and literary critics, as we shall see.
I will be arguing that Zola placed a greater emphasis on matters of form
than he is typically given credit for, even though his was a style of writing
that was radically out of step with the 1880s and 1890s. If its relationship
to modernism is to be rethought, we need first to clarify the terms of its
opposition to the emerging orthodoxies of the period. Crucially, Zolian
naturalism would repudiate many of the central assumptions of fin de
siècle aesthetics, including what it saw as an overemphasis on matters of
form at the expense of content; the prizing of the artificial and startling,
especially in imagery, as a way of penetrating the banality of everyday
life and perception; and the associated privileging of compression and
condensation as indicative of artistic originality or poetic genius. Not
surprisingly, many of the period’s leading aesthetes would come to agree
with the popular and legal sentiments expressed in the Vizetelly trials that
whatever Zola was writing somehow fell short of the normative standards
that defined the literary during this period.
The novelist’s own thinking about the question of style is not as simple
as the trial transcripts and press reports suggest. As Henry James suggested
when reporting back on his visits to Paris in the mid 1880s, French natural-
ism imagined itself as responding to much the same perception of artistic
sterility that haunted decadent aesthetes in the same period. Writing to
T. B. Aldrich, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, James would record with
some sympathy that for Zola’s Médan School of novelists “The torment
of style, the high standard of it, the effort to say something perfectly in
a language in which everything has been said, and re-said – so that there
are certain things, certain cases, which can never again be attempted – all
this seems to me to be wearing them out.”12 What differentiated natural-
ism’s response from that of the decadents or the symbolists, however, was
its insistence that the way forward lay not in replacing banality (saying
what “has been said, and re-said” so often that it becomes clichéd) with
shocking eccentricity, but instead in devising a new experimental method
that might set fiction to work speaking on new topics. In the process, Zola
would inevitably marginalize literary stylistics as largely ornamental and
secondary: “Let us first fix upon the method, on which there should be
agreement,” he argued in the final section of his manifesto The Experi-
mental Novel, “and after that accept all the different styles in letters which
may be produced, looking upon them as the expressions of the literary
temperament of the writers.”13
Zola is not entirely consistent about style in this essay, although the
fact that he came to it so late in what would be his signature effort at
defining naturalism suggests he felt it was relatively unimportant. Style
would seem to be the place where the idiosyncrasies of the author might
assert themselves – “precisely there that individuality shows in literature” –
and yet such differences evaporate in the paragraph that follows, which
insists that such questions are accorded “exaggerated importance.” “In
reality,” Zola admits, “I think that the form of expression depends upon
the method: that language is only one kind of logic, and its construction
natural and scientific,” by which point whatever variability of expression he
had introduced would seem to have been voided (47–8). At any rate, we can
see that the formal method, that which is above all “scientific” and logical,
is paramount, especially given the problem of saying something new in
writing. Considering the nonchalant (and belated) manner in which he
considers the question of style, it is hard to imagine that Zola would have
been especially bothered by the general consensus of the British courts,
journalists, and Parliament – or even the judgments of aesthetes such as
Arthur Symons – questioning his literary abilities.
Naturalism and metaphor

We can clarify the terms of debate further if we focus on a specific element
of Zola’s style, or perceived anti-style: metaphor. As perhaps the figure
that most exemplifies what was meant by literary selectivity in this period,
metaphor helps to define what critics deemed Zola’s deficiency: as Symons
would put it, while a contemporary like Edmond de Goncourt had the
ability to “match a sensation or an impression by its figure in speech, Zola,
on the contrary, never finds just the right word, and it is his persistent
fumbling for it which produces these miles of description.”14 In such a
passage, the language of impressionism is being deployed to position Zola
as the methodical laborer who has set himself the monumentally pointless
task of reconstructing the world in language, and in doing so has revoked
his right to say anything about it. Recalling what Henry James would say
about the naturalists he visited in Paris in the mid 1880s, and their struggle
“to say something perfectly in a language in which everything has been
said, and re-said,” we can infer that metaphorization was being held out
in literary circles as a way out of the perceived impasse of a worn-out
language in which “there are certain things, certain cases, which can never
Naturalism and metaphor 35
again be attempted.” Figuring them as what he termed “finished, besotted
mandarins” sitting in the “celestial Empire” of Paris, James noted the Zola
circle’s envy of the Russian realist Turgenev, whom they saw as “working in
a field and a language where the white snow had as yet so few footprints.”15
Symons’ own initial gambit had been to celebrate decadence, with its
aim of heightening language’s artificiality as a way of disrupting the conven-
tionalized relation of words to things, and ultimately this would lead him to
symbolism: writing about George Meredith in 1897, for instance, Symons
defined decadence as “that learned corruption of language by which style
ceases to be organic, and becomes, in the pursuit of some new expres-
siveness or beauty, deliberately abnormal.”16 Accordingly, we can track the
distance between naturalism and symbolism in terms of their respective
attitudes toward metaphorical language. For poets such as Verlaine and
Mallarmé, as previously for Baudelaire, the unexpected use of language to
compare nominally incongruent or incommensurable concepts aimed at
the liberation of the imagination from conventionalized associations; as
Symons would write of Mallarmé in his influential study of The Symbolist
Movement in Literature (1899), his work demonstrated a “seeming artificial-
ity which comes from using words as if they had never been used before,
that chimerical search after the virginity of language” that echoes the envy
of Turgenev mentioned a moment ago.17 It is an approach to metaphor
that Holbrook Jackson termed the anti-natural “green carnations of song”
in order to underscore a connection with Wildean decadence, and in the
process he highlighted a tendency to borrow terminology from the other
arts, especially painting and music: “Several of the most striking verbal
effects of the time,” Jackson claimed, “were obtained by the transposition
of words from one set of ideas to another, after the manner of Baudelaire’s
theory of correspondences,” so that poems might become “impressions”
or paintings “symphonies.”18 Such efforts stood in the face not only of the
ossification of language but also of social life more generally, at a moment
when (as Jackson argues) “the obvious and the commonplace” were held
in extraordinary “disregard” (143). In such times, as Symons declared in
his manifesto for symbolism, it would be necessary “to spiritualise litera-
ture, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority.
Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically” (5).
To the extent that both exteriority and description were common
descriptive markers of naturalism, we can recognize a challenge to Zola
in this. Accordingly, the novelist takes his place in Symons’ study toward
the end of a long line of French writers for whom “form aimed above all
things at being precise, at saying rather than suggesting, at saying what they
had to say so completely that nothing remained over”; if they threatened to
“take style to a point beyond which the style that says, rather than suggests,
cannot go,” Symons admits that the symbolists exhibited a complemen-
tary “over-possession by form” (4–5). For Zola, however, all their efforts to
defamiliarize and renew the language only repeated the gestures of an out-
moded Romanticism. In a published “Letter to the Young People of France”
written around the time of The Experimental Novel, he acknowledged the
force and wisdom of Romanticism’s initial challenge to a classicism that by
the 1830s had been “dying of inertia.” In terms that echo the fin de siècle
position of the decadents, he credits the Romanticists with having “infused
new blood into [literature] by putting into circulation an unknown and
despised vocabulary, by employing a host of sparkling images, by a livelier
and more enlarged manner of feeling and rendering.” But while such a rev-
olutionary transformation might have been necessary then, and partially
justifiable as “the outcome of the social conditions of the time, and as a
result of the shocks of the Revolution and the Empire,” the problem was
that Romanticism subordinated everything to style, viewing “the idea [as]
but a secondary consideration.”19 Such a prioritizing of style over substance
had subsequently lost any radical edge and had achieved hegemony over
the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was clear to Zola that
dominant French writers were “in question of style, but the children of the
romanticists.” Symbolism, then, would represent for Zola what naturalism
was for Lukács: an inadequate because belated response to a problem gen-
erated by revolutionary upheaval, and a seeming radicalism that disguised
a conservative impulse, at a time when “the reign of the word-mongers is
over” and that of naturalism was supposed to have arrived (94).
The difficulty, however, is that such a view potentially leaves naturalism
with nowhere to go in its use of language. Indeed, the vanishing point
just before style is pushed beyond where it can go, in Symons’ phrasing,
would be a utopian equivalence between signifier and referent very much
like the effort to fully reconstruct the material world in prose form. It
is not exactly that Zola resists metaphors, however, but that he has to
severely circumscribe his use of them in ways that make them antithetical
to symbolist designs. Using examples from L’Assommoir (1877), the novel
that was widely held even by Zola’s critics to be an effective deployment
of his stated methods,20 I want to identify two categories of metaphor in
what follows, as a way of reflecting upon the issue of naturalist aesthetics.
As a first limitation, we might note how Zola persistently sets himself
against the authorial persona of the Romantic genius, in part by negating
the inventiveness of symbolist metaphorization and insisting instead upon
banality. There are, for instance, the metaphors through which his largely
inarticulate characters are able to think of themselves as no better than
animals, as machines, or as corporealized impulses and desires. At an
overelaborate feast that indicates a lower-class resistance to principles of
economy or (less charitably) the inability to restrain appetite or defer
gratification, for instance, Madame Boche deploys a bestial metaphor in
order to literalize the narrative sentiment that she and her friends “could
all live on salad, they could eat it by the bucketful,” claiming that “I’d go
down on all fours in a field, I would [Moi, je me mettrais à quatre pattes
dans un pré].”21 Her husband makes a similar remark at the intersection of
gluttony and bodily function when he witnesses juice shooting out of the
carved turkey and declares “I’ll sign on, if someone’ll pee that way in my
mouth [Moi, je m’abonne, murmura-t-il, pour qu’on me fasse comme ça pipi
dans la bouche]” (214; 577).
Passages such as this, while striking, work mainly to underscore one of the
central tenets of naturalism, that a person is merely what the title of a later
volume in the Rougon-Macquart series would name “la bête humaine” or a
human animal. It feels as if the Boches are endorsing the idea, but without
in the process becoming conscious of themselves as naturalist characters.
If this use of figurative language is consistent with the larger project of the
novel, however, other instances in which L’Assommoir’s characters think
about their lives in metaphorical terms instead underscore their romantic
sentimentalism, and thus work to drive a wedge between their voices and
that of the narrative. In one notable instance, the protagonist Gervaise
reflects upon having buried her mother-in-law through a metaphor that is
so commonplace as to feel worthless, at best a reminder of her own limited
capacity to meaningfully reflect upon her experience. “Back home that
evening Gervaise just sat on a chair in a daze,” the passage begins, with a
cue that this is not likely to be a profound meditation:
But in truth it wasn’t only Maman Coupeau she’d left at the bottom of that
hole in the little garden of the Rue Marcadet. Too much was missing; what
she’d buried that day must be a part of her own life, her shop, her pride
as an employer, and other feelings as well. Yes, the walls were bare, and so
was her heart [Mais elle n’avait bien sûr pas laissé que maman Coupeau au
fond du trou, dans le petit jardin de la rue Marcadet. Il lui manquait trop de
choses, ça devait être un morceau de sa vie à elle, et sa boutique, et son orgueil
de patronne, et d’autres sentiments encore, qu’elle avait enterrés ce jour-là. Oui,
les murs étaient nus, son cœur aussi]. (310; 671)
In one sense, the passage picks up upon the thematic of dehumanization,
but its overt melodrama at the same time registers Gervaise’s problem: that
she can only reflect upon her loss when it’s too late, and only then in a
short-lived reverie of self-pity out of which she inevitably returns to more
of the same. It is a sentimental note that is sounded at other moments,
such as the maudlin “blubbering” that occurs when the drunken feasters
“[let] themselves go completely, wallowing in self-pity [se déboutonnant le
ventre, crevant d’attendrissement]” during a song about “The Child of the
Lord” (226; 590). More typically, the narrative tendency is to deflate such
moments, quite literally in one instance during Madame Coupeau’s funeral
when – at a point when the text signals that “the conversation turned very
sentimental” – “a strange muffled sound of trickling” interrupts it, and is
revealed to be the deceased “emptying [Elle se vide]” (301; 662).
A second category of metaphor extends the dehumanization that under-
pins the first by emphasizing the processes of reification and commodity
fetishism through which human relationships become mediated by and
through what people make or consume. In a set of metaphorical inter-
changes, such items in turn are given animation, as if only things are
truly alive. Where Lukács’ critique insists that naturalism is itself a reified
form, the “inevitable product” of capitalism’s accelerated “dehumanization
of social, the general debasement of humanity,” L’Assommoir could also be
said to reveal such processes at work.22 There is, for instance, no clearer
example of how the repetitive action of manual labor encourages people
to see each other in terms of what they produce than its opening spectacle
of a fight between laundresses: although the narrative description is often
voyeuristic, its focus (as Symons put it) “eternally fixed on the inch or two
of bare flesh that can be seen,” it also reduces the combatants to their own
raw materials, as “[o]nce into their stride, they pounded each other vig-
orously, rhythmically, like laundresses pounding dirty clothes [Alors, mises
en train, elles se tapèrent comme les laveuses tapent leur linge, rudement, en
cadence]” (30; 400). Remarkably, the metaphor inverts itself by ending up
comparing the women to what they actually are, in a manner that signals
that they have first become something else, a rhythmic motion that is only
figuratively recognizable as human beings in action.
The other side of this equation, in which things become fetishistically
animated at the expense of the people who make and use them, might be
illustrated by another scene of competitive antagonism, this time between
two ironworkers, the noble Goujet and a co-worker Bec-Salé whose name
(literally “salty mouth”) already indicates his alcoholic predisposition even
before his alias “Boit-sans-Soif” doubles the meaning. The metaphorical
impulse behind nicknaming, as an everyday form of figuration, in turn is
both signaled and rendered redundant when he is referred to repeatedly,
as if in a form of honorific, as “Bec-Salé, alias Boit-sans-Soif.” The two
workers are shown to compete with each other to impress Gervaise with
their strength by pounding iron with their hammers, respectively named
Fifine and Dédèle, and the personification is extended when the movement
of each is compared with a form of dance. The first performance is by Bec-
Salé, and “you should just have seen Dédèle waltzing about! She did the
grand entrechat, kicking her tootsies into the air and showing her undies
like a floozie at the Elysée-Montmartre [Et Dédèle, valsait, il fallait voir!
Elle exécutait le grand entrechat, les petons en l’air, comme une baladeuse de
l’Elysée-Montmartre, qui montre son linge]” (167; 532). In an explicit contrast
that – like the metaphor itself – is not clearly signaled as emerging from
either the characters or the narrative (and, in the manner of free indirect
discourse, instead fuses the two), “in [Goujet’s] hands Fifine’s dance was no
high-kicking, showing-all-she’d-got sleazy bar routine, no, she was raising
her head then bowing low to the rhythm like some noble lady of long
ago, gravely leading a minuet [Fifine, dans ses deux mains, ne dansait pas un
chahut de bastringue, les guibolles emportées par-dessus les jupes; elle s’enlevait,
retombait en cadence, comme une dame noble, l’air sérieux, conduisant quelque
menuet ancien]” (168; 533). The scene sublimates work into the preferred
leisure activities of dancing and drinking (Fifine does her work soberly,
with blood rather than brandy in her veins), but it is equally true to say the
reverse: the logic of metaphorical substitution also suggests that pleasure
has become simply an extension of a work that is performed by hammers
rather than the people who wield them, laborers who have been reduced
to the spectators of their own labor.
Leisure, then, does not compensate for – and in many ways merely
redoubles – the misery of work. In the novel’s most grotesque image of
dehumanization, the liquor still at its eponymous bar is referred to as a
“boozing-machine,” and one of its most regular customers, Mes-Bottes,
goes so far as to imagine himself becoming an extension of it:
His laugh sounded like a pulley that needed greasing as, nodding his head,
he gazed fondly at the boozing-machine. Christ almighty! wasn’t she a
sweetheart! There was enough in that great copper belly to keep your whistle
wetted for a whole week! He’d have liked it, he would, if they’d solder the
end of the tubing between his teeth, so he could feel the rotgut – still warm,
it’d be – filling him up, flowing on and on right down into his heels, like
a little stream [Il avait un rire de poulie mal graissée, hochant la tête, les
yeux attendris, fixés sur la machine à soûler. Tonnerre de Dieu! elle était bien
gentille! Il y avait, dans ce gros bedon de cuivre, de quoi se tenir le gosier au frais
pendant huit jours. Lui, aurait voulu qu’on lui soudât le bout du serpentin entre
les dents, pour sentir le vitriol encore chaud, l’emplir, lui descendre jusqu’aux
talons, toujours, toujours, comme un petit ruisseau]. (42; 411)
By the end of a novel that traces Gervaise’s sequential succumbing to

alcoholism, prostitution, and finally death, each step is imagistically linked
with each other and back to Mes-Botte’s nightmare vision of a hybridized
and subhuman drinking machine:
she kept casting sidelong glances at the boozing machine behind her. That
bloody great pot, as round as the belly of a fat tinker’s wife, with its thrusting,
twisting snout, sent shivers down her back, shivers of fear mixed with
longing. Yes, it was like the metallic innards of some gigantic whore, of
some sorceress who was distilling, drop by drop, the fire that burned in
her gut. A pretty source of poison . . . [elle jetait des regards obliques sur la
machine à soûler, derrière elle. Cette sacrée marmite, ronde comme un ventre de
chaudronnière grasse, avec son nez qui s’allongeait et se tortillait, lui soufflait un
frisson dans les épaules, une peur mêlée d’un désir. Oui, on aurait dit la fressure
de métal d’une grande gueuse, de quelque sorcière qui lâchait goutte à goutte le
feu de ses entrailles. Une jolie source de poison . . . ] (345; 706)
Figuratively linking the steps of her downward spiral in this way signals
the metaphor’s subordination to the underlying principle of naturalism’s
method, just as comparing people to animals reinforces the idea of “la
bête humaine.” In this sense, Zola’s metaphors are always meta-metaphors,
working to amplify the novelist’s central purpose and becoming almost
unnoticeable as a result.
We might say that whereas symbolism uses comparisons in order to get
at something hidden or otherwise incomprehensible about the material
world, and thus prizes unexpected and artificial combinations, natural-
ist metaphors feel obvious to the point of redundancy. They don’t say
anything particularly new, and as we have seen, can even go so far as to
compare something with itself. In association with its play with animating
and deanimating, this metaphorical literalism might be read as a refusal of
reification at the level of the image (of something as “literary” as personifi-
cation, for instance) in order to insist that we in fact simply are animals, or
the mechanical arrangement of desires and forces over which we have no
control. Whatever it ultimately achieves, figuration is not a technique of
selection or compression that might usefully highlight a particular feature
among a range of possible options, as it would need to be to register for
someone like Arthur Symons; indeed, it is only by their repetition and
reduplication that Zola’s images can function at all, as the building blocks
of the proverbial naturalist brick wall.
Strange signs in the literary zodiac: Symons and Zola 41
Characterizing naturalism in this way as thinking differently about
style – as opposed to being simply against it or determined to subordinate
it to content – helps us to avoid the impasse I highlighted in the Introduc-
tion, in which it comes to stand in unequivocal opposition to modernism.
The story of its imbrication within the history of modernism is, as I hope
to show, a different and more interesting one to tell, and one that makes
greater sense of what was a much more conflicted response to Zola on
the part of the artistic vanguard than standard accounts have allowed. If
the mythology of the 1893 dinner in London with which I began oversells
Zola’s rehabilitation in the public eye, those told from the perspective of
the avant-garde have tended instead to underestimate the ambivalence with
which he was met, in part because they have been overwritten in retrospect
in terms of an oversimplified form/content binary. The rest of this chapter
tracks this ambivalence, focusing on three representative figures: Arthur
Symons, Henry James, and the poet-critic Vernon Lee.
Strange signs in the literary zodiac: Symons and Zola

One account of Zola’s changing reputation in Britain comes to us from
the literary historian William C. Frierson, who nominated the year of
the Authors’ Club speech as the critical turning point in “the English
controversy over realism.” The year 1893, he declared, saw “five distinc-
tive volumes of realistic short stories [by Crackanthorpe, Henry Harland,
‘George Egerton,’ H. D. Lowry, and Frederic Wedmore],” which were “for
the most part incisive, naturalistic analyses of human nature and sentiment
in their least romantic phases.” In addition, Frierson suggested, “there had
been created in England by 1893 a reading public sympathetic to an analytic
examination of contemporary society,” as evidenced by the appearance of
“an article favorable to Zola and naturalistic art” in The Contemporary
Review.23 I will discuss the essay to which this refers, Vernon Lee’s “The
Moral Teachings of Zola,” at the end of this chapter. Here, I want to con-
sider a parallel assessment of 1893 as a tipping point in these debates, one
made by a figure closely involved in the literary debates of the decade. In
the 1920s, Arthur Symons recorded, among his memories of a time spent as
a close neighbor of George Moore in London, his impressions of “a year we
all of us remember [when] there were strange signs in the literary Zodiac.”
“There had been,” he recalled,
a distinctly new growth in the short story, and along with the short story
(“poisonous honey stolen from France”) came a new license in dealing
imaginatively with life, almost permitting the Englishman to contend with
the writers of other nations on their own ground; permitting him, that
is to say, to represent life as it really is. Foreign influences, certainly, had
begun to have more and more effect upon the making of such literature as
is produced in England nowadays; we had a certain acceptance of Ibsen, a
popular personal welcome of Zola, and literary homage paid to Verlaine.
What do these facts really mean? It is certain that they mean something.24
Frierson and Symons are in agreement, then, not only about the significance
of 1893, but also about its key characteristics: a quantum leap in the British
short story, mainly modeled on France and written by authors who would
soon appear in the pages of Harland’s The Yellow Book; a relative tolerance
of naturalism, after fierce debates over the works of Ibsen as well as Zola’s;
and a refreshingly open attitude on the question of the proper subject
matter for fiction – especially considering that we are only three years on
from the “Candor in English Fiction” debate, in which Thomas Hardy
would despair that an author’s treatment of “the profounder passions”
would “bring down the thunders of respectability upon his head, not to
say ruin his editor, his publisher, and himself.”25
What’s more puzzling, though, is Symons’ concurrence with this idea of
a sea-change in public attitudes, especially concerning Zola. After all, he
was absent from the public celebrations of the French author, and was one
of those who disparaged Zola’s workmanlike approach to writing. Symons’
description of him in 1899 as toiling “in brick and mortar inside the covers
of a book”26 is mild in comparison with some of the other metaphors
through which he had earlier tried to elucidate Zola’s style in “A Note
on Zola’s Method.” The work, he claimed there, “has a mass and bulk,”
“a savor of plebian flesh,” so that “in all his books . . . there is something
greasy, a smear of eating and drinking.”27 Returning to the metaphorics of
construction, Symons compared Zola unfavorably with Flaubert, as trying
to work “without the craftsman’s hand at the back of the tools. His fingers
are too thick; they leave a blurred line. If you want merely weight, a certain
kind of force, you get it; but no more” (155). When was this published?
1893, the supposedly transformative year that included “a popular personal
welcome of Zola”!
I want to use Symons as a first barometer for measuring the shifting
reaction toward Zola among the decadent aesthetes of the 1890s. As a
representative figure for that wider grouping, Symons never fully embraced
Zolian naturalism, but neither did he entirely reject it. The forms that
his ambivalence took, especially in the first half of the decade, can help
us to understand larger patterns of cultural response, and especially the
complicated discussions of form and content that naturalism incited. It
is perhaps not altogether surprising that Symons exempted himself from
the welcome given by the young professionals of the Authors Club whom
Gissing viewed as being motivated by “mutual advertisement,” or that his
own opinion of Zola might seem to stand in direct opposition to that of the
general public; after all, he would not be the last aesthete of the 1890s (or
any other decade) to indulge in such an apparent act of inverted snobbery.
“A Note on Zola’s Method” does, however, echo the widespread reluctance
to view the Frenchman’s work as literary that I highlighted earlier, by
raising questions about the author’s vocabulary, his inability ever to find
“just the right word” or figure of speech, and his tendency to substitute
excessively detailed description in place of le mot juste: “with Zola,” the essay
remarked, “there is no literary interest in the writing, apart from its clear and
coherent expression of a given thing; and these interminable descriptions
have no extraneous, or, if you will, implicit interest, to save them from
the charge of irrelevancy; they will sink by their own weight” (153–4). For
Symons, the work felt laden, stolid, lacking the lightness and conciseness
that literary technique was thought to provide, both through discrete acts of
compression (symbolic representation, metaphor, metonymic substitutions
of part for whole) and through the more general labor of editing – in other
words, “doing, as Flaubert does, namely, selecting precisely the detail out
of all the others which renders or consorts with the scene in hand, and
giving that detail with an ingenious exactness” (155). While this judgment
upon Zola’s style was not universal – the Vernon Lee essay mentioned by
Frierson is a notable exception, as we shall see – it does underscore the view
of him that was circulating during the Vizetelly trials, despite (or perhaps
because of ) the “popular personal welcome” Symons recalls him as having
received in September of 1893.
The following year, in a sign that Zola at least was being tolerated in
Britain, a new effort was undertaken to publish translations of his novels,
one that both echoed and threw into relief Vizetelly’s. The low cost of
his editions, which so often had seemed evidence of an intent to deprave
an unsophisticated audience, provoked a crucial question that found its
answer in 1894: would expensive translations encounter the same legal
scrutiny? The publisher Leonard Smithers, with a reputation that was if
anything worse than Vizetelly’s, established the Lutetian Society that year,
with the purpose of publishing Zola in English “in a handsome format
issued privately to members” and at a cost of 2 guineas.28 As Edgar Jepson
would later recall, the motivating principle seemed to be that “if you
charged enough for it you could publish a translation of any work ever
published and no one would send you to prison, as they sent poor Mr.
Vizetelly to prison for charging only six shillings each.”29 Most revealing
are the names of the translators that Smithers hired, at the considerable
sum of £50 per volume: Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Victor Plarr,
Havelock Ellis, and A. Teixeira de Mattos, each with a reputation among
the aesthetic avant-garde. If we set aside simple monetary gain – because,
as Jepson notes, “to be young with fifty pounds in those days was to enjoy
a splendour” (245) – we might speculate that these figures all felt some
affiliation with Zola, even as the cultural politics of the moment were
widening the gap between aestheticism and naturalism. It is a sense of
kinship that never really went away, and to a degree even strengthened as
we get to the mid 1890s: Ellis, for instance, would publish a sympathetic
essay on Zola in the inaugural issue of The Savoy in January 1896, under the
editorship of Symons.30 What seems most telling in 1894, however, is the
sheer work involved in translating L’Assommoir, an effort that was far from
a labor of love and served only to highlight Zola’s apparent literary and
technical defects. On Karl Beckson’s account of it, Symons had to produce
“eleven or twelve pages a day in order to complete it on schedule,” and
“like Dowson, who was translating ‘that wearisome work’ La Terre for the
Society, Symons found Zola a tedious burden.”31 If the novels had felt bulky,
without literary merit and sinking “by their own weight” of “interminable
descriptions” a year earlier, it is hard to imagine that translating them into
English did much to change Symons’ mind.
Even so, we can identify a marked ambivalence about Zola and natu-
ralism that haunted Symons in the early 1890s. Beckson’s suggestion that
he had somehow “retract[ed] his earlier view of Zola” by the time he came
to edit The Savoy certainly feels overstated.32 The magazine signaled its
eclecticism in its opening Editorial Note, claiming, “We have no formulas
and we desire no false unity of form or matter. We have not invented
a point of view. We are nor Realists, Romanticists, or Decadents,”33 a
declaration that followed the practice of its more famous predecessor
The Yellow Book, which Margaret Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner have
argued grew out a stable of writers and artists with a common “receptiv-
ity to avant-garde theories and styles, including impressionism, realism,
naturalism, and symbolism.”34 As Beckson acknowledges, there was a con-
siderable corpus of fictional work in the magazine dealing with “com-
mon existence” or bringing “a complex realism to bear upon bleak lives,”
by authors including Theodore Wratislaw, Roman Mathieu-Wierzbinski,
Humphry James, Clara Saville Clark, Rudolph Dircks, George Morley,
and Frederick Wedmore, as well as Hubert Crackanthorpe, Conrad, and
Symons himself. Symons’ own commitment to a version of naturalism in
this period (if not necessarily Zola’s) is perhaps most evident in his advo-
cacy of the Goncourt brothers, once-loyal followers of Zola who had also
shown signs of chafing against naturalist orthodoxies.
If we return to that pivotal year, 1893, we find – besides the essay on
Zola’s method – the first publication of another key essay by Symons,
“The Decadent Movement in Literature.” In it, he identifies two distinct
but intersecting tributaries, which he labels Impressionism and Symbolism,
both of which are both shown to contribute to a new form of truth telling
(“la vérité vraie”), with symbolism speaking “the truth of spiritual things
to the spiritual vision” and impressionism “the truth of appearances to the
senses, of the visible world to the eyes that see it.”35 The latter formulation,
which attached both to the literary example of the Goncourt brothers and
to a painterly practice that strove “to flash upon you in a new, sudden way so
exact an image of what you have just seen” (99), indicates that Symons still
felt that impressionism was compatible with the basic principles of realism
and naturalism. We shall see examples of this kind of literary practice
throughout the chapters that follow, but at this point what is critical is the
insistence that the precise representation of the material world, depicting
what Symons termed the “common things about us,” was seen as a valid
ambition for fiction, given that it was naturalism that would have most
clearly articulated such a goal in this period.
Perhaps, then, we need to see Symons’ argument with Zola not as a
decisive repudiation in or around 1893, or as one that he might have
retracted by 1896, so much as a stylistic disagreement about the means to a
common end. His endorsement of the Goncourt brothers leans heavily on
their impressionistic technique and other stylistic innovations (including
an emphasis on fragmenting time) and suggests that they represented
just the kind of naturalists a fin de siècle aesthete could admire: in “The
Decadent Movement in Literature,” for instance, he approved how the
brothers “have broken the outline of the conventional novel in chapters,
with its continuous story, in order to indicate – sometimes in a chapter or
half a page – this and that revealing moment, this or that significant attitude
or accident or situation” (102–3). Such a practice would bring them in line
with more classically modernist techniques, of course, an emphasis that is
even more visible in a later assessment of the brothers that was appended
to The Symbolist Movement in Literature in 1919. There, the focus on
selection and impression has been foregrounded, with the new key term
the “inédit” or unseen: the Goncourts “seek mainly the inédit,” Symons
proposes,
caring only to record that, so it is the inédit of life that they conceive to
be the main concern, the real “inner history.” And for them the inédit of
life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of the sensations that they
have resolved to be the historians; not of action, not of emotion, properly
speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but of an inner life which is all made
up of the perceptions of the senses. . . . One thing, they know, exists: the
sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina. Having
found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their
instinct of selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter’s
method, a selection made almost visually.36
It would be hard to find a description of a novelistic practice that sounds

less like Zola’s, or more like Virginia Woolf’s. This might represent a kind
of wishful thinking on Symons’ part that comes with hindsight, of course;
in the 1890s, the general judgment was that the Goncourts had more in
common with the aesthetics of impressionist painting than Zola, and yet
also that what united the French authors was greater than what divided
them. An anonymous reviewer in the Quarterly Review, for instance, could
assess that the brothers “were as proud of their skill in mixing colours on
a palette as of their supposed encyclopaedic knowledge,” and at the same
time that their work showed how “the boudoir, with its Japanese lacquer
and artistic decorations, may look straight down into what M. Zola has
justly styled ‘le milieu empesté de nos fauborgs.’”37
The Goncourts themselves sounded a similar note in the well-known
Preface to their 1864 novel Germinie Lacerteux, which was based on the life
of their maid: in it, they ask “whether what are called ‘the lower classes’ did
not have a right to the Novel,” and if “the misfortunes of the little people and
the poor could arouse interest, emotion, and pity to the same degree as the
misfortunes of the great and rich.”38 This novel was the explicit model for
one of Symons’ literary projects of this period, a narrative he termed a “novel
à la Goncourt” based on the life of Muriel Broadbent, although it is fair to
say that Symons was interested more in the style of the work – in particular,
its episodic structure, documenting discrete and disconnected moments in
a life – than in its content.39 The two installments he published in The
Savoy using the pseudonym of “Lucy Newcome” for Muriel Broadbent,
who had been a prostitute before being welcomed into the coterie of
London decadents, appeared in reverse order, so that we first meet the
protagonist (in April 1896’s “Pages from the Life of Lucy Newcome”)
in medias res, with “the baby in her arms” and “her first sensation . . . one
of thankfulness, to be out of the long, blank, monotonous hospital, where
she had suffered obscurely.”40 Eight months later, “The Childhood of Lucy
Newcome” would fill in her background with naturalistic detail, ending
with a suggestive mention of a male cousin who “had seemed to her so kind,
and so ready to be her friend,” and is most likely the cause of the unwanted
pregnancy, though that is never confirmed.41 In “Pages from the Life” in
particular, Symons self-consciously plays upon naturalist typology and our
expectations of an irreversible spiral that might be traced back to details
of Lucy’s childhood. Thus, while working in a laundry to support her
illegitimate child, she comes to recognize how she appears to co-workers,
who would believe that “hav[ing] had a child, without being married, was
the first step, so they held, in an inevitably downward course” (152); a
few pages later, she gives herself that most Victorian of names, rhetorically
asking “was she not (they all said it) a fallen creature?” (155). Given the
logic of her situation, as well as that of naturalist convention, Lucy makes
the predictable decision to become what she already appears in the eyes
of the public, agreeing to sleep with a wealthy neighbor as quid pro quo
for his helping her pay for a doctor for her sick child; three times the text
reiterates that she acts “mechanically” in the final pages (in taking the man’s
money, repeating directions to the doctor’s, and finally tidying herself in
preparation for the man’s visit) in what seems a characteristic denial of
agency and will that is given melodramatic reinforcement when the child
nonetheless dies (158–60).
The published evidence of the two installments from The Savoy suggest
that Symons was just as interested in naturalist thematics as in the stylistic
example of the Goncourts, although a third installment that remained
unpublished until the 1980s complicates such an assessment. In terms of
the overall narrative arc, “The Life and Adventures of Lucy Newcome”
charts Lucy/Muriel’s rise rather than her fall, to the extent that she is
welcomed into its author’s own aesthetic circle (even if initially as high-
class prostitute), and this would seem to signal a structuring desire to
direct the story away from naturalism’s trajectory of inevitable decline.
As Alan Johnson has documented, however, Symons persistently revised
this third installment throughout the teens and 1920s; through this process,
formal questions are considerably foregrounded in comparison to the earlier
installments, leading Johnson to compare it with the work of Joyce and
Woolf.42 “Life and Adventures” certainly plays more clearly with point
of view, largely abandoning the interior monologue style of the Savoy
chapters for a discontinuous and multiperspectival account of Lucy as
viewed by a sequence of male observers; this technique, reminiscent of
Cubist painting, in turn underscores a more abrupt fragmenting of time in
the final installment, in which it becomes a challenge to connect any single
episode with what precedes or follows it.43 If it is hard to credit Symons
with having arrived at such a style in the 1890s, we can surely acknowledge
that he might have seen the potential for such a radical modernist stylistics
in the example of the Goncourt brothers, while nonetheless insisting that
the “Lucy Newcome” project as a whole developed in dialogue with – and
not in opposition to – naturalism.
Unlikely defenders: Henry James and Vernon Lee

If one of the questions circulating through the 1880s was whether or not
Zola was a good writer, we might expect an authoritative answer to have
come from Henry James. It is, after all, hard to think of a major figure
writing fiction in the decade whose style might stand in greater contrast
with Zola’s, even if we acknowledge that James had his own youthful
flirtation with naturalism. In a widely cited letter from Paris to William
Dean Howells, James insisted in 1884 that “there is nothing more interesting
to me now than the effort and experiment of this little group” comprising
Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt. “In spite of their
ferocious pessimism and their handling of unclean things” he went on,
“they are at least serious,” and the inherent dirtiness of naturalism was in
any case seen as preferable to the “floods of tepid soap and water which
under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England.”44 For Peter
Keating, it is over the issue of technique that the American seeks to draw this
comparison, so that “in so far as James is criticizing the limitations of British
and American fiction by praising the virtues of the French, form . . . take[s]
first place.”45 By the same token, it is over the same issue that James would
turn away from naturalism a few years later, after experimenting with it in
The Bostonians (1886) and The Princess Casamassima (1887).
James’ seemingly conflicted response helps us to chart the very different
ways that he and naturalism came to see the relationship of form to con-
tent. Keating is correct, I think, to insist that James’ attraction to French
naturalism was primarily formal, but only if we first decouple our under-
standing of form from what we – and more particularly, writers of this
period – mean by literary style. If we consider James’ essay on “The Art
of Fiction,” published in the same year as his visit to Paris, we find what
initially feels like a standard response to Zola, especially in the closing
paragraph highlighting the Frenchman’s “extraordinary effort vitiated by
a spirit of pessimism on a narrow basis” that has James judge him both
“magnificent” and at the same time “ignorant.”46 The temptation is to
read what is positive in the assessment as insincere or at best a backhanded
Unlikely defenders: Henry James and Vernon Lee 49
compliment that – in underscoring Zola’s Herculean efforts – only reminds
us of his poor taste and lack of literary judgment. A longer passage from
earlier in the essay helps us to understand, though, how James himself
thought of the positive and negative, the effort and the ignorance, as insep-
arable elements. Ultimately, although it may appear paradoxical especially
for Henry James to say so, Zola’s resistance to what the period defined as
an appropriately “literary” style provides the proof of his importance. The
passage begins in response to Walter Besant’s original point that the art of
novel-writing depends upon “selection,” something that a critic like Arthur
Symons accused Zola of actively eschewing. For James, however, the term
is ambiguous and should be handled with care, unlike Besant, whom he
felt to be “in danger of falling into the great error with his rather unguarded
talk about ‘selection.’” “Art is essentially selection,” James insists, “but it is
a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive,” by which he
means the representation of “life without rearrangement” (58; emphasis in
original). Since Zola is named at the beginning of this typically long and
winding Jamesian paragraph, it is likely he has in mind here precisely the
refusal to edit – and instead, the choice to include everything – that was
being recognized by both his admirers and critics as the hallmark of the
Rougon-Macquart cycle. Certainly, a “warts and all” approach was prefer-
able to what James saw as the more common idea of selection at the time,
one that he sensed was implicit in Besant: “For many people,” he insisted,
art means rose-coloured window-panes, and selection means picking a bou-

quet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations
have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off
shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art till
you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and limits of
ignorance. (58–9)
Notions of artistic selection will thus invariably slide into the erection of
moral standards for fiction. For James, though, it is precisely Zola’s want
of “taste” (in both the moral and aesthetic senses of the term) that secured
his status as a major novelist.
James made essentially the same assessment nineteen years later, and with
greater clarity, in a lengthy obituary article following Zola’s death. Once
again, he concedes the novelist’s limitations, in this instance comparing him
to a musician faced with a complex instrument like a harp and recognizing
that he cannot play most of its strings: “They would only sound false,
since (as with all the earnestness he must have felt) he could command
them, through want of skill, of practice, of ear, to none of the right
harmony. What therefore was more natural than that, still splendidly bent
on producing his illusion, he should throw himself on the strings he might
thump with effect, and should work them, as our phrase is, for all they
were worth?”47 If this takes care of one of the central charges, that Zola’s
novels reiterated the same ideas and themes with increasing attenuation as
the Rougon-Macquart series progressed, the accusation of bad taste is also
acknowledged and then turned on its head. “Taste, as he knew it, taste
as his own constitution supplied it, proved to have nothing to say to the
matter,” James writes, for “[h]is own dose of the precious elixir had no
perceptible regulating power. Paradoxical as the remark may sound, this
accident was positively to operate as one of his greatest felicities.” Perhaps
alone among Zola’s original readers, it was James who insisted upon the
class valence of the term “taste,” arguing that its tangible presence in
fictions dealing with the Parisian underclass would feel inappropriate and
thereby open the author up to accusations of bad faith: Zola’s world, he
perceives, is one “with which taste has nothing to do, and though the act of
representation may be justly held, as an artistic act, to involve its presence,
the discrimination would probably have been in fact, given the particular
illusion sought, more detrimental than the deficiency” (879–80). Again, a
capacity for “tasteful” selectivity, like the moral restraint dictated by Mrs.
Grundy, would only count against Zola, whose work on balance is shown
to be strengthened by what others viewed as its central deficiencies.
This assessment still sounds patronizing, especially coming from an
acclaimed prose stylist like James. If we return to his use of the construction
metaphor from this same obituary, however, we nonetheless can recognize
how he deploys it to different ends than Arthur Symons’ sneering image
of Zola attempting “to build in brick and mortar inside the covers of a
book.” For James, on the contrary, Zola emerges as a master craftsman,
one for whom “the pyramid had been planned and the site staked out” and
yet whose tools are only his hands and “as we may say, his wheelbarrow
and his trowel.” Recognizing his own limitations, the builder’s process
was to “set up his subject wholly from the outside, proposing to himself
wonderfully to get into it, into its depths, as he went,” and never waver
from that point onward (876). “If we remember that his design was nothing
if not architectural,” James insists, “that a ‘majestic whole,’ a great balanced
façade, with all its order and parts, that a singleness of mass and a unity
of effect, in fine, were before him from the first, his notion of picking up
his bricks as he proceeded becomes, in operation, heroic.” Returning to
Peter Keating’s initial remark that it was the formal approach adopted by
naturalism that most attracted James, we see this judgment confirmed in
Unlikely defenders: Henry James and Vernon Lee 51
what follows, with the American novelist concluding that Zola’s “attitude
and programme” constituted “a drama more intense on the worker’s own
part than any of the dramas he was to invent and put before us” (877). James
is a rare reader in taking Zola at his word, recognizing that it is the method
and not any preconceived end-point that mattered most. Even if, as he
suggests, it was made necessary by technical limitations, the phenomenal
labor of the project more than redeems it, especially as it turns such limits
to the author’s advantage. Most crucially, the experimental method could
take the novel into new areas, and in doing so produce new knowledge,
because it refused to honor consensus views about its own shortcomings,
ethical or aesthetic.
The view of Zola that was held most strongly among the aestheticist wing
of the avant-garde, for which naturalism was equated with a doggedly
inartistic labor, gets turned on its head by Henry James (of all people),
who gave the Frenchman considerable credit for his honest work and
refusal to cut corners. An even more surprising assessment can be found in
Vernon Lee’s 1893 essay, which was mentioned earlier by William Frierson
as helping to signal a turning point in British responses to Zola. In “The
Moral Teachings of Zola,” Lee [Violet Paget] developed an idiosyncratic
reading of the novelist’s use of figuration, arguing that he is drawn both
to the representation of what’s typical and also to the tragic or fatal. As
a consequence of the latter impulse in particular, Lee saw moments “in
most of his works, when we learn what he has to show us no longer by
the pictures which he is painting, but by the gestures which he makes, the
cries which he utters, by a whole marvelous phantasmagoria of hyperbole,
metaphor, and allegory.”48 She seems to have meant by this that an effort
at representing the social totality, especially through metaphors that have
become the customary figures for modernity (the shopping arcades, the
railway, and so on), exceeds any strictly mimetic desire to remain faithful
to the fragment that is being represented at any given time, or the narrow
specialization that was thought to arise out of naturalism’s reluctance to
select and compress. In the process, for Lee, meaning inevitably accrued
across the larger series of novels as a whole, which in turn required her (like
Henry James) to credit the immense architectural planning that Zola had
undertaken.
So far, we might see Lee’s essay as an insightful anticipation of more
recent attempts to position Zola as a critical commentator on modernity,49
but what is more surprising is her elaboration of his literary technique:
for the reader “who lets himself [sic] go to these complex effects,” Lee
speculates,
there can be no question, in Zola’s novels of exaggeration or one-sidedness:
he will feel at once that what he is being shown does not exist in the
sense of individual, literal fact; that of course the world contains no such
arrangements – or in Whistlerian language, symphonies – in special kinds of
misery and wickedness; that good and evil are, on the contrary, scattered
about with no sense of pattern and no intention of impressing; but that from
Zola’s elaborate arrangements we learn what sort of misery and wickedness
the world contains, however much mixed up with goodness and happiness.
(199; emphasis in original)
In her reference to Whistler’s paintings, and – through it – to a language
of music that recalls the symbolist fascination with states of synesthesia,
Lee here affiliates Zola with an opposing school of thought regarding
literary imagery, that which prized surprising juxtaposition as the key to
revitalizing language. To speak of his “elaborate arrangements” is similarly
to stand opposed to the general tendency to see a refusal to select and order
the world as perhaps the defining characteristic of his naturalism, whether
for better (James) or for worse (Symons).
My own sense is that we should read Lee’s assessment as symptomatic of
the critical binary within which Zola was received, one in which writing was
presumed to be either steadfastly realist in its ambitions or imaginatively
figurative: to critically comment upon the experience of modernity, as the
first passage suggests that Lee sees Zola as doing, would then inevitably
mean participating in kinds of formal experimentation that the second
extols, in which only surprising combinations and “arrangements” of lan-
guage were thought capable of proving the necessary distance from social
reality. Literary practice, as the example of Arthur Symons most clearly high-
lighted, was considerably more complicated. In thinking about naturalist
aesthetics and techniques (including metaphor) differently in this chapter,
my aim has been to reopen and complicate this critical debate, one that ran
as a fault line through the literary discourse of the fin de siècle. The chapter
that follows turns to Zola’s surprising advocacy of French Impressionist
painting as a way of tracing what I am presenting as a third way between
the twin poles of mimeticism and formalism: a literary practice that would
reorient naturalism’s analytical focus via a reflexive consideration of the
social and perceptual spaces from which it is enacted.
chapter 2
Portraits and artists

Impressionism and naturalism
The previous chapter did most of its interpretive work, I will admit, against
the grain not only of Zola criticism but also of the novelist’s own statements
about writing fiction. Having locked himself early on into the structure
and method of the Rougon-Macquart novels, he would prove doggedly
resistant to redirection, despite what he experienced as a series of painful
defections from the naturalist cause by the likes of Joris-Karl Huysmans
and Edmond de Goncourt. For all of its relative sympathy, Henry James’
obituary assessment lamented Zola’s inflexibility, remarking that even the
Dreyfus affair failed to detour his life’s project: “The extraordinary thing,”
James noted, “is that on the single occasion when, publicly – as his whole
manifestation was public – life did swoop down on him, the effect of the
visitation was quite perversely other than might have been looked for. His
courage in the Dreyfus connection testified admirably to his ability to live
for himself and out of the order of his volumes,” and yet “nothing was ever
so odd as that these great moments should appear to have been wasted,
when all was said, for his critical intelligence.”1 Later in this chapter, I will
offer a reading of what is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of novels in the
Rougon-Macquart sequence, 1886’s L’Œuvre – not coincidentally the one in
which he explicitly focused on art. In it, there is a novelist who is obviously
modeled on the author himself, a generally sympathetic character whose
main fault is a stubborn reluctance to acknowledge changes happening
around him; on this basis, if nothing else, we might conclude that Zola
recognized his faults, even if he felt that his theoretical pronouncements and
architectural design for the Rougon-Macquart novels left little room for
them to be expressed or corrected. Crucially, L’Œuvre also recounts, in the
form of a roman à clef, the history of Zola’s encounter with Impressionist
painting, from his early enthusiasm to a dramatic break that the publication
of the novel would only exacerbate.
The argument I want to make is that the art criticism that Zola produced
in the 1860s and 1870s, and especially his writings on Édouard Manet
53
54 Portraits and artists: Impressionism and naturalism
and the Impressionists, represented a space outside of the often fractious
debates over naturalism and literary politics, within which Zola could
consider issues of form and aesthetics that he had otherwise bracketed
from consideration. As a consequence, this body of work was a central
step in the development of a more reflexive mode of naturalism that I see
as occurring within – rather than in opposition to – the larger narrative
of modernism. Zola’s advocacy of Impressionism has been a source of
confusion ever since, at least in part because it dissents from the dominant
view of him and his conceptualization of naturalism, most especially in
its insistence that formal concerns and criteria should be uppermost in
any effort to understand the new school of painting. As Michael Fried
has argued, Zola’s major contribution to art criticism stemmed from “his
unshakeable conviction that considerations of subject matter, composition,
and expression have no bearing on questions of art,” which means that he
should be credited with having “sketched the terms in which Manet would
eventually be assimilated to the history of modern art.”2 Similarly, Peter
Gay has highlighted what has felt like a paradox ever since, that “Zola, the
chief of the realists, was a founder of formalism” when it came to his art
criticism.3
If we look for evidence that could confirm this reading, we might con-
sider the following passage from 1867: “Painters, especially Édouard Manet
who is an analytic painter, do not share that preoccupation with subject
matter that torments the crowd above anything else; the subject for them
is a pretext for painting, whereas for the crowd only the subject exists
[le sujet pour eux est un prétexte à peindre, tandis que pour la foule le sujet
seul existe].”4 The formalist emphasis seems undeniable here, and yet Lilian
Furst has suggested exactly the opposite, that it was really only the subject
matter of the paintings that registered for Zola, which meant that, having
“missed the point completely, taking the effect for the cause, he in fact
distorted Impressionism.” Even his apparently explicit statement on the
relation of form to content from a year before the passage on Manet, that
a work of art should be thought of as “a corner of nature seen through a
temperament [un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament],” can’t
convince Furst, instead providing evidence that for Zola “the emphasis
seems to lie, in theory at least, more on the actual seeing of reality than on
the ‘tempérament.’”5 What is hopefully already clear is that when it comes
to his writings about art – and in very different ways than in his writing
about fiction – Zola would focus squarely upon the relationship between
form and content, seeking something (here, as in The Experimental Novel,
referred to as “temperament”) that could mediate between them. If we are
Portraits and artists: Impressionism and naturalism 55
to give any credence to the image of him that we encountered throughout
Chapter 1, of a dogged stonemason with a deep-seated hostility to figural
language, let alone abstraction, then Zola’s defense of Manet – that the ser-
vant in Olympia, for instance, is merely fulfilling the need for a “dark patch”
[il vous fallait des taches noires, et vous avez placé dans un coin une négresse] –
is hard to fathom.6 By focusing on the art-critical writing here, then, I hope
to underscore the inadequacy of that public image of Zola, and the ways
that it might hamstring our efforts to understand naturalism’s relationship
with the central current of modern art, in which Impressionism is thought
to have played a key role.
Robert Jensen has suggested a different point of departure than either
Fried’s or Furst’s by setting Zola’s criticism of the Impressionists in its
historical context. “The Salon and the other forms of official state con-
trol over the artists were Zola’s real opponents,” he argues, thus making
it understandable that his critical viewpoint would shift later with “the
entrance of Manet and his friends into the Salon in the late 1870s and
early 1880s.”7 This approach does not downplay the emergence of clear
aesthetic differences in the meantime, as we shall see, but insists that those
differences also need to be understood contextually, in terms of how writ-
ing and painting diverge as well as the ways that they were able to form a
united front. In what follows, then, I make three assumptions: First, that
although painting and fiction did not proceed along identical paths, they
were thought to have converged at key moments during the second half of
the nineteenth century. Second, that even if there is a danger in transposing
terms from one medium to another (speaking, for instance, of a naturalist
painter, or a literary Impressionist), there was also considerable interest on
the part of both writers and artists in imagining themselves as engaged in
a combined campaign. Third, that they would all see such a campaign as
waged in terms of both content and form, which means that there is no
need to prematurely differentiate Impressionism’s stylistic preoccupations
from naturalism’s thematic ones.
When we get to the public break between Zola and the Impressionists
around 1879, we will see that it was conducted largely in terms of content
and form, but in a sense that follows on from the discussion of imagery at
the end of Chapter 1. For Zola, I will argue, the problem with Impression-
ism was not that it overvalued the subjective act of perception at the expense
of material reality, but that it succumbed to the temptations of Romanti-
cism and Symbolism. Making this argument will depend heavily upon a
reading of L’Œuvre, the fourteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle
and the one that he designed to be an investigation of the lives of modern
artists – literary as well as pictorial. First, however, I want to examine Zola’s
art criticism from the 1860s and 1870s as a way of determining the basis
upon which he saw naturalism and Impressionism as potentially compati-
ble endeavors. Later in the chapter, I will return to this topic via the example
of George Moore, who saw himself both as a disciple of Zola and as an
advocate for French Impressionist painting. In Moore, as initially in Arthur
Symons, I see an ongoing effort to make good the public breach between
the two schools, one that is crucial for understanding the novelistic efforts
of James Joyce, George Egerton, and Sarah Grand that will be my focus
(along with Moore’s own work) in Chapters 3 and 4.
Naturalism/Impressionism: Zola/Manet
Narrating Zola’s unfolding relationship with Impressionist painting runs
into two difficulties, one local and the other terminological. As F. W. J.
Hemmings first noted in the 1950s, an apparent gap in Zola’s art criticism
between 1868 and 1880 can be explained as the result of his blacklisting
by French newspapers, which meant that none would contract with him
to publish reviews of the annual Salon exhibitions. Instead, he published
a total of sixty-four “Letters from Paris” in the Russian newspaper Vestnik
Evropy, which included accounts of the salons and independent Impres-
sionist exhibitions.8 This material was translated back and forth between
French and Russian, in a process that was responsible for at least one major
misunderstanding, when a faulty transcription led to the substitution of
“Manet” for “Monet” at a crucial moment of an 1879 review contain-
ing some of Zola’s more strident criticisms. This was the supposed attack,
headlined “M. Zola has just broken with M. Manet” when it was excerpted
in Le Figaro in July, that gave the first public signals of a split between the
naturalists and Impressionists. Zola was able to smooth things over with
Manet, rightly claiming to have been mistranslated, and yet the controversy
was really only put on hold for another seven years until the publication
of L’Œuvre, as we shall see.
From a distance, especially given the unreliable documentation, it is hard
to assess the basis of the split or when exactly it developed. On first restoring
the Russian letters to the record of Zola’s art criticism, Hemmings rather
optimistically concluded that they showed how he “retained his enthusiasm
for the group (a little diluted perhaps, compared with the crusading fer-
vour of his younger days) for much longer than has usually been thought –
in fact, until the group itself began to disintegrate under the pressures of
rivalries, jealousies, and sheer ill-humour.”9 By this, he might be attributing
Naturalism/Impressionism: Zola/Manet 57
to Zola an early awareness of the imminent fracturing of Impressionism
into competing strands that have subsequently been designated as Neo- or
Post-Impressionism, and which tellingly pushed painting in the direction
of more formalist experimentation. There is a suggestion of this in the
same 1879 review that offended Manet, when Zola describes the general
line of Impressionism as having introduced “open-air painting, the study
of the changing effects in nature according to the innumerable conditions
of weather and time [Les impressionnistes ont introduit la peinture en plein
air, l’étude des effets changeants de la nature selon les innombrables condi-
tions du temps et de l’heure].” This paragraph, which immediately precedes
the controversial one on Manet, is conspicuously neutral in tone, and yet
more clearly articulates where Zola saw Impressionism as heading: “They
are pushing the analysis of nature further,” he wrote, “all the way up to the
decomposition of light, to the study of air in motion, of shades of color, of
chance variations of shadow and light, of all the optical phenomena which
make a view so mutable and difficult to render [Ils poussent l’analyse de la
nature plus loin, jusqu’à la décomposition de la lumière, jusqu’à l’étude de l’air
en mouvement, des nuances des couleurs, des variations fortuites de l’ombre et
de la lumière, de tous les phénomènes optiques qui font qu’un horizon est si
mobile et si difficile à rendre]” (399).
It is in many respects easier to see why Zola finally grew disenchanted
with the Impressionists than it is to understand his initial support for them.
Here, terminological distinctions complicate matters, even in the material
published in French that had no need to pass through Russian intermedi-
aries. We might, for example, consider a review from 1876 in which Zola
appears to open up a gap between Manet and the other Impressionists
by reserving the designation “naturalist” for the former only. It would be
wrong, he suggested, to expect of Manet anything but a literally accu-
rate rendering of the real [“Ne lui demandez rien d’autre qu’une traduction
d’une justesse littérale”], for the simple reason that the painter is a naturalist
or an analyst [“C’est un naturaliste, un analyste”].10 As Robert Lethbridge
has shown, Zola had a long history of applying the term “naturalist” to
painters, reaching at least as far back as 1868,11 and its use here would not
seem especially surprising except that it is in competition with the new
preferred term for the art movement – one that Zola readily acknowledges
when he groups together the other French painters on display: they are also
called “impressionists,” he writes, “because some of them appear to want
to convey above all the exact impression of things, without descending to
the execution of meticulous detail that robs a personal, lifelike vision of
all its vitality [parce que certains d’entre eux paraissent vouloir rendre surtout
l’impression vraie des êtres et des choses, sans descendre dans une exécution
minutieuse qui enlève toute sa verdeur à l’interprétation vive et personelle]”
(313). Since 1876 was in many ways the moment of Impressionism’s com-
ing out as a movement, with a group exhibition that (as Jensen puts it)
“announced the permanent character of the association,”12 it seems crucial
that Manet, who was not part of what has come to be known as the second
Impressionist exhibition, is being differentiated here – and yet the exact
basis for his isolation is not immediately clear.
Two obvious possibilities suggest themselves, and each might explain
why Manet would have seemed more of a naturalist to Zola. First, we might
highlight the difference between the “exact impression” of something,
with the implication of a necessarily subjective act of perception, and
the literal accuracy of Manet’s rendering. Recalling the formula of the
“corner of nature seen through a temperament,” this might suggest that
Lillian Furst’s interpretation – that Zola was in reality all nature and no
temperament – was true at least of his positive response to Manet’s work;
indeed, he had truncated the formula just the year before, speaking of
Manet as having reproduced a corner of nature on canvas [“C’est un coin
de nature, transporté sur la toile”].13 Second, we might stress the seeming
incompleteness of the Impressionist work, its inattention to minutiae, as
distinguishing it from naturalism’s overabundance of detail, which would
approach the fidelity of photographic reproduction. Zola would seem to
praise the Impressionists for refusing such fidelity, finding it detrimental
to the vitality of the work, and yet still might have believed that it was this
inattention that distinguished Impressionism from naturalism.
There are good reasons, I think, to mistrust both of these possibilities.
Photography, which we now know to have been a major interest of Zola’s
(John Lambeth terms it his “second artistic endeavor”),14 only seems like
a visual analog for naturalism on the terms I discussed and rejected in
Chapter 1, a viewpoint that sees naturalism and photography as equally
resistant to matters of form and style. The term by which he chooses to
indicate the idiosyncrasy of style, “temperament,” might seem sufficiently
vague to justify dismissing its significance, as Furst does, and yet we recall
that the same term appears in The Experimental Novel, where “different
styles in letters” are referred to as “the expressions of the temperaments
of the writers” and thus as designating where “individuality shows in
literature.”15 The key distinction may be that Zola saw literature in this
period as overly concerned with formal questions, whereas painting was
dominated by thematic genres (classical scenes, still life, nudes, and so on)
that dictated default technical methods: new forms would then appear, as
was the case with Manet, with an attention to new subjects [“l’artiste a
créé une nouvelle forme pour le sujet nouveau”], in this case simply those
contemporary figures that would have been visible in life [“Il peint les
gens comme il les voit dans la vie, dans la rue ou chez eux, dans leur milieu
ordinaire, habillés selon notre mode”].16
And yet naturalism had to do more than simply record such figures and
fashions, needing to balance what The Experimental Novel terms “obser-
vation” with “experiment.” In this context, photographic reproduction
embodies one version of a bad Impressionism that is all to do with sur-
face reflection, without analytical comment. In the same 1876 letter that
spoke about the Impressionist resistance to detail, then, we read about
Gustave Caillebotte producing an “anti-artistic” art, “a clean painting, icy,
bourgeois, thanks to its exactness. The reproduction of reality, without the
original imprint of the painter,” Zola asserts, “is a poor thing [une peinture
propre, une glace, bourgeoise à force d’exactitude. Le décalque de la vérité,
sans l’impression originale du peintre, est une pauvre chose]” (314). In such a
formula, we might understand the resistance to detail as what prevented
painting from merely reflecting bourgeois order back to itself, as a form of
selective un-finishing that stood in for the artist’s own temperament. Iron-
ically, given Zola’s own reputation for exhaustive cataloging, it is a certain
degree of incompleteness that can here differentiate a critical commentary
on modern life from its documentary reconstruction.17
From the foregoing analysis, we might graph Zola’s response to Impres-
sionism as occurring in three broad phases. Initially, given both the domi-
nant models of classical painting and the hostile reaction to Impressionist
works, he defended them mainly on formal grounds. Seeing a common
cause with naturalism, he moved on (especially in the case of Manet) to
a consideration of how Impressionist style came to convey – and to have
been summoned by – new subjects, and of how the mediation of the artist’s
“temperament” is what makes visible a critical commentary on modern life.
On the other side of this equation, in which subjective perception is bal-
anced by close observation of the world around us, he sensed a slide into a
pure formalism in which the world becomes increasingly only the pretext
for the examination of perception itself. In many ways, as we shall see from
L’Œuvre, this third and final development was for Zola a misapplication
of science, an analysis that takes the processes by which we come to know
the world and not the world itself (much less a better one) as its object of
study.
At this point, it is worth asking whether the kind of naturalist art that
Zola tried to imagine through his engagement with the Impressionists
was actually possible, or if his disappointment was inevitable. Part of the
difficulty emerges from the basic distinction that so much fin-de-siècle
experimentation with synesthesia tried to undo, that between dynamic
and static forms. In The Experimental Novel, the would-be naturalist is
repeatedly cautioned not to settle simply for observing the world in the
manner of a photographer: once “the observer in him [sic] gives the facts
as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure . . . the experi-
mentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his
characters going in a certain story.”18 And yet this capacity to narrate,
even if we accept Lukács’ point about naturalism’s tendency to emphasize
description, is what a painting lacks. It can, of course, refer to a story, as
with the dominant tradition of classical painting with which Impression-
ism initially struggled at a time when observers routinely questioned just
what “story” was being told in canvases such as Manet’s Olympia or Le
déjeuner sur l’herbe (both 1863). As we shall see, Zola would draw upon that
reaction in L’Œuvre, identifying it with a bourgeois philistinism, but an
equally telling example occurs during the chapter devoted to Gervaise and
Coupeau’s marriage in L’Assommoir. Following a perfunctory ceremony
and lunch, the wedding party are caught in a downpour and decide to visit
the Louvre. They stand before a range of French, Italian, and Dutch works
with two basic responses. The first is to ask about the subject of the paint-
ing, so the pompous Monsieur Madiner halts them before Géricault’s Raft
of the Medusa and “explained what it was about [il leur expliqua le sujet],”
while Gervaise asks “what the ‘Wedding at Cana’ is about [demanda le
sujet],” commenting critically that “it was silly not to put the subjects on
the frames [c’était bête de ne pas écrire les sujets sur les cadres].” A second
response praises the paintings only to the extent that they in effect tell the
viewers’ own stories, in a one-to-one relationship that means that Mme.
Lorilleux likes Titian’s painting of his mistress because she had “yellow hair
she thought quite like her own [la chevelure jaune pareille à la sienne],” or
that the men delight in scouring a Rubens for “smutty details” of lives like
their own.19
In thus underscoring the meager returns that accrue from a desire to
see paintings merely as “subjects” or stories, Zola provides a textbook
example of what Pierre Bourdieu has analyzed as a popular aesthetic.
“Popular naturalism,” he writes in Distinction, “recognizes beauty in the
image of a beautiful thing, or, more rarely, in a beautiful image of a
beautiful thing,” thereby shifting criteria of value from the image to what it
represents. By contrast, Kantian high aesthetics prioritizes disinterestedness
in the observer and a distance from utility on the part of the artwork that
finds its ideal in an abstract formalism: it is, for Bourdieu, “an aesthetic
disposition which tends to bracket off the nature and function of the object
represented and to exclude any ‘naı̈ve’ reaction – horror at the horrible,
desire for the desirable, pious reverence for the sacred – along with all
purely ethical responses, in order to concentrate solely upon the mode
of representation, the style.”20 In L’Œuvre, Zola has the Impressionist
painters themselves articulate what is understood to be – at least up to a
point – a superior aesthetic understanding, one based in a knowledge of
form and largely uninterested in content. In L’Assommoir, such a position
can only be articulated by the narrative itself, however, through the ironic
detachment that it maintains throughout the scene in the Louvre and via
a distinctive passage that introduces it. Focusing on the wedding party
on its way to the gallery, Zola offers the following description: “In the
midst of that milling throng, against the grey, wet background of the
boulevard, the line of couples stood out like a string of garish splashes of
colour: Gervaise’s deep blue dress, Madame Fauconnier’s flowery cream
print, Boche’s canary yellow trousers [Au milieu du grouillement de la
foule, sur les fonds gris et mouillés du boulevard, les couples en procession
mettaient des taches violentes, la robe gros bleu de Gervaise, la robe écrue à
fleurs imprimées de Mme Fauconnier, le pantalon jaune canari de Boche]”
(74; 443).
As with the examples I cited at the end of Chapter 1, this is a kind of
meta-metaphor, with figures appearing just as they might in an Impres-
sionist painting and in the process signaling Zola’s command over an
aesthetic mode of thinking that soon will be seen to escape his characters.
Indeed, a phrase like “des taches violentes” inevitably recall the language of
Impressionism itself, echoing Zola’s own formalist argument that Olympia’s
controversial black servant had been needed not for reasons of story, but
to answer the formal demand for a black patch [“il vous fallait des taches
noires.”] The passage would feel at home in a later work by Conrad or even
Woolf, who describes a very similar formal requirement for balancing light
and dark in the depiction of Lily Briscoe’s painting in To the Lighthouse.21
It does, however, feel out of place in Zola, and in L’Assommoir in particu-
lar. Its significance in the story only emerges in hindsight, by preemptive
contrast with the naı̈ve and utilitarian approach to art on display when the
party reach their destination. Outside of the terms of the text, it would
seem to signal Zola’s own allegiance to Impressionism and support for its
preferred mode of reception, as opposed to the implied hostility or incom-
prehension that inevitably would arise if Gervaise and her friends could
somehow encounter such works at the Louvre.
Nine years later, with the publication of L’Œuvre, Zola used such
passages for a very different effect. Robert Lethbridge argues that the
subsuming of the language of art into the prose of the later novel indicates
a competitive desire on the part of the novelist to correct an art movement
that he saw as going astray by the mid-1880s, “incorporat[ing] impressionis-
tic effects while simultaneously restoring the delineations, the geometry and
the perspectival co-ordinates Impressionism had erased.” Indeed, he goes
on to suggest, Zola “goes one stage further, recuperatively signaling . . . the
material realities it seemed to have lost from sight.”22 Recovering this more
agonistic relationship between naturalist writing and Impressionist paint-
ing allows Lethbridge to read back over the history of Zola’s advocacy
of Manet in particular and to understand the surprising formalism of his
earlier defenses of the painter as distinctly double-edged. If such a position
represented an admirable and sincere attempt to rescue Impressionism from
its detractors by shifting the debate away from the narrow terrain of subject
matter, it might also contain an implied criticism. Any praise of Manet’s
technique would thus need to be understood as dialectically linked with
Zola’s consistent attacks on pictorial symbolism and an art of ideas, thereby
indicating how the author’s “formalist stance seeks to define, as well as to
reassert, the inherently differentiated limits of painting itself,” according
to Lethbridge (78). In other words, the primacy accorded to technique in
art was granted at a high cost, as a compensation for its inability to engage
ideas in narrative form. When it tries to do so, Zola suggests, it almost
inevitably succumbs to the false allures of Romanticism and Symbolism,
at which point it has to part company with naturalism.
L’Œuvre
If it was possible, even in the 1870s, to view Zola’s attitude toward Impres-
sionism as ambivalent, such a reading would not be able to withstand the
publication of L’Œuvre in 1886. Manet was dead by then, but the novel’s
depiction of the painter Claude Lantier (a composite of Manet and Paul
Cézanne) ended Zola’s friendship with the latter, whom he had known
since boyhood. Claude Monet wrote Zola to record his fear that “our ene-
mies in the press and in the public at large may seize this pretext to call
Manet and the rest of us failures,” while Camille Pissarro reported on a
dinner with Mallarmé, Huysmans, Monet and others in which they all
voiced similar concerns about the novel.23 As we shall see later in this chap-
ter, the Irish writer George Moore was also in attendance and was shocked
to hear condemnations of Zola from artists and writers that he assumed
L’Œuvre 63
were allies. There had been a definitive split by this point, then, and yet
the novel itself – while more explicit about Zola’s evolving response to the
Impressionists than the account contained in his art criticism – is less than
clear about its precise cause. Over its course, the failure of Impressionism
sometimes seems rooted in its incomplete separation from Romanticism;
at other times, the reasons appear more circumstantial, having to do with
an inability to fully deliver on the movement’s own early promise or its
co-optation by reactionary forces in the Parisian art establishment; at yet
others, it is attributed to a faulty theory that propels it toward abstract for-
malism or symbolism, or to a superficial belief that all art forms progress in
identical ways, or to Claude Lantier’s hereditary psychological and physical
weaknesses.
Each of the three phases of Zola’s response to Impressionism (as detailed
in the preceding) can be found in the novel’s depiction of Claude’s paint-
ings at successive moments in his artistic career. Zola’s initial sympathy
with Impressionism and its preferred formalist justification is evident, for
instance, in its discussion of a large canvas that closely resembles Manet’s
Le déjeuner sur l’herbe,
remarkable for its vigour, its spontaneity, and the lively warmth of its colour.
It showed the sun pouring into a forest clearing, with a solid background of
greenery and a dark path running off to the left and with a bright spot of
light in the far distance. Lying on the grass in the foreground, among the
lush vegetation of high summer, was the naked figure of a woman . . . In the
background, two other nude women, one dark and one fair, were laughing
and tumbling each other on the grass, making two lovely patches of flesh-
colour against the green, while in the foreground, to make the necessary
contrast, the artist had seen fit to place a man’s figure . . . [Cette ébauche, jetée
d’un coup, avait une violence superbe, une ardente vie de couleurs. Dans un trou
de forêt, aux murs épais de verdure, tombait une ondée de soleil; seule, à gauche,
une allée sombre s’enfonçait, avec une tache de lumière, très loin. Là, sur l’herbe,
au milieu des végétations de juin, une femme nue était couchée . . . Au fond,
deux autres petites femmes, une brune, une blonde, également nues, luttaient
en riant, détachaient, parmi les verts des feuilles, deux adorables notes de chair.
Et, comme au premier plan, la peintre avait eu besoin d’une opposition noire,
il s’était bonnement satisfait, en y asseyant un monsieur . . . ]24
While not an exact transcription of Manet’s, enough details make Claude’s

canvas – which he titles “En Plain Air” after the earliest designation of
Impressionist works as “open-air” painting – recognizable; the stress upon
its vigor, and upon the balancing of color and shade as the key to its compo-
sitional logic (as opposed to any narrative connection between its different
elements), similarly signals its status as one of the early Impressionist works
that Zola himself had championed. This is made clearer after the painting is
rejected by the Salon and hung instead at the “Salon des Refusés,” where –
just like Manet’s Déjeuner – it becomes an object of public criticism
and ridicule. Visiting the exhibition, Claude hears a swelling sound as
he approaches the room where his canvas is hung, “one long-drawn-out
explosion of laughter, rising in intensity to hysteria [L’explosion contin-
uait, s’aggravait dans une gamme ascendante de fous rires].” “It was,” the
text records, “the subject that was the main target for witticisms. Nobody
understood it [c’était le sujet surtout qui fouettait la gaieté: on ne comprenait
pas],” and they accordingly offer up, in the spirit of Bourdieu’s “popular
aesthetic,” a set of possible causal explanations: that the woman is hot while
the man is cold, that she has just been swimming, and so on. The style
proves just as inexplicable, with one remark highlighting the uniformity of
color: “People blue, trees blue, he’s blued up the whole thing, if you ask me!
[les chairs sont bleues, les arbres sont bleus, pour sûr qu’il l’a passé au bleu, son
tableau!]” As if the scene still needed editorial commentary, Zola concludes
it with the assessment that such a response is precisely what “the sight of
an original work never fails to elicit from the mouths of bourgeois imbe-
ciles [que la vue d’une œuvre originale peut tirer à l’imbécillité bourgeoise]”
(139–40; 127–8).
While this passage would seem to position L’Œuvre, like Zola himself,
squarely on the side of Impressionism and in opposition to such a philistine
reaction, two hints already suggest some equivocation. There is, to begin
with, the response of Claude’s mistress and sometime model Christine, who
is the novel’s more affirmative embodiment of popular tastes. Her initial
view of the painting echoes that of the mass, in seeing it as “monstrous and
hideous, but also quite beyond the pale of any acceptable truth, the work
of a madman, in short [elle ne trouvait pas seulement ces réalités d’une hideur
de monstres, elle les jugeait aussi en dehors de toute vérité permise. Enfin,
il fallait être fou]” (117; 109). Although in time she comes to adopt the
preferred language of Impressionism, being able to compliment Claude’s
newer work for demonstrating “a true feeling for people and things bathed
in diffused light [cette sensation si juste des êtres et des choses, baignant dans
la clarté diffuse],” Christine stops short of a full endorsement on much
the same terms as the resistant gallery-goers: when she criticizes Claude
for painting a poplar blue, for instance, he shows her his reasons, and yet
“In her heart of hearts, however, she refused to accept the fact. She was
convinced that, in nature, there was no such thing as a blue tree [au fond,
elle ne se rendait pas, condamnait la réalité: il ne pouvait y avoir des arbres
L’Œuvre 65
bleus dans la nature]” (172–3; 155). As we shall see, Christine’s hesitations
extend to a criticism of the gender politics of Impressionism, including its
capacity to abstract or give a purely symbolic value to the female form.
Zola’s novel feels symptomatically ambivalent in relation to such cri-
tiques, which are directed from the point of view of a commonsense
understanding of material reality. It acknowledges the legitimacy of Chris-
tine’s insistence that actual trees (and actual women) simply don’t look like
that, while simultaneously supporting Claude’s right to see them as such –
and indeed, affirming that his vision had a basis in fact [“C’était vrai
pourtant, l’arbre était bleu”]. From the point of view of style, the novel
acknowledges a second weakness within Impressionism, stemming from
its desire to be read mainly as a style rather than in relation to its thematic
concerns. As a consequence, Claude repeatedly finds himself eclipsed by
an opportunistic imitator, Fagerolles, who is criticized for “producing a
sort of slick compromise, painting that appeared daring on the surface but
without a single original quality to it! What’s more, he was certainly going
to make a success of it, for there’s nothing the bourgeois likes better than
being stroked when he thinks he’s being manhandled [une peinture qui
jouait l’audace du vrai, sans une seule qualité originale! Et ça aurait du succès,
les bourgeois aimaient trop qu’on les chatouillât, en ayant l’air de les bous-
culer]” (184; 165). As Robert Jensen has argued, a similar stylistic imitation
on the part of what was termed “juste milieu” painting reinforced Zola’s
growing awareness of the dangers inherent in Impressionism’s tendency to
define itself in technical terms: following the independent Impressionist
exhibitions of the mid-1870s, Jensen suggests, Zola recognized how the
“paintings were coming to be consumed, not for their subjects, but for
their technique. The progressive rationale of Manet’s art had been stripped
away by the success of the new generation of juste milieu artists, who used
Manet’s techniques and those of the Impressionists . . . but in both senses in
a way that pandered to the popular tastes of the Salons. If the forms could
be abused in this way, then the revolutionary project of Impressionism was
substantially implicated.”25
The subsequent history of Impressionism, essentially its repackaging as
what T. J. Clark has termed “a domestic and charming style,”26 testifies to
the success of figures like Fagerolles, who in due time produces a crowd-
pleasing facsimile of the Déjeuner painting “toned down, faked, warped
to produce a skin-deep elegance, cleverly arranged to satisfy the taste of
an untutored public [adoucie, truquée, gâtée, d’une élégance d’épiderme,
arrangée avec une adresse infinie pour les satisfactions basses du public]” (332;
286). Claude’s own avant-gardist logic instead pushes him away from any
compromise with the public, even if doing so ironically only intensifies
the very commitment to style over substance that enabled Impressionism
to be replicated and consumed. If we recall the second phase of Zola’s
own art criticism, which sought a greater equilibrium within which new
forms could arise for the depiction of new subjects, we can understand
the deficiency of Claude’s approach, which is at the same time excessively
dependent upon and in simple reaction against public and official tastes.
In quick succession, the novel summarizes three years of failed Salon sub-
missions, revealing how easy it is to miss a desired calibration on either side
of the form/content equation. One year, Claude submits a winter scene,
painted outdoors, that he knows will be rejected on account of its “brutal-
ity; it was like a door flung open on the street revealing the blinding snow
against which two pitiful figures stood out in dirty grey [L’œuvre . . . l’étonna
lui-même par sa brutalité; c’était comme une porte ouverte sur la rue, la neige
aveuglait, les deux figures se détachaient, lamentables, d’un gris boueux].” The
next year, he tones down the harshness of the style, but is still rejected;
then, in the third, he puts “all his pent-up fury into a work of revolt [la
troisième année, s’enragea-t-il sur une œuvre de révolte],” by which point
even his friends are “embarrassed, seriously disturbed even, for they all felt
that martyrdom could be the only reward for painting such as this [les
camarades . . . restèrent gênés, saisis d’une même inquiétude: le martyre était
au bout d’une peinture pareille]” (233–5; 205–6).
If this sequence betrays a considerable confusion about how to balance
form and content, the critical factor in each instance – that which can be
toned down or played up, depending in large part upon the previous year’s
rejection – is stylistic. Given Zola’s increasing concerns about Impression-
ism’s formalist direction, it is significant that Claude’s paintings during
this period are composed under the influence of what might be seen in
hindsight as the Neo-Impressionist theory of color complementarity. As
outlined by his friend Gagnière, the idea radically extends Claude’s early
experiments with blue trees, which he had justified according to his own
experience of optical perception, by insisting that “the red in the flag looks
paler and yellower because it’s next to the blue of the sky, and the com-
plementary colour to blue, orange, combines with the red [Le rouge du
drapeau s’éteint et jaunit, parce qu’il se détache sur le bleu du ciel, dont la
couleur complémentaire, l’orangé, se combine avec le rouge]” (217; 191). By
this point, color has become detached from the material world entirely,
and is being determined instead purely in relation to what is already in the
composition. Even more damning, given Zola’s mistrust of synesthesia, is
Gagnière’s explanation, when pressed to explain his ideas by Claude, that
L’Œuvre 67
they developed under the influence of music scoring. At times, especially
early on, the novel would seem to endorse such ideas of a mutual influence
and common direction across media, as with Claude’s utopian vision in
which “all the arts were intended to march forward together, and the process
of change which was taking place in literature, painting, and even music,
was going to lead to a renewal of architecture, too [Est-ce que tous les arts ne
marchaient pas de front? est-ce que l’évolution qui transformait la littérature, la
peinture, la musique même, n’allait pas renouveler l’architecture?]” (151; 137).
In many respects, however, the decline and eventual failure of Claude’s
work is the price he pays for such an idealistic belief, as formal technique
and symbolism come to occupy the space of a supposed common ground,
each underscoring what the novel finally acknowledges as an incomplete
break with Romanticism.
Initially, L’Œuvre depicts a shared childhood in Provence between
Claude and the would-be novelist Pierre Sandoz that is modeled on that
experienced by Cézanne and Zola. Each suffers from an initial attraction to
Romanticism, and is in time challenged to surpass the respective influence
of major nineteenth-century forerunners: Courbet and Delacroix in paint-
ing, and Victor Hugo and Balzac in literature. For Sandoz, who stands in
for the Zola of The Experimental Novel here, the forward movement would
only come with the application of science, as that which “poets and novelists
are going to have to turn to; science is their only possible source these days
[Bien sûr, c’est à la science que doivent s’adresser les romanciers et les poètes,
elle est aujord’hui l’unique source possible],” as he notes in conversation with
Claude (43; 46). For Sandoz, this involves his envisaging a massive life’s
work exactly like the Rougon-Macquart novels, and we later hear how the
planned project is progressing: “I’m going to take a family and study each
member of it,” he promises, “one by one, how they react to one another.
Humanity in miniature, therefore, the way humanity evolves, the way it
behaves [Je vais prendre une famille, et j’en étudierai les membres, un à un, d’où
ils viennent, où ils vont, comment ils réagissent les uns sur les autres; enfin, une
humanité en petit, la façon dont l’humanité pousse et se comporte]” (181; 162).
If we return to the earlier conversation, we can recognize with hindsight a
form of narrative misdirection occurring when Claude replies to Sandoz’s
inclusive schema with one of his own: “The ideal would be,” he declares,
“to see everything and paint everything . . . Think of it, Pierre! Life as it’s
lived in the streets, the life of rich and poor, in market-places, at the races,
along the boulevards, and down back streets in the slums . . . Modern life
in all its aspects, that’s the subject! [Ah! tout voir et tout peindre! . . . Hein? la
vie telle qu’elle passe dans les rues, la vie des pauvres et des riches, aux marchés,
aux courses, sur les boulevards, au fond des ruelles populeuses . . . Oui! toute
la vie moderne!]” (44; 46–7). Superficially, these projects sound alike, but
in fact the latter exhibits the very deficiency that Zola saw in photogra-
phy, and in the more mimetic realism of Caillebotte: however inclusive,
it can only produce a static panorama of modern life, but will inevitably
struggle to replicate the dynamism of Sandoz’s temporal sequence, within
which the various elements are shown to exert a mutual influence over each
other.
The inherent weakness of painting, in these terms, is indicated in the
final section of the novel when Claude attempts to realize just this kind
of panoramic canvas of Parisian life, one that he initially imagines as
depicting dual images of the capital at work and play. When he shows a
preliminary design to Sandoz, however, the first impulse toward a mimetic
transcription has been detoured, in the novelist’s eyes, by the inclusion of
a naked women in a rowboat on the Seine, a figure he sees as “the outcome
of some tormenting secret symbolism, the old streak of romanticism in
him that made him think of his nude figure as the incarnation of Paris
[le tourment d’un symbolisme secret, ce vieux regain de romantisme qui lui
faisait incarner dans cette nudité la chair même de Paris]” (271; 236). In
the last section of the novel, Zola traces the increasing degradation of this
final painting until Claude’s eventual suicide before it, as the female image
grows more and more at odds with the rest of the artwork: it “simply broke
the canvas with a violent burst of flesh tints which were completely out of
place,” and “struck a disturbing and discordant note amid all the realism of
the rest of the picture [Seulement, la barque des femmes, au milieu, trouait
le tableau d’un flamboiement de chairs qui n’étaient pas à leur place; . . . un
grandissement d’hallucination d’une fausseté étrange et déconcertante, au mileu
des réalités voisines” (299; 259). The disjuncture is symptomatic of Claude’s
struggle to do something other than merely reproduce the view in front
of him, but Zola makes clear that this awkward method of introducing
some form of commentary into the scene is a misapplication of scientific
principle, and one that follows on directly from his previous experiments
with color complementarity: “with all that science buzzing in his brain,”
the narrative notes a few pages earlier,
Claude came back to direct observation, his eye, now biased, forced the
more delicate shades and over-stated the theory by introducing certain garish
notes, with the result that the originality of his colouring, once so light and so
vibrant with sunshine, gave way to what looked like a stunt, overthrowing
all the accepted habits of the eye and producing purple flesh-tints and
tricolour skies. That way, it was obvious, madness lay [le grand mal était
L’Œuvre 69
que, lorsqu’il revenait maintenant à l’observation directe, la tête bourdonnante
de cette science, son œil prévenu forçait les nuances délicates, affirmait en notes
trop vives l’exactitude de la théorie; de sorte que son originalité de notation, si
claire, si vibrante de soleil, tournait à la gageure, à un renversement de toutes les
habitudes de l’œil, des chairs violâtres sous des cieux tricolores. La folie semblait
au bout]. (286; 248)
In Zola’s view, this scientific formalism is dialectically linked to Claude’s
susceptibility to symbolism, with each defect enhancing the other as the
final canvas takes shape. Because they are pursued independently from the
actual scene he is depicting, his experiments with color make it increas-
ingly hard for him to say anything about Paris or modern living; turning
to symbolism in order to make good that deficiency, though, only moves
the painting further from its original mimetic impulse, opening the way
for more experimentation. It is women who bear the brunt of these exper-
iments, coming to occupy the space where a desire for symbolic meaning
collides with abstraction. Speaking as the novel’s voice of (naturalist) rea-
son, Sandoz had earlier cautioned Claude – who acknowledges but never
resolves a problem painting lifelike women – not to succumb to the fash-
ionable Baudelairean tropes of a predatory femininity that were in reality
remnants of an outdated Romanticism,27 cautioning his friend against
“Woman seeking whom she may devour, Woman who kills the Artist,
grinds down his heart and eats out his brain” as “a Romantic idea and
not in accordance with the facts [Le femme dévastatrice, la femme qui tue
l’artiste, lui broie le cœur et lui mange le cerveau, était une idée romantique,
contre laquelle les faits protestaient]” (179; 160). In similar ways, Christine
comes to view the final canvas as a misogynistic work, in which the seeming
elevation of the feminine form through symbolic figuration makes her own
life and misery the price to be borne for Claude’s artistic failings. Watching
him at work shortly before his suicide, she witnesses him “painting her
legs and body like some infatuated visionary driven by the torments of the
real to the exaltation of the unreal, making her legs the gilded columns
of a temple and her body a blaze of red and yellow, a star, magnificent,
unearthly [il peignait le ventre et les cuisses en visionnaire affolé, que le tour-
ment du vrai jetait à l’exaltation de l’irréel; et ces cuisses se doraient en colonnes
de tabernacle, ce ventre devenait un astre, éclatant de jaune et de rouge purs,
splendide et hors de la vie]” [401; 343]. In an affirmation of the popular aes-
thetic, Christine rounds upon him angrily, asking “Was any woman ever
that shape? Did any woman have bright gold thighs and flowers growing
out of her loins? Wake up! Open your eyes and come down to earth again!
[Est-ce qu’on est bâtie comme ça? est-ce qu’on a des cuisses en or et des fleurs
sous le ventre? . . . Réveille-toi, ouvre les yeux, rentre dans l’existence]” (406;
347).
Claude’s trajectory then takes him all the way from Impressionism to
symbolism, from canvases that resemble the early Manet to these final
facsimiles of Gustave Moreau, a painter that Zola saw as having artistic
ideas in diametric opposition to his own.28 Given Moreau’s influence on
decadent writing, including authors like Huysmans whom Zola viewed as
deserters from his own cause, we can read this as a critical commentary
on Impressionism, which began by seeming compatible with naturalism
and yet ended up in the opposite camp. In the final chapter of L’Œuvre,
Sandoz acknowledges a struggle taking place for the future of art at the
fin de siècle, one in which Claude’s death signals a lost opportunity. In a
rare moment of introspective self-doubt, Zola has his stand-in reflect that
We’re resentful because, in a matter of a hundred years, science hasn’t given

us absolute certitude and perfect happiness. Why then continue, we ask,
since we shall never know everything and our bread will always be bitter? The
century has been a failure. Hearts are tortured with pessimism and brains
clouded with mysticism for, try as we may to put imagination to flight with
the cold light of science, we have the supernatural once more in arms against
us and the whole world of legend in revolt, bent on enslaving us again in our
moment of fatigue and uncertainty [la science ne nous a pas encore donné, en
cent ans, la certitude absolue, le bonheur parfait? Alors, à quoi bon continuer,
puisqu’on ne saura jamais tout et que notre pain restera aussi amer? C’est une
faillite du siècle, la pessimisme tord les entrailles, le mysticisme embrume les
cervelles; car nous avons eu beau chasser les fantômes sous les grands coups de
lumière de l’analyse, le surnaturel a repris les hostilités, l’esprit des légendes se
révolte et veut nous reconquérir, dans cette halte de fatigue et d’angoisse].
While Sandoz/Zola finds immediate comfort in the idea of transition,

reassuring himself that “we are moving towards rationality and the firm
foundations that only science can give [nous marchons à la raison et la solidité
de la science],” the doubt is worth lingering over (422; 360). If Zola’s novel
has typically been read as effecting his final break with Impressionism,
it should also be recognized that he used the narration of his increasing
distance from contemporary painting to reflect upon the potential failure
of naturalism itself. Setting aside the by now pro forma hymn to scientific
inevitability, what is most striking is the recognition here of a fundamental
bifurcation that might just as easily lead back to symbolism and mysticism
as forward to the predicted triumph of naturalism. The loss of his ear-
lier Impressionist allies, however shaky the foundations of that presumed
coalition had proven to be, made the former possibility more not less likely.
(Self)-portraits of the artists as naturalists 71
(Self)-portraits of the artists as naturalists

The foregoing reading has argued that L’Œuvre can be read no less as
reflexive self-criticism than as a triumphalist vindication of its author’s
own aesthetic theories. While a great deal of critical attention has been
devoted to identifying the prototypes for Claude Lantier, it is typically
agreed and yet rarely discussed that Zola based Sandoz on himself – and
yet it is surely surprising to encounter a self-portrait such as this in a work of
naturalism. As I have discussed, the apparently invisible position of omni-
science from which its narratives typically emerge has been a long-standing
ethical problem for naturalism, especially when its analytical insights are
brought to bear upon the lives of the underprivileged and inarticulate.
June Howard’s observation that naturalism’s commitment to determinism
extends everywhere but to its own authorial subjectivity is worth recalling
here, for the way it highlights a suspicion of bad faith that is never far from
the surface, and yet Zola’s placing of a stand-in for himself at the center of
his only novel about art suggests one way of disarming the objection.29 In
L’Œuvre, as in the works by George Moore that I will analyze later in this
chapter, the author figure is revealed to be just as determined and subjected
to the same critical scrutiny as anybody else, in what might be the first
instance of naturalist observation turned back upon itself.
The artistic personae of Sandoz and Claude are both shown to be deter-
mined by elements of their respective childhoods. The latter’s attitude
toward work and the public can be traced back, at least to some extent, to
early circumstances: the son of L’Assommoir’s Gervaise, he is able to break
the cycles of deprivation and alcoholic dependence that run through the
Rougon family line only through the intervention of a benevolent foster
father, a “generous, though somewhat eccentric, old art collector” who is
able to provide Claude with an education and a dedicated income. In the
same chapter early in the novel, we learn the determinants of Sandoz’s later
character, including a father who emigrated on account of a political dis-
pute, ran a paper mill, and died “the victim of local prejudice and ill-will,
leaving behind a series of such obscure and complicated lawsuits that his
entire fortune was soon swallowed up in dangerous litigation [puis, il était
mort, abreuvé d’amertume, traqué par la méchanceté locale, en laissant à sa
veuve une situation si compliquée, toute une série de procès si obscurs, que la
fortune entière avait coulé dans le désastre]” (31; 35). Just as we might infer
Claude’s dismissal of the marketplace of public opinion from his unusual
background, so we could predict Sandoz’s dogged and often embittered
insistence upon engaging with it from his. By the same token, if Claude’s
bohemian rejection of bourgeois norms is determined in part by his mate-
rial independence, Sandoz’s lack of a financial inheritance helps to explain
his embrace of them: as a preface to his criticism of Claude’s tendency
to succumb to Romantic fantasies about femmes fatales, for instance, he
encourages his friend to propose to Christine by hymning marriage as “the
essential condition . . . for the good, solid, regular work required of any-
one who meant to produce anything worth while today [Sandoz expliqua
ses idées sur le mariage, qu’il considérait bourgeoisement comme la condition
même du bon travail, de la besogne réglée et solide, pour les grands producteurs
modernes]” (179; 160).
This would seem to be less self-mockery than a sincere self-portrait of
Zola in this period, and yet what is undeniable is that his novel counts
the costs of Sandoz’s commitment to stability. The eventual break-up of
the circle of friends around him and Claude is prefigured very early, which
means that their continued desire to be seen as a movement or united front
is implicitly subject to criticism. L’Œuvre smartly exposes the mythology of
the “plain air” movement as a journalistic invention, and insists – against its
representatives’ more utopian dreams – that architecture and music in fact
shouldn’t be renewed by theories of painting, any more than art should try
to imitate literary naturalism. Tellingly, Sandoz is the last one to come to
this realization, preferring to remain in an oddly paternalistic relationship
with his friends: “he liked to be one of a band,” we read, “all good friends,
all living for the same ideals. Although he was the same age as his friends,
he beamed with a pleasant, fatherly sort of kindness to see them about
him, under his own roof, all intoxicated with the same ambitions [Cela
l’enchantait, d’être en bande, tous amis, tous vivant de la même idée. Bien qu’il
fût de leur âge, une paternité l’épanouissait, une bonhomie heureuse, quand
il les voyait chez lui, autour de lui, la main dans la main, ivres d’espoir]”
(85; 82). This desire for an enforced bonhomie feels increasingly delusional
as the novel progresses, especially as its (and Sandoz’s own) critiques of
Claude’s painting intensify. The novelist’s habit is to invite them all to
dinner every Thursday, and on one such evenings even the self-absorbed
Claude comes to recognize that the group has grown apart under the
pressures of professional successes and failures, and yet he sees Sandoz as
“immobilized in a dream of eternal friendship, with Thursdays like this one
following each other in endless succession to the remotest outposts of time,
with all the gang eternally together, having started out together, together
attaining their coveted victory [Un rêve d’éternelle amitié l’immobilisait, des
jeudis pareils se succédaient à l’infini, jusqu’aux derniers lointains de l’âge.
Tous éternellement ensemble! tous partis à la même heure et arrivés dans la
même victoire! ]” (219; 193).
If it’s possible to see Zola as engaging in a form of self-aggrandizement
here, by positioning himself as the epicenter of stasis amid an increas-
ingly irrational movement of ideas for their own sake, the self-description
also plays into the dominant critical image of him that I highlighted in
Chapter 1: as somebody stubbornly refusing to change and as a consequence
not recognizing that time is passing. In L’Œuvre, the stubborn fixity for
which Zola was becoming famous ultimately slips into a form of existential
doubt that we rarely associate with naturalism. Even as Sandoz’s attitudes
toward Claude’s painting drive a wedge between them, in parallel with
the novelist’s own growing disenchantment with Impressionism, he also
articulates a sense of futility that indicts both his and Claude’s enterprises
equally. “Has it ever struck you,” he asks his friend shortly before their final
Thursday soirée, “that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we
like to think it is? We console ourselves for being spurned and rejected by
relying on getting a fair deal from the future, just as the faithful put up
with abomination on this earth because they firmly believe in another life
where everyone shall have his deserts. Suppose the artist’s paradise turned
out to be as non-existent as the Catholic’s? [As-tu jamais songé à cela, toi,
que la postérité n’est peut-être pas l’impeccable justicière que nous rêvons? On
se console d’être injurié, d’être nié, on compte sur l’équité des siècles à venir,
on est comme le fidèle qui supporte l’abomination de cette terre, dans la ferme
croyance à une autre vie, où chacun sera traité selon ses mérites. Et s’il n’y
avait pas plus de paradis pour l’artiste que pour le catholique]” (373–4; 320,
emphasis in original).
In tone, such speeches feel closer to high modernist skepticism than
the self-confidence that a purported scientific inevitability more typically
leant to naturalism. By the time the novel ends, Sandoz has re-closed
the gap separating his own work (and, by extension, Zola’s) from that
of his Impressionist friends by wondering whether any of them are ever
capable of overcoming their Romantic baggage: as he laments to an older
painter at Claude’s funeral, “Even with your generation between us and the
Romantics, ours is still too clogged up with lyricism to produce anything
really sound. It’ll take another generation, probably two, before painters
and writers work logically in the pure and lofty simplicity of truth [Même
après la vôtre, notre génération est trop encrassée de lyrisme pour laisser des
œuvres saines. Il faudra une génération, deux générations peut-être, avant
qu’on peigne et qu’on écrive logiquement, dans la haute et pure simplicité du
vrai]” (419; 358). The dominant reading of the novel is right, then, to view
it as settling scores with Impressionist painting, more clearly than Zola
did in his art criticism, and yet wrong to see it as doing so in a spirit of
triumphalism. Reading passages such as these, it is easy to see why Monet,
among others, worried that the novel could jeopardize the modern art
project, even if we might now recognize its capacity for self-evaluation and
scrutiny as ironically indicative of its own modernity.
Among those who failed to recognize this reflexive quality in the novel
was George Moore, the figure among Zola’s followers who would most
diligently apply the lesson about the need to specify what determines the
author as well as her/his characters. As recently as 1884, Moore had rather
extravagantly pledged in a letter to be Zola’s “ricochet in England,”30 and
so we can read his adverse reaction to L’Œuvre as one of the earliest signals
of a disenchantment with naturalism. Writing to the Dutch novelist and
committed Zolaiste Frans Netscher, Moore passed judgment on the novel
in early 1886, declaring that “I do not care for it,” and the assessment is con-
sistent with similarly critical remarks from the correspondence, including
the following from August of the same year: “[Y]ou seem to me to believe
in those ridiculous theories which my great friend Émile Zola has written
so much about. You surely do not believe in the naturalistic school? You
surely do not believe in a scientific art? I love art because it is not nature.
But waive all this – the great thing to do, it seems to me, is to create
men and women as Shakespeare and as Balzac did; and this Zola cannot
do.”31 Moore’s apparent apostasy is more complex than this would imply,
however, with its complications rooted in his conflicted allegiances both to
Zola and to the painters who were targeted in L’Œuvre.
Moore’s biography is significant for the story I am telling here about the
unfolding relationship between Impressionism and naturalism. As the son
of a Catholic landowner from County Mayo in the west of Ireland, Moore
had used his patrimony to support an aesthetic education, first in London
and then in Paris, declaring rather grandly in his Confessions of a Young Man
(1889) that “I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge, but I went to the
‘Nouvelle Athènes’” (a café on the Place Pigalle).32 On arriving in France in
1873, he quickly made friends first with the Impressionist painters and then
with Zola, to whom he was introduced by Manet at a Montmartre ball held
to celebrate the success of an 1878 theatrical adaptation of L’Assommoir.33
In his later memoirs, Moore would insist that the painters always came
first, even if he himself would abandon hopes of being an artist and settle
for writing fiction; for example, in 1914’s Vale (the third volume of Moore’s
autobiographical masterpiece Hail and Farewell ), he recalled nights spent
in the café with Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant, and other disciples of
Zola in which “We all entertained doubts regarding the validity of the
Art we practiced, and envied the Art of the painter, deeming it superior
to literature” and artists like Manet, Degas, Pissarro, and Monet “our
masters.”34
It is understandable, then, that Moore would have been keenly interested
in – and also possibly wary of – the publication of Zola’s novel about mod-
ern art. As his biographer Adrian Frazier recounts, Moore was summoned
back to Ireland by the threat to landowners posed by the newly formed
National Land League (founded in Castlebar, less than twenty miles from
Moore Hall) in 1879, just as the Zola–Manet feud was made public, and
it may be that his absence from Paris insulated him from its fallout. In
November 1885, just a few months before disclaiming all belief in natu-
ralism to Netscher, Moore was promoting L’Œuvre in London, without
yet having read it, as “a complete refutation” of “superficially conceived
judgements” against Zola’s materialist emphasis, arguing that the novelist’s
firsthand knowledge of the Parisian art world meant that he wouldn’t need
to rely so heavily on research and external documentation. He was thus
surprised to attend a Parisian dinner four months later at which friends
such as Pissarro, Monet, and Huysmans all denounced the novel that had
just been serialized in French!35 In a chapter of Confessions of a Young Man
entitled “The Synthesis of the Nouvelle Athènes,” Moore recorded what
he claimed were overheard snatches of café dialogue among the Impres-
sionists, much of which was highly critical of Zola, Goncourt, and the
naturalist writers. Most notable is the critique of an unnamed figure who
declared that “What I reproach Zola with is that he has no style . . . He
seeks immortality in an exact description of a linendraper’s shop; if the
shop conferred immortality it should be upon the linendraper who created
the shop, and not on the novelist who described it.”36 Other passages from
the chapter address Zola’s view of the artistic process, along lines suspi-
ciously similar to those that Moore had expressed to Netscher, as when (in
the course of an appreciation of Whistler’s aesthetics) it insists that “Art is
not nature. Art is nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement. Zola and
Goncourt cannot, or will not understand that the artistic stomach must be
allowed to do its work in its own mysterious fashion. If a man is really an
artist he will remember what is necessary, forget what is useless” (115).
If this accurately appraises the division that was made public in Paris in
the early 1880s, it also reproduces a formal opposition – between natural-
ism’s dogged documentary mimeticism and a selective rendering placing
the artist’s own sensibility above the material world being depicted – that
would be familiar to readers in Britain by the decade’s end. On first read-
ing, it is hard to resist viewing Confessions as Moore’s public repudiation
of his naturalist phase, especially given that he describes Zola as only one
in a series of what he terms “echo-auguries” that designate stages in his
Künstlerroman. Even as the text delineates the terms upon which a denun-
ciation of naturalism would have been grounded, however, Moore’s own
writing continued to reject such an interpretation, and he would deploy
elements of a naturalist method (as Chapter 3 will show) through the early
years of the twentieth century. My argument, then, is that we need to
always treat Moore’s retrospective assessments with caution: if a repudi-
ation of Zola occurs, it comes later and with more ambivalence than is
typically credited. At the very least, Moore should be seen as one of the
figures with most to benefit from maintaining the image of a common
front between naturalism and Impressionism, given that he had declared
his allegiance to each more or less simultaneously.
In an 1894 essay, “Reminiscences of M. Zola,” he returned to the moment
when Confessions was appearing in serial form in France and recalled an
awkward meeting at the Frenchman’s Médan home, just after the “Nouvelle
Athènes” chapter had been published, in which Moore felt he had to address
what he underplays as “some frivolous remarks about naturalism . . . [that] I
hoped to be able to explain away.”37 His tactics for doing so are illuminating,
suggesting first that the writing was “an attempt to reduce to words the
fugitive imaginings of my mind, its intimate workings, its shifting colours.”
When that fails, he tries the opposite tack, naming it “an expression of the
opinions of the various ratés” assembled at Impressionist cafes, to which
Zola retorts that the remarks unfortunately “coincide with those which
you express yourself in an earlier part of the book” (72) – and indeed, the
chapter in Confessions that precedes it depicts Moore’s enthusiastic rush
to endorse naturalism as well as a later reassessment that the Rougon-
Macquart novels really only registered as “the simple crude statements of
a man of powerful mind, but singularly narrow vision.”38 At this point in
their conversation, Moore would float the most un-naturalist of defenses,
insisting that “contradictory thinking should not be taken for the opinions
which he holds by and abides by” (73).
If we follow Moore here, not only is Confessions more ambiguous
than might first appear in representing his position vis-à-vis the natu-
ralism/Impressionism controversy; the self-defense that is being mounted
is also able to accommodate the subjectivist language of Impressionism
(the “fugitive imaginings” of the mind, its “shifting colours”) alongside the
hard objectivism of naturalism (the journalistic impulse to simply record
the “expressions” of others). When each fails to convince Zola, at least in
part (we must imagine) because they are being offered in tandem rather
than being placed in opposition, Moore resorts to a form of dialectical
synthesis via an understanding of self-divided subjectivity with which he
had begun to experiment in his literary works. Like the desire to placate
Zola and the Impressionists at the same time, this synthesis represented an
unstable effort at holding together elements of the fin de siècle mindset that
were increasingly perceived as antagonistic. On one hand, Moore’s reading
in continental philosophers such as Schopenhauer and (to a lesser extent)
Nietzsche39 solidified a belief in the power of self-creation through force
of personality, and in art as a vehicle through which to assert individual
autonomy; on the other hand, his long-standing commitment, via Zola,
to determinist principles was never fully displaced. Summarizing Moore’s
dilemma, Elizabeth Grubgeld has argued that “the self-creative process cel-
ebrated in Confessions is counterweighted by an implacable determinism:
each proclamation of freedom stands in tension with its denial. Taken
as a totality, however, Confessions less demonstrates its author’s vacillation
between two theories of origin and development than it testifies to his
startling power of assimilation.”40
The new terms in the equation, derived from Schopenhauer, are
“instinct” and “impulse,” and these come to define the self that Moore
constructs for himself in Confessions of a Young Man. In what amounts to
another retrospective reading, however, he also identifies the commitment
to artistic autonomy with the Impressionists (especially Manet), in at least
partial opposition to Zola: “Manet paints his whole picture from nature,”
he now declares, “trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devi-
ous labyrinth of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a
vision in his eyes which he calls nature, and which he paints unconsciously
as he digests his food, thinking and declaring that the artist should not seek
a synthesis, but should paint merely what he sees” (105). And yet, Grubgeld
is surely right to insist that such instincts are themselves shaped (at least for
Moore himself ) by external influences, as the form of the Künstlerroman
dictates, and she highlights as evidence for this the text’s opening modifica-
tion of a key Schopenhauerian image. As an emblem of the inferior mind,
she suggests, Schopenhauer offers that of a wax doll, made up entirely
of external impressions. Moore’s revision, insisting that “I came into the
world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no
impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes”
(49), attempts a transvaluation of the image that combines active and pas-
sive constructions (“capable of . . . being moulded”) and so makes a virtue
out of receptivity; indeed, the more influences we can receive, the better.
Paradoxically, in Grubgeld’s summation, “The man of wax may receive
impressions, but only at the bidding of his unchanging understructure, the
rigidity of which seems to surprise even him.”41
Interestingly, a key term that Grubgeld highlights as indicating that rigid
“understructure” is “temperament” – a concept that to the late Victorians
would have been “associated with heredity’s irreducible force,” whereas for
Moore “one’s temperament, particularly if impetuous, finds release and
expression only when hereditary forces are contained” (42). In this way,
we can understand a dialectic of liberation and determination playing
itself out, in terms that were all borrowed and modified from Moore’s
own multiple impresses. As we have seen, “temperament” is also a crucial
term in Zola’s work, and in many ways the connecting thread linking his
theory of naturalist fiction with his advocacy of Impressionist painting. It
is both the quality that distinguishes the style of the individual writer in
The Experimental Novel and what prevents the artwork from becoming sim-
ple photographic reproduction in his art criticism; at the end of L’Œuvre,
it is also Sandoz’s best hope for a final victory over Romantic backsliding,
when he asserts that “temperament is always there, and temperament will
out. Who would dream of denying personality? Why, it’s just that that puts
the last instinctive touch on a man’s work and marks his productions as his
[le tempérament est là, qui emportera toujours le créateur. Est-ce que quelqu’un
songe à nier la personnalité, le coup de pouce involontaire qui déforme et qui
fait notre pauvre création à nous!]” (420; 358). Moore, we might suggest,
follows Zola even in his way of working beyond naturalism, by specifying
the framework within which instinct can emerge as something that is at
the same time personal and involuntary.42 In this, as with the turn toward
autobiography more generally, he might be said to have learned important
lessons from L’Œuvre in spite of his stated aversion to it.
Landlord M – From County Mayo

Adrian Frazier gives a similar account of the novelist in this period, except
that he places more emphasis upon conflict than synthesis, suggesting that
at best Moore arrives at “an unsettled dialectic.” More telling are the terms
that Frazier assigns to the push and pull of the late 1880s, and how they
enable us to understand more clearly what Moore was seeking to repudiate:
not so much the theory of determinism per se as specific elements in his own
hereditary makeup that had to do with social class and national identity.
If his reading of Schopenhauer provided Moore with “an inward sense
Landlord M – From County Mayo 79
of himself as a thing made by himself,” according to Frazier, his Zolian
discipleship had taught him that “the self is not really free,” which meant
that Moore himself “can be no more than ‘Landlord M–’ from County
Mayo.” Resolving the conflict potentially returned him to the old naturalist
paradox of determination for anybody but the writing self, by insisting that
the true Schopenhauerian instinct wasn’t universal and that most people
“were dupes of all-too-human instincts, which made them, for all their
hypocritical idealizations, greedy, lustful, and foolish.”43 If Frazier is right,
we can see Moore as still caught within the paradoxes of naturalism here,
even as he sought to distance himself from Zola’s influence.
The phrase Frazier quotes about Moore’s objectively being “Landlord
M– from County Mayo” refers to one of the works on which he was
engaged while he contemplated the split between Impressionism and nat-
uralism, a series of letters about Ireland that were published first in Paris
and then collected as 1887’s Parnell and His Island. It shared much of the
research and insights of the work that preceded it, a novel about the Irish
marriage market titled A Drama in Muslin (1886), and each in different
ways attempts what I have been describing as a turn toward naturalist
autoethnography. Both offer a diagnosis of the landlord class in Ireland
under pressure from the agitations of the Land League, which sought
reduced rents under the threat of boycotting and physical violence, and
their shared portrait of that class in crisis could perhaps only have been
written from within. As James Buzard says of autoethnography, however,
this is an insider perspective that can purchase analytical distance only by
first being routed through a position that is external to the phenomenon
being observed, and so Moore in both cases produces recognizable stand-
ins for himself that function to disavow any sympathetic identification with
the Irish landlords. The version in A Drama in Muslin, a novel I shall be
reading in detail in the next chapter, is the journalist John Harding, a fig-
ure who had appeared previously in Moore’s more orthodox Zolian novels
A Modern Lover (1883) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885). Crucially, Harding –
who is easily recognizable as at least a version of Moore’s imagined self –
is English and not Irish, and he explains having come to Ireland in order
to complete a project very much like that of Parnell, “to take a series of
representative characters – the landlord, the grazier, the tenant farmer, the
moonlighter, the parson, the priest – and tell their history, their manner of
life, and their aims and ambitions.”44 With this gesture, Moore purchases
for himself the analytical distance necessary for his own sociology of con-
temporary Ireland, while throwing into question whether national identity
is a prerequisite or hindrance for such a project.
Harding is a vehicle for articulating many of Moore’s own beliefs, includ-
ing his developing skepticism concerning Christianity and his advocacy of
aestheticism and cosmopolitanism. On the latter issue, Harding tells the
novel’s heroine, Alice Barton, that “we must not confuse home with the
place of our birth. There are Frenchmen born in England, Englishmen
born in France” (198). The statement, even if placed in the mouth of
an imaginary Englishman, is clearly significant, as written by an Irishman
who felt that what Harding terms his “connatural home” was first Paris and
then the south of England; it constitutes a form of mobile identification
involving what Confessions details as needing first to have “got rid of, or
pushed out of sight” France “before I could understand England.”45 This
restlessness would eventually lead Moore back to Ireland at the turn of
the century, by which time he had reconfigured the idea of home itself as
an extension of aesthetic practice in making the quasi-Hegelian argument
that he was merely following the artistic Zeitgeist: in Hail and Farewell,
for instance, he claimed to have
gone to France because art was there, and . . . when art had died in France,
I had returned to England; and now that art was dead in England, I was
looking out like one in a watch-tower to find which way art was winging.
Westward, probably, for all the countries of Europe had been visited by art,
and art never visits a country twice. It was not improbable that art might
rest awhile in this lonely Northern island; so my native country had again
attracted me.46
If this sounds like a lukewarm affirmation, couched in negatives, we will

see in the next chapter that Moore was far more enthusiastic about the Irish
Literary Revival at the time of his return, and had only soured in the ensuing
decade. Even so, it is worth remembering that his loud proclamations of
Celtic Irishness come only after the critique of his native land in Muslin and
Parnell, and in the context of a prior commitment to cosmopolitanism.47
Semi-autobiographical figures like Harding are what link the two, enabling
his commentary on contemporary Ireland to seem both authentic and
disinterested, inside and outside, at the same time.
This is not, however, to imply that Harding is a flattering authorial
alter ego, or what Declan Kiberd has taken to be simply “a version of
[Moore] himself, a freethinking novelist who is convinced that a republic
is the best form of government.”48 Elizabeth Grubgeld’s assessment is
nearer the mark, that Harding instead represents a version of his creator’s
public persona at the time, an assessment that leaves open the possibility of
self-criticism on Moore’s part.49 Like Zola’s in L’Œuvre, the self-portrait in
Muslin fuses negative elements with components of an idealized self-image,
with the difference that the reader is exposed to each largely through the
responses of the impressionable Alice Barton: thus, on the one hand, we
recognize an erotic charge that is absent from her other encounters (at
least with men), as when the text insists that “He had touched a chord
sharply that had long been vibrating in the darkness of her consciousness”
(148), and on the other hand can identify projected aspects of Moore’s own
physical appearance, about which he was markedly ambivalent, especially
from her initial description of him as having “passionless blue eyes” (146).
Harding is recognizably an embodiment of the fashionable dandy, a public
figure known for wit, hyperbole, and paradox. “Writing gets you into an
antithetical way of speaking,” he declares, and he is said to fascinate Alice
with “the quick flight of his thought, and the rapid and daring way in which
he expressed it” (150; 197), and yet the intellectual limits of such a persona
are clearly marked when the latter passage concludes that “He spoke with
a view to effect; he desired to astonish her, and, if possible, to have the
girl think of him when he was gone as something quite exceptional.”
Most damning of all in this writerly self-portrait is Harding’s inability to
distinguish his work from the common marketplace of ideas, a fault that
might already be indicated by the proliferation of Wildean clichés. Even
though he can cynically – and, it turns out, correctly – prophesize for Alice
a future as a hack writer in a London suburb, we also recognize, for all its
fashionable pretense, that Harding’s own work is no better when reading
that “over the intellectual counter he flaunted samples of everything he had
in stock; and the girl saw God in the literary shopboy” (154).
This capacity for autobiographical mockery and self-criticism is if any-
thing even more pronounced in Parnell and His Island, which splits between
a first-person narrator touring the Irish countryside and a West country
landlord who is given the initial “M–” and is clearly modeled on Moore’s
public image. In a chapter titled “The House of an Irish Poet,” the nar-
rator describes his host as having “his pockets filled with back numbers
of ‘La Vogue,’ from which he occasionally reads sonnets by Mallarmé and
Verlaine.”50 Even more than Harding, this would seem to be the Moore
who had returned from Paris in 1879, and as such, he successfully conveys
his own incomprehension at the state of contemporary Irish life and lack
of interest in its complicated politics. When pressed to understand his
tenant’s demands for reduced rents, for instance, this emblem of absen-
tee landlordism struggles “to recall the tercets of a sonnet by Mallarmé”
even as a deal is being struck on his behalf (25), and this echoes the self-
serving obliviousness that he would satirize in Confessions of a Young Man
in describing his summons back from Paris to Ireland in tones of mock
horror: “That some wretched farmers and miners should refuse to starve,
that I may not be deprived of my demi-tasse at Tortoni’s; that I may not be
forced to leave this beautiful retreat, my cat and my python – monstrous.”51
Parnell’s landlord “M–” proves equally incapable of understanding what
is happening around him, or his part in the proceedings as landlord, and
he ends the chapter in a vain search for the bones of his ancestors that
now “lie scattered about the ground trodden by chance of the passing
feet of the peasant”: “Notwithstanding his cynicism,” it concludes with a
dry cynicism of its own, “my friend was touched to the heart. Three days
afterward he began a poem on the subject, the chief merit of which lay in
the ingenuity of rhyming Lilith with lit” (28).
Moore’s self-mockery indicates an understanding that eluded the ear-
lier self he is describing, implicitly acknowledging a responsibility for the
problems of Irish life that he shared with other landlords as a condition
of their structural position in society and that exile only sharpened. If
that understanding, which can only be read against the grain of the text,
exemplifies the benefits of autoethnography, its downside can also be seen
in the more immediate denial to himself of any authority to speak on Irish
matters. It is as if the narrative or authorial position is caught between the
poles of a relatively disinterested “I” and his shockingly un-interested other,
the “Irish poet” who is also a version of Moore himself. Ultimately, then,
the text can only undermine its capacity to say anything about contem-
porary Ireland, in much the same way that Harding’s commercial writing
and Englishness make it likely that his own set of “descriptive sketches” –
undertaken as “an order from America,” because “the Americans pay well”
(Muslin, 196) – will merely recycle received clichés about Irish life. The
Conclusion to Parnell and His Island borrows a pictorial language to try to
justify its own avowed inability to say anything meaningful, speaking of “a
series of pictures to touch the fancy of the reader as a Japanese ivory or fan”
and of offering up instances of the picturesque, “each to be evocative of
dissimilar impressions, and the whole to produce the blurred and uncertain
effects of nature itself” (89). Moore knew more about Impressionism than
this rather desperate claim lets on, however, and it falls about as flat as his
argument to Zola that he had only recorded impressions picked up at the
Nouvelle Athènes rather than his own and others’ opinions. Moore would
claim that we are supposed to treat Parnell as an experiment in literary
impressionism, and yet it can be so only with a heavy dose of naturalism
thrown in; indeed, even this closing resistance to totalization might be seen
as reflecting a crucial problem within naturalism.
Having undermined what Terry Eagleton, in writing of Moore, has
termed “the transcendent non-place of the naturalist artist”52 by making
himself (or versions of himself ) the textual subject, Moore ends up having
to restore it in order to say something, seemingly against his own best
instincts, about his native country. Thus, having playfully insisted that “it
does not strike me as wholly foreign to, and incompatible with, my method
to look upon what the world terms the serious side of things” (89), he ends
the conclusion as the worst kind of social Darwinist, applying determinist
principles that are designed to deny any future for Ireland: “It would be
comforting,” he suggests,
to hug the belief that if the peasants were owners of the soil they till, that if
the exasperatory yearly tributes they are called upon to pay were abolished,
that patriotism would exist no longer and that the Celt and the Saxon
would henceforth live together in brotherly peace and love, My special
temperament inclines me to this view of the question, but when I look
Ireland in the face, the face I have known since I was a little child, I find
myself obliged to admit the existence of a race-hatred – a hatred as intense
and as fierce as that which closes the ferret’s teeth on the rat’s throat. (95–6)
Moore is again split, between intimately knowing and hating Ireland, or
between wanting to believe in one thing according to his “temperament”
and actually knowing something else to be the truth. For obvious reasons,
Parnell would prove to be an abiding embarrassment when Moore returned
to Ireland in 1901 as a champion of nationalism, the Gaelic language, and
Celtic culture, and it was a text from which he quickly sought to distance
himself.53 On my reading, it is potentially salvageable as a sign of its time,
a text that is marked and deformed by the struggle to hold impressionism
and naturalism together, just as Zola’s L’Œuvre painfully documented the
problems involved in differentiating them.
chapter 3
A naturalism for Ireland
According to Emer Nolan, naturalism came “to dominate the Irish novel
in the twentieth century,” in sharp contrast to what we’ve seen as its
relative invisibility, at least as a term of reference, on mainland Britain.
Elaborating upon naturalism’s appeal for Ireland, she notes its attention to
“the banal and ugly ‘realities’ of Irish life, primarily as a way to critique
the crowd mentality that formal religion, especially in its Roman Catholic
version, supposedly nourished,” as well as a focus on “minutely detailed
recreations of the sordid environments in which the demoralized victims
of social and historical circumstances are forced to live” that substituted
for realism’s stress upon collective political agency.1 Nolan’s argument is
in many respects a Lukácsian one, seeking to restore a form of Catholic
realism to Irish literary history, and yet the contrast she delineates also
usefully indicates the basis upon which Irish naturalism would be grounded.
The determination of Irish life by quite literally external forces, mainly
based in England and Rome, was a central concern for writers such as
Moore and Joyce, as was the relative incapacity of individuals to fully
resist or transcend such forces – at least while they remained in Ireland.
We might add to this the considerable fissures within Irish society – of
which Catholic/Protestant, rural/urban, and republican/loyalist are only
the most obvious – that militated against realism’s totalizing ambitions.
As Terry Eagleton has argued, the realist novel is “the form par excellence
of settlement and stability, gathering individual lives into an integrated
whole,” whereas “social conditions in Ireland hardly lent themselves to any
such sanguine reconciliation.”2 Naturalism’s specialization, which enables
it to zero in on the particularities of a class, a profession, a neighborhood,
or a social problem, again makes it feel like the logical alternative.
And yet, as Joe Cleary suggests, it has been “the unacknowledged
stepchild of modern Irish fiction,” pushed to the margins by a critical
overemphasis on two contemporary literary movements: modernism and
84
A naturalism for Ireland 85
the Irish Literary Revival. Against their separation, he argues, we might
recognize a greater interpenetration between naturalism and modernism
in a national case such as that of Ireland (or, he suggests, the United States)
with a relatively weak realist tradition.3 If James Joyce’s work is the ulti-
mate test for such a claim, I propose to use Moore’s short story collection
The Untilled Field (1903) in comparable ways, to think about language and
style as the grounds upon which naturalism might find a rapprochement
with the cultural politics of the Revival. First, however, the central figure of
W. B. Yeats will provide a counternarrative of division, in which the mytho-
logical symbolism at the heart of his understanding of the Celtic Revival
is explicitly counterposed to naturalism and impressionism. “Throughout
the 1890s,” according to Gregory Castle, “Yeats called for an Irish national
literature . . . that would seek its identity and substance not in the traditions
of Europe but in Ireland’s own folk tradition,” but this may be overstating
his antipathy to European literary models.4 It is perhaps more accurate
to suggest that he was hostile toward some (most crucially, impression-
ism and naturalism) and receptive to others, including aestheticism and
symbolism – but only on the basis that the latter could be brought into
agreement with his understanding of folk culture. As an illustration, we
might consider a bizarre thought experiment from his retrospective mem-
oir of the 1890s, “The Tragic Generation,” in which illiterate peasants off
the west coast of Ireland become a litmus test for modern (French) art:
“I can imagine an Aran Islander who had strayed into the Luxembourg
Gallery turning bewildered from Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but
lingering at Moreau’s Jason, to study in mute astonishment the elaborate
background, where there are so many jewels, so much wrought stone and
moulded bronze.”5
In many respects, this Yeatsian narrative – in which symbolism is privi-
leged at the expense of a rival movement such as impressionism – updates
the story of the British 1890s that I was telling in Chapter 1, in which some-
body as influential as Arthur Symons could exemplify an organized force
against Zola and yet still experiment with elements of naturalist method
and style in his own writing. For Yeats, Symons had held to an “impres-
sionist view of life and art” when they first met and collaborated as central
figures in the London Rhymers Club in the early 1890s.6 It was only after
Symons had abandoned such a commitment “and, deeply in love at last,
tried for expression of passion” that the two became close friends, with
an 1896 trip to the west of Ireland representing a pivotal moment in this
transformation.7 Subsequently, his growing friendship with Yeats encour-
aged Symons to reassess his understanding of the relationships among
86 A naturalism for Ireland
impressionism, symbolism, and decadence. The dedication of The Sym-
bolist Movement in Literature (1899) to Yeats is to someone who has “seen
me gradually finding my way, uncertainly but inevitably, in that direction
which has always been your natural direction,” even though Symons con-
tinued to worry that he was “so meshed about with the variable and too
clinging appearances of things, so weak before the delightfulness of earthly
circumstances” as to be an ineffective advocate for Symbolism.8
Nonetheless, he produced a revised literary taxonomy that came to envi-
sion “a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the
unseen world no longer a dream” as the terminus of 1890s art; meanwhile
decadence, his key term as recently as 1893, was reconceived as an “inter-
lude . . . [that] diverted the attention of the critics while something more
serious was in preparation.” Even more than previously, when it still held
some purchase on the material world, decadence was now considered a
purely formal intervention, designed to effect a break with a long tradition
of scientific realism that Symons saw as encompassing Flaubert and Baude-
laire as well as Zola and the Goncourt brothers – one in which “form aimed
above all things at being precise, at saying rather than suggesting, at saying
what they had to say so completely that nothing remained over.” This
would make naturalism into the master category of nineteenth-century
literature, or perhaps the limit-case in which a set of guiding realist presup-
positions are pushed to their logical conclusion; in its place, the twentieth
century would substitute symbolism, which endeavored “to disengage the
ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists and can be realized by the
consciousness” in a manner that echoes religion and “sacred ritual.”9
Such a positioning of naturalism as a holdover from the past century’s
way of thinking (especially coming in a text from 1899) is again consistent
again with Yeats’ own attitude, expressed most clearly in relation to the
works of Ibsen. As I will discuss in the next chapter, those works continued
and yet crucially reoriented the debates about Zola’s naturalism when they
were first performed in English in the early 1890s, and the desire to support
them against conservative censors and critics is made explicit in Yeats’
comment that “neither I nor my generation could escape him because,
though we and he had not the same friends, we had the same enemies.” Such
qualified support, positioning Ibsen as an ally only by being “the enemy of
my enemy,” is offset, however, by the reminder that the plays brought to
Yeats of the artistic realism and scientific materialism that had been in vogue
during his youth: “what was it,” he recalled, “but Carolus Duran, Bastien-
Lepage, Huxley and Tyndall all over again?” Perhaps more pointedly, and
echoing Symons’ problem with Zola, Yeats objected to Ibsen’s language as
A naturalism for Ireland 87
“so close to modern educated speech that music and style were impossible,”
in violation of what was to him the central commandment that “Art is art
because it is not nature.”10
The phrasing also recalls the statements by which Moore distanced
himself from Zola in his letters to Frans Netscher and in the “Nouvelles
Athènes” chapter of Confessions of a Young Man. For Yeats, however, Moore
would remain firmly in the opposing camp, even if – on the same logic of
“the enemy of my enemy” – they would be forced into a strategic alliance
against British colonialism and in favor of an Irish theater. The experiments
at dramatizing Irish folklore undertaken by Yeats and Augusta Gregory,
in which symbolist and aestheticist techniques held prominence, were
forced to coexist alongside the Ibsenite tendencies of Moore and his cousin
Edward Martyn, who helped bankroll the Irish Literary Theatre in the early
years of the twentieth century, and yet their differences were persistently
exposed through efforts at more sustained collaboration. As we shall see,
Moore retained from his naturalist years a suspicion of literary style, and he
continued to value a directness of language that led him to champion Gaelic
for Irish writing against what he came to see as an increasingly artificial
and debased English. For Yeats, however, such an advocacy amounted
to making a virtue out of necessity, since Moore lacked an ear for style:
“because he was fundamentally a realist . . . he required many dull numb
words. But he put them in more often than not because he had no feeling
for words in themselves,” Yeats concluded in a critique that once again
tied Moore to his one-time master, Zola. Indeed, the poet ostentatiously
blamed himself for setting a different example, “an unmixed misfortune
for Moore, as it set him upon a pursuit of style that made barren his later
years”; “if you ever get a style,” Yeats recalls advising, “it will ruin you. It is
coloured glass and you need a plate glass window.”11
This is a backhanded compliment at best, of course, and yet it gets to
the core of Moore’s sustained struggles with issues of style (and, in time,
of language), which in turn indicate a traceable Zolian inheritance. In
an essay, “A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People,” that he published in
1901 on his return to Ireland, Moore uses the term “style” as a pejora-
tive, to indicate the decadence that he saw as having irredeemably tainted
the English language: “At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of
the seventeenth century every one wrote well,” he declared, “and every one
wrote without style. There was no need for style then, any more than there
is need for a filter when the water is taken straight from the well-head.
Style becomes necessary when a language becomes corrupt, just as a filter
becomes necessary when a stream has left the mountain and has passed
through a town.”12 This is perhaps the clearest explanation for why he
would insist upon the primacy of the Gaelic language on his return, a
position that otherwise feels simply perverse, given that he could not speak
it and admitted that he associated it with the tenants of Moore Hall, “a
little decaying race in knee-breeches, worsted stockings, and heavy schoon,
whom our wont was to despise because they could not speak English.”13 To
refashion Gaelic as the linguistic version of the pure “mountain stream” is
thus to turn the tables upon Yeats and to give positive value to the debased
“plate glass window,” in the process condemning Yeats’ own prized style –
as well as the preferred “Hiberno-English” being developed by Gregory and
J. M. Synge – as ornamental and inauthentic. Recalling his first meeting
with Yeats, Moore records the poet having stories in his head but being
unsure “what language to put upon them” – before being forced to admit
that he too “had no Irish.”14 The sense of a literary style as detachable,
and thus disconnected organically from what it is used to say, is even more
evident in a later anecdote that Moore recounts in which George Russell
(“Æ”) compares Yeats’ style to “a suit of livery which a man buys before he
engages a servant; the livery is made of the best cloth, the gold lace is of
the very finest, the cockade can be seen from one side of the street to the
other, but when the footman comes he is always too tall or too thin or too
fat, so the livery is never worn.”15
In his increasingly fractious relationship with Yeats, Moore replayed and
reworked elements of the larger cultural arguments of the 1890s that saw
impressionism and naturalism being counterposed to symbolism. At the
same time, as we have seen, he was engaged in modifying some of the basic
presuppositions and principles underpinning Zola’s model of naturalism,
opening it up to autoethnographic considerations about the determinations
of the speaking self. In what follows, I track the terms of those modifications
through important novels such as A Drama in Muslin and 1894’s Esther
Waters, before returning to the moment of Moore’s arrival back in Dublin
as the champion of Gaelic culture and language. Here, I will be arguing that
his troubled project of a short story collection entitled The Untilled Field,
originally planned to function as an Irish-language primer, best embodies a
naturalism that had been adapted for the particularities of Irish experience,
and also one that anticipates recognizable aspects of literary modernism.
In a final section, I will take up that argument in relation to James Joyce’s
novelistic trajectory, highlighting his own early affinities for naturalism and
its continued presence in his work as a privileged mode for figuring the
social and psychic life of Ireland. With the example of Joyce, but also with
(Irish) determinism and (English) agency 89
Moore’s complicated history as a forerunner, we can test the validity of
Joe Cleary’s claim for Ireland as one of the spaces where “naturalism was
crucial to the development of modernism.”16
(Irish) determinism and (English) agency

Although they were published eight years apart, and bookended more
explicitly aestheticist novels such as A Mere Accident (1887) and Confessions
of a Young Man, A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters together amount
to a sustained interrogation of the limits of the naturalist method and its
relationship to the larger currents of European realism. Each is in significant
ways a novel that is geographically situated, with Muslin representing
Moore’s first efforts at producing what he advertised as “a picture of Ireland
all complete, [Dublin] Castle, landlords and land leaguers, and painted by
an Irishman,”17 and the later novel coming to function as a synecdoche
for what he later termed “The Englishman that was in me (he that wrote
Esther Waters).”18 As we shall see, the national politics of each is more
complicated, especially when they are considered in relation to each other,
but there is nonetheless the sense that each speaks to a component of its
author’s ethnic self-identification, and thus to the larger question of the
extent to which he saw his persona as determined or self-willed.
As I argued at the end of Chapter 2, Moore emerged out of the debates
of the 1880s unsure how to balance what he had learned from Zola and
Schopenhauer (or, in aesthetic terms, naturalism and decadence), and we
find the same unresolved tension in his later accounts of his return to
Ireland. Edward Martyn provides the occasion for a lengthy recapitulation
of Moore’s past Zolianism, and the observation that “All the instruction we
get from the beginning of our lives is to the effect that man is free, and our
every action seems so voluntary that we cannot understand that our lives
are determined for us,” and yet such a model of freedom is what Moore
would continue to reserve for himself.19 His ambivalence is best grasped
at the moment when he tries to explain his decision to return to Dublin,
following a mystical summons that he (semi-)facetiously claims makes him
both “God’s instrument” and “the Messiah Ireland was waiting for”:
A Mummer’s Wife and Esther Waters seemed conclusive proof that I could
only write about England. Then what is it, I cried, starting up from my
berth, that is driving me out of England? for it is not natural to feel as
determined as I feel, especially for me, who am not at all self-willed. I am
being driven, and I am being pushed headlong into the unknown.20
The language here is a little obscure, seeming deliberately to reverse the
conventional associations of self-will and determination so that the latter
comes to indicate a form of will (even if rooted in some external force
or agency) that makes Moore resist turning back; meanwhile, he pictures
himself as being “not at all self-willed” to the extent that he will follow such
a summons, but in doing so insists upon an egoistic force that otherwise
would recognize England as his true home.
If we follow out the implications of this, we arrive back at Adrian Fra-
zier’s point that the issue of determination is for Moore almost entirely
figured in national terms in this period: thus, people such as Martyn,
who never deviate from a strict identification as Irish nationalists and
Catholics (and, as a result, willingly accept a definition of self imposed
from outside) inevitably experience “lives [that] are determined,” some-
thing that Moore recognizes as his own likely fate if he should accept
the summons to return to Ireland; by way of contrast, the capacity to
switch national identities or to render them provisional, whether by liv-
ing or simply writing about somewhere else, comes to define for him the
counterpossibility of self-creation. In this sense, to read his most “English”
novel, Esther Waters, alongside his first intervention into Irish politics,
A Drama in Muslin, is to recognize the extent to which he exempts Britain
from the grip of a determinism from which the Irish seemingly can never
escape.
Ironically, Muslin was not initially conceived as a novel about Ireland,
according to an undated letter to Frans Netscher. In it, Moore claimed that
“My new book deals with the question whether English girls (of whom there
is now a surplus population of more than two million) will take professions
or continue to consider marriage as the only profession open to them.”
The national setting is muddied, however, as his letter goes on to say that
“The scene is laid in Ireland during the land agitation: while the girls are
crying for white dresses, the peasants are crying for the soil.”21 This perhaps
suggests that Moore meant “English-educated” (like himself ) in the earlier
reference to “English girls”; in any case, the parallelism of the last sentence
expresses what I will argue is the novel’s weakness, in proposing to treat
different situations and problems as syllogisms but ending up only with a
vague suggestion of connection. To the extent that the text (subtitled “A
Realistic Novel”) aims at a more comprehensive depiction of Irish life than
might have been possible according to a stricter naturalist methodology, it
exemplifies Moore’s desire to move beyond being seen as “Zola’s ricochet,”
just as its effort to grasp the Irish Land Wars from the differing perspectives
of landowners and peasants (as well as of Dublin high society) indicates
the counteracting influence of Balzac.22 And yet to read it as an instance of
failed realism, one that proves incapable of surmounting the very problem
of totality that Terry Eagleton associates with nineteenth-century Ireland,
is at the same time to recognize the grip that naturalism continued to
have on Moore, and on Irish fiction more generally. In other words, the
novel’s aim of widening its perspective, in order to encompass more than
the narrow experience of Moore’s own hereditary class (the landowning
gentry in the west of Ireland), amounts to a symbolic gesture helping to
disguise its deeper affinities with naturalist specialization.
In Muslin’s most worked-out statement of connection, Moore writes
that
The history of a nation as often lies hidden in social wrongs and domestic
griefs as in the story of revolution, and if it be for the historian to narrate the
one, it is for the novelist to dissect and explain the other; and who would say
which is of the most vital importance – the thunder of the people against
the oppression of the Castle, or the unnatural sterility, the cruel idleness of
mind and body of the muslin martyrs who cover with their white skirts the
shame of Cork Hill?23
And yet the connection between macro- and microlevels of national expe-
rience is forged only through rhetorical juxtaposition, and this becomes a
repeated device in a novel in which discussions of the Land League and
the fair rent valuations calculated by Richard John Griffith keep explod-
ing as non sequiturs in polite conversations, as if from the unconscious
of the landed gentry: “I don’t think there could be finer weather,” says
one, “and still they say the tenants are worse off then ever; that no rent at
all, at least nothing above Griffith’s valuation, will be paid” (55). Peasant
agitation similarly subtends the flirtatious relationship between Mrs. Bar-
ton and Lord Dungory, who mostly communicates through risqué French
epigrams. In one of their social encounters, “when Milord arrived, the
little table was drawn forward, the glass of sherry poured out, and just as if
rents were being punctually paid, white hands were waved, and the coaxing
laugh began to dissipate the gloom in which the League usually draped
the morning hours,” but the trick doesn’t work in their next engagement:
Lord Dungory attempts only one epigram, sending Mrs. Barton in horror
to her mirror, “but she was not to blame. The Land League had thrown its
shadow over all, and out of that shadow no one could lift their thoughts.
It mattered little how joyously a conversation might begin, too soon a
reference was made to Griffith’s valuation, or to the possibility of a new
Coercion Act” (96; 106).
The imagery of gloom and shadows, while reminiscent of the Yeatsian
“Celtic Twilight,” also indicates how Irish Ascendancy lives are haunted by
the politics of rent and ressentiment, and yet these Gothic atmospherics at
the same time deny the gentry the capacity to directly look at and consider
Ireland’s problems. At their worst, they recoil, as when “striving to forget
the murders and rumours of murders that filled the papers, the girls and
their mammas talked of beaux, partners, and trains,” while on their way
to being presented to the Viceroy at Dublin Castle; indicating that they
do so “in spite of the irritating presence of the Land League agitators who
stood on the platforms of the different stations” registers both the necessary
force of their efforts at repression and the inevitable return of the problem,
which comes to seem omnipresent in their lives (144). At their best, they
vaguely come to understand their proximity to their impoverished tenants,
but still resist its implications. A dispiriting Galway ball is almost disrupted
by the view of poor peasants “staring in at the window,” for instance, but its
significance is lost on the single women who see them as merely “sinister,”
while concluding that “if we had nailed up every window we should have
simply died of heat” (87). That scene is later recalled in Dublin when
physical co-presence is compressed into a still tighter discomfort, as
In the broad glare of the carriage lights the shape of every feature, even
the colour of the eyes, every glance, every detail of dress, every stain of
misery were revealed to the silken exquisites who, a little frightened, strove
to hide themselves within the scented shadows of their broughams: and
in like manner, the bloom on every aristocratic cheek, the glitter of every
diamond, the richness of every plume were visible to the avid eyes of those
who stood without in the wet and the cold. Alice thought of the Galway
ball, with the terrible faces looking in at the window. (171)
Alice’s reminder, though, is really just a repetition, and not a mark of any
developing intellectual or political awareness, as windows – which separate
landlords from their tenants, or the aristocracy in their carriages from the
misery out on the streets – come to seem far more opaque than Yeats’
metaphor of “plate glass” had implied.
One possible implication, as I have suggested, is that Moore might
be insisting upon the totality of Ireland – and thus, any solution to its
problems – as in fact incomprehensible to the Irish themselves, and yet
possibly not to outsiders such as the English journalist Harding. But the
politics of A Drama in Muslin is more complicated than this, even as the
novel positions mainland Britain as a space from which an Archimedean
overview might be possible. It ends with Alice’s emigration to London with
her new husband Dr. Reed, and their last gesture in Ireland is to pay the
back rent for a family that is about to be evicted, even as the novel makes
clear that such a microcosmic gesture does nothing to solve the macro
problem: indeed, as Reed is advised when the transaction is complete,
“There are plinty more of them over the hill on whom he can exercoise
his charity if he should feel so disposed!” Their aim would seem to be a
clean slate for a new life, so as not to “leave Ireland with such a shocking
picture engraved on our minds forever,” and there is little to suggest that the
newlyweds think any more about Ireland once they attain a greater distance
from it (323). Just before their departure, the novel registers their lack of
interest by listing among a series of “indifferent things” to them both “the
state of the country” and “Mr. Barton’s pictures,” and then having their
conversation pivot to “what was uppermost in their minds,” Alice’s writing
and her interactions with a London publisher (296). But what makes the
turn feel especially callous is that their discussion had originally been set
in motion by a story of peasant suffering that brings each almost to the
point of overt political declaration, only for Alice to feel that “it would be
out of place for her to speak of her sympathies for the Nationalistic cause,
and she knew it would be unfair to lead the doctor to express his” (293).
Because we have barely witnessed either thinking such sympathies, to have
them articulated would come as a greater surprise than that they should
remain unspoken, even at this late stage.
What republican sentiments there are in the novel are largely articulated
by the narrative voice, which is forced into awkward acts of ventriloquism
whenever it feels the need to direct its characters into thought patterns that
it denies to them. An instructive example occurs early in the relationship
between the impoverished Violet Scully and the titled (but also cash-
strapped) Lord Kilcarney: “She knew how terribly the Kilcarney estates
were mortgaged,” the novel informs us; “and, even now, as she rightly con-
jectured, the poor little man was inwardly trembling at the folly it had been
on his lips to speak. Three of his immediate ancestors had married penniless
girls, and it was well-known that another love match would precipitate the
property over that precipice known to every Irish landowner – the Encum-
bered Estates Court.” And yet this is something that neither of them
actually seems to comprehend, except perhaps at a level of deepest repres-
sion, for she only has to reassure him that “Things never turn out as well or
as badly as we expect them to” for “this facile philosophy” to go “like wine
to the little marquis’s head,” and their relationship to be back on (201–2).
A little later, Lord Kilcarney is accorded more knowledge that he doesn’t
possess when he walks through Dublin and derives symbolic meaning from
landmarks that include the statue of Daniel O’Connell (“the man who had
begun the work”) and the Bank of Ireland building (“the silent power that
protected him”). At such moments, the narrative tells us, “he awoke, sur-
prised to find himself starting at something he did not see,” but he would
surely be even more surprised to find himself suddenly and inexplicably
able to comprehend what secures and threatens his privilege (217–18).
At such moments, Moore is straining to indicate a complex understand-
ing of Ireland against his insistence that it is unknowable to the Irish.
Supposedly “of Ireland . . . painted by an Irishman,” the novel forces Moore
by the logic of autoethnography to approach its subject from without as
well as within, depicting social rituals such as dancing (as Declan Kiberd
has pointed out) “as if he were a social anthropologist caught among a
strange, barbarous people whose customs baffle him.”24 Metaphor is a
key tool in his investigation, but it only enhances the distance between
observer and observed when characters are shown to act, unbeknown to
themselves, according to pre-scripted forms: in the space of a single chap-
ter on the Dublin viceroy’s ball, for instance, the actions of the figurative
“muslin martyrs” are compared with hunting, the Eucharist, and a funeral
procession, an excess of metaphor that might imply that even the author
is not exactly sure what to make of the native custom. All this ventril-
oquizing tells us that Moore’s “Realistic Novel” hasn’t solved the central
narrative problem of naturalism, which his attitude toward Ireland sets
for it by presuming the impossibility of self-knowledge. Stylistically, the
effect of this is a peculiar combination of free indirect discourse, which we
might think of as one of the defining characteristics of fictional realism,
and authorial intrusions that recall the privileged position accorded to the
narrator by naturalism. A close narratological reading by Judith Mitchell
identifies sudden shifts between these modes within paragraphs such as the
following:
[Alice] had talked to these Brennans, seen how they lived, could guess what
their past was, what their future must be. In that neat little house, their
uneventful life dribbled away in maiden idleness; neither hope nor despair
broke the cruel trivialities of their days – and yet, was it their fault? No;
for what could they do if no one would marry them? – a woman could do
nothing without a husband. There is a reason for the existence of a pack-horse,
but none for that of an unmarried woman. She can achieve nothing – she has
no duty but, by blotting herself out, to shield herself from the attacks of ever-
slandering friends. Alice had looked forward to a husband and a home as the
accomplishments of years; now she saw that a woman, independently of her
own will, may remain single. (58; my emphasis)
As Mitchell points out, the passage functions in classic realist style for the
most part in seeking to fuse Alice’s thoughts with those of her narrator,
except for the italicized sentences, which too abruptly signal a changed
perspective by their shift into present tense.25
This analysis prods Mitchell to read Moore’s novel alongside the canoni-
cal writers of so-called Victorian realism – Hardy, Meredith, Trollope, and
especially Eliot – and to conclude that it is no less “abstract” or “pedantic,”
and that Alice is “like certain of George Eliot’s heroines . . . occasionally
presented by the narrator in a piously altruistic light.”26 In similar fashion,
Kiberd has suggested that the novel probes “how far a version of Middle-
march can be written about Ireland.”27 For me, though, these readings miss
the point by modestly concluding that Moore almost pulls off the equiva-
lent of British realism, in a novel no worse than its mainland counterparts.
Even if we set aside reservations such as Nancy Armstrong’s that the Vic-
torian novel was less “realist” than is typically imagined, or Emer Nolan’s
that the Irish novel was more so, it seems clear that Moore was writing –
unlike comparable British figures – from within a set of problematics he
inherited from Zola and naturalism.
As a last example, I will focus on the complex functions of heredity
and the language of biological causation in A Drama in Muslin. Under the
assumption that any claim to literary realism presumes something closer
to a model of subjective autonomy and self-determination, the novel’s
stridently determinist rhetoric would seem to undermine the validity of
its subtitle, at least up to a point. In its early chapters, for instance, Mrs.
Barton has a “figure singularly in keeping with her moral character” and is
able to spawn her own category, “the Mrs. Barton type of woman,” (23–4);
similarly, Violet Scully’s brother Fred is said to have “stableyard . . . written
in capital letters on his face,” with the further editorial comment that “the
psychology is easy to surmise” from a brief sketch of “the physiology of this
being” (75); meanwhile, a question about the mental weakness of Alice’s
sister Olive prompts the comment that “it was easy to see that, from the
imaginative but constantly unhinging intelligence of the father, the next
step downwards was the weak, feather-brained daughter. In what secret
source, lost far back in the night of generations, was this human river
polluted?” As its answer, the narrative adopts a Zolian tone, insisting upon
“how absolutely consequent are these laws of heredity” (38).
The pattern does not initially change when it comes to the depiction
of Alice. Moore explains “her reasoned collectedness” as “the consequence
of the passivity of the life and nature of her grandfather (the historian),”
while “her power of will, and her clear, concise intelligence were inherited
from her mother” (187). To the extent that she is exceptional, her difference
might reside in a greater self-consciousness about the hereditary process
itself, and its entropic tendency: “Everything in nature I see pursuing the
same course,” she notes in an air of resignation, so “why should I imagine
myself an exception to the general rule?” (61). Even her separation from
the other “muslin martyrs” – first, as a celibate, and then, in addition, as
an atheist – gets refigured as typology, as she becomes emblematic of a
(presumably English or European) feminism, “if anything a representative
woman of 1885” (229).28 The novel’s turning point comes when Alice
abandons such commitments to the values of the New Woman and falls
in love, and we might imagine that this is also what marks her transition
from character type to realist heroine. And yet the change remains opaque
to others and to Alice herself. Given Mrs. Barton’s own typological status,
as the sort of matrimonially obsessed mother that we encounter in Jane
Austen, her confusion is perhaps understandable: after all, we learn, a fixed
“idea had grown up with Mrs. Barton, and fifteen years ago she had seen,
in the child’s face, the spinster of fifty.” Under the pressure of new evidence
to the contrary, her “convictions that Alice would never be able to find a
husband had been somewhat shaken” (205–6).
The more interesting reaction comes from Alice herself, whom the
transformation is equally capable of shocking. Initially, and only after being
asked by her sister if she would like to marry Dr. Reed, she begins “to allow
her liking for the doctor to grow into, to become part of the nature of her
mind,” in a formulation implying that she has been unnaturally resistant
to such thoughts up to now (296–7). In a development of this idea, Alice
is later said to be “curiously surprised by her own words,” when she stands
up to her mother on the question of marriage; “it seemed to her that it was
some strange woman, and not herself – not the old self with whom she was
intimately acquainted, who was speaking,” the novel tells us (314). As we
shall see repeated in the case of The Untilled Field, Moore here figures Irish
self-revelation not as the product of realist development, with a protagonist
coming to self-knowledge over time, but as a sudden illumination rooted
outside of the subject herself. To the extent that this final Alice differs
from the earlier one, they are disconnected from each other in ways that
imply altered material circumstances more than the character’s incremental
Bildung. Like Ireland, Moore’s protagonist is denied the necessary distance
from which to measure and evaluate her position relative to the historical
progression through which she is moving, and in this sense has more in
common with the heroines of naturalism than with those of realism.
Appearing eight years later, and thus at a greater distance from both
Moore’s Zolian discipleship and his immersion in Parisian aesthetics, Esther
Waters is in many ways his most English of novels.29 It can readily be sit-
uated within the framework of a putatively normative English realism as
well as Victorian subgenres such as the “condition-of-England” or “fallen
woman” novels. As with A Drama in Muslin, however, it might be an
exaggeration to suggest that it fits neatly within a national tradition; Terry
Eagleton’s suggestion that its earliest scenes at the horse-breeding estate of
Woodview in Sussex function by analogy, as “an imaginary transposition
of Moore’s Mayo big house,” is given further weight if we recall the autobi-
ographical description in Parnell and His Island of a family fortune wasted
“by one generation in terraces, by another in race-horses, and by another
in dissipation in Paris.”30 As with Muslin, the novel is also an intense med-
itation on the limits of determinism and the possibilities of realist heroism,
and thus might be said to engage the earlier novel in dialogue.
Esther’s class background as a servant is considerably lower than Alice
Barton’s, and so her greater agency and capacity to decide on a course of
future action might support the view that Moore is moving further away
from naturalism or that he had come to associate it with the particular
conditions of Irish life. Esther’s life is, the novel tells us, “a heroic adventure
if one considers it – a mother’s fight for the life of her child against all
the forces that civilisation arrays against the lowly and the illegitimate.”31
The narrative relentlessly indicates those forces in terms that recall the
standard scripts of both the naturalist and the “fallen woman” novel – the
irreversible stigma attached to unmarried mothers; economic equations of
labor, income, and child support that never allow such mothers to rise in
the world; the looming shadows of prostitution and the workhouse as twin
alternatives to a life of underpaid drudgery; the temptations of alcohol and
gambling – only to represent Esther as somehow managing to avoid each.
In this sense, David Baguley is right to term Esther Waters “a naturalist
palinode” and “written in opposition to the genre” to which Moore had
earlier and so publicly declared his allegiance.32 On my reading, this is
not to marshal the novel as evidence of a repudiation of Zola, however,
but instead to indicate Moore’s continuing inquiry into what a naturalist
method enabled and precluded, during a period in which his earlier reflexive
cosmopolitanism was giving way to a reflection upon the complex national
underpinnings of his own authorship and aesthetic impulses.
If Alice Barton’s social position provides her with the illusion of self-
determining agency, only for the narrative to insist instead upon her typol-
ogy, Esther’s situation is exactly the reverse. In her own mind, she is fully
a pawn of circumstances beyond her control, feeling “that her will was
overborne by a force which she could not control or understand” (237),
and yet the narrative repeatedly underlines her capacity for transformative
action, converting what Lukács termed merely “abstract potentialities” into
the concrete decisions that he saw as a mark of realism’s superiority. Indeed,
at the very moment that Esther imagines herself as “overborne” she is in
reality weighing up two possible futures, either marriage to the devout
Fred Parsons or a reunion with William Latch, the (now-married) father
of her illegitimate son. Interestingly, the narrative here adopts the same
paradox I highlighted in the case of Alice, by figuring conscious reflection
as emerging from a space external to the thinking subject herself: “She
stopped thinking” about two possible future lives, we read, “for she had
never thought like that before, and it seemed as if some other woman whom
she hardly knew was thinking for her. She seemed like one standing at cross
roads, unable to decide which road she would take” (238). In contrast to
the example of Alice, however, the idea that comes to Esther does not
so much substitute for reflection – indeed, it interrupts an ongoing, but
unproductive pattern of thought – as reroute it and ultimately enable her
thinking to progress. If the lives that she imagines with William and Fred
represent diverging instances of abstract potentialities, largely knowable
at this point in terms of their different social locations (with the former
behind the bar at the King’s Head, or the latter in a cottage at Mortlake
and “nothing but the prayer-meeting”), they in due time help to enable a
concrete choice to reunite with William.
Esther’s capacity to take decisions for herself, even when they don’t
necessarily work out, endows her with one of the key characteristics of the
realist heroine. In the first part of the novel, even as she bemoans economic
circumstances or the contingencies of fate, she routinely elects to leave
positions that don’t enable the life she wants for herself and her son. She
leaves one job as wet nurse, for instance, in order to take care of her own
child when he falls ill, and another when her employer demands to know
how she spends her wages. In such moments, the looming possibilities of the
workhouse or a life of prostitution are floated only for Esther to steer clear
of them, in a pattern that the novel attributes to good fortune. In this way,
it still insists upon her typology and the weight of social circumstances that
ought to dictate her future life, in the familiar downward spiral experienced
by other naturalist heroines: once, while between jobs, she sees well-dressed
women from the suburbs arriving at Piccadilly Circus, for instance, and
yet “through this elegant disguise Esther could pick out the servant-girls.
Their stories were her story. Each and all had been deserted; and perhaps
each had a child to support. But they hadn’t been as lucky as she had been
in finding situations, that was all” (177). Among instances of her good
fortune, we might include her first employer, who gives her a character
The Untilled Field 99
reference even when she is dismissed for being pregnant, and another who
decides to pay her more than the going wage rate on hearing her story,
declaring (against the generalizing sentiment of the previous passage) that
“There aren’t many such good women in the world as you, Esther” (185).
In all of this, Moore is acutely aware of the pitfalls of romanticizing
Esther or providing her with implausible resources. If she benefits from
the kindness of strangers, the narrative constantly reminds us of how
different things really should be for her, underscoring that the appropriate
pay for her service would have been insufficient to pay for the childcare
that formed a precondition for taking the job in the first place. In this
sense, the novel doesn’t repudiate naturalism so much as wrestle with the
implications of shifting its focus from the typical to the exceptional. It’s
also worth pointing out that, even with all of her good fortune and survival
instincts, Esther repeatedly ends back where she begins, as if staying in place
is the only other imaginable scenario to set against the inevitable decline
experienced by naturalist protagonists or fallen women. On being evicted
from the King’s Head pub with William after seven years as landlords
(and bookmakers on the side), for example, Esther looks back over “Seven
years of hard work – for she had worked hard – and nothing to show for
it . . . Horses had won and horses had lost – a great deal of trouble and fuss
and nothing to show for it” (344), and this is also the effect of Moore’s
famous reiteration of passages from Chapter 1 in the penultimate chapter,
when Esther arrives back to work at the same country estate in which
her troubles first began. Nonetheless, her avoidance of the grim fate of
so many women in parallel situations, and her limited capacity to reflect
upon circumstances and influence her future life in decisive ways, suggests
the extent to which Moore felt that English women – even lower-class
ones – might attain the status of realist heroines. Esther’s social position,
even at the best of times, is significantly lower than Alice Barton’s, and
yet it is hard to escape the sense that she possesses something that her
Irish counterpart can never attain: an Englishness that enables her to shift
from the determined subject of naturalism to the self-determining agency
required by realism.
The Untilled Field

In an overgeneralized assessment of Moore’s work that has been echoed by
Joe Cleary, Terry Eagleton suggests a structuring irony: that the novelist
had been capable of a “negative identification” with English working-class
figures (and especially women like Esther Waters) “but much less with
the Irish tenantry whose unjust treatment spurred on his own fall into
necessity in the first place.”33 While the preceding analysis of A Drama in
Muslin and Esther Waters might provide support for such an assessment, its
oversimplification of a complex issue becomes clear if we consider the story
collection The Untilled Field on which Moore worked on his return to
Dublin in 1901. Its component stories are centrally focused upon the peas-
antry, which is perhaps not surprising if we consider that he had returned
as a self-proclaimed champion of the Gaelic language and had already par-
ticipated (along with Yeats, Martyn, and Gregory) in the fledgling efforts
at founding an Irish literary theater that aimed to represent elements of a
Celtic folk culture back to the nation. The relationship of tenant farmers
to the authority of the Catholic Church is the crux of most of these sto-
ries, and in some respects we might view the disconnection between their
respective viewpoints and experiences as replicating the internal division
of A Drama in Muslin, in which peasants and landowners faced each other
from either side of various glass windows. Indeed, as Adrian Frazier notes,
the crucial aspect of Irish social life that Moore had failed to note until his
return was the extent to which “the clergy were taking the place once occu-
pied by landlords, his own class.”34 If coming to grasp that shift afforded
the novelist a greater critical distance from which to assess the destruc-
tive force of Catholic authority, it also enabled the identification with
the socially inferior position that he had practiced in an “English” novel
such as Esther Waters to extend to his own former tenants in the west of
Ireland.
The history of the Untilled Field project is a complicated one, made
more so by Moore’s growing realization of clerical tyranny. His motivating
concern on his return was the preservation and revitalizing of Gaelic, and we
can trace the basis of his language advocacy back through his Continental
education in decadent aestheticism. In one of his first public statements, a
Dublin speech on “Literature and the Irish Language” from 1901, Moore
allied himself with both Ibsen and Walter Pater, praising the former for
spurning the major European languages in order to write in one “which is
spoken by very few millions” and predicting by analogy that “[w]ere a great
work written in Irish to-morrow, in a few years it would have travelled all
over Europe.” If the alternative was the increasingly “universal language” of
English, he maintained, the leading British critic Pater had condemned it
as having reached the same stage of decay as second-century Latin.35 Each
of these propositions was extended, and also politicized, in an essay Moore
published the same year, “A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People,” which
uses the example of Ibsen to imagine an alliance of peripheral European
languages that might include Bohemian and Flemish as well as Dano-
Norwegian.36 To that end, Moore declared, “it may be said that all over
Europe the desire to preserve the small languages is manifesting itself, as if
Nature were aware in its subconscious of the danger of uniformity which
a great empire imposes, and in her own obscure way were remedying the
evil.” If language advocacy is here positioned as implicitly anti-imperialist,
the corruption of English is given a similar geopolitical valence, as a self-
proclaimed “universal language” that would be better “left to the free and
fearless use of bankers and popular novelists.”37
This more explicit political inspiration, which had initially come through
Moore’s opposition to Britain in the Boer Wars, emerges toward the end
of the 1903 edition of The Untilled Field,38 when the American-born Ned
Carmady prepares to leave Ireland to aid the Boers: “War had broken out
in South Africa, Irishmen were going out to fight once again; they were
going to fight the stranger abroad when they could fight him at home no
longer.”39 And yet, as I shall show, Ned’s political commitment comes at the
expense of the earlier beliefs in both Gaelic culture and Irish nationalism
that had brought him to Ireland in the first place – presumably the reason
that the fight could no longer be imagined as occurring on Irish soil. The
arc of this story, “The Wild Goose,” reenacts Moore’s own experience in
composing the volume in which it appeared, having initially conceived it as
a tool for promoting the Irish language but ending up asserting the futility
of such a project in a country that refused to challenge clerical authority.
As he would recount the history of the project a decade later in Hail
and Farewell, The Untilled Field originated in a conversation with Edward
Martyn about the need for a book (initially conceived as a translation)
that could be used as a Gaelic language primer, with his cousin offering
£50 for the labor of translating Moore into Irish but only on the condition
that “it must be sanctioned by the Gaelic League and published under
its auspices.”40 Moore’s absence from Ireland and his enthusiasm for the
language meant he didn’t question the terms of the deal, nor a further one
to have the stories first published in Gaelic in the New Ireland Review,
which was edited by the Jesuit priest Father Tom Finlay. A measure of his
naiveté can be glimpsed in a conversation he recounts with Æ (Russell) in
which Moore argues the cause of the Irish language over and above the ideas
that it might be used to record, as if the medium of Gaelic would render
the message irrelevant (344). As the project continued, Finlay would reject
stories he felt “could hardly be included in a collection of stories which
he could recommend as a text-book for the Intermediate,” while Moore
for his part “seemed closed for the time being to the stories suitable to a
text-book, and wide open to those that would lead me away from Father
Tom and the New Ireland Review” (346). As one of the last stories to be
written, “The Wild Goose” taught its author that “it being impossible to
enjoy independence of body and mind in Ireland, the thought of every
brave-hearted boy is to cry, Now, off with my coat so that I may earn five
pounds to take me out of the country” (349).
As Joyce would do in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Moore’s eventual motivation in completing The Untilled Field was
thus to diagnose the forces paralyzing Irish progress and the bankruptcy
of then-prevalent strategies for cultural renewal, making the argument for
the necessity of exile as a logical consequence. One repeated trope is the
severely limited options for poor Irish of either gender, who struggle to
decide between unpalatable alternatives. In “The Exile,” a farmer named
James is heartbroken when the woman he loves, Catherine, turns out to
prefer his own brother Peter, for instance, and while “It was thought that
he would take to drink . . . he took to fishing instead” (130). Like many
characters in the collection, James decides to emigrate to America, but can
only justify his decision on the basis that his departure will leave a clear
path for Peter to propose and thus ensure that their aging father will have
somebody to look after him; Peter, in turn, views marriage in similarly
instrumental terms, declaring “‘Faith, I will, though I never thought of
marriage, if it be to please James.’ Seeing how heartsick his brother was, he
said ‘I can’t say I like her as you like her; but if she likes me I’ll promise to
do right by her’” (136). The story outlines a complex circuit of attraction –
one made more difficult by the decisions that both Peter and Catherine
make and then reverse to take religious orders – from which any language
of desire is replaced by one of duty; as one priest elsewhere in the collection
blithely puts it, “The Irish find poetry in other things than sex” (60).
Women have it even harder, often being told who to marry by parents
and priests and becoming objects of barter in the process. In “Julia Cahill’s
Curse,” the central figure is present during complex negotiations in her
parents’ shop between her father, a local suitor, and the parish priest, but is
never consulted while they debate a dowry of between £70 and £80. When
they split the difference, we read,
the three men thought the marriage was settled. And Father Tom thought
that he would get not less than £10 for the marrying of her. They did not
even think to ask her, and little did they think what she was going to say,
and what she said was that she would not marry any one until it pleased
herself, and that she would pick a man out of this parish or out of the next
that pleased her. (216)
In taking the decision for herself, Julia scandalizes the priest and her village,
and eventually she emigrates (although “some say that she joined the
fairies”) after cursing the village to the effect that “every year a roof has
fallen in, and a family has gone away” (219; 214).
Presumably the curse is meant to mark an ironic separation between
gullible peasants and a knowing readership, who understand that such a
fate would have occurred in any case given the social realities the text
depicts. The collection as a whole does not always tilt so heavily against
folk superstition, however, especially in those moments when it comes into
conflict with the power of the church. In its starkest form, the contest
plays out in a section of the suite of stories titled “Some Parishioners,” in
which a devout chicken farmer, Biddy M’Hale, has amassed £50 that Father
Macguire would like to use for an ambitious plan to restore and upgrade
the parish church. While he assumes she will simply give him the money
for his use, Biddy successfully insists that she wants it to pay for a stained
glass window, and in spite of her sincere devotion, the text notes, “Her faith
in her money was abundant; she knew that as long as she had her money
the priest would come to her for it on one pretext or another, sooner or
later” (93). What follows is a strategic game in which Biddy outwits him,
showing herself to be in many respects the truer Catholic by reporting a
vision of God descending from the window to place a crown on her head.
Hearing her story, the priest “did not like to impugn a popular belief, but
he felt himself obliged to exercise clerical control,” and he tries to invalidate
her vision through an oddly rationalist line of questioning (110). On being
asked where the crown is now, Biddy responds, “It is with Him, to be sure.
He would not be leaving it on my head and me walking about the parish –
that wouldn’t be reasonable at all, I am thinking. He doesn’t want me to
be robbed,” adding the caution that “Maybe someone would come out
of another parish, if I had a gold crown on my head” (111). Having lost a
battle of wits with a villager he considers literally witless, Father Macguire
ultimately has to embody the force of his office in its purest form, just as
earlier he had told a recalcitrant parishioner that “If I weren’t a priest I’d
break every bone in your body for talking to me like that” (47). “Well,
Biddy,” he concludes, “I want you to understand that I cannot have you
interrupting the Mass. I cannot permit it. The visions may be true, or not
true, but you must not interrupt the Mass. Do you hear me?” (111–12).
Moore is clearly interested in exposing the ideological and material bases
of church authority, and in dramatizing instances of growing opposition
to it, especially on the part of women. Like Esther Waters, these characters
repeatedly take decisive action, often simply to absent themselves from
Ireland altogether. As with the gentry in A Drama in Muslin, however,
Moore provides an acute psychological rendering of the often-conflicting
demands that are placed upon the peasantry, largely on account of a learned
obedience to the Church that is in the process of breaking down under
the weight of material hardship. “The Exile” provides the most complex
portrait of internal division, returning to the trope we have seen Moore
deploy, to different ends, of having a voice seem to emerge from outside
of consciousness itself in order to negotiate conflicting demands. Early on,
as the brother Peter is walking home thinking about his future possibilities
(as a farmer, husband, policeman, or priest), he comes to realize “that
everything was at last decided, when suddenly, without warning, when
he was thinking something else, his heart misgave him. It was as if he
heard a voice saying: ‘My boy, I don’t think you will ever put on the
cassock.’” “It is frightening,” the text notes, “to hear yourself saying you
are not going to do the thing you have just made up your mind you
will do,” and yet other characters from The Untilled Field have similarly
bifurcated consciousnesses, and are equally prone to abandoning long-held
ambitions when they consider them in another register of thought. Kate
Kavanagh, whose story mirrors that of Julia Cahill, succumbs to Father
Macguire’s pressure to marry Peter M’Shane, for instance, and declares on
their wedding night that her husband “was very good to her, and she had
no fault to find with him. But no sooner were the words out of her mouth,”
however, “than her mind seemed to wander, and everyone expected her to
run out of the house. But she went into the other room instead, and shut the
door behind her,” and then departs for America the following morning (78).
It is worth recalling at this point Moore’s original motivation in having
wanted the collection of stories to serve as a Gaelic-language textbook.
One way of understanding the volume’s hostility to the Catholic Church
is to consider that its representatives spoke, at least while performing their
priestly duties, in the original degenerate language of Latin. In one of its
more remarkable stories of clerical confusion, a local priest considers a dras-
tic remedy to the problem of continuous Irish Catholic emigration (and
perverse concerns about a nation overrun by Protestants!) by proposing in
a letter to the Vatican that it consider rescinding the celibacy vow for Irish
priests; Father MacTurnan can only understand the absence of a response
as evidence that “the ideas that I submitted to the consideration of His
Holiness have been degraded by my very poor Latin” (194). Along similar
lines, we can imagine the often-fraught interactions between priests and
parishioners as occurring figuratively – if, indeed, not literally – in con-
flicting languages, and the internalized debates besetting figures like Peter
and Kate as effectively those same conflicts introjected.41 In an apparent
reversal of Moore’s favoring of an English subjectivity for understanding
Irish reality, clericalism functions throughout The Untilled Field as a pole
of false determination, then, because it is mobilized from an external point.
By comparison with the pure stream of Gaelic Irish, Moore in his more
nationalist thinking dismissed both papal Latin and English as degenerated,
alien languages.
One way of reading Moore’s experiments with split consciousness is
through the work of Bakhtin/Voloshinov on the multiaccentuality of lin-
guistic signs.42 Thought patterns and speech acts, on this account, bear the
marks of a struggle between languages as well among sociolects: each rep-
resents, as Bakhtin put it, “forms for conceptualizing the world in words,
specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and
values,” and as such they “encounter one another and coexist in the con-
sciousness of real people” and are thus prone to active contradiction.43 In
these terms, the difficulty of a novel such as A Drama in Muslin is its use
of a binary division characteristic of naturalism, in which the languages
of peasants and landlords are walled off and thus never able to engage
each other; in “The Exile,” on the other hand, clerical authority and peas-
ant self-interest can debate each other and also find mediation through a
third voice, the one of ethical protest that originates outside of Peter’s own
consciousness and yet helps to structure his rejection of the priesthood.
If we recall Moore’s motivating aim, we can recognize this kind of lin-
guistic contestation as integral to the project, although not in the terms
that he originally imagined. As the collection progresses, the core beliefs
of both the Celtic and Gaelic Revivals come under increasing scrutiny for
what Moore saw as their complicity with the authority wielded by the
Catholic Church. Partly due to his absence from Ireland, Moore was slow
to recognize the mutual imbrications of religious and cultural discourses, as
his initial readiness to accept both the Gaelic League and a Jesuit priest as
gatekeepers for The Untilled Field makes clear; in this sense, as Neil David-
son has suggested, the volume’s purpose was redirected toward exposing
“the instability of the Revival’s attempt to wed a neo-pagan Gaelicism with
Catholic orthodoxy” by disarticulating these interwoven stands of Irish
life.44 The effort is clearest in the twinned stories that framed the 1903
edition, “In the Clay” and “The Way Back” (subsequently combined as
a new finale, “Fugitives”), and in “The Wild Goose.” The latter story’s
central figure, Ned Carmady, raised in England and then the United States
but now desiring a return to Ireland, becomes a stand-in for the author,
in both his initial naiveté and his developing cynicism. Moore-like, Ned
begins by musing on how “Everything had its day, and as England decayed,
Ireland would revive. A good time might be on its way to Ireland; if so, he
would like to be there or thereabouts; for he always liked to be in the van
of a good time” (303). On his return he is quick to patronize the peasantry,
becoming “interested in Ireland’s slattern life, touched by the kindness and
simplicity of the people” and remarking on “how touching it is to find
them learning their own language” (304).
Ned is soon married to the nationalist (and Gaelic-learning) Ellen
Cronin, who echoes his own commingling of sympathetic identification
with an assumed superiority born of distance: if the Irish “wanted a new
leader, a leader with a new idea,” she reasons, “the new leader must come
from the outside, and he had come to them from America” (313). As
someone positioned at the intersection of language advocacy and political
nationalism, Ellen embodies the values of the Celtic Revival as Moore ini-
tially read it, but more crucially she comes to be identified with a bedrock
Catholicism that has to break with her husband when his politics (again,
much like Moore’s) turn increasingly anticlerical; at first, Ned agrees with
her that “the fight for free will” is one of Ireland’s “lesser battles” to be
put off for a later day, and yet even as “he promised again and again he
would not raise the religious question, . . . every time he promised his wife
his life seemed to vanish” (331). The political stakes are revealed when Ellen
confesses her husband’s antireligious viewpoint to Father Brennan, only to
be told “that Mr. Carmady has come from America to divide us again” at a
moment of precarious unity. “If he tells the clergy that the moment Home
Rule is granted an anti-religious party will rise up and drive them out of the
country,” Brennan threatens, then “he will set them against Home Rule,
and if the clergy are not in favour of Home Rule who, I would ask Mr.
Carmady, who will be in favour of it?” (364).
Realizing that the church placed its own survival above the goal of Irish
nationalism, and that the struggle against it would thus have to be the
primary battle to fight in Ireland, Ned decides to emigrate and seek to
engage British imperialism in South Africa instead – although the closing
story, “The Way Back” finds him having only reached as far as London.
While there, he finds a kindred spirit in the sculptor John Rodney, a fellow
exile who left Dublin after having had a sculpture of the Virgin Mary
destroyed on account of his use of a nude model: when asked if he believes
“in the possibility of a Celtic renaissance – that with the revival of the
languages,” Rodney responds that “I do not believe in Catholics” (416). If
there is a discordant note in this finale, it is that the question is asked by
John Harding, whom Moore once again resurrects; as the other two discuss
different destinations for Irish exiles, Harding is going back there, having
seemingly learned nothing, and still clinging in the final sentence to the
belief that Rodney’s ideas of “the Italian renaissance would not interest me
half so much as what Paddy Durkin and Father Pat will say to me on the
roadside” (420).
Stories such as “The Wild Geese” and “The Way Back” help to identify
The Untilled Field, like Zola’s L’Œuvre, with a minor strain of self-reflexive
naturalism. On my reading, much of Moore’s work both before and during
his return to Ireland constituted a rigorous reexamination of the naturalist
method he had adopted from Zola, to which we might add that The Untilled
Field similarly interrogated Moore’s own motives and interests in coming
home. As Tina O’Toole has suggested, in figures such as Ned Carmady
or James Bryden from “Home-Sickness,” who feels himself summoned
back from New York “wishing to re-knit himself to the old customs,” and
yet soon comes to miss “the modern restlessness and cold energy of the
people he had left behind him,” Moore “refuses what diaspora theorists
call the ‘myth of return.’”45 Paradoxically, just as Ireland seems only fully
knowable to an outsider such as A Drama in Muslin’s John Harding,
so the nation’s only hope of rescue might come from those (like Moore
himself ) whose development has taken place elsewhere.46 To have stayed
behind, for Moore, would be to act like the Revivalist leaders he viewed
as succumbing to clerical authority without even seeming conscious of the
sacrifice; recognizing the problem, however, only necessitates a round trip
back into exile, as undertaken by both Bryden and Carmady. Faced with
such a paradox, advocating for the Gaelic language became for Moore as
much of a blind alley as collecting fairy lore, even as his writing envisaged
a struggle with authority that was waged in part on the terrain of language:
Julia Cahill’s curse, Biddy M’Hale’s triumphant language games, or Peter
from “The Exile” hearing himself say “you are not going to do the thing
you have just made up your mind you will do.”
If the method of The Untilled Field can be described as naturalist, it is
so only in ways that modify the Zolian template on what Moore saw as
uniquely Irish grounds. He provides plenty of details about the material
circumstances of life and the diminished options available to Ireland’s
citizens (especially women and peasants), even if Ned Carmady ends up
disputing that economic reasons explain the irreversible tide of emigration.
What Moore crucially added to a naturalist portrait of the nation was an
emphasis upon how external determinations get internalized, which is one
reason that he – like Joyce – was drawn to forms of interior monologue.
Presenting lower-class figures of considerable psychological complexity,
with an experience structured by contradictory codes and commands,
allowed Moore to go some distance in redressing the problem of narrative
condescension that had haunted naturalist writing – and would lead him, in
1905’s The Lake, to experiment further with the “stream-of-consciousness”
technique. I will be focusing more on such formal techniques, first with
Joyce and then in Chapter 4 with “New Woman” authors such as George
Egerton, but will want to insist (as in the case of Moore) that each writer
traveled through naturalism in order to get there. Recalling Arthur Waugh’s
description in The Yellow Book of introspective psychological fiction as “the
mind thrown back upon itself,” we can understand a form of introjected
naturalism at work here, one that aimed to diagnose in microscopic details
the mental reception of – and the struggles against – powerful determining
forces.
Joycean naturalism: A style of scrupulous meanness

As with just about any topic related to James Joyce, a great deal of critical
attention has been devoted both to his attitude toward Moore and to his
interest in naturalism.47 Without wishing to recapitulate these debates at
length, I want to make a few prefatory comments here, before turning
to Joyce’s writing. His relationship with Moore was, as has typically been
pointed out, a surprisingly agonistic one given that the two writers shared
central beliefs about religion, Ireland, exile, aesthetics, and literary form.
It is surely the discomfort of their felt proximity that accounts for the level
of hostility between them, especially as it would surface in relation to the
very aspects of their work that they valued most highly. Thus, Joyce would
reserve his more vitriolic comments for texts such as The Untilled Field and
The Lake that most obviously prefigured his own literary practice during
the difficult period he spent composing, destroying, and reconstituting the
Künstlerroman of Stephen Hero/A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Moore’s dismissal of Joyce as “a sort of Zola gone to seed,” and of Ulysses
(1922) as a pointless effort “to record every single thought and sensation of
any human being,” similarly reverberate with a defensiveness that is all the
more transparent when we recall Joyce’s concern during discussions with
publishers over Dubliners (1914) that he might be branded “The Irish Zola!”
or his efforts to distinguish Ibsen from what he saw as the bad naturalism of
the Frenchman.48 When the College President in Stephen Hero argues the
case for banning Stephen’s proposed lecture on the basis of believing Ibsen
to be “a fierce realist like Zola with some kind of a new doctrine to preach,”
for instance, Joyce’s alter ego persuades him to relent by pointing out that
Joycean naturalism: A style of scrupulous meanness 109
one “ennobles the human race: the other degrades it.”49 I will return in the
next chapter to how Joyce and others perceived the differences between Zola
and Ibsen, but for now want to emphasize their more obvious linkage, for a
discussion of Joyce and Moore: as common points of influence derived from
a European naturalist style that each adapted and modified, in strikingly
similar ways, for writing about Ireland, in particular through experiments
with interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and autoethnography
that underscore the argument I have been making about the compatibility
of naturalism with impressionism.
As Philip Raisor points out, a great deal of the earliest Joyce criticism
simply presumed that naturalism was the operative category within which
to assess his work, up to and often including Ulysses.50 What he terms “post-
Wake” readings have tended to reconfigure this approach along teleological
lines, however, so that naturalism is associated only with the early writing
and with a fictive mode that Joyce strove to transcend. (In Chapter 5,
we’ll see a similar process at work in Virginia Woolf criticism, which
has tended to rule out in advance even the possibility that the novelist
might have had any engagement with naturalist practices.) In an elaborate
reading of Joyce’s œuvre along Dantean lines, Stephen Sicari figures a style
of “rigorous naturalism” as the grim and lifeless Inferno from which Joyce
had to emerge during the course of writing Ulysses, using epic and allegory
to signal the way that “he too works for his writing to be raised from the
dead.”51 Throughout his biography, Richard Ellmann makes clear Joyce’s
wide reading in European naturalist drama and fiction, as he attempted “to
find his bearings in the literature of the world” by “weigh[ing] whatever
he read meticulously for its naturalistic accuracy, honesty of purpose, and
style,” and yet Ellmann also viewed such a model as having become, by the
time of writing Ulysses, a “naturalistic bridle.”52 Raisor similarly qualifies
Joyce’s affiliation with naturalism, terming it “a reserved attachment” and
a baseline only, an originating “ferment” that his evolving literary praxis
“rises above or extends beyond.”53
What is at issue here, I think, is a desire on the part of his champions to
rechart Joyce’s literary career so that he is always already leaving naturalism
behind, or – in terms of the central debate of the 1890s that I discussed in
Chapter 1 – affiliating himself with the symbolists instead. If his relationship
to these movements is complicated, however, it is because his work so
insistently thematizes the stakes that are wagered in taking one side or
the other, as well as how such decisions themselves might be materially
determined. Joyce criticism, on this reading, prefers to imagine the author
as Stephen Dedalus at the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist (1916),
avoiding the nets of “nationality, language, religion,” and not as caught
back up in those very same nets when we meet him again in Ulysses.54 If,
instead of celebrating Joyce’s capacity to overcome his jejune origins as an
admirer of naturalism, we recognize and interrogate its continuing appeal
for him, we can begin to understand how a privileged high modernist
practice might be rooted in its supposed other. As with Moore, we then
might understand Joyce to have operated within a set of problematics that
have defined naturalism from its inception: about how to infer meaning
from material detail; about how to write about social experiences that the
author can observe but hasn’t necessarily lived; and about how to totalize
details and observations in order to give them some coherence and shape,
without merely imposing that totality from without.
One starting point would be to recognize that Joyce’s insistence on
presenting a stubbornly recalcitrant lived reality remains consistent from
Dubliners through to Ulysses. As with Moore, we can trace a changing
pattern in the presentation of that reality, with Joyce following a paral-
lel process of internalizing and psychologizing the forms by which it is
observed and recorded in adherence with impressionist technique. In each
case, it is a particularly Irish experience that is being depicted, and one that
is defined by a scarcity of material and intellectual resources that constrain
the subject’s capacity for self-development. What gets valued as an expres-
sion of transcendence or sublation in Joyce criticism is thus the potentiality
to rise, however mythically or magically, above those conditions of impov-
erishment, whether that self-elevation is seen to have been accomplished
by the author, the narrator, or a character – and, in the case of Stephen, a
combination of all three. And yet such upward movements are invariably
accompanied by – and dialectically linked to – a reverse movement that
can also be undertaken by the narrative as well as by individual charac-
ters. It is not merely that the inhabitants of Joyce’s Dublin experience the
downward spiral that has traditionally characterized the naturalist arc, or
that they remain caught in a state of collective paralysis; in addition, the
narrative itself persistently enacts a process of bathetic leveling, in which
the desire (or pretension) to elevate oneself is mocked and exposed. As Ell-
mann once pointed out, “If a character momentarily resembles a god” in
Joyce, “the next moment he is too definitely a man . . . Flying for Stephen
turns out to be paradoxically a lapse from humanity, a failure; while falling
is a recognition of life’s saving lowliness, a success.”55
We can recognize the desire for upward mobility (in both aesthetic
and social senses) in the well-known concept of the Joycean epiphany, as
described in Stephen Hero. The process is supposed to ennoble the triviality
of the everyday, representing “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in
the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind
itself,” but, as Liesl Olson has argued, Joyce’s own literary corpus increasingly
rejected the “notion of heightened experience in favor of more mundane
moments that resist epiphanic transformation.”56 Olson traces a pattern
of self-satirization in Ulysses especially, but the impulse to deflate epiphany
begins much earlier, I would argue. In Dubliners, a text written in a style
of what Joyce famously termed “scrupulous meanness” and the one that
corresponds most closely to our conventional understanding of naturalism,
the flash of self-revelation or sudden transformation is withheld from the
characters themselves and reserved for the reader, who thus comes to assume
the privileged position traditionally afforded by naturalism.57 The distance
that separates us from them is nowhere more evident than in “A Painful
Case,” a parable of self-alienation in which a reader of Nietzsche can
abandon a public commitment to socialism when he faults the workers at
meetings for the inordinate “interest they took in the question of wages.”58
The suburban Mr. Duffy is an ironic rendering of the figures in Moore
who experience their lives as if from some position outside themselves, and
is said to prefer living “at a little distance from his body, regarding his own
acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit,”
the text continues, “which lead him to compose in his mind from time
to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third
person and a predicate in the past tense” (104) – a description that might
well approximate Joyce’s own experiments with autoethnography through
the creation of Stephen Dedalus.
Duffy’s capacity for self-delusion remains intact through a budding
relationship with Mrs. Sinico, in which he both imagines transcendence in
terms of self-serving Romantic cliché (so that “in her eyes he would ascend
to an angelical stature”) and deploys his alienated other self to deflate it,
on hearing “the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own,
insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness” (107). But the withdrawal into
solipsism is really just another cliché, exactly the one we might anticipate of
a suburban would-be Nietzschean, and thus can’t function as a corrective to
its Romantic counterpart. By the time he reads of Mrs. Sinico’s death with
a sense of relief, insisting that the vulgarity of its details “degraded him,” we
understand that the final line (“He felt that he was alone”) is the only ending
possible for him, even as we recognize another potentiality that he cannot
admit when he feels her spirit near him and momentarily questions “Why
had he withheld life from her?” (113–14). Broadly speaking, this same pattern
of self-misunderstanding occurs throughout Dubliners, arguably up to and
including Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” As such, as Joe Cleary has argued,
the compact between reader and narrator “implicitly imputes to them a
level of shared understanding superior to that of the characters whose fates
they contemplate,” figures who are damned equally if they seek to rise
above their material circumstances and if they don’t.59 The protagonist of
“Eveline” can be read as emblematic here, caught between the prospect of
a stifling “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” with
her mother and the vaguely threatening promise of a different life in
Buenos Aires with Frank. Our final glimpse of her on the Dublin quayside,
“passive, like a helpless animal” with eyes that offer “no sign of love or
farewell or recognition” externalizes how these abstract potentialities have
fought each other to a stalemate (33–4).60 I would argue that versions of
the same stalemate – between a materialist understanding of life as largely
determined by external force and a transcendentalist belief in the power of
art, the individual, or the symbol to overcome those same forces – remains
even after Joyce makes the turn to autoethnography. Indeed, as he revised
the material of Stephen Hero to more greatly emphasize his protagonist’s
unfolding understanding of the world through heavy deployment of free
indirect discourse, the struggle becomes A Portrait’s central thematic and
also its structuring principle.
It is, on one hand, undeniable that Stephen represents himself as an
apostle of transcendence, in both his aesthetic principles and his efforts
at self-determination. But it is equally true that his aesthetic decisions are
themselves materially determined, as the products of his Dublin upbring-
ing. It is, for example, hard to imagine anyone but a Catholic Irish-born
intellectual who would have looked to Aristotle and Aquinas as the foun-
dations of an aesthetic theory in the 1890s, while some of the sheer back-
wardness of Dublin intellectual life can be glimpsed in Stephen’s need still
to defend Lord Byron from charges that he was “a heretic and immoral,”
and a lesser poet than the mere “rhymester” Tennyson (85).61 In this way,
we can recognize Stephen’s attraction to the classical values of disinter-
estedness and abstraction as compensatory, especially as his own efforts
at self-elevation track his father’s countervailing mission to degrade and
impoverish the Dedalus family through a succession of moves down the
economic ladder. As an early account of this process at work, we might
highlight the composition of the poem to “E– C–” in which anything that
Stephen “deemed common and insignificant fell out of the scene. There
remained no trace of the tram itself nor of the trammen nor of the horses:
nor did he and she appear vividly. The verses told only of the night and the
balmy breeze and the maiden luster of the moon” (74). If this is a portrait
of the artist engaged in the negation of naturalistic detail, it is surely a
self-mocking one that finds its culmination in the desiccated formalism of
Stephen’s villanelle.
The aesthetic theory that is supposed to parallel this poetic praxis is
mainly articulated in the final chapter of A Portrait, in dialogue with
Stephen’s friend Lynch, who (much like Ulysses’ Buck Mulligan) performs
the requisite Joycean role of Carnivalesque debunker. What Dedalus says
in this dialogue is what Joyce himself believed and recorded in his note-
books, and yet there is a weighted ambivalence to the way he presents their
discussion that gives more legitimacy than we might expect to Lynch’s
mocking opposition – including his final words that reconnect Stephen’s
abstractions to the material particularity of their utterance: “What do you
mean . . . by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable
God-forsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his
handiwork after having perpetrated this country” (233). The last line refers
back to Stephen’s image of impersonality, with the artist remaining “invis-
ible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails,” a passage
that he has been read as subtextually keying into a pattern of homoerotic
signification from earlier in the novel, in particular the depiction of Tusker
Boyle, who “some fellows called . . . Lady Boyle because he was always at his
nails, paring them” (233; 43).62 At the same time, the phrase suggests a kind
of germophobic recoil from the dirt and grime that increasingly comes to
characterize Stephen’s home life, from which he hopes aesthetics will help
him escape and to which Lynch bathetically returns him by highlighting
the absence of beauty in the Dublin here and now.
As Tim Dean has commented, “In adjudicating this tension between
Stephen as a mouthpiece for Joyce’s impersonalist aesthetic and Lynch as
the mouthpiece for the materialist demystification of that aesthetic, we
need to find the means for evaluating which character – and therefore
which position – represents the primary target of Joyce’s irony.”63 How we
answer this question depends in large measure on the framework within
which it is asked. For instance, Stephen Sicari, who views Joyce’s life’s work
as one long effort to transcend naturalism, scores the contest for Stephen,
arguing that through the course of A Portrait “we have watched the artist
grow to self-conscious maturity; for while the rhetoric at the end of the
fourth chapter is excessive and not to be trusted, in the last chapter he
is able to articulate the rudiments of an aesthetic theory and to begin his
own writing.”64 This assessment, which applies a teleological reading to a
text that has already been inserted into a teleological narrative, is highly
questionable. If our glimpse of Stephen-as-mature-writer occurred in the
diary passages that end the novel, and not the more adolescent effort of
the villanelle, we would need to register a fundamental irony that the shift
from third to first person inverts the progression that he outlines in the
theoretical discussion with Lynch, in which the impersonality that Stephen
values is illustrated by “that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins
in the first person and ends in the third person” (233). By contrast, the
hyperbolic egocentrism of A Portrait’s conclusion, with its promise “to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” offers
up the cult of personality as its final word (276).
Sicari acknowledges that the process of sublation is not without obstacles,
insisting that it finds itself checked “with sudden moments of self-awareness
about [Stephen’s] own failures at achieving his heroic status” (34). These
moments are revelatory, because they not only form a structuring pattern
throughout the novel but also function as reminders of the material scarcity
and social restrictions that prohibit self-actualization. In this sense, the
visionary rhetoric at the end of Chapter 4 – with its epiphany of the bird-
girl whose “eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live,
to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” – suggests unlimited
potentialities that are mocked as soon as we begin Chapter 5: “[Stephen]
drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts
of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of
the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like a boghole . . . The
box of pawntickets at his elbow had just been rifled and he took up one
after another in his greasy fingers . . . ” (186; 188). The second passage is
naturalistic both in its detail and its tone, insisting that the best Stephen
can hope for is to stretch inadequate resources to somehow make do, and
similar passages occur at other moments in the text when he feels himself
temporarily liberated from his circumstances. His fantasized rewriting of
his life in terms of The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, gets interrupted
three times, first by a vague understanding “that his father was in trouble
and that this was the reason why he himself had not been sent back to
Clongowes.” The second is still more devastating because he has somehow
been able to reenter the fantasy and affirm “that he was different from
others” in his felt desire “to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image
which his soul so constantly beheld”; the narrative resumes after an ellipsis,
however, with “Two great caravans” and the repo men “tramping into the
house to dismantle it” (66–8). When Stephen tries once again to fashion his
life as Romantic French fiction, he can’t imaginatively recreate Marseille’s
“bright sky and the sunwarmed trellises of the wineshops” when what is
before his eyes is only Dublin (“he looked on the quays and on the river
and on the lowering skies”), and he gets angry at “the change of fortune
which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and
insincerity” (69).
Stephen’s frustration at how external circumstances, especially his fam-
ily’s deepening poverty, are “reshaping” his world is an admission that they
also get in the way of his own efforts to refashion it in his imagination.
The same might be said for his character in Ulysses. By now less naı̈ve
about his capacity to simply “fly by” constraining nets like religion and
nationality, this later Stephen is forced to renegotiate Dublin’s material
scarcity while upholding his earlier refusal to place himself at the service
of instrumentalist projects in which his worth would be defined by oth-
ers. Adapting a term from Giorgio Agamben, and echoing in the process
Lukács’ distinction between concrete and merely abstract potentialities,
Gregory Dobbins points out that Ulysses’ Stephen is “caught in a state
of impotentiality” that registers as an affirmation of the general paraly-
sis that Joyce had seen gripping the city since Dubliners. What centrally
occupies Stephen, according to Dobbins, is “how impotentiality in the
form of idleness might acquire a more productive dimension,” as he rejects
both the cultural-nationalist imperative at the heart of the literary Revival
and also more overtly commercial intellectual labors such as teaching and
journalism.65 As the pun at the heart of “impotentiality” implies, the task
is to create something out of and on the basis of one’s structural weakness,
while refusing conventional modes of production and reproduction – an
effort to transcend determining material constraints perversely through the
act of insisting upon them.
Due in part to their near-simultaneous reading of Ulysses and Dubliners,
which was only translated in 1922, French critics more easily recognized
naturalism as functioning in similar ways for Joyce himself. According
to Valéry Larbaud, critical responses dwelt on connections with late-
nineteenth-century French writers in recognition that “it is from them
that Joyce departs, not from the English or Russian novelists who preceded
them . . . it is with our Naturalistes that Joyce, from his first prose work,
has the most affinities,” Larbaud continued. The difficulty was “to keep
from considering him as a late naturalist, as an imitator or popularizer
in the English language of the methods of Flaubert or of Maupassant, or
of the Médan group.”66 This conjoining of affinity and departure nicely
expresses Joyce’s complicated relationship with naturalism, as both a con-
sistent grounding principle of his work and the style that he most struggled
to sublate: in this context, it makes sense that it is the naturalists that
Larbaud has to struggle to stop himself from identifying Joyce with. As I
have suggested, Anglo-American criticism has instead tended to solve the
problem by imposing a teleological framework within which Joyce’s use
of mythopoetic parallels and symbols would indicate a decisive movement
beyond, by emphasizing the very processes of a priori selection and struc-
turing arrangement that naturalism is supposed to have abjured: in the
process, as Ellmann put it, “the naturalistic level loses its integrity; nothing
that happens can be limited to its day – it is the reverberation of a hundred
coinciding instances.”67 On this view, the author necessarily observes and
generates patterns that remain inaccessible to those inside the text, and
in so doing prevents it from merely replicating the messy contingency of
lived experience. As an interpretive strategy, it simultaneously rehearses
the distance separating naturalist authors from their characters and affirms
Stephen’s vision of an impersonality that figures the creator as an invisible
deity “paring his fingernails.”
What’s missing, though, is the sense that this structuring authorial per-
sona is subject to the same bathetic leveling as Stephen Dedalus: that
rewriting The Odyssey in modern Dublin is no less an act of hubris than
imagining yourself as a figure from The Count of Monte Cristo. Joyce’s work
consistently – we might say ostentatiously – exhibits its own organizing
principles, whether in the form of intertextual cross-referencing, the Bil-
dung structures underwriting both Dubliners and Portrait, or the forms of
temporal synchronicity that link the former text and Ulysses, even as those
same structures can themselves feel contingent, totalities for totality’s sake.
In the opinion of one of its original reviewers, Shane Leslie in the Quarterly
Review, the famous keys and symbolic devices that were supposed to lend
Ulysses some overarching coherence were little more than the principles of
French realism writ large. “Over half a million words crowd the disconcert-
ing paginal result,” he noted, “for the form and scale of which ‘Balzacian’ or
‘Zolaesque’ would be appropriate but insufficient epithets;” it is on matters
of thematic content, “of psychology or realism [that] Balzac is beggared and
Zola bankrupted.”68 The first judgment can be questioned: in many ways,
what Joyce attempted was to compress the scale of a life’s work such as the
Rougon-Macquart novels, having told his brother Stanislaus in 1906 that
“I should like to read Zola but have not the heart to attack his twenty
volume history of France.”69 In contrast, a single day in Dublin, focalized
through a smaller cast of characters, represents a scaling down of Zola’s
comprehensive ambitions, more in line with Joe Cleary’s suggestion that
Irish naturalism has thrived on a miniaturizing of the form.70
Leslie’s second judgment, that Joyce exceeded Balzac or Zola in terms
of his depth of commitment to psychological realism, indicates the other
side of the trade. Following the distinction made between extensive and
intensive reading practices, curbing the Zolian tendency to extend natu-
ralist observation across classes, professions, and generations enables for
Joyce an intensification of analysis to more fully account for the workings
of the individual mind. This brings us to the “stream of consciousness,”
about which William James had first written in 1890. One strand of James’
thought might be sufficient here to suggest its relevance for writers like
Moore and Joyce who were sorting out what to borrow and what to reject
from naturalism. James comments that we habitually assign a bounded
content to a thought, saying “the thought is ‘about’ that” or that this is
“your thought’s object,” when such a simplification is something like iso-
lating a grammatical subject in a sentence; in reality, James asserts, “The
object of every thought . . . is neither more nor less than all the thought
thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter,
and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be.”71 Such a view
of the human mind complicates the process of aesthetic contemplation
outlined by Stephen in the Portrait, one that relied in the first instance on
presuming “a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended,”
even when that object is something as prosaic as “a basket which a butcher’s
boy had slung inverted on his head” (230).
When it came to aesthetics, William James depended upon the same
critical commonplace as the anti-Zola critics I discussed in Chapter 1,
claiming “That unity, harmony, ‘convergence of characters,’ as M. Taine
calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is
wholly due to elimination.”72 But the opposite case could surely be made,
and on the basis of James’ own work, that any artwork that relied upon
subtraction for its force would inevitably be inferior to the world or the
human mind that comprehends it; in this context, we might recall the
assessment of James’ brother Henry, cited in Chapter 1, that the goal of
fiction was not selection but the depiction of “life without rearrangement.”73
At any rate, the challenge of expressing the complexity of thought in its
totality, without the shortcuts of assigning it thematic subject headings, is
what the writers in this and the next chapter accepted. As such, as Douglas
Mao has argued, we can understand “the registering of little experiences”
in a writer like Joyce less as “the protest of a detail-privileging modernism
against more sweeping accounts of the power of milieu than a contribution
to a larger project shared with naturalist narratives.”74 Given the inevitable
need for some restriction, and also the complex (and perhaps necessarily
contradictory) forces determining the thought patterns of the Irish subjects
in Joyce and Moore, or the modern women who were the focus of writers
like George Egerton and Sarah Grand, it would be a task made more
manageable through a prior restriction to a small number of minds, or just
one – preferably, as the idea of autoethnography might suggest, one’s own.
chapter 4
Photo-sensitivity
Naturalism, aestheticism, and the New Woman novel
Among the surprises one gets in reading Joyce’s early laudatory essays
about Ibsen is their overwhelming emphasis on thematic content. While
this may not register quite on the scale of Zola’s formalist criteria for
assessing Impressionist paintings with which I opened Chapter 2, it is
nonetheless odd, given Joyce’s reputation as a modernist master stylist, to
see him focus so heavily on Ibsen’s characters, and especially his women.
The Norwegian’s “knowledge of humanity,” Joyce wrote while still only
eighteen, “is nowhere more obvious than in his portrayal of women. He
amazes one by his painful introspection; he seems to know them better
than they know themselves.”1 Like a lot of the compliments in “Ibsen’s
New Drama,” it’s not clear how Joyce could begin to back up such a claim,
but it is significant, at least in the context of the responses to naturalism
I have been tracing in this book, that Joyce saw Ibsen’s feminine portraits
as combining descriptive thickness with a contrasting concision. On the
one hand, then, he admired the playwright’s fearlessness, a “marvelous
accuracy” that lent the appearance, at least, of his having “sounded [women]
to almost unfathomable depths” (46). On the other hand, Joyce pinpointed
compression as the hallmark of Ibsen’s “analytic method,” and so could
claim that in comparison with the fictions of Hardy and Meredith (or, we
might imagine, Zola), the plays could do “in a phrase, in a word . . . what
costs them chapters” (31; 46).
Whether Joyce applied this lesson in his own work is open to debate, as I
suggested at the end of the previous chapter. For my purposes here, what is
important is that it is in response to Ibsen’s women that Joyce was driven to
conjoin compression and depth. Two basic assumptions help to structure
the very different writing of the two “New Woman” novelists that are the
focus of this chapter, Sarah Grand and George Egerton, both of whom
could claim Irish citizenship but did their most significant writing while in
Britain.2 First, both believed that the female mind operated with a degree of
complexity that was far beyond its male counterpart, and in many respects
119
120 Photo-sensitivity
was the epitome of the continuously flowing consciousness described by
William James; and second, each held that social and environmental factors
persistently blocked its capacity for self-expression. As it did for Moore and
Joyce, the naturalist method proved valuable for them only up to a point,
in helping to diagnose with analytical precision and at considerable depth
the causes of female subjugation – and even then, it would be useful only
in its more introjected form, when reengaged in its original dialogue with
impressionist technique. Ultimately, however, both naturalism and its more
experimentalist counterparts proved to be problematic ways of thinking
and writing for both Grand and Egerton, which meant that they each
would deploy and critique them simultaneously.
We can begin to unpack this paradoxical attitude if we interrogate more
closely how fin de siècle debates about the New Woman got entangled with
those concerning Ibsen’s naturalist dramas, to the extent that, in the words
of one of her most hostile critics, the modern feminist should be thought of
as “the woman of the new Ibsenite neuropathic school.”3 Ibsen himself was
bewildered by the association, famously declaring in 1898 that he should
“decline the honor consciously to have worked for the cause of women. I
am not even quite clear what the cause of women really is,” he continued,
as “[f]or me it has been the cause of human beings.”4 In a British context,
the signal moment was the first performances of A Doll’s House at London’s
Novelty Theatre in June 1889, witnessed by a powerful assembly of leading
feminists, socialists, and aesthetes of the time, including George Bernard
Shaw, Olive Schreiner, Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, Amy Levy, and Dolly
Radford; many had been primed for the event by a reading of the play three
years earlier at the home of Marx and Edward Aveling, which in addition
to the hosts featured Shaw and William Morris’ daughter May as readers.5
The most dramatic account of the impact of seeing A Doll’s House onstage
comes from Edith Lees (later married to Ellis), who described her socialist-
feminist circle of friends as “restive and impetuous and almost savage in
our arguments. This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a
new world for women. What did it mean? Was there hope or despair in the
banging of the door? Was it life or death for women? Was it joy or sorrow
for men? Was it revelation or disaster?”6
As this suggests, it was the play’s final moment – when Nora Helmer
slams the door behind her on leaving her husband Torvald and their chil-
dren – that brought so much attention, and yet it is a curiously open-ended
action, which helps to explain why Lees and her friends had so many ques-
tions and were still unsure whether or not to read the action as a feminist
gesture. In the context of Britain in 1889, the play arrived at a moment of
Photo-sensitivity 121
heightened public debate about marriage, with Mona Caird having pub-
lished an incendiary attack on the institution the previous August and even
the conservative Daily Telegraph having opened a debate on “Is Marriage a
Failure?” during the same month.7 But it also emerged in the wake of the tri-
als of the publisher Vizetelly for issuing cheap translations of Zola’s novels,
which meant that the Norwegian’s naturalist dramas were inevitably viewed
as extensions of the French fictional variety. The conjunction explains why
critics of the play such as Robert Buchanan sought to tie Ibsen to Zola, ask-
ing among “questions, widely divergent at first sight, but moving in reality
around one common centre, which occur to the philosophic spectator of
contemporary dramatic Art,” whether “the gods of our worship be a Shake-
speare and a Spinoza, or a Zola and a Schopenhauer?” and if “Literature
[should] become a series of physiological records and anatomical diagrams,
or remain the organ of divine impressionism, of passionate aspirations?”8
For the connection to be secured, Buchanan had to place undue emphasis
upon the relatively minor figure of Dr. Rank, a friend of the Helmers who
diagnoses himself with a terminal hereditary disease that he glosses as his
own “poor innocent spine [doing] penance for his father’s wild oats.”9 For
Buchanan, who clearly has an eye out for Zolianisms, this is sufficient
to make the character “a satyr to be condemned hopelessly beneath the
law of the Horatian aphorism – he is neither man nor beast, but both,”
or (in other words) la bête humaine.10 Two years later, the more explicit
language of hereditary disease used in the premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts would
arouse the Telegraph, in an editorial usually attributed to its theater critic
Clement Scott, to even greater invective, terming the play “simple only in
the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act
done publicly,” and its author “what Zola would have been without his
invention and analysis.”11
There are two main reasons to distrust this line of criticism, each of which
gives weight to the ambivalence of the New Woman writers’ relationship
with naturalism as a mode of analytical diagnosis. First, if we return to
A Doll’s House, we find another – and in some ways more central – dis-
cussion of heredity in the context of Nora’s own potential exposure. Her
indiscretion is to have falsified her father’s signature on a promissory note
that she used, in turn, to borrow money in order to improve her husband’s
failing health. Without yet knowing the circumstances of his wife’s own
actions, Torvald insists that in “an atmosphere of lies home life is poisoned
and contaminated in every fibre. Every breath the children draw contains
some germ of evil,” which is typically “traced to lying mothers.” This
explains why, at the moment that her past act is revealed, he reverts to
a language of heredity, prefacing the judgment that their children should
no longer remain in Nora’s care with the thought that “All your father’s
want of principle you have inherited – no religion, no morality, no sense
of duty” (255; 307–8). The play, then, criticizes this extension of a form of
thinking about hereditary determinism beyond the question of disease and
into the realm of character, highlighting in the process how such ideas have
been used to buttress ideas of feminine weakness. The familiar intertextual
reading of Mrs. Alving in Ghosts as having experienced a version of Nora’s
life if she hadn’t left Torvald similarly registers the human cost entailed
by women’s acceptance of a logic of determination that causes them to
concede the capacity for decisive action. Opposition to that logic is not
the same as supplying an alternative, of course, which might be one reason
for the muted tone of Nora’s climactic declarations to her husband that
“henceforth I can’t be satisfied with what most people say, and what is in
books. I must think things out for myself, and try to get clear about them,”
and “I have no idea what will become of me” (315; 319).
If Ibsen’s plays dramatize an ambivalent relationship toward contem-
porary theories of naturalistic determinism that will find an echo in the
writings of the New Woman novelists later in this chapter, they also reveal
the inconsistency of their application across both gender and class lines. In
A Doll’s House and Ghosts, hereditary illness originates with fathers, and yet
women suffer its effects in a double standard that Sarah Grand will reveal at
work through the multiple narratives of 1893’s The Heavenly Twins. In this
sense, Ibsen’s work proved useful for feminist purity campaigns that had
been trying to shift the focus of debates about venereal disease away from
lower-class prostitutes and toward their more privileged clientele.12 We can
think of a parallel movement within naturalism itself, one that critics such
as Buchanan and Scott deliberately erased, in which the spotlight now
shines on the inherited genetic flaws within the privileged rather than the
lower classes: the movement from Zola to Ibsen might then represent the
autoethnographic turn in its widest sense, with the latter writer circum-
venting the accusations of condescension and bad faith that were aimed at
the former by seeking to shock the bourgeoisie from within. Perversely, as
Peter Keating has argued, this altered the perception of naturalism within
progressive circles, at the moment when their support for Zola was draining
away: “To speak for Zola meant approving a greater degree of frankness
in literature without anything else being necessarily involved,” he suggests,
“and it soon became just as fashionable to denounce the nature of that
frankness,” as we have seen in Chapter 1; in the case of Ibsen, by way
of contrast, “To describe a work of literature as ‘realistic’ or ‘analytical’
Photo-sensitivity 123
constituted praise if the speaker approved the destruction of older forms
of idealism,” in what may have been at its roots a narcissistic satisfaction
at seeing one’s own class being subjected to analysis for a change.13
In Zola, the impacts of heredity and contagious disease migrate down the
social scale or are shown to be transplanted across class boundaries: the title
figure in Nana, for instance, experiences a sense of triumph from “turning
this whole society putrid to the rhythm of her vulgar tune.”14 In Ghosts,
however, Mrs. Alving’s efforts are directed at quarantining her syphilitic
son Oswald from contact with the servant Regina, who is also, secretly,
his half-sister. For a socialist-feminist such as Eleanor Marx, such a desire
to place a cordon sanitaire around the middle class – even if undertaken
for admirable reasons – had unintended consequences that would provoke
her to collaborate in rewriting the ending of A Doll’s House in March of
1891. In a version published in Time that claimed to have “restored what
was evidently Ibsen’s original idea,” Marx and Israel Zangwill highlighted
the class dynamic of the play’s finale by having Nora still desire to do her
proscribed “duty” toward her children and Torvald refuse her: on being
told his actions are “unnatural,” he responds that separating mothers from
children is “the law of nature in the working classes, and you have debased
yourself to their level. Didn’t the three nurses you engaged for the children,
because I was afraid nursing them would spoil your figure, have to send
their own babies to baby farms?”15 “A Doll’s House Revisited” represents a
complex response to Ibsen’s play, but one of its central implications is to
insist that the freedom from determination that Nora seeks to claim for
herself in Ibsen’s original is itself determined by her class position.
This complicated relationship, which is both an affiliation with and a
rewriting of Ibsen, is one that I take to be emblematic of the New Woman
writers on which I focus in this chapter. The question of determinism,
and whether escape from it is ever finally possible, is one that threads
through the work of Grand and Egerton, and it opens out onto a range
of issues of literary form and style through which the modernity of their
writing (but especially Egerton’s) has often been claimed. Each is, however,
in different ways both attracted to and aiming to distance herself from
naturalist modes and models, Ibsen as well as Zola. Grand, for instance,
could admire the latter (as well as Moore) for “brushing aside the merely
conventional and showing life as it is” and also threaten a libel action when
her name was connected with Zola’s, viewing it as effectively a “charge of
indecency.”16 She was less agitated by an association with Ibsen, and yet still
insisted in 1894 that his “was a name of no significance to me until I saw
myself mentioned as a follower of his.”17 Egerton’s own ambivalence toward
naturalism might be glimpsed in the story “Now Spring Has Come” from
her 1893 collection Keynotes, a text that is dotted with references to Ibsen
and Strindberg, among others. The story’s heroine falls under the thrall
of a Norwegian example of “the modern realistic school” and believes its
author to be a man capable of a fully reciprocated understanding of women.
The illusion disperses in due time, under the pressure of recognizing that
the writer actually saw her “in the flesh” as merely “prosaic fact” – and yet the
ending preserves for him, seemingly without irony, the title of “genius.”18
(Anti-)naturalism and the New Woman

New Woman fiction arguably reached its height of popularity in the same
year, 1893, that Arthur Symons saw “strange signs in the literary zodiac,”
including “a certain acceptance of Ibsen” and “a popular personal welcome
of Zola,” in London.19 The same year saw the publication of Egerton’s
Keynotes, the success of which led its publisher John Lane to initiate an
entire series of new works under the same title, and Grand’s Heavenly
Twins, which went through six editions and sold nearly 20,000 copies
in Britain during the first year alone when issued by Heinemann.20 The
simultaneity of these events meant that naturalism became one of the
central reference points in critical reviews and discussions, often through
negative associations that belied the narrative of Zola’s public recuperation.
The most sophisticated of these critical responses was Arthur Waugh’s
“Reticence in Literature,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of Lane’s
The Yellow Book in April 1894. As I have already suggested, the essay served
twin functions, inoculating the magazine against the criticism that it was
preaching to the converted and at the same time generating controversy
by including a strongly dissenting voice. In many respects, Waugh’s essay
tracks a history of British naturalism and the terms in which he does
this are clearly gendered: where only recently he could identify an “age of
brutality, pure and simple” for instance, in which writers “subjected to the
microscope mean objects of the road-side,” we have now passed into a phase
marked by “effeminacy” and introspection.21 To be more precise, what has
taken its place is a merger of these twinned impulses to look outward and
inward at the same time, in a development that Waugh clearly identifies
with New Woman novelists in his insistence that “our women-writers are
chiefly to blame” (218).
For somebody so critical of the literary developments he is describ-
ing, Waugh ironically comes closer to analyzing what I see as natural-
ism’s movement into autoethnography than any of its more sympathetic
(Anti-)naturalism and the New Woman 125
historians – and in the process, he usefully documents elements of the pre-
history of New Woman fiction. As he sees it, naturalism had reached a dead
end, finding “no very inspiring acquisition to territory or to knowledge,”
and so “lacking stimulus without, it has sought inspiration within” (212).
This is similar to the idea that Egerton proposed when she was asked in
the 1930s to provide the “keynote” to her collection of the same name: “I
realized,” she said, “that in literature, everything had been better done by
man than woman could hope to emulate. There was only one small plot
left for her to tell: the terra incognita of herself, as she knew herself to be,
not as man liked to imagine her.”22 Doing so required a new emphasis
upon what Waugh termed “passions and sensations, common, doubtless,
to every age of mankind” and yet “hitherto dissociated from literature,
hitherto, perhaps, scarcely realized to their depth and intensity. It is in this
development that the new school of realism has gone furthest” (213). His
emphasis on a relentless analytical probing, as well as the suggestion that
this might place the work beyond the pale of the literary altogether, echo
criticisms of Zola. On this view, fiction had made itself indistinguishable
from “medical manuals” by doing what Sarah Grand had done the year
before with The Heavenly Twins, “infect[ing] its heroines with acquired
diseases of names unmentionable” and “debas[ing] the beauty of maternity
by analysis of the process of gestation” (218). Throughout, Waugh insists,
New Woman writers maintained the steely detachment of the scientific
naturalist, employing “no art at all” as “they merely reproduce, with the
fidelity of the kodak, scenes and situations which we all acknowledge, while
taste prefers to forget them” (217).
It is worth recalling at this point Zola’s own problems with this metaphor,
as registered in his description of Gustave Caillebotte’s work as the “copying
of reality, without the original imprint of the painter.”23 At least in part, as
I suggested in Chapter 2, his hesitation follows on from the distinction in
The Experimental Novel between simple observation and scientific experi-
mentation, with the latter process at least in theory opening up the possibil-
ity of progressive reform through the alteration of determining conditions;
this issue of melioration is one that would similarly confront feminist writ-
ers, as we shall see later in this chapter. For my present purposes, however,
it is sufficient to highlight how a critic like Waugh saw New Woman
novelists as evolving from within naturalism’s own problematics and their
stylistic methods as consistent with what was often referred to in the 1890s
as the “new realism.” The most dogged of the New Woman’s critics, Hugh
Stutfield, makes the same case in his 1897 essay “The Psychology of Femi-
nism,” which anticipates Egerton’s “keynote” by asserting that even if the
female ego “is said to remain a terra incognita even to herself,” novelists “are
determined to explore its innermost recesses.”24 Like a forensic scientist (or
an autoethnographic naturalist), Stutfield continued, “the lady writer has
for some years past been busily occupied in baring her soul for our benefit.
And not only baring it, but dissecting it, analysing and probing into the
innermost crannies of her nature” (244). Of course, the same might have
been said of Moore or of Joyce a little later; it is, for instance, the thrust of
D. H. Lawrence’s mockery of the latter for seeking to draw out a description
of unbuttoning a glove to a million pages that I quoted in my Introduc-
tion. Stutfield, however, seeks to introduce a hackneyed gender distinction
to explain why men can handle the same autobiographical impulse – of
“relating their own mental experiences . . . without any attempt at conceal-
ment” – and not open themselves up to censure: the female novelist’s “gifts
are intuitive rather than intellectual,” he asserts, “and she owes nothing to
the reason or the research of man” (247).
What he sees emerging from this is a distorted (because feminized)
variant of naturalism that suffers from a hypostasis of the faults of its
male counterpart; like Zola, for instance, the New Woman writer lacks “a
sense of proportion and the atmosphere of restfulness and restraint,” but for
Stutfield this is because “she remains a being of transient impulses and more
or less hysterical emotions” (252; 245). In such a formulation, the absence
of proportion that was viewed as a methodological or formal weakness
in Zola gets refashioned into a pathological symptom of a fundamental
irrationality. As a consequence, the New Woman can never be a true
realist or naturalist, no matter how conscientiously she turns the dissecting
scalpel or camera lens on herself. Stutfield expresses this idea through a
related metaphor, remarking that the female novelist “is forever examining
her mental self in the looking glass” (244), and yet it is presumably only
ever a distorted reflection, emphasizing whichever “transient impulses”
happen to hold her attention at any given moment (244). This is precisely
the sense in which James Ashcroft Noble deployed the same metaphor
in 1895, when he concluded that “The new fiction of sexuality presents
to us a series of pictures painted from reflections in convex mirrors, the
colossal nose which dominates the face being represented by one colossal
appetite which dominates life” – in other words, as Stutfield would put
it the same year, “erotomania.”25 As Lyn Pykett has argued, “discussions
of the ‘modern woman novel’ recapitulated and recirculated many of the
terms of the discourse on naturalism” that immediately preceded it in
the 1890s, in ways that help us to understand the changing valuation
of Zolaism in this period. On one hand, Pykett suggests, critics echoed
(Anti-)naturalism and the New Woman 127
previous condemnations of naturalism’s “failure to select, and of its morbid,
tasteless inclusiveness of range,” or the insistence that “to bring everything
within the field of representation is to misrepresent.”26 On the other hand,
figuring women’s writing as a pathologized naturalism implicitly imagined
a normative masculine contrast, one that, as Arthur Waugh puts it, is
“virile, full of the sap of life, strong, robust, and muscular.”27
Pykett’s assessment stands out from other accounts of the New Woman
novelists in its willingness to view their fictions as sharing some key commit-
ments with naturalism. It has become more typical to view these fictional
works as embodying an antinaturalist position, as if insisting upon their
distance from such an unfashionable literary form were a prerequisite for
claiming their incipient modernism. In her New Women, New Novels, for
instance, Ann Ardis argues for a powerful strain of “antinaturalism” that
sought to critique ideas of woman’s nature or natural instinct (for moth-
erhood, for instance) as continuing the realist novel’s emphasis upon an
ideology of the “pure woman” and thus a betrayal of naturalism’s claim to
scientific frankness.28 Ann Heilmann takes that claim to task in another
way, suggesting that for the New Woman, the naturalists allied themselves
“with the very traditions and institutions whose invasive and oppressive
practices were being scrutinized and condemned by feminist writers.” If,
as was the case with Ibsen, writers such as Sarah Grand sought to reverse
the discourse of pathology and condemn “men as sites of contagion,” Heil-
mann suggests, this was to appropriate the dominant medico-scientific
discourse only in order to turn it back upon itself.29
As focused on central components of a New Woman thematics, these
analyses strike me as compelling, and yet they also betray a tendency
to overstate or simplify the affiliation between New Woman fiction and
naturalism, which was forged on the ground of style as well as content.
In a later work, New Woman Strategies, for instance, Heilmann says of
Grand’s Ideala (1888), the first installment of a trilogy that continues with
The Heavenly Twins and 1897’s The Beth Book, that it “seems indebted to
Naturalism, the very genre her later heroines Evadne and Beth so forcefully
critique” in those respective novels; on my reading, however, this assessment
misrepresents what is a complicated evaluation of literary forms in the
later works, and also risks confusing the positions of their author with
those articulated by her characters.30 As we shall see, the impulse toward
naturalism and some of its philosophical principles – including frankness of
expression, procedures of data collection and categorizing, the prioritizing
of content over form, and an acceptance of the logic of heredity – emerged
as the grounds of a feminist praxis, especially in Grand’s work, even as she
recognized the misapplication of those same principles for misogynistic
ends.
The confusion is most obvious in the case of Evadne Frayling in The
Heavenly Twins, a character who is signaled from the outset as a version of
the scientific naturalist. “She found herself forced to put prejudice aside,”
we initially read, “in order to see beneath it, deep down into the scared heart
of things, where the truth is,” and one of her earliest investigations leads
her to dismiss as unfounded her father’s ideas about female inferiority;
following the principle of experimentation, she proceeds to investigate,
but “did not begin her inquiry of set purpose; she was not even conscious
of the particular attention she paid to the subject. She had no foregone
conclusion to arrive at, no wish to find evidence in favour of the woman
which would prove the man wrong. Only, coming across so many sneers
at the incapacity of women, she fell insensibly into the habit of asking
why.”31 After she marries Colonel Colquhoun and learns of his past sexual
indiscretions that might signal a transmissible disease, the same rational
mentality leads Evadne to decide to live but not sleep with him, at which
point her new husband seeks to win her over by encouraging her reading.
Having retrieved her books from the parental home from which she is now
banished, Colquhoun displays them (and “a lot more”) in her room: “see,
here’s Zola and Daudet complete, and George Sand,” he tells her. “You’ll
like them better, I fancy, when you get into them than Herbert Spencer and
Francis Galton. But I’ve got you some more of their books as well – all that
you hadn’t got.” What is ironically being signaled here is the relationship
of Zolian naturalism to social Darwinism and eugenic pseudo-science,
each of which would confirm the wisdom of Evadne’s decision to refrain
from sex with him; Colquhoun, however, has put “Zola and Daudet in
prominent positions” on the shelves in the anticipation “that she would end
by making love to him,” presumably imagining that racy French literature
will prove an aphrodisiac and an antidote to dry science (176). We have to
assume that Grand gets her own joke here, one made even sharper if we
imagine that the Colonel’s preferred agent of seduction might well have
been Nana, with its syphilitic heroine. The point, I think, is not that Zola
has betrayed his own stated purposes for sensationalist ends, but that the
public reception of his work – including, we recall, the recent imprisoning
of Vizetelly for obscene publication – made him seem to have done so.
As I shall suggest later, part of the context for such a misreading entailed
projecting a masculine libertinism onto French literature tout court, in place
of the finer distinctions among imported forms like naturalism, decadence,
and symbolism that were being debated by the aesthetes of the period.
Determinism and essentialism 129
Determinism and essentialism

Naturalist theories of determinism have posed a persistent difficulty for
writers with progressive political views, including feminists and socialists.
As useful as they might be as an analytical tool for understanding why
the world is the way it is, or why people are where they are, such theories
struggle to elaborate a mechanism of change. What results from this is a
peculiar paradox, in which authors are typically drawn to naturalism on
the basis of a reformist impulse and then produce narratives of degradation
and despair, in what June Howard has termed “a configuration of hopeful
observer and hopeless character.”32 A pertinent example of this might be
Arthur Morrison’s 1896 novel A Child of the Jago, which he dedicated to
a crusading clergyman involved with issues of slum clearance and resettle-
ment, the Rev. Osborne Jay. A character modeled on Jay, named Father
Sturt, lures the vicious criminals of the East End’s Jago into church, works
with the local council to demolish unsanitary housing, finds respectable
work for the novel’s youthful protagonist Dicky Perrott, and yet, in a piv-
otal conversation with a surgeon, invalidates all of his ameliorative efforts:
“You know the Jago far better than I,” the doctor comments. “Is there a
child in all this place that wouldn’t be better dead—still better unborn?” to
which Sturt responds that “You are right, of course . . . The burden grows
day by day, as you say. The thing’s hopeless, perhaps, but that is not for me
to discuss. I have my duty.”33 This is not a momentary loss of heart, either:
the novel ends with Dicky stabbed in one last gang fight, after having tried
to rally “Father Sturt’s boys,” and telling the clergyman that “there’s ’nother
way out – better” which can only be death.34
For feminists, the inherent danger of the naturalist method was, if any-
thing, even greater. If we recall that Zola defined determinism as encom-
passing both biological and environmental factors, we can quickly see diffi-
culties. As the example of hereditary diseases (and especially those that were
transmitted sexually) makes clear, women were targeted by legal and medi-
cal discourse as agents of infection and reproduction, and thus as the bearers
of illness. Feminist purity campaigners had sought to redirect the focus away
from women, and especially prostitutes, in response to the notorious Con-
tagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, and had secured their repeal seven years
before the publication of Keynotes and The Heavenly Twins, but the latter
text in particular presents it as part of an ongoing struggle to draw attention
to a sexual double standard. In many respects, the purity campaigns tried
to deflect a narrow medical determinism into a wider discussion of envi-
ronmental causality, one that could speak simultaneously about the social
and economic pressures that might drive women to become prostitutes and
the legal aporia through which their male clients largely escaped legal and
medical scrutiny: the Royal Commission responsible for the 1864 Act, for
instance, had blithely rejected an approach “putting both parties to the sin
of fornication on the same footing,” on the basis that “with the one sex the
offence is committed as a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular
indulgence of a natural impulse.”35 Naturalism would prove an adept form
for narrating the causes that led women into prostitution, to the extent
that it would rehearse the trajectory of women’s “fall” over and over again,
and across national boundaries: thus, the arc of L’Assommoir’s Gervaise is
practically identical to that of Morrison’s “Lizerunt” from 1891’s Tales of
Mean Streets, or of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). The
termini of these women’s stories are especially monotonous, as domestic
abuse leads them to a life of prostitution that leads in turn to their deaths.
Such pessimistic scripts would understandably offer little to interest New
Woman writers such as Grand or Egerton, even if each was interested in
aspects of the naturalist focus on hereditary and environmental causation.
Working within a broadly naturalistic frame of reference thus required
some loosening of the strict logic of determinism that consistently led
female characters to the streets or to an early grave, especially if these texts
were to serve progressive political ends. One strategy deployed by Grand
in The Heavenly Twins might be seen to return to the initial premise of
Zola’s The Experimental Novel in seeking to do more than simply observe
and document women’s lives. For Zola, as I suggested in Chapter 1, the
experimental component of naturalism involved putting a set of biological
and environmental variables into motion and seeing what resulted; as a
form of “practical sociology,” the literary work would thus have an explic-
itly ameliorative aim, “to give justice a solid foundation by solving through
experiment the questions of criminality.”36 In a discussion of George Giss-
ing’s novels, Fredric Jameson identifies this as the creation of “something
like a laboratory space, where given characters can be submitted to experi-
ments in a controlled environment in which the modification of variables
is systematically tested,” presumably with the goal of finding out which
combination produces the most desirable end result.37 This is a helpful
description of Grand’s methodology in The Heavenly Twins, in which
intertwined narratives depict how three young women respond differently
to the pressures of marriage and to what the novel represents as the strong
likelihood of sexual disease in men. As I have already mentioned, one of
them (Evadne) responds to reports of her husband’s past transgressions by
refusing to sleep with him. A second, Edith Beale, is either more naı̈ve
or lacks Evadne’s tendency toward rational investigation, and so marries a
man from whom she and her infant child contract syphilis. Her painful
death is both literally and figuratively central to the novel, providing a
baseline against which the different choices made by her friends can be
measured and evaluated. The third example is Angelica Hamilton-Wells,
who engineers a very different form of sexless marriage for herself, as we
shall see.
For Evadne, Edith’s death confirms her own decision to remain celibate,
and in the process it corrects the idea that she had earlier held, that even
though
she and Edith were very different types of girlhood, . . . it seemed a strange
coincidence that their opportunities should have been identical nonetheless;
but not singular that their action should have been the same, because the
force of nature which controlled them is a matter of constitution more
than of character, and subject only to a training which neither of them had
received, and without which, instead of ruling, they are ruled erratically.
(237)
Evidently, her early training in scientific investigation had in fact been

sufficient to enable Evadne to avoid their common fate, even if the decisive
action she takes in her negotiations with Colonel Colquhoun only takes
her so far. As a concession to her insistence upon their unorthodox arrange-
ment, a “painful near-parody” of the ideal of companionate marriage (as
Teresa Mangum puts it),38 her husband requests that Evadne “not mix your-
self up publicly – will not join societies, make speeches, or publish books,
which people would know you had written, on the social subjects you are
so fond of” (342). Having agreed to this, she commits herself to a funda-
mental duplicity which outlasts even the Colonel’s death, to the extent that
her second husband, Dr. George Galbraith, recognizes the contradiction
between thought and action as itself producing pathological symptoms:
“if you don’t act, you must think,” he tells her, “and if you think without
acting, you become morbid. The conditions of an educated woman’s life
now force her to know the world. She is too intelligent not to reason about
what she knows. She sees what is wrong; and if she is high-minded she
feels forced to use her influence to combat it. If she resists the impulse her
conscience cannot acquit her, and she suffers herself for her cowardice”
(672). And yet, she has by now become so conditioned to inaction that she
is unable to change; tellingly, she also ends the novel obsessively fixated on
“the heredity of vice,” going so far as to attempt suicide in order that an
unborn child should not share “Edith’s fate” (662–5).
This is not exactly the triumph of biological determinism, as the novel
suggests that Evadne’s fears are unfounded in this instance. In many ways, it
is another kind of determinism that wins out: the power of men to regulate
the scope of women’s actions, along with women’s capacity to internalize
their commandments even up to the point of pathological fixation. The
third friend, Angelica, avoids this ending only by producing her own
variation on the sexless marriage: having selected a suitable candidate in
Mr. Kilroy, she then commands him to “Marry me, and let me do as I
like” (231; emphasis in original), even though it commits her to a life of
chastity and using him as a front for her feminist politics. Like Evadne,
she recognizes but cannot change how social norms dictate her options
in life, bemoaning that “I had the ability to be something more than a
young lady, fiddling away her time on useless trifles, but I was not allowed
to apply it systematically, and ability is like steam – a great power when
properly applied, a great danger otherwise” (450). What is left unclear in
the novel, and throughout Grand’s work as a whole, is whether woman’s
untapped potential exists because of specific environmental factors or as
some immutable essence. In the case of Evadne, it would seem to arise from
her initial course of study, which opens up a gap between her understanding
of the world in theory and in practice that is never closed: “as her reading
extended,” then,
she asked herself doubtfully: “Are women such inferior beings?” a position
which carried her in front of her father at once by a hundred years, and
led her rapidly on to the final conclusion that women had originally no
congenital defect of inferiority, and that, although they have still much way
to make up, it now rests with themselves to be inferior or not, as they
choose. (13)
Contrastingly, figures such as Angelica or the protagonist of The Beth

Book seem always already to know this to be true, with the latter explicitly
rejecting “theoretical knowledge” on the grounds that “It was from practical
experience of life rather than from books that she learned her work.”39
New Woman writing is haunted by what we now consider as the problem
of essentialism, which posits some form of transhistorical spiritual force
defining femininity. As Ann Ardis suggests, one way of deriving a more
satisfactory antiessentialist position from a writer such as Egerton is to
focus on her critical interrogations of the term “nature,” and how it often
functions “as culture’s label for the cultural formations it wants to make
inaccessible to social change” – a perfect example of which would be the
Royal Commission’s idea that adultery represented a “natural impulse” in
men but a criminal one in women.40 There are many passages from Keynotes
that suggest an authorial belief in natural essence, as when the protagonist
of “A Cross Line” says of women that “At heart we care nothing for laws,
nothing for systems. All your elaborately reasoned codes for controlling
morals or man do not weigh a jot with us against an impulse, an instinct.
We learn those things from you, you tamed amenable animals; they are not
natural to us”; or when the narrator of “Now Spring Has Come” insists that
“the untrue feminine is of man’s making, whilst the strong, the natural, the
true womanly is of God’s making” (28; 42). In each case, evidence suggests
that to label her an essentialist would be to misread Egerton’s complicated
reflection on how such notions of gendered essences operate socially. In
“Now Spring Has Come” especially, she highlights the dangers of thinking
in these terms when the narrator imagines her Norwegian novelist to be a
kindred spirit on the basis of his ability to know women (as Joyce said of
Ibsen) “better than they know themselves.” As she reflects with hindsight,
“I never reasoned that the whole struggle might be only an extraordinarily
clever intuitive analysis of a possible experience. I accepted it as real, and I
wanted to help this man” (39–40). Like the category of the “real,” then, the
“natural” or “intuitive” is open to misinterpretation, misrecognition, and
projection: the narrator thinks the novelist can instinctively understand
her nature because she thinks she can do the same with him, in what
she imagines as a process of full reciprocity, of “analysing, being analysed,
criticising, being criticised” (59). Bathetically, she has to recall that when
this silent utopian interchange ended, his first utterance was to complain
that “Oh yes, I was wretchedly thin” (59).
In that moment, she records, “I felt as if I were being totted up. Item, so
much colour, item, so much flesh,” which is perhaps more what we might
expect from a male naturalist (60). On its surface, the story underscores an
essentialist gender binary in the ways that it posits a male viewpoint that is
always a materialist one, inevitably bound to disappoint a female one that
sees itself as superior and spiritual by way of contrast. There are, however,
reasons to complicate such a reading. For one thing, the narrator insists
without irony that the man is a “genius” to the end, and her anger at having
been objectified places no obstacle in the way of them discussing “Ibsen’s
Hedda” or “Strindberg’s view of the female animal” (63); as with “A Cross
Line,” in which Egerton writes of how “a Strindberg or a Nietzsche arises
and peers into the recesses of [woman’s] nature and dissects her ruthlessly,”
it is difficult to derive an antinaturalist position from passages that would
instead seem to confirm that men can come to understand women through
close analysis. “Now Spring Has Come” places the blame accordingly on its
female protagonist, who is also not above reducing herself to her physical
body. On two occasions, her expectation of reciprocity leads her to imagine
herself through his eyes, of being “outside my self, watching myself as it
were”: on the first, what she notes is “the very childishness of my figure,
the too slight hips and bust, the flash of my rings on my fingers,” while the
second instance merely confirms that “the same hips, figure, features were
reflected there” (44; 48). As she agonizes in advance of a later meeting and
loses sleep imagining their reunion, she similarly comments that “It was
foolish, exceedingly foolish, because it was fatal to my looks,” and even
diagnoses herself with hysterical symptoms (56).
We can view this as evidence of women having internalized masculine
judgments about their looks, or as suggesting the ideological cost of holding
to a “separate spheres” model that associates men and women, respectively,
with body and spirit. Either way, we are moving further away from a simple
understanding of gender as a unitary essence that predates or transcends
social interactions among the sexes. “A Cross Line” explores this idea more
fully, with its female protagonist laughing to herself “because the denseness
of man, his chivalrous conservative devotion to the female idea he has
created blinds him, perhaps happily, to the problems of her complex nature.
Ay, she mutters musingly, the wisest of them can only say we are enigmas,”
and very few (Strindberg and Nietzsche included) “have had the insight
to find out the key to our seeming contradictions” (21–2). Tina O’Toole
has argued that in such passages Egerton “invests strategically in what she
perceives to be foundational elements in women’s ‘nature,’” a formulation
that recalls Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of “strategic essentialism” as a tactic
available to Subaltern subjects.41 Egerton certainly deploys the language
of essentialism while at the same time suggesting that it is complexity
and contradiction that define a woman, just as her superior consciousness
is figured through the capacity to stage “a mental debate in which she
takes both sides of the question impartially” (13). If essentialism entails
the reduction of complexity to singularity, it emerges from this story as a
masculine trait, consistent with a desire for classification: for the purpose
of social harmony, the narrator observes, “well it is that the workings of
our hearts are closed to them, that we are cunning enough or great enough
to seem to be what they would have us, rather than be what we are” (22;
emphasis in original).
Performing femininity as a form of masquerade in this way is another
tactic for undermining notions of woman’s unitary essence, then. But
Keynotes also includes more direct challenges to hegemonic constructions
of gender identity that question key components of women’s supposed
“nature.” Instinctive maternal feeling, for example, gets transvalued in
“The Spell of the White Elf,” which features an unorthodox marriage in
which the woman works and the man stays at home. On taking an infant
into their home, the wife admits that “I did not know how to hold her”
and “could not reason out any system they go on in baby talk,” and later
becomes suspicious when her husband seems to have intuitively acquired
“a stock of baby lore” (84–5; 88). In “A Little Grey Glove,” a woman allows
herself to be sued for divorce, although clearly innocent, and refuses to
defend herself in court, leaving a would-be lover to work out “the legal and
social conclusion to be drawn” (110–11). Echoing Ibsen’s Nora, her own
inference is that “I must learn to think of myself as a free woman again” in
terms that clearly run contrary to prevailing social and legal norms.
Sarah Grand’s novels are similarly attentive to the ways that essentialist
presuppositions might have operated as a double-edged sword in fin de siècle
debates about gender identity and relations, working as often against as for
the interests of feminists. In The Beth Book, for instance, the eponymous
heroine marries a doctor, Dan Maclure, who comes to embody the worst
excesses of medical misogyny as a vivisectionist who also superintends a lock
hospital confining women with sexually transmitted diseases. When Beth
learns this, she confronts him and criticizes his use of conventional ideas
about woman’s “nature” to justify double standards in matters of sexual
health, in the process representing her own view in terms developed by
social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer: “what are you doing to improve
the race, to strengthen its power to resist disease?” Beth asks Dan. “You talk
about Nature when it suits you; but it is the cant of the subject you employ,
for you are at variance with Nature. Your whole endeavour is to thwart
her. Nature decrees the survival of the fittest; you exercise your skill to
preserve the unfittest,” she concludes, presumably referring to his efforts to
shield diseased men by locking up and blaming prostitutes for their disease
(442). Meanwhile, Dr. Galbraith from The Heavenly Twins (a character
who appears in both novels) highlights another potential problem with the
celebration of the natural, playfully pointing out how it is “a quality upon
which too much stress is generally laid. If you are naturally nice it is all
very well, but suppose you are naturally nasty?” (556).
For New Woman novelists to uncritically reproduce naturalism’s empha-
sis on strict hereditary determinism would thus not only repeat its tendency
to assign violent ends to its female characters, but also miss the ways that
what was thought of as “natural” was in reality the product of mutable
social and environmental causes. A recourse to biology, and also to biolog-
ical replication, becomes in this sense a way of avoiding complex thinking
and of propping up the status quo, as when Evadne’s father’s regressive
view upon marriage are dismissed in The Heavenly Twins as founded
not upon any system which he could have reduced to writing, but rather
as the lower animals do when they build nests, or burrow in the ground,
or repeat, generation after generation, other arrangements of a like nature
with a precision which the cumulative practice of the race makes perfect
in each individual. He possessed a certain faculty, transmitted from father
to son, that gives the stupidest man a power in his dealings with women
which the brightest intelligence would not acquire without it; and he used
to obtain his end with the decision of instinct, which is always neater and
more effectual than reason and artifice in such matters. (114)
The animalism of men was a central topic of New Woman writing, which
argued the case for a superior thought process in women. As Grand would
put it in an 1894 essay on marriage, “Man, having no conception of himself
as imperfect from the woman’s point of view, will find this difficult to
understand, but we know his weakness, and will be patient with him, and
help him with his lesson.” In such an effort, the naturalist emphasis upon
disinterested observation and documentation would prove valuable, even if
its restriction to the physical world would have to be expanded, as we have
seen, into the invisible realm of the psyche: it is there, after all, that woman’s
superiority was most evident, having been (as Grand puts it) “sitting apart
in silent contemplation all these years, thinking and thinking” while men
like Evadne’s father tried “to arrange the whole social system and manage or
mismanage it all these ages without ever seriously examining his work with
a view to considering whether his abilities and his motives were sufficiently
good to qualify him for the task.”42
“A strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate”

We can evaluate some of the ways that a naturalist method of observation
and documentation could prove useful for New Woman novelists if we
consider the metaphor of photography, to which naturalist fiction was so
often compared. In many ways, the comparison rests on the history of
photography’s reception as an art form in the nineteenth century, which
parallels the turn-of-the-century response to naturalism that I outlined
in Chapter 1. On one hand, it was frequently pilloried as not art for its
reliance upon technical instruments to do its work, which was the basis
“A strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate” 137
upon which it was relegated to the space set aside for machinery in the
1862 Great International Exhibition. Even a pioneering photographer such
as Henry Fox Talbot could give credence to this idea, by writing of his
earliest works that “They have been formed or depicted by the chemical
means alone, and without the aid of any one acquainted with the art of
drawing.”43 On such an argument, the photographer was inferior to the
painter, of course, but on another the hierarchy was reversed: by elimi-
nating human error through its dependence upon mechanical technology,
photography was thought to be the superior art, at least from the view-
point of its capacity to reproduce the visible world. Its limit, of course, was
precisely its tie to the visible, which is why it might initially seem to be a
better analogue for Zolian naturalism than for New Woman writing that
addressed itself by necessity to that which is unseen: how and what women
think.
What we actually find, in both Grand and Egerton, is a set of ambivalent
references to photography and parallel processes such as the phonograph.
Beth Caldwell, for instance, shows an early promise of the genius that the
novel tells us she is to become when we read that her developing mind,
“acting without conscious effort, was a mere photographic apparatus for the
registration of impressions on the brain. Every incident stored and docketed
itself somewhere in her consciousness for future use, and it was upon this
hoard that she drew eventually with such astonishing effect” (119). Her
powers of retention are, moreover, implicitly compared both with a camera
that records details indiscriminately and with the naturalist method that
was being faulted for a similar refusal to select and place emphasis: “When
we review the march of events which come crowding into a life, seeing
how few it is possible to describe,” Grand’s narrative recounts, “no one can
wonder that there is talk of the difficulty of selection. Who, for instance,
could have supposed that a good striped jacket Jim had outgrown, and Mrs.
Caldwell’s love of grey, would have had much effect upon Beth’s career?”
(120). If passages such as this link the advanced consciousness of the New
Woman with photographic recording, however, the drawback to that same
process is highlighted by Sir George Galbraith in one of the discussions
he and Beth stage about style and purpose in writing: speaking of “the
stylists,” he declares them “brilliant” and in the same sentence denounces
their work as standing in the same relation as “the photograph is to the
painting, the lifeless accuracy of the machine to the nervous fascinating
faultiness of the human hand.”
The point he is making here is a little obscure, especially as the term
“stylist” functions throughout The Beth Book as a coded term for decadent
aesthetics. In what would seem like a conscious inversion of expectations,
then, it is the overembellished purposelessness of “art for art’s sake” formal-
ism that is here being identified with photographic functionality, whereas
something like the plain style that naturalism extolled gets Sir George’s
recommendation on account of its salutary capacity “to sacrifice form to
accuracy, to avoid the brilliant and the marvelous for the simple and direct”
(375). It is possible that for Grand, who (in common with her heroine Beth)
prized writing’s purpose above all considerations of rhetoric or form, what
ultimately invalidates photography as an art form is its impersonality, or
the inertness of its content that tends to make it a poor vehicle for making
arguments; the discussion with Galbraith certainly leads Beth to a starkly
gendered dichotomy in which “Men entertain each other with intellec-
tual ingenuities and Art and Style, while women are busy with the great
problems of life, and are striving might and main to make it beautiful”
(376). Considering the different references to photography in The Beth
Book as a whole, we might conclude that its capacity to accurately and
dispassionately record the world in all of its detail makes it a valuable tool
for feminism, even if it is severely limited in its ability to draw conclusions
or take consequent action. If so, photography might indeed analogize a
naturalist method that, in spite of Zola’s initial directions, had proven
better at observation than experimentation.
Egerton, who was more sympathetic toward the “stylists” of decadence
than Grand, also expressed her ambivalence about photography (and, by
extension, naturalism) by deploying it as a metaphor, although for her it
functions invariably as a figure for thought. Her most extended use of it
comes at the beginning of the story “An Empty Frame” from Keynotes.
As if in cinematic close-up, we open on a picture frame “such as you
may buy at any sale cheaply,” and its details give way to those of the
“typical boarding-house bedroom” that surrounds it – though already the
narrative places the emphasis on the process of sensual perception as we
read how “the flickering flames of the fire . . . played out over the silver-
backed brushes, and the cut-glass perfume-bottles on the dressing-table;
flicked the bright beads of the toes of coquettish small shoes and the steel
clasps of a travelling bag in the corner” (115). The pattern continues as “A
woman enters” and a similarly material description highlights “the hollows
of her delicate thoughtful temples and the double furrow between her
clever irregular eyebrows”; again, though, this is not in fact a mimicking
of photographic reproduction but an impressionistic effect of a firelight
that “picks out and accentuates as remorselessly as a rival woman the
autographs past emotions have traced on its surface.” Indeed, the point
“A strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate” 139
of the facial details is not to enable us to classify the woman as a type
but to mark what is distinctive: a face “nine men would pass” but the
tenth “sell his immortal soul for,” and a mouth displaying contradiction
between a passionate upper and a timid lower lip (116–17). As we surmise,
men (or, at least, nine out of every ten) cannot see this, but a female
rival would. In fact, woman’s perception is shown to have a photographic
fidelity and at the same time to be superior to mimesis in its ability to apply
techniques of naturalist observation to the unseen. As proof, our central
character, with her “inner soul-struggle . . . acting as a strong developing
fluid upon a highly sensitized plate” is able to regenerate the frame’s absent
content: “Her eyes rest upon the empty frame, and the plain white space
becomes alive to her. Her mind’s eye fills it with a picture it once held in its
dainty embrace” (117). Perhaps tellingly, it is another image of male genius,
someone she has rejected in favor of an unworthy and unimaginative
husband.
In a complicated act of figuration here, the woman can act as a pho-
tographic recording device only because, punning on the doubled sense
of “sensitivity,” she experiences life so intensely: being hyperhuman, in
this sense, is what allows her to compete with and better a machine. In
the process, the passage fuses two components of cognition – the sensual
appropriation of external stimuli and the projection outward of person-
ality onto the surrounding world – that are typically kept apart, and it
thus sketches the kind of utopian harmony of subject and object that the
narrator strains for in “Now Spring Has Come.” Two other examples from
Keynotes outline similar possibilities for fusing inner and outer worlds, each
using aspects of the recording process as a figure for the female conscious-
ness. In “Ebb Tide,” from the closing suite of stories “Under a Northern
Sky,” the protagonist’s “senses are more alive to outward sounds and scenes.
It is as if when one’s inner self is working with some emotion, wrestling
with some potential moral enemy, crying out under the crucifixion of some
soul-passion – eyes and ears and above all sense of smell are busy receiving
impressions, and storing them up as a phonograph records a sound, to
reproduce them with absolute fidelity if any of the senses be touched in
the same way by the subtle connection between perfume and memory”
(173). This same association of fidelity in reproduction with a form of
hypersensitivity is conveyed early in “Now Spring Has Come” as well,
before the woman is disappointed by the failure of reciprocity: “I felt,” she
recalls, “as if my nerve-net was outside my skin, not under it, and that the
exposure to the air and surrounding influences made it intensely, acutely
sensitive” (58).
Regenia Gagnier has recently tried to disentangle fin de siècle references
to nerves and sensations such as these, suggesting that if the latter term
“indicated the outside world coming in through the senses – sight, hearing,
taste, and touch – then the nerves that preoccupied the Decadence pointed
to the psyche inside coming out, imposing itself upon the world.”44 It is
certainly true that a writer like Egerton was often identified with the explo-
ration of nerves, as when Hugh Stutfield claimed that “Her perceptions
are of the nerves, for, like some of her favourite Swedish and Norwegian
authors, she personifies our modern nervousness, and her best characters
are quivering bundles of nerves.” As a sign that Gagnier’s opposition was
hard to maintain in practice, however, he also refers to Egerton’s work as
“introspective,” by which he seems to be indicating an inability ever to
move the discussion of nerves out into the external world, and a practice
instead of neurotic solipsism.45 In the imagination of 1890s conservatism,
neither nerves nor sensations were a suitable subject for literature, and
focusing on either left women writers open to the same charges: Arthur
Waugh, for instance, essentially made Stutfield’s point when he proposed
that “The man lives by ideas; the woman by sensations,” and that the latter
only becomes an artist when “she throws off the habit of her sex, and learns
to rely upon her judgment, and not upon her senses.”46 Looking ahead,
however, Egerton’s effort to fuse nerve and sensation, inside and outside,
so that they become interchangeable terms anticipates the experiments
with literary impressionism that would be conducted by better-known
authors such as Conrad, James, and Woolf. At the same time, as her refer-
ences to photography and phonography make clear, her effort is anchored
by a commitment to mimetic reproduction that forestalls a lapsing into
pure solipsism and indicates another way that naturalist and impressionist
methods were brought into synthesis.
Sarah Grand and the politics of reception

When considered in terms of style, Egerton and Grand are often posi-
tioned at opposite extremes in discussions of New Woman writing, with
the former figured as an experimental protomodernist and thus as a foil
to Grand’s stolid, backward-looking realism. Tamar Katz, for instance, has
written that “The Heavenly Twins does not use particularly experimental
narrative methods. It is conventionally plotted in comparison with a text
like Egerton’s [Keynotes], and for most of its plot the novel is narrated by a
traditional omniscient voice,” and it is against such assessments that Ann
Heilmann has tried to rescue Grand from what she terms “the Woolfian
Sarah Grand and the politics of reception 141
category of moralistic, stuffy, sensually repressive and intellectually regres-
sive Victorianism.”47 The dichotomy certainly has not served Grand well,
as John Kucich first pointed out, and runs the risk of imputing to her
aesthetic positions that are articulated by her characters, such as Beth and
Sir George Galbraith in The Beth Book: for Kucich, their “celebrations of
realist writing” should be seen as “part of a histrionic, distorting war with
male modernists” that the novel stages, but in the process they threaten “to
entrench Grand in polemical stances not necessarily reflected by her own
practice,” which is far more heterogeneous and disjunctive.48 Focusing on
The Heavenly Twins, Kucich offers the status of Galbraith as the unreliable
narrator of the final section, and the opening “Proem” and cross-dressing
“interlude” entitled “The Tenor and the Boy,” as evidence that Grand’s
novel had some stylistic sympathies with fin de siècle antirealist aesthetics,
which it placed in a dialogical argument with realist narration.49 Grand,
he suggests, was aware of a stylistic double bind that condemned the New
Woman writer for being both too realistic and not enough, which is why
neither mode wins out, each being viewed “distrustfully, as equally imper-
fect imitations of male models” (201). As I shall be arguing in a moment, I
see Egerton arriving at a comparable position from her perceived starting
point at the other end of the spectrum, seeming to promise naturalism and
impressionism as mutual correctives to each others’ respective weaknesses.
In either writer, especially in comparison with a contemporary such as
George Moore, the desirability of synthesis remains unstable and provi-
sional at best, although (as Kucich suggests) even this might be taken as a
mark of their anticipatory protomodernism.
In the case of Grand, moments of experimental self-reflexivity and play
with form are offset, especially in The Beth Book, by the insistence that
novels should have a purpose, a requirement that Beth and her friends
wield as a stick with which to beat the vapid formalism of male aesthetes. In
the most damning attack, Ideala (from the first volume of Grand’s trilogy)
appears in the novel to provide Beth with reassurance about the bankrupt
nature of formalist aestheticism, telling a story about seeing “one neat shelf
of beautiful books” in the library that “had been specially recommended to
me as best worth reading by my stylist friends”: whereas those books had “no
marks in them, no signs of wear and tear,” others signaled their use value
through handwritten marginalia in which readers expressed agreement,
admiration, or simply how “This book has done me good” (461). While
mindful of Kucich’s caution against assuming that her characters’ tastes
were the author’s, what is significant about The Heavenly Twins is how
often Grand associates her valued modes of didactic plain speaking with
the term “naturalist.” When the father of the titular twins tries to resolve a
problem with their childhood education that has been caused by traditional
assumptions about what boys and girls should learn, for instance, he causes
a governess and a male tutor to depart in short order, with the narrative
explaining this with the suggestion that “He was either a born naturalist
or had never conquered the problem of what not to say” (127; emphasis
in original). Grand is here equating naturalism with a refusal to follow
conventional wisdom, especially when it concerns gender, and she uses it
in much the same way in a later passage about the writing of an apparent
tell-all book about the English enclave in Malta where Evadne spends
much of her married life with Colonel Colquhoun. Its author is a relatively
minor figure, Mrs. Malcolmson, and yet the incident feels weighted with
significance, especially considered in light of Teresa Mangum’s observation
that Grand’s own writing encountered similar reactions. Malcolmson’s
Maltese readers initially dismiss her authorial ambitions as presumptuous
and then her character as “not right-minded.” Because “she had made
mention of immorality in her book,” they feel authorized to castigate her,
in turn, as not “moral at heart” (334).50
Like the father of the “heavenly twins,” Grand terms Mrs. Malcolm-
son a “naturalist” on account of her straightforward approach to writing,
which was “to represent things as she saw them, things real, not imaginary.”
Her mistake, the novel insists, was that “when she began to embody such
thoughts in words she did not suppose that their everyday character would
be altered by the process,” but it is clear that Grand favored this over what
she saw as the distortions of aestheticism and Romanticism. As an author,
Mrs. Malcolmson had “positive ideas of right and wrong,” and thus avoided
the twin pitfalls of moralism and art for art’s sake, neither denying “that
wrong may be pleasant in the doing” nor claiming “with equal untruth,
that because it is pleasant it must be, if not exactly right, at all events excus-
able” (333–4). In the context of the recent imprisonment of Vizetelly and
the apparent rehabilitation of Zola in Britain, this would seem to suggest
an awareness on Grand’s part that the moralistic condemnation under-
pinning the former action and the supposedly value-neutral acceptance of
the latter were in reality dialectically linked: when the author tends to be
conflated with his or her works, the crucial question (at least for Grand) of
authorial purpose gets lost in the consideration of the work’s reception and
effects.
As in the critical language of the 1890s more generally, the terms “French”
and “France” enter these debates about literary form and authorial purpose
in telling ways, functioning as generic signifiers in Grand’s novels. The
Sarah Grand and the politics of reception 143
noble Mr. Price from The Heavenly Twins dismisses a category of men
whose “minds are hopelessly tainted with exhalations from the literary
sewer which streams from France throughout the world,” for instance,
while Angelica similarly generalizes about “those hateful French people
who have no conception of anything unusual in a woman that does not
end in gross impropriety of conduct; and fill their books with nothing else”
(186; 549). If these examples demonstrate the first pitfall of an overzealous
(and overgeneralized) moralism, its counterpart, which Grand saw as a
decadent amoralism, is personified by The Beth Book’s Dan Maclure. Beth’s
vivisectionist husband is another avid reader of French literature, but the
argument he advances for its superiority rests not on grounds of morality
but on its relative brevity: “A Frenchman will give you more real life in
a hundred pages than our men do in all their interminable volumes,” he
proclaims, even if George Galbraith glosses “real life” as actually meaning
“more sexuality” (366). We can get a fuller sense of Dan’s readerly tastes if we
read such passages contextually. The discussion between him and Galbraith
leads Beth to a consideration of what kind of writer she would like to be,
in which what emerges most strongly is a commitment to purpose over
style; that position in turn leads her into a climactic confrontation with
her literary nemesis Alfred Cayley Pounce, a clichéd “stylist” who rejects
purpose outright, magnanimously deciding to “leave that to the ladies,”
and who prides himself that “it takes me a week to write five hundred
words” because “my work is highly concentrated” – a term that we have
good reason to suspect, given Dan’s earlier advocacy of French brevity
(455–7; emphasis in original).
As unlikely as it might seem, then, Beth’s husband might well be a
reader of French decadence rather than naturalism, although it is hard
not to conclude with Galbraith that its appeal to him is just what Zola’s
was for Colonel Colquhoun: the erotomaniac’s desire for “more sexuality.”
What remains continuous is the social status and uses of French litera-
ture (whether decadent or naturalist) in the British cultural imagination,
for which Francophilia remained synonymous with literary corruption
through the 1890s. For Grand, though, there seems to have been a value in
making a distinction between these two imported forms, and her handling
of them is marked by a basic asymmetry. Across her work, I would argue,
Grand triangulates her own writing with reference to both naturalism and
decadence, in some respects using the strengths of each to highlight each
other’s weaknesses – and yet The Beth Book argues for a principled rejection
of decadent aesthetics (and art for art’s sake) that has no equivalent in the
handling of naturalism in The Heavenly Twins.51 My argument is not that
Grand was an advocate for naturalism, about which she was clearly con-
flicted, but that she saw its limitations as stemming largely from the terms
of its reception. Unlike John Kucich, I don’t see her necessarily as expressing
the view that naturalism was an irretrievably male form of writing, but as
holding that the terms of its critical and readerly reception made it appear
so. The examples of Colonel Colquhoun and Dan Maclure suggest that
men controlled the terms of its circulation, helping to cement the image
of French naturalism in particular as semipornographic in the imagination
of the British public.
This placed female readers and writers in a double bind of which Grand,
with her close association with feminist purity campaigns over issues of
sexual and reproductive health, was all too aware. To contest the image of
Zola as pornographer that had arisen through the Vizetelly trials, and that
still continued in a more muted form even after the novelist’s rehabilitation,
required women to indicate a familiarity with the works themselves that
could render them liable to guilt by association; not to do so, on the other
hand, meant that the more purposive emphasis within naturalism was
obscured by a public discourse of moral panic that equated it with strains
of male decadent writing that were at times virulently misogynistic. We
can glimpse the precariousness that came with feminist advocacy from an
1889 article on Zola from the Contemporary Review that Emily Crawford
wrote in the wake of the first Vizetelly trial. On the one hand, she conceded,
Zola’s novels “are dangerous, and must be frowned out of existence in any
country where there is free intercourse between the youth of both sexes,”
because he “is unable to conceive liberty for the young in England and
the United States without riotous license as a consequence”; on the other
hand, Crawford insists, “If the author of Therese Raquin has no sense of
decency, he has moral perception, wherein he is above the art-for-the-
sake-of-art school – a thin, poor school, the products of which don’t bear
being read a second time. Zola sometimes does good in a bad way.”52 An
anecdote from the diary of Beatrix Potter gives another graphic illustration
of the difficulties of the female Zolaiste. Finding herself sharing a railway
compartment with a prominent Liberal politician in 1887, Potter noted
how “I begged him to go into a smoking carriage” on account of having
“in the pocket of my sealskin not only a volume of Zola [Au Bonheur des
Dames], but my case of cigarettes! neither of which could I enjoy in his
distinguished presence.”53 As a sign of naturalism’s appeal to both genders,
even if it was necessarily covert for one, the male Parliamentarian (having
resisted Potter’s call to relocate) begins his own reading by taking out
The Princess Casamassima, Henry James’ own attempt at writing naturalist
fiction.
George Egerton and feminine consciousness 145
George Egerton and feminine consciousness
Egerton is often placed at the other end of the New Woman spectrum from
Grand both in terms of her political beliefs – especially what Ann Heil-
mann terms her “pronounced opposition to the women’s movement” –
and her aesthetic commitments, which included a steadfast refusal to
succumb to the pressures of self-censorship and concealment outlined
above.54 As the references to Ibsen, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and others that
crop up throughout Keynotes make clear, she was if anything boastful
about her own reading habits, and certainly keen to have her work situ-
ated in the context of currents of naturalist and aestheticist writing that
were arriving from continental Europe, in particular Scandinavia. Her
writing nonetheless indicates an ambivalent relationship to these sources
that runs parallel to Grand’s in many respects, similarly triangulating her
attitude toward naturalism through elements of fin de siècle decadence.
In Holbrook Jackson’s memories of the 1890s, Egerton mainly emerges
as a practitioner of literary impressionism, with an emphasis upon her
powers of observation and shading as well as a capacity to reveal the
subjective processes of perception at work. He quotes the opening para-
graphs of “An Empty Frame,” in particular, to indicate what he saw as a
forward-looking practice in which “[f]ine shades of meaning and niceties
of observation slipped into swift revealing sentences, and for the first time
temperament was studied as a thing in itself.”55 I want to suggest, how-
ever, that Egerton was also aware of the gender politics of Impressionist
art, including the casual misogyny that (as the wife/model Christine also
highlighted in Zola’s L’Œuvre) underwrote symbolic figurations of the
feminine.
In Keynotes, it is only women who are capable of really thinking and
expressing themselves in terms of impressions. The distinction explains why
mutual understanding and communication between the sexes is so fraught
in these stories, as men and women are shown to literally think differently.
In a parody of Linnaean classification, the masculine variant depends upon
subdivision and specialization in its desire to restrict ambiguity and force
fixity upon a world that is figured as highly mutable. When it comes
to gender, predictably enough, this approach – what the narrator of “A
Little Grey Glove” terms pursuing “The Eternal Feminine in a spirit of
purely scientific investigation” (93) – fails, because its object of inquiry
proceeds on the basis of a different set of principles: as the lover in “A
Cross Line” ruefully acknowledges, “If a fellow has had much experience
of his fellow-man he may divide him into types, and, given a certain
number of men and a certain number of circumstances, he is pretty safe
on hitting the line of action each type will strike; ’t aint so with woman,”
however, for “she generally upsets a fellow’s calculations” (3–4). Translated
into stylistic terms, this indicates why naturalistic models of determination
had such problems in depicting female characters outside of a limited
range of typological clichés, and also why they sometimes flounder (as
L’Œuvre makes clear) in the opposite direction, wanting to idealize women
in symbolic form. Women’s minds, according to Egerton, work laterally in
ways that magnify – rather than seeking to minimize – complexity, even at
the risk of never arriving at substantive certainty. Looking at her husband,
for instance, the protagonist of “A Cross Line” is described in the act of
thinking as follows: “One speculation chases the other in her quick brain;
odd questions as to race arise; she dives into theories as to the why and
wherefore of their distinctive natures, and holds a mental debate in which
she takes both sides of the question impartially” (13).
The aesthetic corollary for this is a form of interior monologue showing
precisely how (as “Now Spring Has Come” puts it) “some trivial thing
will jog a link in a chain of association, and set it vibrating until it brings
one face to face with scenes and people long forgotten in some prison
cell in one’s brain” (38). At the moment of her lover’s death, for instance,
the woman in “An Ebb Tide” feels “[t]hings she has forgotten completely
come vividly back to her,” including “an old Maori man, who used to
sell sweet potatoes” and a “stupid chorus” that leads her to wonder in
“what chink of the brain did it lie all these years,” before they are dispelled
by “beating time with her foot to a jig tune, a bizarre accompaniment
to the words ‘too late’” (169–70). Such paratactic movements typically
form the basis for arguments proclaiming Egerton’s protomodernity or
(less charitably) the egocentric solipsism that insists on woman’s essential
inscrutability. More commonly, though, she favors what Regenia Gagnier
termed “sensation” over “nerves,” documenting how her female characters
process the world around them rather than projecting their idiosyncratic
thought patterns onto it. A few pages later, as the same woman thinks
about her uncertain future, for instance, “all these conflicting images and
reasonings dash through her brain and yet not a detail of her surroundings
escapes her,” as the narrative proceeds to describe in painterly detail “strips
of blue fjord with the pilot boats with their numbered sails in the immediate
foreground,” or “[b]right flecks on the black-green shadows of the trees in
the near background, that stand out distinctly from the misty blue of the
distant mountains” (174).
The account of the feminine mind in action that Egerton develops in
Keynotes strongly echoes that of consciousness in general as it was described
by William James in an influential set of lectures published at the begin-
ning of the 1890s. In his well-known chapter devoted to “The Stream of
Thought,” for instance, we can read that “As the brain-changes are contin-
uous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving
views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken
stream.”56 This model of consciousness had profound and well-known
consequences for high-modernist stylistics, of course, not least for the way
that James imagines the process of thinking in linguistic terms as more
transitive than substantive: if, as he suggests, we habitually imagine our
thought pattern as consisting of self-contained units, “where every thought
is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period,” the
reality is closer to the sinuous flow of the Woolfian or Proustian sentence
which, like a bird in flight, is “filled with thoughts of relations, static
or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contem-
plated in the periods of comparative rest” (1: 243). Decades before Virginia
Woolf, and still largely unacknowledged in histories of modernism, it was
Egerton’s insight to particularize the stream-of-consciousness as exemplary
of a female thought pattern that was set in opposition to – and held to be
superior to – its male counterpart.
Egerton elaborated upon this model of a gendered consciousness in a
story published in the inaugural issue of The Yellow Book that is at the
same time a satirical reflection on the sexual politics of impressionism.
Her “A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ’93” follows a clichéd male
flâneur as he moves through London on a tide of “impressions [that]
crowded in too quickly to admit of analysis . . . an interested spectator of
a varied panorama.”57 His mental practice involves the sublation of the
material world around him into symbols, so that chimneys get reprocessed
as “obelisks rearing granite heads heavenwards” and bricks become “hiero-
glyphics, setting down for posterity a tragic epic of man the conqueror”
(191), but what he’s ultimately unable to make figural is a series of women
who persistently intrude – from “the hideous green of the velveteen in the
sleeves of the woman on my left” through “the supercilious giggle of the
young ladies on my right, who made audible remarks about my personal
appearance,” and on to “a pretty anaemic city girl” whose “indignant look”
provokes the command to “get thee to thy typing” (190; 192–3). The dis-
turbance reaches its peak just as the narrator imagines himself becoming
a Nietzschean Übermensch, in a process that uses a pointed set of mater-
nal metaphors to describe the creation of his purported masterpiece, “the
thought of this darling brain-child, this off-spring of my fancy, this rare
little creation, perhaps embryo of genius that was my very own” (193). His
fantasy of autogeneration is broken, however, by a “foreign element” near
Chancery Lane, and we can recognize elements of the New Woman in
his depiction of this figure with “kohl-tinted lids,” “gloves in one hand,
her white-handled umbrella in the other, handle up, like a knobkerrie,”
dominating the city space while “men and women cede her the middle of
the pavement” (194–5). Unlike the earlier disruptions caused by women
who look back and laugh, this one simply ignores him – and yet she cannot
be ignored in turn. As Kate Krueger Henderson has noted, the story thus
ironically “adopts the narrative point of view of an artist whose creative
impulse, predicated on a stance of detached superiority, disintegrates in an
encounter with a New Woman.”58
By the end of the story, she has been made responsible for the loss of the
narrator’s thought pattern entirely, as he drifts through a series of lateral
associations that recall the disordered thought pattern of the woman in “An
Ebb Tide,” and which take us swiftly from memories of an opera singer in
Rio to the meaning of the French word pompier: “What connection,” he
is forced to ask himself, “has the word with this creature who is murder-
ing, deliberately murdering, a delicate creation of my own brain . . . I am
convinced pompier expresses her in some subtle way – absurd word! I look
back at her, I criticise her, I anathematise her, I hate her!” (195–6; emphasis
in original). His loss, then, gets expressed in absurdly hyperbolic terms,
the violence of which ironically punctures his claim that, if it were only
capable of retrieval, his “precious literary gem” would hold the solution to
many of the pressing problems of the period – among which both “Home
Rule” and “the Woman Question” are enumerated (196). In these ways,
the male narrator of “A Lost Masterpiece” exemplifies a disordered pattern
of thought that Max Nordau, in his taxonomy of fin de siècle degeneracy,
would label Mysticism, in which “the unrestricted play of association rep-
resentations are called into consciousness, and are free to run riot there”
because unrestrained by proper attentiveness.59 Characteristically, Nordau
viewed such a mode of distracted thinking as implicitly feminine, “the
brain activity of the degenerate and hysterical” as opposed to “[t]he con-
sciousness of a healthy, strong-minded, and consequently attentive man,
[which] resembles a room in the full light of day, in which the eye sees all
objects distinctly, in which all outlines are sharp, and wherein no shadows
are floating” (55–6).
Egerton effects a transvaluation of this model on two counts. First, as
“A Lost Masterpiece” shows, she is able to highlight its inherent misog-
yny through a simple act of inversion, by making it a male protago-
nist who suffers from associative distraction. In some ways, this helps to
denaturalize the very linkages between gender and modes of consciousness
that Egerton herself deploys throughout Keynotes by making normative
what had seemed to conservatives such as Stutfield and Waugh to be
merely neurotic and degenerate. In this, her thinking is consistent with
that of William James, whose chapter on “Attention” from Principles of
Psychology offers an account of inattention that is practically identical with
the stream of consciousness itself: “The sounds of the world melt into
confused unity,” he wrote, “the attention is dispersed so that the whole
body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is
filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty
passing of time.”60 James’ radical implication is – like Egerton’s and con-
tra Nordau – that a distracted and unfocused drifting across disconnected
ideas and associations represents something like the norm of modern con-
sciousness rather than its pathological aberration; indeed, as he puts it in
a summary of his thinking about the continuous stream of thought, “it
is . . . the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life
which I am so anxious to press on the attention” (1:254). Giving value
to a mode of thinking derided as feminine and neurotic by conservative
critics such as Nordau and Stutfield represented a significant component
of such a reinstatement, implicitly aligning James’ project of psychological
definition with the politics of the New Woman.
If we recall James’ linguistic metaphor, in which true thought is likened
to the transitive through the image of a bird in flight, we can recognize how
Nordau’s insistence on a singular focus as that “which brings order into the
chaos of representations awakened by the association of ideas, and makes
them subserve the purposes of cognition and judgment” would result only
in a set of short declarative sentences. It anticipates what Leslie Higgins
and Cassandra Laity have documented as the kind of muscular speech
that would become the hallmark of some versions of male modernism that
sought to distance themselves from the supposed effeminacy of the 1890s,
in a mode of writing that might be said to take the desire for selection
and compression to its logical end.61 In ethical terms, such a mode would
resonate with the desire for cataloging and categorization that Egerton
associates with the men in Keynotes, and with the consequent frustration
that the protagonist of “A Lost Masterpiece” feels upon failing to see his
mind’s work actualized. In this sense, her second method of transvaluation
would be to insist upon holding up a feminine mode of complex unfocus
as a template, an epistemological counterpart to Sarah Grand’s insistence
that women have been “sitting apart in silent contemplation all these years,
thinking and thinking” while waiting for men to catch up. As stories
such as “A Cross Line “ or “A Lost Masterpiece” indicate, this may not
happen for some time, as men either dismiss women’s thinking as unnec-
essarily convoluted and contradictory or attempt to appropriate its form
while nonetheless still directing it toward a definitive objective. For all its
pretensions to practice maternal reproduction, the latter story suggests,
masculine impressionism won’t be able to solve “the Woman Question,”
at least in part because it can’t acknowledge its co-opting of the feminine
or the hubris that such an action entails. Like Zola’s Claude Lantier, who
admits to having a painter’s block when it comes to representing women
but insists that the problem lies in his attitude toward painting, not toward
women,62 such an approach can only try to understand women through
complex acts of figuration that end up perpetuating a vicious cycle of
misogynistic substitutions.
chapter 5
The voice of witlessness

Virginia Woolf and the poor
From the foregoing analysis of Egerton’s fiction, and in particular her

experiments with impressionism and the stream of consciousness, it is easy
to see why she, more than any other New Woman novelist, has been so
frequently linked with Virginia Woolf and High Modernism. A text such
as Keynotes is clearly what Sally Ledger has in mind when she describes
New Woman novelists of the fin de siècle as having “acquired a certain
cachet as the literary ‘mothers’ of female modernists,” while Lyn Pykett
is even more explicit, connecting “an impressionistic and intuitive, rather
than a pathological, forensic, categorising naturalism” developed in the
1890s with “the attempts of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to
develop a specifically feminine voice and form for fiction.”1 Like Ledger
and Pykett, I have been interested in charting the formative influence of
fin de siècle writing on what we consider to be the modernist moment of
the early twentieth century, seeing not only Egerton but also Moore as
helping to create a space within which better-known authors such as Joyce
and Woolf would come to operate. Pykett’s association of impressionism
and naturalism echoes my own understanding that it is the conjunction
of those two movements that we can understand as the origin of literary
modernism, by recognizing the stream of consciousness as in many respects
merely naturalism turned in upon itself.
Thought of in these terms, examples of a modernist naturalism (or,
if you prefer, a naturalist modernism) can be seen all over the literary
landscape during the period that separates Egerton from Woolf: in women’s
fiction, we might mention not only Richardson but also Rebecca West and
Gertrude Stein; meanwhile, among male writers, D. H. Lawrence and John
Dos Passos could usefully exemplify a continuing struggle at the limits of
naturalism’s methodology that looks back to Zola’s founding principles
as well as forward. For this chapter, I want to focus on Virginia Woolf,
not because she best embodies the intersection between naturalism and
modernism, but because she represents a high modernist sine qua non. Her
151
152 The voice of witlessness: Virginia Woolf and the poor
novelistic practices seem as far from our received notion to naturalism as
you can get, to instantiate a pure stylistics that might set itself against what
Fredric Jameson causally apostrophized as naturalism’s “rummaging around
in alleyways” and obsession with “content as such.”2 Jameson’s point, of
course, is that this isn’t an accurate image of naturalism, and is, instead, the
projection of precisely the idea of a high modernism that depends upon
separating out form from content. If that image of naturalism is a faulty
one – Jameson terms it the product of “the modernist stereotype” – then its
dialectical opposite is too. What happens, this chapter begins by asking, if
we imagine even a novelist like Virginia Woolf as engaged with the problems
raised by naturalism, working incessantly and often unsatisfactorily to
try to produce a coherent ethical attitude and a complementary style of
representation that might do such an attitude justice?
As with the school of Joyce criticism with which I ended Chapter 3,
and in particular the tendency of Anglo-American readers to identify nat-
uralism with an embarrassing adolescent phase that the mature Joyce soon
outgrew, the dominant view of Woolf is invested in distancing her from
such low associations. Even Alex Zwerdling, who has perhaps gone fur-
thest is seeking to counter the image of her as uninterested in the social
world, insists that Woolf was barely touched by “the complex example of
Dickens” or by “the rival tradition of French naturalism,” two claims that
this chapter will contest.3 The question of Woolf ’s relation to the poor is
a particularly long-standing one, and a useful way of considering where
we might locate an engagement with naturalism as well as the blindness of
critics to it. Even those who have sought to rescue her from accusations of
snobbish condescension have been reluctant to engage with her occasional
representations of poverty. Zwerdling, for instance, generalizes about her
novelistic output as being “characterized by a refusal or inability to describe
anyone below the rank of the middle class in persuasive detail,” and thus
as content to treat “[a] whole section of society . . . as terra incognita.”4
Alison Light has more recently reconstructed the novelist’s famously intense
relationships with her own servants to give a fuller picture of her social atti-
tudes, and yet she prefaces her study with a story about the self-censorship
of Woolf ’s writing, focused on a manuscript sketch of a lavatory attendant.
“The shadowy outlines of the poor and of servants can be seen in many
of the earlier versions of Woolf ’s work,” Light concludes, before asking,
“Why did she so often blue-pencil them out?”5 Her impulse to delete such
figures is undeniable, and yet it is possible to overstate it, thereby losing
sight of the telling examples that survived. They are hard for us to see
because we are not sure what to make of them.
The voice of witlessness: Virginia Woolf and the poor 153
There has been a larger critical effort to rethink Woolf as a political
writer, revisiting the image established by her husband Leonard of her as
“the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the term.”6
Important work by Jane Marcus and Patrick Brantlinger has pointed to the
Bloomsbury Group’s collective writings on war and empire, for instance,
with the latter concluding that the collective record far exceeds “the nar-
row, bourgeois liberalism and elitism” of which they are routinely accused.7
Such rejoinders have been forced to contend with the powerful account
of the “Bloomsbury fraction” outlined by Raymond Williams, however, in
which even the group’s progressive political commitments are understood
to flow from a collective egotism that prioritized the reform of the ruling
class over any desired improvement of the lives of the lower classes. As
a “fraction” in only partial opposition to the values of their larger class
formation, Bloomsbury approached those below them as the “underdog,”
according to Williams, with “very strong and effective feelings of sympathy
with the lower class as victims.”8 What thus emerges as an antidote to
imperialism, war, and class society is the sensibility of Bloomsbury itself,
or “the contents of the mind of a modern, educated, civilized individual”
as the ideal norm: “this higher sensibility,” he concludes, “is the kind of life
which is its aim and model, after the rational removal of (‘unnecessary’)
conflicts and contradictions and modes of deprivation” (245–6). In its most
negative connotations, Williams’ assessment suggests an underlying strain
of self-promotion and aggrandizement at the heart of Bloomsbury ethics,
one that readily meshes with accusations concerning Woolf’s snobbery.9
On its best reading, “The Bloomsbury Fraction” implies an imposed dis-
tance from social others that might well be salutary in avoiding charges
of condescension and slumming, but also risks succumbing to solipsistic
navel-gazing.
The problem becomes more complicated when we consider Williams’
suggestion that the preferred currency of Bloomsbury was intellectual and
not economic capital, through its promotion of the educated and civilized
mind as both its norm and its model. Such a mind is, as Woolf argues
in “Modern Fiction” (1921), one that “receives a myriad impressions –
trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.”10
The valued consciousness is thus the same one that was being sketched
by William James and by George Egerton in passages I cited in the last
chapter, one that is necessarily complex, associative, capable of considering
issues and problems from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, and defined
by transitive motion rather than substantive conclusions. In this sense,
Woolf’s own experiments with representing the stream of consciousness
might provide one way of connecting her with the naturalist tradition,
if the argument I made in that chapter about a shared commitment to
descriptive fidelity is a valid one. If Egerton’s attempts to record the mind
in free-associative motion can be seen as naturalistic, in their turning of
the observational impulse back upon the narrator’s own consciousness, can
the same be said for Woolf?
This is not an easy question to answer, in part because it begs the issue
of exactly what we understand by stream of consciousness narration. In an
attempt to make clear distinctions, the George Moore scholar Richard Cave
suggests a division very much like Regenia Gagnier’s opposition between
sensation and nerves. In an effort to question the primacy sometimes
accorded to Edouard Dujardin’s novella Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (1886–7),
a text that both Moore and Joyce recognized as having influenced their own
writing, Cave proposes a two-stage process that is initiated by “an anterior
movement of the mind, its unconscious receptive activity prior to that selec-
tion of sense-data for conscious awareness that constitutes perception.”11
For Cave, Dujardin’s novella represents the first stage only, what Gagnier
terms “the outside world coming in through the senses,”12 and this would
disqualify it from consideration as a true “stream-of-consciousness” text.
By the same token, it would place Dujardin squarely within the naturalist
tradition I have been outlining, and indeed position Les Lauriers as a sig-
nificant intersection between naturalism and impressionism. My reading
of Egerton’s Keynotes similarly focused on its ambition to record the mind
engaged in the complicated act of receiving sensory data, as opposed to
selecting out and patterning particular nodes of experience through which
we come to understand the perceiving subject – but these are clearly not the
distinct and watertight categories that Cave’s and Gagnier’s dichotomies
suggest.
For Virginia Woolf, even in the case of the major mature novels such as
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), it is a harder than might
be expected to decide the relative emphasis that is placed upon external
sensory data versus their inward processing. One of her last manuscripts, “A
Sketch of the Past,” which was left incomplete at her death in 1940, has been
thought to provide a clue. “If I could remember one whole day I should be
able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child,” Woolf
considers. “Unfortunately, one only remembers what is exceptional,” she
goes on to qualify, before introducing the well-known idea of such excep-
tional “moments of being” that nonetheless find themselves “embedded
in many more moments of non-being.” The idea of “non-being” lends
weight to the view that for Woolf experience is only meaningful – and,
indeed, only recoverable – when it is internalized in thought, so that to
posit that “A great part of every day is not lived consciously” is to declare
naturalist detailing both irrelevant and impossible.13 On this model, the
material world might come to resemble the famous emblems that open
Mrs. Dalloway, the royal car and the letter-writing that trails behind a
commercial airplane, each of which becomes knowable only through its
lingering effects. Clarissa Dalloway wonders why the street is blocked, sees
a chauffeur and “a disc inscribed with a name” in the hand of a footman,
sees a policeman redirect traffic for a vehicle to pass, and reconstructs the
scene’s meaning as it is “disappearing,” having “left a slight ripple which
flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides
of Bond Street.” Even then she is unsure if the vehicle belonged to the
Queen, the Prince of Wales, or the Prime Minister. By the time the car
enters a gate that would presumably confirm the identity of its occupant,
Clarissa and the other Londoners in the scene have been distracted by
another set of evanescent ripples from a plane that might be spelling out
“KREMO TOFFEE” (we only get as far as the first F), but even as it is
disappearing the plane is also being processed as a set of interchangeable
metaphors: “a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it
seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of
man’s soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the
cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought,
Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory.”14
The implication seems clear: without such thoughts – to which we can
add a growing list of others, to do with war, power, ceremony, advertising,
and so on – to elevate them into “moments of being,” the experience that
occasioned them would recede into “non-being” and not become part of
the record of Clarissa’s day. This would be the basis of the argument Alex
Zwerdling makes that Woolf was untouched by a naturalism that insisted
upon the materiality of lived experience, but I am reluctant to simply
leave it at that and want to consider two other moments in her fiction
at which the balance between sense experience and internal processing is
weighted differently. The one that superficially resembles the opening of
Mrs. Dalloway is drawn from later on in the same novel, when Clarissa
has to consider the basis of her rage against her daughter’s companion
and tutor, Doris Kilman. Here, the material keynote is an item of rain-
wear that Clarissa visualizes even before she sees it: “outside the door was
Miss Kilman, as Clarissa knew; Miss Kilman in her mackintosh, listen-
ing to whatever they said.” The functioning of this garment as symbol,
as an occasion for extended thought, is immediately signaled in the next
paragraph: “Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackin-
tosh, but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty;
and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degrad-
ingly poor” (123). The mackintosh thus provides a shorthand for Clarissa’s
assessment of Miss Kilman, which she proceeds to modify by enumerating
a set of extenuating circumstances, most notably that – coming from a
family “of German origin” (originally Kiehlman) – she had become impov-
erished by refusing to “pretend that the Germans were all villains.” On
that basis, Clarissa moderates her extraordinary repugnance, but not the
felt contempt for Miss Kilman’s style of dress. At first, then, we learn how
“the idea of her diminished, how hatred (which was for ideas, not people)
crumbled, how she lost her malignity, her size, became second by second
merely Miss Kilman, in a mackintosh,” and yet as soon as the women leave
Clarissa’s rage returns: “now that the body of Miss Kilman was not before
her, it overwhelmed her – the idea. The cruelest things in the world, she
thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdrop-
ping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh
coat, on the landing” (126). Less an idea than an idée fixe, the mackintosh is
inseparable from its wearer here and not so much the occasion for a set of
following thoughts as their center; in this way, what marks its functioning
in these passages is Clarissa’s inability to fully process it or make it merely
symbolic, so that the garment remains irreducibly material rather than
being transformed into evanescent ripple effects.
At other times in Woolf the world of things has a similarly recalcitrant
quality that can interrupt the stream of consciousness as well as help to
direct it. In To the Lighthouse, the perpetually busy Mrs. Ramsay has to
catch occasional moments for her own thinking, often needing to occur
beneath or above the surface of quotidian arrangements, such as while she is
reading to one of her children: thinking of two of her guests that she would
like to pair up, she wonders “where were they now?” while “reading and
thinking quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman
and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and
then ran up unexpectedly into the melody.”15 But if such a scene provides
a literal instance of harmony between inner and outer worlds, we see them
in dissonant discordance only a few pages later, as Mrs. Ramsay meditates
upon “the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always
a woman dying of cancer even here.” The train of thought extends to
the responsibilities of parenthood, and the existential problem of raising
children in such a world, but finds itself interrupted by the most banal of
issues: “And yet,” the passage continues, “she had said to all these children,
you shall go through it all. To eight people she had said relentlessly that
(and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds). For that reason,
knowing what was before them – love and ambition, and being wretched
alone in dreary places – she had often the feeling, Why must they grow
up and lose it all?” Like the mackintosh, the greenhouse bill emerges here
as a minor leitmotif in the thought process; in the next paragraph, for
instance, we read that “Marriage needed – oh, all sorts of qualities (the bill
for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one – she need not name it –
that was essential; the thing she had with her husband” (60). In the terms
diagrammed by “A Sketch of the Past,” the bill would seem to represent a
moment of “non-being,” although the second instance might indicate why
it is retrieved at this point: her worrying about domestic finance and repair
is, like her reading to their children, what enables the Ramsays’ marriage
because it frees up Mr. Ramsay to maintain an extended existence in a
realm of pure and philosophical thinking.
As Liesl Olson has suggested, in such scenes we can recognize the impor-
tance to Woolf of making distinctions, so that the novels, “which always
mark the disparities between the upper and lower classes and especially
between men and women[,] seem to acknowledge rather than to overlook
the radical differences in how the everyday is experienced.”16 This already
brings her closer to a naturalist practice that (at least implicitly) assumed
a differential index of subjective determination, according to which you
are either more or differently the product of your environment the lower
down the social scale you exist. Later in this chapter, I will consider self-
conscious reflections upon just this model by Frank Norris and Stephen
Crane, but first I want to finesse it a little in the case of Virginia Woolf.
After all, Mrs. Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway each has a degree of privilege
that ought to purchase them some distance from greenhouses and mack-
intoshes; as women, but more particularly as wives and mothers, they find
everyday life harder to bracket or to relegate permanently to the level of
bass notes or background noise. For poor women, on whom I will focus
for the bulk of this chapter, the difficulty is only compounded by the
demands of wage labor, which extend the obligation felt by these women
of privilege to devote significant portions of their daily lives to doing
things for and thinking about other people. Writing about such women
involved Woolf in a complex play of identification and difference that we
can think of as moving outward from the autoethnographic impulse to
document one’s own processes of thought, thereby engaging her in a set
of ethical and aesthetic questions that have come to define the problem of
naturalism.
Mrs. McNab and the rusty pump

As Clarissa Dalloway’s husband Richard is crossing Green Park in Lon-
don, laden down with roses on his way home to tell Clarissa he loves her,
his thoughts are briefly sidetracked by a return to his profession of poli-
tics; having observed “whole families, poor families” enjoying the public
greenspace, he is forced to wonder about (and finally throw up his hands
at) the problem of the homeless, asking “what could be done for female
vagrants like that poor creature, stretched on her elbow . . . he did not
know.” The two of them have the briefest of silent interactions, but it is
the asymmetry of their responses that is most telling: the woman laughs at
the sight of Richard, “[b]earing his flowers like a weapon,” whereas he –
even while “smil[ing] good-humouredly” – finds himself “considering the
problem of the female vagrant” (116). We might see this scene as illustrating
the opposing forms of characterization that Woolf famously discussed in
her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1928): the unnamed woman
is able to see Richard as an individual, and indeed to laugh at him on
account of his idiosyncratic appearance, whereas he sees only a type, forc-
ing her to stand for an entire class of people. Hers is of course the preferred
mode of relating to others, especially according to Bloomsbury ethics, and
far superior to his politician’s tendency to generalize. Indeed, the latter is
reminiscent of what “Mrs. Brown” identifies as an unsatisfactory mode of
observation that Woolf associated with Edwardian writers such as Arnold
Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, in which the person under
scrutiny paradoxically dematerializes under a weight of accumulated mate-
rial details: such writers, she concludes in a thought experiment, have “not
so much as looked at” Mrs. Brown before providing their hypothetical
portraits, with Galsworthy in particular seeing in his subject only “a pot
broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner.”17
Along these lines, Alex Zwerdling smartly uses the scene from
Mrs. Dalloway to draw out a form of political critique in the novel, one
that is directed against the mentality of a governing class that can “com-
partmentalize in order to control and make things manageable” and that
keeps itself “unruffled by viewing all social problems as involving distinct
categories of people different from themselves” (128–9). I will return later
to this issue of typology, which was so central to Georg Lukács’ promotion
of realism at the expense of naturalism. First, though, I want to consider
what might be at stake in Woolf’s very different depiction of the female
vagrant, and a cluster of characters like her. She is, most obviously, drawn
as an amalgamation of physical features: she is said to be “impudent” and
Mrs. McNab and the rusty pump 159
“loose-lipped,” and leans on one shoulder “as if she had flung herself on the
earth, rid of all ties, to observe curiously, to speculate boldly, to consider
the whys and the wherefores” (116). Taking our cues from naturalism, we
might characterize Woolf’s characterization in three ways, each of which
might get us closer to pinpointing what is distinctive about her lower-class
figures: most obviously, it highlights visible detail as a preferred mode for
comprehending those from other social classes; it also relies upon negation,
emphasizing what the vagrant fails to share with her privileged counter-
part as a consequence of her material deprivation; and, finally, it depends
upon metaphor, that pivotal “as if,” to ground its speculative efforts at
understanding her internal mental processes. Each of these is, as we shall
see, also a hallmark of similar representations of the lower classes in both
Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
The easiest connection we can make is to the figure of another female
vagrant, this time seen in Regent’s Park by Septimus and Rezia Smith. It
may, of course, be the same woman, or it may be that we are supposed to
recognize a typology here – even if such thinking might exonerate Richard
Dalloway from the charge of abstract categorization mentioned above.
This woman is also depicted at length and through external detail, as “the
battered old woman with one hand exposed for coppers the other clutching
her side,” though what Woolf adds this time is a voice. It is telling, however,
that what the vagrant voice projects looks like gibberish on the page,
“ee um fah um so/Foo swee too eem oo” – sounds that have been identified
as the residue of what was once Richard Strauss’s song “Allerseelen.”18 This
“old bubbling burbling song” that once spoke of lost love “streamed away
in rivulets over the pavement and all along the Marylebone Road, and
down towards Euston, fertilizing, leaving a damp stain” in what we might
read as an emblem of modernist dismay at the dissipation of high cultural
forms (81–2). In this sense, the vagrant’s Straussian song resonates with a
larger concern – articulated most forcefully in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” –
at the evaporation of cultural meaning that occurs when texts outlive their
own moment and/or pass into the possession of the lower classes.
An earlier context, within which this song might still be capable of signi-
fying something, can barely be glimpsed on the horizon, though it is here
that we must acknowledge the distance that comes to separate Woolf from
her imaginative creations. Like naturalist characters, including those Irish
figures that Moore and Joyce depicted in The Untilled Field and Dubliners,
these vagrants register largely as negative signs, bearing the marks of a loss
that they themselves may be incapable of comprehending. In common
with the vagrant that Richard encounters, the Regent’s Park woman is
all negation, “a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning
or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human
meaning,” and indeed one “of no age or sex.” The force of this negative
characterization is not offset – and indeed, in many ways is enhanced –
by a cluster of pastoral images that compare her to “a wind-beaten tree
for ever barren of leaves” and her voice to “an ancient spring sprouting
from the earth.” The latter image is undercut in turn by two more prosaic
metaphors that convey the same meaning without any of the attendant
idealization: her mouth is “a mere hole in the earth” and her body is twice
imaged as “a rusty pump” that can presumably no longer issue the water
that would flow from an “ancient spring” (80–82). “Poor old woman” is the
response she elicits from Rezia Smith, one that is both strikingly anticlimac-
tic given the lengthy description of her we have been given and as casually
dismissive as Richard’s reflexive shift into the categorical mode of (non-)
engagement.
If we turn to To the Lighthouse’s housekeeper Mrs. McNab, we find
a similarly lengthy portrait contained in a single paragraph that is most
striking for the ways that it differs from all the other character portraits
we get in the novel. We can cross-reference her with the poor women of
Mrs. Dalloway to outline a clear pattern of characterization. Like the second
vagrant, she is singing a snippet of melody while she cleans the empty
Ramsay house in the “Time Passes” section,
something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage perhaps,
had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the toothless,
bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was like the voice
of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down but springing up
again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she seemed to say how it was
one long sorrow and trouble. (130)
Mrs. McNab, too, may have lost touch with the cultural meaning of
the song, assuming she ever had it or it ever possessed one. Instead, it
feels like the rhythmic accompaniment to a monotonous labor that is
itself largely pointless, maintaining a house for an absent family that is
dying off in Woolf’s clipped parenthetical phrases. Just two pages later, for
instance, we can read how “[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness
connected with childbirth . . . ],” in a manner that is sharply distinct from
the interruptive force of Mrs. Ramsay’s dwelling on the cost of greenhouse
repairs.
As with the Regent’s Park vagrant, metaphors work to dehumanize Mrs.
McNab, who “rolled like a ship at sea,” while the physical body that
Mrs. McNab and the rusty pump 161
Woolf describes as that of a “toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman”
who at paragraph’s end “continued to drink and gossip as before,” can
be situated in a long history of poor female grotesques. Indeed, some of
the same imagery attaches itself to Doris Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway, as
Elizabeth takes her shopping for petticoats and she is said to need guiding
around as if she were “an unwieldy battleship,” and to move by “rocking
slightly from side to side” and “lurching with her hat askew, very red in
the face” (130; 133). As with Miss Kilman, there is some measure of self-
recognition on the part of Mrs. McNab – “she was witless, she knew it” –
and yet Woolf seems reluctant to leave it at that, perhaps mindful of
how readily such a description might lend itself to the familiar charges
of snobbery and condescension. But what looks like a greater effort to
imagine Mrs. McNab’s thought process only ends up only widening the
distance between character and narrator. Woolf attempts a form of free
indirect discourse, recording for instance that “It was not easy or snug this
world she had known for close on seventy years,” but includes a series of
conditional phrases such as “she seemed to say” and (as in Mrs. Dalloway)
“as if” that cause us to doubt the accuracy of the reconstructed line of
thought. Consider the following passage, speculating about her song and
whether “indeed there twined about her dirge some incorrigible hope.”
Visions of joy there must have been at the wash-tub, say with her children
(yet two had been base-born and one had deserted her), at the public-house,
drinking; turning over scraps in her drawers. Some cleavage of the dark there
must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which
light enough issued to twist her face grinning in the glass and make her,
turning to her job again, mumble out the old music hall song.
The passage is a fascinating conjoining of the certainty of knowable detail

with the self-doubt that comes when Woolf challenges herself to really
imagine other kinds of people, the two impulses meeting in the repeated
phrase “there must have been.” The passage ultimately abandons whatever
hope it had of penetrating beneath the surface or of showing Mrs. McNab
as capable of doing so for herself: unlike mystics or visionaries who get some
answer (even if “they could not say what”) to questions like “What am I”
or “What is this?” the female domestic is left hard at her manual work, and
capable of finding consolation only in “drink and gossip” (130–31).
It is hard to know what to make of a passage such as this, or the
type of the poor woman that it – along with similar descriptions in
Mrs. Dalloway – works so hard to articulate. If one accusation against
Woolf is (in Zwerdling’s charge) that of “a refusal or inability to describe
anyone below the rank of the middle class in persuasive detail” then we
could offer such examples to refute it, even as we might want to pause
and consider what “persuasive” could mean in this context: Who, after
all, does Woolf need to persuade? We might also want to consider the
difference between refusing and being unable to do something. At the very
least, we need to examine the effort itself, and the sincerity of purpose
that is made palpable through all of the twists and turns of these passages,
rather than simply dismissing them as instances of what Mary Childers
has labeled as Woolf situating herself “on the outside looking down.”19
That having been said, it is clear that such passages imagine the minds
of these poor women as something other than the ideal of complexity
that was being prized by Bloomsbury, and their personalities according
to a very different model of characterization than that which is deployed
whenever Woolf portrays figures closer to her own social class. To put it
crudely, nobody else is identified by their drinking habits or by how many
teeth they have. If, as Tamar Katz has suggested, Mrs. Dalloway provides
us with metaphors to link its characters through “a figurative resemblance
that lies beneath the details of their lives” and that define them “through a
register that is less clearly social or historical,” it would be hard to make a
case for including rusty pumps or ships rolling at sea in such a catalog of
images.20
There is, then, a tangible difference between these passages and those
that describe the thought patterns of characters whose life experience we
recognize as being closer to Woolf’s own. It is tempting, as I shall suggest in
a moment, to think of such passages as citations of naturalism that embed
its thematic and stylistic concerns within a larger narrative structure that
they inhabit but don’t really engage. And yet, while there’s an undeniable
tendency to equate naturalist practices with the lower classes – precisely
as if only the poor ever got drunk or had missing teeth – this is also to
miss the point that trying to delineate the thought patterns of Londoners
on seeing promotional skywriting over their heads, or a mother as she
reads to her children, owes just as much to naturalism’s emphasis on
detailed observation and analysis. In that sense, it might be more accurate
to consider Woolf as operating across different social and aesthetic registers,
and in the process articulating and sometimes disarticulating the ways that
we habitually assume that particular representational modes are appropriate
for some classes of characters but not others. In the following detour into
the work of two American writers of the 1890s, Stephen Crane and Frank
Norris, I consider a parallel set of investigations that more clearly signaled
themselves as occurring under the sign of naturalism as a way of indicating
Misery or luxury: The metafictions of Norris and Crane 163
Woolf’s larger, and equally self-conscious, engagement with many of the
ethical and aesthetic questions that naturalists have been asking ever since
Zola wrote The Experimental Novel.
Misery or luxury: The metafictions of Norris and Crane

Woolf ’s drift toward a particular kind of imagery – especially one rooted
in material details and dehumanizing qualities – as soon as the poor come
into focus is an impulse that was associated historically with naturalism. In
an American context, June Howard defines as one of “the most distinctive
element of naturalism” its simultaneous “construction of two polarized
categories of characters – one of sign-producers, one of signs,” with the
former treating the latter as “other” in spite of liberal inclinations toward
empathy.21 In many ways, American practitioners of naturalism, Frank
Norris and Stephen Crane in particular, were much more explicit about
this gap separating themselves from their subjects, which means that their
reflections upon the topic can shed a useful light upon Woolf ’s own ethical
hesitations, which I will be considering in the next section. Each Ameri-
can writer produced metafictional pairs of stories, in which one example
both embodies and reflects upon a naturalist methodology while the other
tackled the same subject matter in another social register that entailed a dif-
ferent style of writing. In the process they simultaneously underscore and
denaturalize the tight association of naturalism with lower-class subjects
that is implied by Woolf’s depictions of vagrants and servants.
Norris, for instance, produced a series of short vignettes in 1896 of
which each takes for its subject the generic action “Man Proposes,” thereby
dramatizing a perceived but unspoken connection between particular social
realities and preferred aesthetic techniques. In his “‘Man Proposes’ – No. 1,”
a scene of courtship plays out between an unnamed man and woman at a
seaside hotel. Little is said between them, and this is Norris’ point, since
what matters is that they share an unspoken connection that the reader
can access via interior monologue. As the man puts his arm around the
woman’s waist, for example,
he choked down a gasp at his own temerity. It was astonishing to him how
simply and naturally he had done the thing. It was as though he had done
it in a dance. He had not premeditated it for a single instance, had not
planned for it, had felt no hesitancy, no deliberation. Before he knew it,
his arm was where it was, and the world and all things visible had turned a
somersault.22
Naturalist characters typically act this way, on instinct and without fore-
thought, but they almost never renarrate their actions after the fact. What
is significant is the ideal of transparency that is being represented, with the
man in full understanding of what he has done and hopeful that his action
is received accordingly.
In the terms I derived from Gagnier and Cave at the beginning of this
chapter, external sense-data are not only recorded but more importantly
shown to have been processed; an action that might have come to him
“naturally” is thus the subject of self-conscious reflection that minimizes
what might initially have been experienced as shocking. As the man waits
for some acknowledgment, he proceeds to read the woman’s body language,
noticing with satisfaction how she starts to lose balance and “swayed toward
him, and throwing out her hand instinctively, seized his shoulder furthest
from her.” This in turn authorizes him to catch hold of her hand, just as later
the charming scene of her watching over her sleeping brother cues him to
“put his arm around her neck and [draw] her head toward him. She turned
to him then very sweetly, yielding with an infinite charm, and he kissed
her twice.” A fully mutual understanding connects the couple beneath
the wordless surface of these minutely described interactions, making the
desires and motives of each open to the other, and to us. “This was how he
proposed to her,” we read in conclusion. “Not a word of what was greatest
in their minds passed between them. But for all that they were no less sure
of each other” (57–8).
It is a very different story in what follows, “‘Man Proposes’ – No. II,” a
sketch that instead follows the standard script of naturalist writing. Its first
words, “He was a coal heaver,” immediately specify a social positioning that
is absent from the first story, and all the other differences flow from that
first one. Like Woolf ’s lower-class women, this man is described in physical
details – with small eyes, a flat nose, an immense lower jaw “protruding
like the jaws of the carnivora,” a thick lower lip – and via metaphors
that link him to the natural world and animals (“strong as a dray horse,”
for instance). Unlike his more privileged predecessor, he also possesses no
apparent interiority, being delineated as a set of actions that could function
as stage directions that tell us, for instance, how “He took his pipe from
his lips and filled it, stoppering it with his thumb, put it back unlighted
between his teeth and dusted his leathery palms together slowly.” When
he makes a proposal of sorts it is offered in words, but elliptically and with
a menace that shows little concern for mutual understanding or desire,
saying only “Say, huh, will you? Come on, let’s” and then repeating “come
on” in an effort to overcome the woman’s resistance. The basis for her recoil
is conveyed to us but seems inaccessible to her, an instinctive “No, no!”
that she expresses “without knowing why, suddenly seized with the fear of
him, the intuitive feminine fear of the male.” There is no reconstruction
on her part of why such a reaction might have occurred, and it is soon
invalidated in a rare moment of interiority when we learn that she submits
to his strength and persistence, “glad to yield to him and to his superior
force, willing to be conquered.” In the end, having “penn[ed] her into
the corner of the room” as she stands laboring at the washtub, the man
gets his way, and “they kissed each other full on the mouth, brutally,
grossly.”23
We have a different pattern of characterization here, in which the pro-
tagonists either have no interiority or (in the case of the woman) have a
will that strangely runs contrary to their own instincts and intuitions –
although the gap between them is known only by the reader, and as a
result of a minimally intrusive narrative editorializing. Stylistically, we can
recognize that the “Man Proposes” series pivots on what June Howard has
termed “a generic opposition” in which it is a set of representational modes
and not their associated realities that are being contrasted: a “sentimental
courtship vignette” in the first instance, versus a “fragment of sordid ‘natu-
ralism’” in the second.24 It would be as wrong to assert the greater “realism”
of the second sketch as it would be to claim an inherent superiority for the
life described in the first, however, just because it might feel more familiar
to us. Does the first couple’s silent yet mutual understanding make their
courtship feel any less scripted? Does having some access to their thoughts
individualize them, or do they nevertheless remain at the generic level
of “man” and “woman,” just like their lower-class counterparts? Indeed,
are they not that much less “real” or “rounded” for having no apparent
occupation or social positioning?
The clearest effort to address such questions occurred two years earlier
in Stephen Crane’s paired sketches “An Experiment in Misery” and “An
Experiment in Luxury” (1894). Both are presented as speculative acts of
impersonation in which an unnamed protagonist seeks to understand and
describe the lifestyles of the very poor and the very rich, respectively. What
initially registers as an even-handed investigation, presumably undertaken
on behalf of a putative middle class, soon comes to feel asymmetrical, how-
ever. Whereas the first “experiment” is undertaken out of simple curiosity,
because seeing a passing tramp leads the investigator to “wonder how he
feels,” the second proceeds from another premise entirely, seeking to test
the clichés that “the millionaire is a very unhappy person” because “mis-
eries swarm all around wealth.”25 As a consequence, as Alan Trachtenberg
has suggested, “Luxury” contains a significant degree of “discursive self-
reflection” as it moves to disprove these myths and link itself to the first
experiment by insisting that such consolations only help to propagate the
ignorance of poor lives that “Misery” aimed to redress.26 As with Norris’
“Man Proposes” sketches, Crane’s make an implied correlation between
social reality and the act of perception, insisting on the tangible details of
poverty while figuring the investigation into wealthy living instead as the
actions of “a man who had come to steal certain colors, forms, impressions
that were not his” (45).
But if we are tempted to an easy conclusion here, that naturalism and
impressionism are the appropriate modes of representation for these respec-
tive class realities, Crane gives us grounds to question both assumptions.
“An Experiment in Misery” opens and closes on a familiar note of social
cleavage, insisting at the outset that the feelings of the poor cannot be
known “unless you are in that condition yourself. It is idle to speculate
about it from this distance.” At its conclusion that distance is recognized
again, but it is now confronted from the other side of experience, as it were,
so that those walking “in their good clothes . . . expressed to the young man
his infinite distance from all that he valued. Social position, comfort, the
pleasures of living, were unconquerable kingdoms” (42–3). What has pro-
duced the change? Cynically, we might say it is a cosmetic one, brought
about by the observer having traded his own good clothes for a version
of “rags and tatters,” and we might equally say that his final conclusion,
that he still has no understanding of the beggar’s point of view even as his
own “has undergone a considerable alteration,” does very little for the poor
themselves.
In a pivotal scene, the young man spends the night in a doss-house
and hears a fellow resident “utter long wails that went almost like yells
from a hound, echoing wailfully and weird through this chill place of
tombstones, where men lay like the dead.” But if those similes, invoking
clichéd images of the poor as animals and the dead, prove unsuccess-
ful, the narrative nonetheless finds it necessary to turn the wailing into
thoughts, even if they are not ones that its utterer himself would be capa-
ble of thinking or understanding: it “expressed a red and grim tragedy
of the unfathomable possibilities of the man’s dreams,” for example, and
was “to the youth . . . the protest of the wretch who feels the touch of
the imperturbably granite wheels and who then cries with an impersonal
eloquence, with a strength not from him, giving voice to the wail of a
whole section, a class, a people.” If this sounds overwritten, it is surely sup-
posed to be; the next morning’s sun seems to wash away all such thoughts,
rendering the room “comparatively commonplace and uninteresting” (39).
In so doing, Crane seems to indict his own experiment as rooted in a
flawed mode of perception, one that is only too willing to put thoughts
into poor characters’ heads but thereby enacts a narcissistic projection
according to which they can only think what the privileged observer thinks
them liable to think in the first place. Ultimately, as the ending insists,
this has been about his own “point of view” all along – an implication, we
might say, that is preferable only to a status quo in which the poor can only
function in metaphorical terms, as Zolian bȇtes humaines or the walking
dead.
If “An Experiment in Misery” only seems to be about material reality but
focuses increasingly on the process of subjective perception, “An Experi-
ment in Luxury” moves in the opposite direction. It announces itself as
concerned more with impression and yet repeatedly exposes such a focus as
mystification, and just as much an extension of the lifestyle it is describing.
As the investigator begins to adapt to the life of the idle rich, for instance,
he experiences a loosening of his initial exasperation at what he previously
had termed “the eternal mystery of social condition,” back when he had
been prepared to ask how he could allow “a mass of material” to intimidate
him when he recognized their true meaning as the signs of “a lavish expen-
diture” and nothing more. A newfound acceptance of life the way it is,
however, turns out to be the real trap, as signs and signifiers come to take
on the self-evidence of material facts. “It was necessary that it should be
so,” he now comes to think of the division between rich and poor: “Thus
it was written; it was a law, he thought. And anyway, perhaps it was not
so bad as those who babbled tried to tell” (47). We can recognize in this a
seduction by wealth, in which privilege comes to justify itself according to
abstract and unquestioned principles, and the language of impressionism
emerges as its preferred aesthetic coding; after all, the initial premise that
millionaires suffer as much as the poor highlights a perception of hardship,
never actually substantiated, that seeks to gloss over the material realities
that “Misery” documents. What Crane seeks to reminds us of is the recal-
citrant facts of social existence that enable the life of luxury, especially
toward the end when a servant hovers at the periphery of the investigator’s
consciousness. As “[t]he lights shed marvelous hues of softened rose upon
the table . . . the butler moved with a mournful, deeply solemn air” to clean
up behind the millionaire and his family, introducing a discordant note
that is all the more jarring because he is unnoticed by those he serves:
“Upon the table there was color of pleasure, of festivity, but this servant in
the background went to and fro like a slow religious festival” (50).
As the repressed source of wealth, labor strives to make itself visible here,
but only as another metaphor – and in doing so, it only indicates the extent
to which we have immersed ourselves in the life of luxury. Whereas “An
Experiment in Misery” does little more than document life at it might
be lived at the other end of the social scale, while straining to imagine
a language in which it might articulate the grievances of the poor, its
counterpart enumerates the ways that such a message (assuming it could
ever be spoken) would fail nonetheless to move its intended audience.
“When a wail of despair of rage had come from the night of the slums,” it
concludes, the wealthy responded with the falsehood of their own suffering
and had “stuffed this epigram down the throat of he who cried out and told
him that he was a lucky fellow” (51). Even as the two sketches come together
around this wailing of poverty, then, they underscore how the lives they
describe never can. The separation of these social worlds becomes, as
Trachtenberg has suggested, “a difference in perspective, in how the world
is seen, felt, and accepted,” and it is precisely this difference that the
sketches adopt formally, just as Norris’ paired marriage proposals take on
the respective languages and narrative strategies of their characters.27 In the
process, for both writers, it becomes just as unthinkable to fully document
the material basis of wealth as it is to provide an inner monologue for the
poor.
By doubling as both instances and interrogations of naturalist method-
ology, these sketches by Norris and Crane are linked with the self-reflexive
texts by Zola and Moore that I discussed in Chapter 2. Whereas the
autoethnographic emphasis of L’Œuvre or Parnell and His Island turned
naturalist determination back upon their authors in order to explore their
background and subject positions, “Man Proposes” and Crane’s experi-
ments in misery and luxury investigate the ethical underpinnings of efforts
to depict others. In the process, they also return us to a question raised by
the reception of Zola in the 1890s: Is naturalism a style, with discernible
aesthetic qualities and characteristics, or is it instead a consciously antilit-
erary method that sets itself against the idea of style itself as an exercise
in mystification? If the effect of “‘Man Proposes’ – No. 1” and “An Exper-
iment in Luxury” is to scrutinize the seemingly naturalized connection
between lives of privilege and techniques such as impressionism or abstract
figuration, their counterparts similarly defamiliarize naturalism’s presumed
association with poverty and material detail, implicitly posing the question
of what exactly is lost or gained in the rejection of a supposed “literariness.”
In returning now to Virginia Woolf, I want to consider the consequences
of this double bind, in which a writer is damned in her efforts to be literary
Writerly ethics and social observation 169
and by the effort not to be, potentially at fault either for daring to write
about people outside of her immediate class experience or for writing only
from within her narrow scope of social experience. As we shall see, the act
of analytical observation, which is so central to the naturalist enterprise, is
shown to be one that is fraught with ethical pitfalls.
Writerly ethics and social observation

In Woolf ’s case, the question of the poor, as both a social and an artistic
problem, was especially prominent in the prose writings of the early 1930s.
Her 1930 essay on her work with the Women’s Co-operative Guild, “Mem-
ories of a Working Women’s Guild,” usefully identifies a set of problems,
and – since those memories originate in meetings Woolf attended prior
to World War I – also indicates a long-standing effort to address them.
Considering her relationship to the working women in the organization,
the novelist is led to confess that the goals and desires that the women
articulate – for material benefits such as “sanitation and education and
wages, this demand for an extra shilling, or another year at school, for
eight hours instead of nine behind a counter or in a mill” – fail to touch
Woolf herself, because, as she acknowledges, if “every reform they demand
was granted this very instant it would not matter to me a single jot.” As
a result, she recalls having felt “irretrievably cut off from the actors,” at
best a “benevolent spectator” and at worst “an outcast from the flock.”28
Woolf admits to sharing these “contradictory and complex feelings” with
the other privileged women at Guild meetings, and she anatomizes that
complexity by considering the terms of her potential identification with
her working-class counterparts (142).
Because privileged women such as herself don’t need the material goals
being demanded, any sympathy they feel is inevitably said to be that of
“the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and of the nerves; and
such sympathy is always physically uncomfortable.” Interestingly, such a
limited form of sympathy is characterized by Woolf as both “fictitious” and
“aesthetic,” by which she presumably means to stress the necessary work of
the imagination to fill in a story that cannot be immediately understood
and the importance of the eye as the privileged sensory receptor (140).
When she tries to picture the life of an imaginary “Mrs. Giles of Durham
City,” for instance, Woolf produces in essence a set of naturalist clichés,
complete with a washtub, a mining husband “thick with coal grime,” no
hot water, and dust in the saucepans, but she also admits the weakness of
such an imagining, one that “is largely the child of the flesh. One could
not be Mrs. Giles because one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and
chopped up whatever meat may be that makes a miner’s dinner . . . One sat
in an armchair or read a book. One saw landscapes or seascapes, in Greece
or perhaps in Italy, where Mrs. Giles must have seen slag heaps and row
upon row of slate roofs in a mining village” (137). Knowing about the life of
women from other classes only through its visible manifestation becomes,
in this sense, the equivalent of those material demands that the women
make, and that have such a limited impact on their wealthier counterparts:
a restricted understanding that only serves to remind somebody like Woolf
of how little she knows, and how difficult the task of deeper sympathetic
understanding really is.
It is worth asking at this point exactly what, besides seeing them in
the flesh and trying to imagine what their lives are like, the novelist felt
that she ought to be able to do for working women, and whether she
is merely setting herself up for inevitable failure. Two possible answers
suggest themselves, and each in its way gets us to the heart of the problem
of Woolf ’s image as an apolitical snob and to the more general problematic
of naturalist representation. On the one hand, she might have wanted to
be able to extend sympathy in the direction of collective political action
and yet felt hamstrung by her inability to value what the women were
demanding. And, on the other hand, she might have wanted to push
beyond a merely readerly relationship to her lower-class counterparts, one
in which she must be content to witness and try to imagine working-class
lives, and instead be able to actually write about them, especially if, as she
frankly acknowledges in her assessment of the women’s own writings, “as
literature they have many limitations” (146). This second issue is addressed
in a well-known letter that Woolf wrote, but never actually sent, to the
New Statesman in 1932 titled “Middlebrow.” In it, she offered a facetious –
and yet, one suspects, at the same time absolutely serious – account of
British class relations that made use of the popular metaphor of “brows”
and at the same time exposed its dependence on distasteful echoes of animal
husbandry and eugenics. Thus, the highbrow was, in Woolf’s terms, “the
man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop
across country in pursuit of an idea” and finds its natural counterpart in the
lowbrow, “a man or woman of thoroughbred vitality who rides his body in
pursuit of a living at a gallop across life.”29
So far, the terms of her opposition – intelligence/vitality, mind/body,
idea/living – are strikingly mundane, the kind of lazy binary thinking
one might expect somebody like Woolf to abjure.30 Matters don’t much
improve when we come to her titular third term, the middlebrow, who
predictably comes to split the difference: “the man, or woman, of middle-
bred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge,
now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art nor life itself,
but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame,
power, or prestige” (199). One of the most interesting aspects of this attack
on middlebrow culture is the way it anticipates an identical assault that
would be launched by one of Woolf’s fiercest early critics, F. R. Leavis. In
particular, they share the concern that middlebrow culture has no authentic
basis, although they differ on what it borrows in order to make good the
deficit: for Leavis, it is essentially high culture dumbed down for mass
consumption, through such mediating institutions as the lending library
and the book club, whereas for Woolf the greater sin of the middlebrow
is that she or he dares to write about and speak for the lowbrow, thereby
substituting for what was presumably at one time a vibrant folk culture.
This returns us to one of the problems that haunts Woolf’s fiction, and well
as her experience with the Women’s Co-operative Guild: that of speaking
for the lower classes. “Middlebrow” rules out in advance the possibility that
lowbrows might write for themselves, being much too busy with life: “Since
they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full
tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living,” it suggests, “they
cannot see themselves doing it. Yet nothing interests them more” (198).
In this context, a couple of the distinctions I highlighted earlier come into
play, though in unexpected ways. Like the privileged observers at the Guild
meetings, lowbrows have no writerly relationship to life, in the terms devel-
oped by Roland Barthes, but a potentially strong readerly one.31 This is why
they shouldn’t need middlebrow instruction: “how dare the middlebrows
teach you how to read – Shakespeare, for instance?” Woolf asks. “All you
have to do is to read him” (201, emphasis in original).32 By the same token,
they have experience of their own lives but are incapable of visualizing
it (“they cannot see themselves doing it”), which means that they cannot
take even the first unreliable step toward genuine self-representation. A
capacity for visualization comes to seem like a prerequisite in this instance,
even if it inevitably proves inadequate as a basis for representing the other.
If lowbrows are unable to narrate their own lives and middlebrows prove
unsuited to the task, it necessarily falls to the highbrows to step in, and it
is here that we find the conceptual heart of Woolf’s letter. What it imag-
ines is a kind of symbiosis or mutual dependency, in which lowbrows are
tasked with simply living, “magnificently and adventurously,” while their
“high” counterparts – figured, in what feels like a sad variation on fin-de-
siècle uselessness, as “the only people who do not do things” – take up the
challenge of representing that living back to them. Thus, “lowbrows are
waiting, after the day’s work, in the rain, sometimes for hours, to get into
the cheap seats and sit in hot theatres in order to see what their lives look
like,” with the only pertinent question being whether they will accept the
kind of middlebrow kitsch that found itself simultaneously under attack
from Leavis or the Frankfurt School, or would instead trust the presumably
disinterested version being proffered by highbrows (198).
It may be that Woolf actually believed all of this, although her own work
gives little support for it. There remains the issue of how the highbrow
should bridge the social gap, however. On this question, Woolf mimics
the language of the naturalist or social scientist, explaining that “I love
lowbrows; I study them; I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus
and try to get him to tell me what it is like – being a conductor” – and
the same goes, she continues, for stockbrokers, admirals, duchesses, min-
ers, bank clerks, or prostitutes (197). As Alex Zwerdling notes, this image
of Woolf as an amateur sociologist, “cross-examining those with access
to worlds different from their own,” resonates with firsthand accounts
furnished by contemporaries, even if it is worth asking what exactly she
imagined as the potential ends of such “eager research” (113). The “Middle-
brow” letter, written in a tone of exaggerated self-confidence that borders
on insouciance, gives a brief hint as to the limits she placed on her stud-
ies of lowbrows when she parenthetically notes that she “cannot imitate
their style of talking” (201), at which point the distinction between the
readerly and writerly relations I mentioned earlier reemerges. It is, after
all, one thing to question a bus conductor and find out about his life,
but quite another to be able to recreate the speech patterns and thought
processes by which he might himself narrate that life; no bus conductors
actually make their appearance in Woolf’s novels, even at the moment when
Elizabeth Dalloway finds herself liberated from her shopping expedition
with Doris Kilman and decides to take a ride on top of a city omnibus.
In this context, we can read the “ee um fah um so” of Mrs. Dalloway’s park
vagrant, or Mrs. McNab’s “voice of witlessness,” as the tangible signs of
Woolf’s acknowledged inability to meaningfully ventriloquize lower-class
speech patterns, and her repeated “as ifs” as signaling the gap that separates
observation from empathic understanding. Firsthand research can readily
translate into political sympathies, even if those might still be largely “fic-
titious” in nature, but cannot form the ground for an artistic practice that
could do what “Middlebrow” insists upon as a simple good: the highbrow
representation of working-class life in terms that would (like Shakespeare)
be accessible to lowbrows themselves.
It might be useful at this point to consider the example of Dickens,
who provides a powerful model for converting observation and research
(especially into lower-class life) into character and speech patterns. In
a 1930 essay “Street-Haunting: A London Adventure,” Woolf attempts
the quintessential Dickensian experiment of a journey across the capital,
nominally in search of a pencil but more pertinently to document her
observations of urban life. Accordingly, her impressions are for the most
part visual recordings made by what the essay terms “a central oyster of
perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” So far, so Dickensian, but what follows
is an extended assessment of the limits of that eye’s operation, especially as
it works by “gliding smoothly on the surface” of life, not as “a diver, not
a seeker after buried treasure” but like something caught on the current
of a stream.33 For that reason, we must “be content with surfaces only,” at
best scoring small victories but at the same time recognizing our inability
“to compose these trophies in such a way as to bring out the more obscure
angles and relationships” (157). If we are not to abandon entirely any efforts
at sympathetic imagination or the representation of those unlike ourselves,
this essay suggests we may have to be content with the observable details
on which naturalist characterization is constructed.
However “enormous” or perceptive, though, the eye alone cannot answer
the kind of questions (such as “What, then, is it like to be a dwarf ?”) that
would allow recorded observation to be converted into sympathetic under-
standing, and thence into rounded characterization. As with her portraits
of female servants and vagrants, Woolf finds herself stuck on the surface,
never able to push through to the inside or (as the Dickensian model would
dictate) to presume that we might indicate the latter by way of the former.
There are a number of possible explanations for the collapse of that model,
and of the authorial confidence it helped to project. Freudian psycho-
analysis disrupted any simple equation of outside and inside, introducing
layers of mediation and a kernel of the unconscious that could be know-
able (if ever) only after painstaking analysis. Alternatively, limits placed
on women’s access to – and experience of – the city might have necessi-
tated a more passive and fleeting form of observation for Woolf’s narrator,
who chooses to keep moving at the risk of cutting short her inquiries.34
Finally, we might take that curtailment as a symptom of modernity itself,
which dictated shorter social interactions conducted at higher speeds and
in greater volume.35 At one point, Woolf overhears part of a conversation
concerning a woman named Kate who may not think someone else “worth
a penny stamp,” but “who Kate is, and to what crisis in their friendship
that penny stamp refers, we shall never know; for Kate sinks under the
warmth of their volubility; and here, at the street corner, another page of
life is laid open . . . [T]he main stream of walkers at this hour sweeps too
fast to let us ask such questions” (163).
An essay that commences in the style of the Dickensian ramble, with its
confident tone and faith in the power of the “enormous eye,” progressively
fragments into an effort to comprehend what we don’t and can’t know
about those around us, while the joys of urban wandering ultimately give
way to the relief that comes with returning home. On the way, “one
could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men” and so on,
and might even “penetrate a little” into each life, but only so far as “to
give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but
can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others”
(165). This illusion is a feeling that Tamar Katz has compared to “window-
shopping,” an emergent pursuit of well-to-do female city dwellers in this
period and one that similarly provided a fleeting simulation of possession
over surrounding objects: “identification with others,” Katz suggests, “is a
luxury much like shopping; the street haunter remains separate from the
spectacles she sees.”36
The pretense of a deeper bond feels largely harmless in this instance,
perhaps a necessary fiction for a “London adventure” like this in which we
can sense Woolf’s desire to try on Dickens’ walking shoes. But the pattern
embodied in “Street-Haunting,” whereby an initial self-confidence in the
art of storytelling modulates into an admission of failure and disconnection,
is one that is repeated elsewhere, highlighting a symptomatic difficulty that
arises whenever Woolf sets out to represent the lives of other classes. We
might recall, for instance, the promise in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”
to provide a “Georgian” depiction of character that could counteract those
of the despised Edwardian trinity of materialists: when the moment arrives
for modern fiction techniques to take center stage, however, Woolf first
prevaricates and then confesses to having “pull[ed] my own anecdote to
pieces . . . The incident had made a great impression on me. But how was
I to transmit it to you?” (CE 1: 330–31). The admission feels coy, and yet
we can read it as simultaneously acknowledging a problem that manifested
itself in Woolf’s major novels of the late 1920s: how do you write about
other people when you only dimly glimpse their surfaces and are forced to
try to imagine what’s on the inside? Rather than dismiss the problem as a
simple aesthetic failure, or as symptomatic of the social failure of snobbery,
I would suggest a possible cause for Woolf’s evident reticence that we might
deem politically honorable: the affirmation that any effort at writing the
lives of lower-class characters will inevitably invite accusations of bad faith,
Representation and agitation 175
given the ways that Woolf herself figured the social divide and the obstacles
to a genuine (as opposed to merely fictitious) sympathy across class lines.
Representation and agitation

The problem that Woolf set herself would have been a familiar one to
late-nineteenth-century readers, who could connect it with the widespread
concern that people saw the world in terms of narrow class interests and
lacked a more generalizable view of common interests. Perhaps the most
forceful statement of this dilemma came in Oscar Wilde’s 1890 essay “The
Soul of Man under Socialism,” which argues that individuals – much less
social classes – should consider themselves under no obligation to under-
stand and help each other. The chief advantage of socialist reconstruction
is thus, Wilde suggests, that it would “relieve us from that sordid necessity
of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so
hardly upon almost everybody.” Instead, each should strive, as far as possi-
ble, “to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claim
of others . . . and so to realise the perfection of what was in him [sic].”37
Wilde holds to such a view despite his recognition (this is where the essay is
at least nominally “socialist” in its politics) of the appalling poverty under
which others are forced to exist, in lives lived “always on the burden of
sheer starvation, . . . compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do
work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by
the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading tyranny of want” (1042). In the
face of such conditions, any form of protest is justifiable on the part of the
poor themselves, up to and including criminal acts, but almost no inter-
vention on the part of the privileged can escape accusations of bad faith
and condescension: as soon as you try, you not only succeed in creating
“an absolute uniformity of type” for those you want to help (something
like Richard Dalloway’s “problem of the female vagrant”) but also end up
ruining your own life in the process (1063).
This all sounds clear and decisive, and what some might expect given
the public image of Wilde, but it should also be clear that simply ignoring
the poor is no better than trying to make their lives a little better. In that
sense, the essay confronts exactly the same double bind that Woolf would
encounter in her work with the Women’s Co-operative Guild and in her
attempts to write about the lives of others. Raymond Williams’ criticism
that the Bloomsbury Group in effect put themselves forward as the model
of a better life for all in many ways adds them to a long list of social
actors – from Thomas Carlyle’s clergy and Matthew Arnold’s sovereign,
through Leavis’ extolling of the civilized minority, to the Leninist con-
ception of the Party as vanguard – who have claimed for themselves the
disinterestedness necessary to speak for the organic whole, and Wilde also
has his candidate. In “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” the exception
to the rule of separation is the agitator, whose job it is to “come down
to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of
discontent among them.” What creates the space for the agitator is the
recognition that those living under conditions of poverty have no possible
way of coming to consciousness of their deprivation on their own, which is
presumably why they appear “contented.” On this point, we might recall
Woolf’s insistence in “Middlebrow” that the lowbrow are too busy living to
have time to reflect upon or represent their lives to themselves – to which
Wilde would add also, to protest against such lives as not fully lived. This
is why, for him, those “interfering, meddling people” he terms agitators
“are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there
would be no advance towards civilisation” (1044).
I have written about “The Soul of Man” before, and connected it to
Wilde’s opposition to naturalism in the 1890s, including his dismissal of
Zola’s characters as having “dreary vices” and “drearier virtues.”38 High-
lighting its advocacy of agitation, however, would suggest a greater sympa-
thy with the basic impulses of naturalist representation, and certainly with
the ethical dilemmas that Woolf confronted; indeed, the simple fact that
they continue to arise over a quarter of a century after Zola, Wilde, Norris,
and Crane suggests something of their intractability, and of the continuing
appeal of naturalism as a method even after its shortcomings had been so
thoroughly documented. In the very different world of 1940, shortly before
her death, Woolf would think again about these important questions of
writerly ethics and politics in a lecture called “The Leaning Tower” that she
delivered to the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association. By now, her
prime example is the politically committed writings of the so-called Auden
generation. Using the image of a tower to represent the national literary
tradition, Woolf finds it to once again be leaning leftward, with another
group of writers determined to divest themselves of privilege in the service
of a class far below themselves.
As with “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” or “Modern Fiction,” Woolf
starts by creating a set of categories for subdividing writers that are both
chronological and stylistic, with class and character the key benchmarks.
We begin with the nineteenth-century canon of writers, who are all (with
the exception of Dickens) products of a common social and educational
background. As a result, these novelists have so thoroughly internalized
class divisions as to become “unconscious of them,” and this in turn is
what enables them “to create so many characters who are not types but
individuals.” This latter distinction, which seems on the surface consistent
with E. M. Forster’s influential division between “flat” and “round” char-
acters in 1927’s Aspects of the Novel, turns out to be misleading, however,
because there is really no escaping from typology. In the case of the Victo-
rians, Woolf argues, “the writer himself [sic] seems unconscious that he is
only dealing with one type; with the type formed by the class into which
the writer was born himself, with which he is most familiar,” though it
is precisely the inability to come to consciousness of that limitation that
has proved to be such “an immense advantage.”39 By and large, the same
pattern holds for the generation writing between 1914 and 1925, in which
Bloomsbury names feature prominently, even if by now the stability of
the social background – the tower that might well be constructed of ivory,
given the formative role played by an Oxbridge education – has begun
to feel less steady: “Even though the war cut into their lives, and ended
some of them, they wrote, and still write, as if the tower were firm beneath
them. In one word,” Woolf concludes (with clear echoes of Leavis) “they
are aristocrats; the unconscious inheritors of a great tradition” (139).
The immediate temptation here is simply to assign Woolf herself to the
post – World War I cohort, especially given her stinging criticism of the
one that follows. As we read about the Auden generation, we certainly find
a version of Woolf’s writer of bad faith, no better in many respects than
an Edwardian materialist like H. G. Wells. For the writers of the 1930s
the crucially unasked political question was whether they should divest
themselves of the foundations of privilege, most notably wealth, as they
articulated an ethical sympathy with the lower classes. Short of doing so –
and for Woolf “it is death for a writer” to actually do so – they inevitably
felt “trapped by their education, pinned down by their capital,” and as a
result developed a “state of mind . . . full of discord and bitterness, full of
confusion and of compromise” (142). For the most part, “The Leaning
Tower” has registered in Woolf criticism as a charge of false consciousness
directed against bourgeois socialist writers who envisaged a simple process
of identifying with the proletariat: Jane Marcus, for instance, offers a one-
sentence summary, noting how it “chastises Auden and Spender and the
poets of the ’30s for their adulation of working-class men while neglecting
to convert their own fathers to the cause of socialism.”40 And yet it seems
to me possible to read Woolf’s analysis differently, as at least in part a
self-critique. When she arrives at the central question of characterization,
for instance, she says of the “leaning-tower” writers’ works what many
have said of her own: that “they have been great egotists” and “wrote about
themselves” in a time of considerable social and political upheaval, because
“[w]hen everything is rocking round one, the only person who remains
comparatively stable is oneself” (148).
Whatever else it is, “The Leaning Tower” is not a call to return to
Victorian patterns of characterization, rooted as they are in an unconscious
acceptance of class society. Painful as the struggles of the Auden generation
might seem, they are for Woolf also necessary, and “have done a great
deal to free us from nineteenth-century suppressions” (149). They might
have produced some poor literature, in her opinion, written in a language
that (recalling “Middlebrow”) is deficient in being “betwixt and between,”
neither “the rich speech of the aristocrat” nor “the racy speech of the
peasant,” but the difficulty they faced was a very real one: “How can a writer
who has no first-hand experience of a towerless, of a classless society create
that society?” (147; 145–6). In her reassessment of American naturalism,
especially in response to Lukács’ withering dismissal of it as sharing in the
failure of modernism to imagine possibilities of social transformation, June
Howard says something similar, commenting that these are “writers for
whom the historical opportunity to correlate individual action and social
meaning in a single, unified figure has closed.”41 For them, there was no
path back to the certainties of classical realism that Lukács continued to
praise, just as surely as there was no path back to Victorian modalities
either for Woolf or the Auden group.
Instead, “The Leaning Tower” imagines a Utopian future (one that it
hopes will emerge after the inevitable forthcoming war) in which writers
could write “a better novel than the old novel” by resurrecting in new and
conscious forms the Victorians’ ability to depict what they saw as individu-
als rather than types. These future novelists, Woolf hopes, “will have more
interesting people to describe – people who have had a chance to develop
their humour, their gifts, their tastes; real people, not people cramped and
squashed into featureless masses by hedges” of class separation. In 1940,
she could envisage such a future yet still recognize that writers at present
were faced with “a deep gulf to be bridged between the dying world and the
world that is struggling to be born” (151); in the meantime, it was difficult
to see beyond typology, especially when dealing with classes with unfa-
miliar or inaccessible patterns of thought and speech. We can see Woolf’s
own cautious efforts at writing the poor into her fictions as produced out
of this same dilemma, seeking to avoid both the simple egotism of writing
the self and an unconvincing ventriloquism of her social others. It is hard
not to view passages such as those describing female servants and vagrants
as failures, precisely the sort of scenes on which we might wish that Woolf
had used her blue pencil. But they exist nonetheless, and need to be read as
symptomatic of an approach to fiction writing that, much like naturalism,
emerged from and consciously reflected upon the gulf separating the past
from the future, and the classes from each another.
Afterword
Nietzsche contra naturalism (contra Nietzscheans)
In Max Nordau’s encyclopedic (or, some said, pathological) cataloging of

late-nineteenth-century decadence, a chapter on Nietzsche is sandwiched
between those on Ibsen and Zola, which might give the impression that
he saw some continuity between the German philosopher and naturalism;
indeed, the chapter opens by positing a connection in one direction, by
suggesting that “[a]s in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet, so in Nietzsche
it has found its philosopher.”1 In closing this study with a consideration of
a group of loosely affiliated British Nietzscheans, mainly brought together
through the journal The New Age, I want to consider once more what was
at stake in isolating Ibsen from the wider current of naturalist writing asso-
ciated with Zola, and also to think about Nietzscheanism as constituting
another possible site of modernist opposition to naturalism. That critique
will be balanced in turn by naturalist deflations of Nietzschean pretensions
to have successfully transcended environmental determinations such as
those I have already highlighted in Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Egerton’s
“A Lost Masterpiece.” In closing, I will return to the oscillation between
determination and will that I identified in Chapter 3 as the hallmark of
George Moore’s autobiographical writings, situating it as part of the larger
dialectical relationship between naturalism and its high-modernist others
that this book has tried to reconstitute.
The New Age, especially under its initial editorship from 1907 by Alfred
Orage and Holbrook Jackson, has earned a reputation as the embodiment
of modernist eclecticism and political ambivalence. Shaw, Pound, G. K.
Chesterton, Wyndham Lewis, and Arnold Bennett were among the rec-
ognizable authors that it published, and Ann Ardis has noted that “every
article or letter to the editor or sample of modernist writing or art that is
featured in its pages is counterbalanced by a parody or critique or coun-
termanifesto.” Tom Steele similarly remarks that it opened its pages to
“such divergent emergent currents that it was almost impossible to label
it politically.”2 One question to which it devoted considerable space was
180
that of Nietzschean aesthetics, perhaps not surprisingly given that Orage
had provided what Steele termed “the first sustained attempt at a popu-
lar introduction to Nietzsche” with two previous books on the German
philosopher.3 We can hear the Nietzschean note in the editors’ profession
of eclecticism from the first issue of The New Age, in which they define
socialism as “being in its largest sense, no less than the will of Society to
perfect itself” and “a progressive will [that] is neither exclusively demo-
cratic nor aristocratic, neither anarchist nor individualist”; believing “that
the darling object and purpose of the universal will of life is the creation of
a race of supremely and progressively intelligent beings,” the journal thus
saw its task as the gathering together of “‘men of good intent’ of every
shade of opinion” that the editors considered might contribute to “the new
contemplative and imaginative order.”4
In a fascinating exchange from 1911, set in motion by a critical response by
the painter Ebenezer Wake Cook to a glowing review of Anthony Ludovici’s
Nietzsche and Art, the latter clarified his aesthetic thinking in terms that
highlighted the journal’s antinaturalist strain. The term “realism,” Ludovici
argued, denoted “that representation of life which is made by those men –
we will call them laymen for short – who do not necessarily look on
the world with the transfiguring vision of passion and of superabundant
health and spirits” that alone can produce true art. In what he ominously
terms “Ruler Art,” in contrast, the ego of the artist effects a “recreation”
of life on its own terms, so that the material world is, in effect, brought
into existence “only through his [sic] image of it.” Wake Cook’s apparent
misunderstanding of his original argument, Ludovici insists, stems from
the confusion of this latter process (which he also terms “Transfigured
Realism”) with “Realism Proper” or “the usurpation of the throne of art by
that view of the world which is held by the man . . . who is a mere collector
of facts, figures and measurements, and who, in short, is mediocre.”5
With hindsight, we can recognize how much of this terminological con-
fusion could have been cleared up by simply labeling the latter approach
as naturalist, which is surely what Ludovici had in mind. Making distinc-
tions among styles of realism is similarly the task that Frank Swinnerton
set himself in 1910’s “Modern Realism,” which addressed how the term
had mutated in popular usage. At the turn of the century, he asserts,
it would have been reserved for writers such as Zola or George Moore,
who “described certain revolting scenes with minute particularity. Thus
the word was used as a final condemnation of the purely photographic,
with a bias towards the ugly. Realism was ugly, and crude, and – this was
most important of all – untrue.” A decade later, however, the term was
182 Afterword: Nietzsche contra naturalism (contra Nietzscheans)
customarily used to dismiss Ibsen as well, who was (unlike Zola) “a master
in the art of selection” and not “confused into thinking external aspects
more real than anything else, for the reason that matter-of-fact has a great
appearance of solid fact.” In its place, Ibsen is said to have “discovered that
Realism was not, and could not be, the simple copyist reproduction of
manners” for which Zolian naturalism was being condemned.6 The jour-
nal’s defense of the Norwegian playwright was secured by an article called
“Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard” by Dr. Angelo S. Rappaport, in which
the three writers are said to share the belief that “Individualism, Egoism,
Self-Consciousness, and Self-realisation go hand in hand with the feeling
of aristocracy, and on them is founded the teaching of the Superman, the
homo singularis, the Uebermensch.”7
For a journal supposedly defined by its eclecticism, there is a remarkable
uniformity of thought here. The separation of Ibsen from Zola is reminis-
cent of the judgment of literary historian Peter Keating that I discussed at
the start of Chapter 4, that for Edwardian commentators “Ibsen demon-
strated, by the blending of realism and symbolism, a way out of Zolaesque
documentary squalor.”8 In his reconstruction of Orage’s political aesthet-
ics, Tom Steele has detected an anticipation of Lukács in the continued
desire to hold to some definition of realism as a bulwark against natural-
ism, even if in Orage’s case it shaded into symbolism or expressionism –
two terms through which the recuperation of Ibsen was accomplished.
Steele’s description of Orage’s thinking in the 1920s posits the former term
in particular as the pole of an antinaturalist aesthetics in much the same
way as it had been for Arthur Symons and Yeats in the late 1990s, as a
“belief in ‘thought forms’ which became integrated into a perhaps crudely
symbolist aesthetic. This aesthetic,” Steele continues, “was in turn used as
a critique of naturalism, though not realism, from which naturalism was
sharply distinguished. Thus the average academy picture and the ‘photo-
graphic’ naturalism of the late nineteenth century were attacked for paying
attention only to surface details and neglecting the underlying reality.”9
One of Orage’s clearest formulations appeared in his review of the second
issue of Wyndham Lewis’ BLAST from 1915, in which what unites the
two journals seems much greater than what the review insists upon as
ultimately dividing them. “Mr. Lewis shares THE NEW AGE’s detestation
of the Naturalistic or Realistic school,” Orage asserts, before differentiating
how they act upon that initial rejection in ways that make clear why he
insisted on retaining the term realism: “I refuse to be interested, except
in hostility, in anything that Nature could do if she wished; and confine
my friendly interest to discovering what Nature actually does wish yet
cannot. Mr. Lewis, if I understand him, claims the right to manipulate
the plastic forces of Nature and to make a world of his own out of them.”
The Vorticist’s “nature” is thus one “of his own imagination,” whereas
Orage commits himself instead to what he terms “the idealisation of the
actual” through a process of “perfecting the Nature that already exists in
strenuous imperfection.”10 We see in this a different emphasis upon the
work of interpretation, performed in the service of articulating what is at
present only latent in the world and in light of a utopian vision of political
reconstruction very different from Lewis’. In the process, naturalism gets
reduced to the simple mimetic reproduction of surfaces, and thus is opened
up to the charge that it is not art at all. Nietzsche would provide Orage
and others with a powerful articulation of the artist’s special capacity to
see beneath the surface, even if at times this sounded very much like
Lewis’ insistence upon his ability to give meaningful form to the world by
reproducing it in his own image.
If this was the Nietzschean case against naturalism, there is a parallel
critique of advocates of Nietzsche that was pursued in part through an insis-
tence upon the questionable grounds upon which that advocacy was being
advanced. In particular, there are a number of instances, some of which I
have examined in earlier chapters, in which the desire to profess oneself
an Übermensch, and thus exempt from what naturalism would see as the
law of determination, is revealed to be a consoling fiction seeking to cover
up economic deprivation and intellectual limitation. Tellingly, an affilia-
tion with Nietzschean ideas was often associated with a lower middle class
seeking to elevate itself through the means of culture, even as it found its
material ambitions held in check. The situation that such petit-bourgeois
Nietzscheans confronted was very much like the one facing Leonard Bast in
E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), for whom an ambitious self-directed
course of cultural reading has to try to mitigate the humiliating experi-
ence of being a bank clerk. Forster’s famous declaration, upon introducing
Leonard, that “We are not concerned with the very poor,” who are rec-
ommended instead to the notice of “the statistician or the poet,” might
give the misleading impression that the novel is uninterested in the social
and economic determinations of Leonard’s immiseration; by the time he
and his partner Jacky have enjoyed dinner, however, consisting of “a soup
square . . . dissolved in some hot water,” followed by “a freckled cylinder
of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the
bottom,” and then “another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple),”
we can certainly see naturalist observation and detailing at work.11 Forster
contrasts this squalor with a sad pretension to cultural enrichment that
Leonard had expressed a moment earlier, in boasting to Jacky that he cares
“a great deal about improving myself by means of Literature and Art, and
so getting a wider outlook. For instance, when you came in I was reading
Ruskin’s Stones of Venice,” he tells her, but the narrative cruelly underscores
the mismatch between the Ruskin text – on which he “was trying to form
his style” – and Leonard’s surroundings when he struggles to transpose a
passage on Venetian church architecture to fit his London apartment: “Let
us consider . . . first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said
already), what is very peculiar to this flat – its obscurity” (40).
Leonard’s preferred reading is decidedly not Nietzsche. In many respects,
as I have argued elsewhere, his tastes are defined by a recherché high Vic-
torianism that he recognizes as inferior to the modernist names (such as
Monet and Debussy) with which the more privileged Schlegel sisters are
able to pepper their conversation; meanwhile, Leonard is unclear whether
the opera’s name should be pronounced “Tannhouser” or “Tannhoyser,”
and so falls silent when the conversation works itself around to Wagner
(31).12 The collision between lower-class squalor and an inflated desire for
cultural self-elevation is otherwise one that we find repeated in Joyce’s “A
Painful Case” or the poem “Thirty Bob a Week” by John Davidson that I
will examine in a moment. In following the trajectory of British naturalism
away from the slum novels of the mid 1990s, Peter Keating has usefully
suggested that “[t]he centre of class concern” for Edwardians such as Wells,
Galsworthy, Bennett, Forster and Joyce “was now the broad heterogeneous
band of the middle classes, ranging from clerks, typists, and shop assis-
tants, through school teachers, owners of small businesses, civil servants,
managers, journalists and novelists, to relatively small-scale rentiers and
members of the long-established professions.”13 Locating the interest in
Nietzsche at the lower end of this social class provides a form of naturalist
revenge against the Nietzschean disdain for documentary realism that was
expressed in the pages of The New Age, bringing the pretensions of would-
be Supermen back down to earth by detailing the social deprivations that
these autodidactic philosophers were struggling to sublate. Like Leonard
Bast’s, the daily life of Joyce’s James Duffy stages the incommensurability
of his reading and eating habits, “two volumes of Nietzsche” (Thus Spake
Zarathustra and The Gay Science) juxtaposed with a dinner of “corned beef
and cabbage” that “began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate.”14
If this sounds like Stephen Dedalus’ failed attempts to refashion his
Dublin life along the lines of Romantic French fiction, the comparison
is an apt one. Antonio Gramsci once linked the popular spread of Niet-
zsche’s ideas to such popular serialized novels, speculating that “much
of the would-be Nietzschean ‘supermanism’ has its source and doctrinal
model not in Zarathustra but merely in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of
Monte-Cristo.”15 Glossing Gramsci’s suggestive remark, Tom Steele notes
in a discussion of Alfred Orage (who claimed to have encountered similar
heroic models in the novels of Benjamin Disraeli and Bulwer Lytton) that
it was “petit-bourgeois intellectuals, denied the opportunity of constructing
themselves like gentlemen,” who instead “sought expression in its opposite,
the superman.”16 It is just this compensatory substitution that Joyce was
aiming to puncture in both “A Painful Case” and A Portrait, by diagnos-
ing an inverse correlation between material impoverishment and romantic
delusions of grandeur. As we saw in Chapter 2, his fellow Irishman George
Moore recognized a similar push and pull at the higher end of the social
scale, and struggled to harmonize his reading in Continental idealist phi-
losophy, which told him that he was a creation of will alone, with his
literary commitment to a Zolian model of determination by external cir-
cumstances. Moore’s paradox differs from those of Bast or Duffy only to
the extent to which he was aware of its existence and could see it mainly as
an issue of competing aesthetic and philosophical influences.
Perhaps the best expression of the tension between Nietzschean efforts at
sublation and naturalist bathos is found in John Davidson’s poem “Thirty
Bob a Week,” which appeared in the second issue of The Yellow Book
in July 1894. Davidson is in many respects emblematic of the spirit of
contradiction, representing what his biographer has termed “in the same
breath a decadent and a counter-decadent, a friend of the aesthetes and
writer of the impressionist verse but also a dabbler in the Kiplingesque
idiom.” Politically, too, he challenged the liberal orthodoxies that might
be associated with The Yellow Book and maintained strongly patriotic and
pro-imperialist positions that “anticipated the reactionary principles of
twentieth-century totalitarianism.”17 As an early, if never fully committed,
adherent of the principle of the Übermensch, Davidson’s right-leaning
political philosophy seems in many ways more consistent than Orage’s
idiosyncratic socialism: he withdrew one of his poems that he had agreed
to publish in The New Age in protest at its politics and also declined to
publish in the journal of the Nietzsche Society, this time on the grounds
that the German philosopher was “the enemy of ‘herds’” and as such a
poor choice on which to base an organization of like-minded individuals.18
In spite of such clear refusals to join any club that would have him as a
member, Davidson was in agreement with Orage and The New Age on
the subject of naturalism, distinguishing what he saw as a “true realism”
from “unreal, inartistic realism.”19 He duly opposed naturalism’s central
principle of the bȇte humaine, declaring in a review of the late Ibsen plays
that “Neither is man, as was long ago remarked, a naked animal, nor is his
soul unclothed.”20
In another respect, however, this repudiation is surprising, because
Davidson stood squarely for the importing of scientific – and especially
Darwinian – principles into modern poetry. The resulting tension is
nowhere more evident than in “Thirty Bob a Week,” which simultaneously
articulates and critiques a social Darwinist account of subjective determi-
nation by external forces and circumstances. The poem’s central focus is on
a clerk commuting between a city office and “my Pillar’d Halls and broad
suburban Park,” and much of its force is derived from its presentation of
the clerk’s own thoughts in idiomatic first person, as he struggles to eke out
an existence on the titular thirty shillings per week.21 This experiment with
vernacular speech connects it with Kipling in poetry and with “slum” nov-
elists such as Arthur Morrison in prose, who similarly sought to close the
gap between lower-class subjects and privileged authorial commentary that
had consistently dogged naturalism. Commenting on these innovations
in first-person narrative, Raymond Williams usefully suggested that they
represent an “apparent exclusion of self-conscious commentary,” which is
now “completely incorporated.”22 Having the lower class (or lower middle)
seeming to speak directly avoids some of the problems of ventriloquism
that I noted in the last chapter, but Williams’ description also alerts us to
what might occur when a commentary that has traditionally been located
“outside” of the central character (as was the case with Forster or Joyce)
is now transposed to the “inside.” Davidson’s clerk is then both the only
available mouthpiece for naturalist detail – telling us that he eats leeks
every week, for instance, and is “often very cold and very wet” in “Three
rooms about the size of traveling trunks” – and for the poet’s repudiation
of naturalism’s fatalism: as such, even in the midst of his initial cataloging
of seemingly futile efforts “to count ten bob a pound,” the clerk expresses a
surprising combination of resignation with a sense of fair play by insisting
in the poem’s second stanza that
I don’t allow it’s luck and all a toss;
There’s no such thing as being starred and crossed;
It’s just the power of some to be a boss,
And the bally power of others to be bossed.
What pulls the poem back from self-pity is the clerk’s rejection of blind
determination in favor of a more Nietzschean emphasis upon power and the
human will. It is hard to take at face value his clerk’s assertive self-elevation
to the rank of Übermensch, however, or to see him as somehow escaping
the “layman” view of life that Nietzscheans such as Anthony Ludovici
saw as inevitably “mediocre” and incapable of transfiguring reality. The
problem is partly derived from the narrative’s insistent vernacular, which
mocks the clerk even as he gets to express beliefs that Davidson himself
held, as when the idea that “There ain’t no chance/Nor nothing of the luck-
lottery kind” is presented as his “most engrugious notion of the world.”
Like Leonard Bast or James Duffy, Davidson’s clerk wields an idiosyncratic
and autodidactic philosophy as a compensatory bulwark against his own
material deprivation and dependence, in this case proposing a fantasy of
(literal) self-determination to counter explanations that would focus on the
bad luck of economic circumstance: “[I]t’s this way I make it out to be,”
he declaims:
No fathers, mothers, countries, climates – none! –
Not Adam was responsible for me;
Nor society, nor systems, nary one!
A little sleeping seed, I woke – I did indeed –
A million years before the blooming sun.
These claims to social superiority in time swell to absurd proportions,

ultimately positioning the narrator at an impossibly Archimedean point
at which he is both the motor and product of the evolutionary process.
“Beyond my will there was no other cause,” he declares, before suggesting
that “I chose to be the thing I was,” a fantasy of autogeneration that
would seem contradicted by the following idea that “in whatever shape, of
mollusc, or of ape,/I always went according to the laws.” If those statements
suggest a conflicted attitude toward evolutionary principles, the clerk next
upends teleology entirely in a reversal of generational logic that ends up
asserting that “I was the love that chose my mother out;/I joined two lives
and from the union burst” (emphasis in original).
On his own account, then, the clerk shifts between submission to and
transcendence of natural laws, imagining for himself a triumphant agency
of will that rapidly evaporates with the final stanza’s return to a more
clear-sighted assessment of the social struggle. “It’s a naked child against a
hungry wolf,” he bemoans, or like “Walking on a string across a gulf/With
millstones fore-and-aft about your neck,” so it is not surprising that the
final line pictures defeat as finally inevitable: “we fall, face forward, fighting
on the deck.” As it proceeds, then, the poem first makes the case for envi-
ronmental determinism and then explodes it, by instead insisting upon the
capacity of even suburban clerks to transcend their circumstances through a
force of will; that argument, which was essentially what Davidson believed
about himself, is in turn subjected to critique, becoming a reductio ad
absurdum of Nietzscheanism that is finally powerless when we return to
the material conditions of “thirty bob a week.” Any reading of the poem
thus has to contend with the dueling impulses toward sublation and defla-
tion, a driving need for transcendence and its predictable unmasking in
the face of social reality. Critical interpretations have accordingly divided,
even as they consistently figure Davidson as poised somewhere between
Nietzschean and Social Darwinist views of the world that split over the
question of determination. For John Sloan, “Thirty Bob a Week” is evi-
dence that the poet sought “to console himself with the laws of nature, but
is only too painfully aware of accepting the limitations of the Social Dar-
winist view of life,” but if anything it offers evidence of the same process
mapped in reverse.23 For Raimund Schäffner, the story is instead about
the clerk’s “accepting his plight as a necessary constituent of the universal
process of evolution in the course of which misfits are eliminated,” but
this might be to tip the balance too far in the other direction. Perhaps we
need only to particularize this reading more sharply, insisting that it is only
his Social Darwinist plight that is being accepted; for those who identify
instead with the hungry wolves, it presumably still feels very much like a
world of their own making.24
The poem and the poet have internalized the division that so bothered
Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, in which a privileged artistic conscious-
ness that feels itself free from the more mundane forms of economic deter-
mination (such as the need to work for a living and worry about what to eat)
confronts a social inferior for whom such an escape can exist only in fan-
tasy. Where the progressive thinking underpinning Wilde’s and Woolf’s –
as well as naturalism’s – reflection upon that division desired its ultimate
abolition, Davidson and his fellow Nietzscheans were more content to see
it as an intractable fact of life. As Schäffner suggests, Davidson happily fig-
ured the masses as “suffering victims of social and economic processes and
structure,” or as the necessary Other of an elite aristocracy of the intellect
that represented itself by contrast as “free subjects endowed with the power
to fashion history and shape their own fate.”25 Like Forster and Joyce, the
poet demonstrated the incongruity of one of the former imagining himself
to be one of the latter, but the dialectical tension at the heart of “Thirty Bob
a Week” is not easily resolved on the side of either Nietzsche or naturalism.
In its evenhandedness, its capacity to recognize the value of naturalism
even as it struggles to repudiate and transcend it, I see Davidson’s poem as
the embodiment of a tension that I have argued is at the heart of literary
modernism. Such a view was also held by T. S. Eliot, who in 1961 recalled
that he had “found inspiration in the content of the poem, and in the
complete fitness of content and idiom; for I also had a good many dingy
urban images to reveal.”26 John Sloan suggests that for Eliot, “Davidson’s
downtrodden, ignobly decent clerk is a man of acute self-consciousness
who hears two voices singing in his head,” and can thus be thought of as a
model for the former’s J. Alfred Prufrock.27 Those voices are perhaps the low
vernacular and high cultural concepts, or (as I have suggested) two different
ways of understanding our place in the world. Either way, they suggest that
the equivocation expressed by writers such as Moore, Egerton, and Joyce in
the decades that bracketed the turn into the twentieth century, concerning
how and on what terms to document the precise nature of lived reality, is
not somehow dispelled by the onset of something new that we have come
to term modernism. It is more accurate to say that the representational and
ethical problems that naturalism brought to the surface, even as far back as
the founding statements of Zola, helped to constitute the very modernism
that would define itself as naturalism’s opposite.
Notes
INTRODUCTION: A MODERNISM ON ALL FOURS

1 George Gissing, letter to Bertz, 29 September 1893. Reprinted in Arthur C.
Young, ed., The Letters of George Gissing to Eduard Bertz, 1887–1903 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 175–9.
2 Hubert Crackanthorpe, “Reticence in Literature: Some Roundabout
Remarks,” The Yellow Book 2 (July 1894), 262.
3 Crackanthorpe, “Reticence,” 260–61; 267.
4 Peter J. Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel,
1875–1914 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), 250.
5 This list is drawn from Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, Emile Zola, Novelist and
Reformer (London: Bodley Head, 1904), 297.
6 Times, 29 September 1893, 8 (“M. Zola at the Authors’ Club”).
7 See Vizetelly, 328.
8 See Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),
93–5.
9 Keating, The Haunted Study, 117–18. The quoted passages are from Symons’
Introduction to The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and James’ “Emile
Zola” (1903).
10 A representative example might be Woolf’s insistence that the modern Geor-
gian writers “ do not pour out three immortal masterpieces with Victorian
regularity every autumn,” in Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth
Press, 1928), 24.
11 See Mao, Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and
Literature, 1860–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), especially
Chapters 3 and 4.
12 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,”
PMLA 123:3 (May 2008), 738.
13 Fredric Jameson, introduction to The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007),
xviii.
14 Gosse, “The Tyranny of the Novel” (1892), rept. in Questions at Issue (London:
Heinemann, 1893), 28–9.
15 For a short history of these debates, see David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The
Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 29–37.
190
Notes to pages 7–14 191
16 Trotter, “The Avoidance of Naturalism: Gissing, Moore, Grand, Bennett, and
Others,” in John Richetti, ed., The Columbia History of the British Novel
(New York: Columbia, 1994), 618. This essay is a reworking of arguments
first presented by Trotter in The English Novel in History, 1895–1920 (London:
Routledge, 1993), Chapter 7.
17 See especially Woolf’s “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth
Press, 1966), 2: 103–10.
18 See especially Keating’s The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (New York:
Barnes and Noble, 1971), which separates Morrison and “the Cockney School”
(Chapters 7 and 8) from a consideration of “French Naturalism and English
Working-Class Fiction” (Chapter 5).
19 The episodes in this fascinating literary skirmish were Traill’s “The New Real-
ism,” Fortnightly Review 67 (January 1897); Morrison’s spirited response “What
Is a Realist?,” in The New Review 16:94 (March 1897); and finally Traill’s “The
New Fiction,” in The New Fiction, and Other Essays on Literary Subjects (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970 – orig. 1897), 1–26. In the last install-
ment, Traill rather petulantly acknowledges Morrison’s dissent from his earlier
term (hence the new title), griping that “I am no longer permitted to label his
art as ‘the New Realism’” (1).
20 See my Capital Offenses: Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2003), Chapter 5.
21 Christopher Hill, “The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World
Literary History,” Literary Compass 6:6 (2009), 1205.
22 See Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Devoise (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 197; 200.
23 Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review n.s. 1
(January February 2000), 58. In “More Conjectures,” a follow-up essay
responding to critics, Moretti concedes the possibility of a reverse movement,
accepting that core nations do not have “a monopoly over creation” despite
having “more resources to pour into innovation (literary and otherwise).” See
New Left Review 20 (March–April 2003), 76.
24 Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin:
Field Day, 2006), 123–4.
25 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 10.
26 In American literary studies, Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Moder-
nity: The Moment of American Naturalism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004) would seem to stake out a comparable revisionist position.
27 Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), 11.
28 See Marcus, “Comparative Sapphism,” in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever,
eds., The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 251–85.
29 Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67; emphasis in original.
192 Notes to pages 15–27
30 See Williams, “Theatre as Political Forum,” rept. in Politics of Modernism:
Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), 85; 83.
31 Williams, “Cinema and Socialism,” in Politics of Modernism, 113–14.
32 For Symons’ judgment, see the conclusion to his essay “A Note on Zola’s
Method” (1893), discussed at length in Chapter 1.
33 Jameson, introduction to The Modernist Papers, xviii.
34 Georg Lukács, “The Zola Centenary,” in Studies in European Realism
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 89–90.
35 Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in The Meaning of Contemporary Real-
ism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 29.
36 See Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 144.
37 See Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity, especially Chapter 1.
38 Lukács, “Narrate or Describe? A Preliminary Discussion of Naturalism and
Formalism,” in Writer and Critic, and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn
(London: Merlin Press, 1970), 140; my emphasis.
39 Johnson, cited in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life, 87.
40 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of the Art and Ideas at the
Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Capricorn, 1966), 203.
41 D. H. Lawrence, “Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb,” in Phoenix: The
Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1968), 518.
42 Waugh, One Man’s Road (1931), cited in Katherine Lyon Mix, A Study in
Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors (Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 1960), 74.
43 Arthur Waugh, “Reticence in Literature,” The Yellow Book 1 (April 1894), 216.
44 Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, 126.
45 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-
Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12;
emphasis in original.
46 Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 4.
For an argument that 1905–6 represented a turning point in French painting,
see Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames
and Hudson, 2004), 70–77.
47 See Ford Madox Ford, “On Impressionism,” rept. in The Good Soldier (Peter-
borough, ON: Broadview, 2003), 260–80. One measure of the term’s belated-
ness, especially by comparison with the rapid turnover of painterly styles and
fashions, is that Ford references both Cubism and futurism in his essay.
48 Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 49–50; emphasis in original.
49 Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (New York: Norton,
1979), 145–6.
50 Virginia Woolf, “Three Pictures,” in Collected Essays, Volume 4 (New York:
Harcourt Brace and World, 1950), 151.
51 See Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years
1919–1939 (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967), 27.
52 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego: Harcourt, 1981), 131.
CHAPTER ONE: HOW ZOLA CROSSED (AND DIDN’T CROSS)

THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
1 For a useful summary of Zola’s visit (though one that, unaccountably, lists
Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle as present at the Authors’ Club dinner!),
see Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996),
664–8.
2 Walter Besant, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Hardy, “Candour in English
Fiction” (1890), rept. in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de
Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 111.
3 “M. Zola at the Authors’ Club,” Times 29 September 1893, 8.
4 Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer, 336–7.
5 Quoted in Joseph Bristow, “Homosexual Writing on Trial: From Fanny Hill to
Gay News,” in Hugh Stevens, ed., Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian
Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23.
6 Times, 1 November 1888, 13 (“Central Criminal Court, Oct. 31”).
7 Ernest Vizetelly claims that only 40 out of 6–700 MPs were actually present
for the debate (263).
8 See the transcript of the speech, reprinted in Pernicious Literature: Debate in
the House of Commons. Trial and Conviction for Sale of Zola’s Novels, with
Opinions of the Press (London: National Vigilance Association, 1889), 5. As
Ernest Vizetelly concedes, his father’s figures were “injudiciously worded,”
since the total sales amounted on average to less than 3,000 copies each per
year for the 18 Zola titles sold by Vizetelly (256).
9 Press editorials are all cited from the National Vigilance Association’s Pernicious
Literature pamphlet.
10 See the account of the trial in the Times, 1 November 1888, 13.
11 The text of this open letter is included in Ernest Vizetelly’s Emile Zola, 271–3.
12 James to Aldrich, 13 February 1884, cited in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle
Years, 1882–1895 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), 101. James’ contribution to
the “Art of Fiction” debate the same year also indicates a growing distance
from Zola in particular, including familiar criticisms of the author’s pessimism
and lack of taste. See James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), in Literary Criticism:
Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New
York: Library of America, 1984), 1: 44–65.
13 Émile Zola, “The Experimental Novel” (1890), rept. in The Experimental Novel
and Other Essays, trans. Belle M. Sherman (New York: Cassell, 1893), 48.
14 Symons, “A Note on Zola’s Method” (1893), rept. in Studies in Prose and Verse
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), 153.
15 See Edel, Henry James, 101–3.
16 Symons, “A Note on George Meredith,” rept. in Studies in Prose and Verse,
149.
17 Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919),
70–71.
18 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 113; 143.
19 Zola, “A Letter to the Young People of France,” in The Experimental Novel and
Other Essays, 65–7.
20 Symons, for instance, calls it “no doubt the most characteristic of Zola’s novels.”
See “A Note on Zola’s Method,” 152.
21 Zola, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 220; French text from Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Bibliothêque
de la Pléiade, 1968), II: 583. Subsequent passages will be given with English
and French page references, referring to these editions.
22 See Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” 127.
23 William C. Frierson, “The English Controversy over Realism in Fiction,
1885–1895,” PMLA 43:2 (June 1928), 545. The collections to which he refers are
Wreckage (Crackanthorpe), Mlle. Miss (Harland), Keynotes (Egerton), Wreckers
and Methodists (Lowry), and Renunciations (Wedmore).
24 Symons, “George Moore,” from The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art
in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1977), 59. The “poisonous honey” line is an allusion to Tennyson’s “To
the Queen.”
25 In Ledger and Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle, 118. With Tess of the
D’Urbervilles to appear during the following year, Hardy would soon feel
this thunder firsthand, of course.
26 Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 3.
27 Symons, “A Note on Zola’s Method,” 153.
28 See James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers
of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2000), 102.
29 Edgar Jepson, Memories of a Victorian (London: Gollancz, 1933), 244–5.
30 See Ellis, “Zola: The Man and His Work,” The Savoy 1 (January 1896), 67–80.
31 Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons, 104.
32 Beckson, Arthur Symons, 128–9.
33 “Editorial Note,” The Savoy 1 (January 1896), 5.
34 Stetz and Lasner, The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibition (Cambridge:
Houghton Library, 1994), 13.
35 Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), rept. in
Dramatis Personae (New York: Bobbs-Merill, 1923), 98–9.
36 Symons, “Edmond and Jules De Goncourt,” in The Symbolist Movement in
Literature, 148.
37 “Realism and Decadence in French Fiction,” Quarterly Review (July 1890), 76.
38 Edmond and Jules De Goncourt, Preface to Germinie Lascerteux (1864), rept.
in George J. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1963), 118.
39 For a discussion of the design and ambitions of the project, see Alan P. John-
son, “Arthur Symons’ ‘Novel à la Goncourt,” Journal of Modern Literature 9
(1981–82), 50–64.
40 Arthur Symons, “Pages from the Life of Lucy Newcome,” Savoy 2 (April 1896):
147.
41 Arthur Symons, “The Childhood of Lucy Newcome,” in The Savoy: Nineties
Experiment, ed. Stanley Weintraub (University Park: Pennsylvania State
42 See Johnson, “Arthur Symons’ Novel,” 63–4.
43 The third installment, “The Life and Adventures of Lucy Newcome,” was first
published by Alan Johnson in ELT 28:4 (1985), 332–45.
44 James to Howells, 24 February 1884, cited in Edel, Henry James: The Middle
Years, 103.
45 Keating, The Haunted Study, 112–13.
46 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction” (1884), rept. in Literary Criticism: Essays on
Literature, American Writers, English Writers, 65.
47 James, “Emile Zola” (1903), rept. in Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other
European Writers, the Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of
America, 1984), 879.
48 Vernon Lee, “The Moral Teachings of Zola,” Contemporary Review 63 (1893),
198.
49 See, for instance, Susan Harrow’s Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects
of Representation (London: Legenda, 2010).
CHAPTER TWO: PORTRAITS AND ARTISTS: IMPRESSIONISM

AND NATURALISM
1 Henry James, “Emile Zola” (1903), Literary Criticism: French Writers, 896.
2 Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 248; 2.
3 Peter Gay, Art and Act: On Causes in History – Manet, Gropius, Mondrian
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 79.
4 Émile Zola, “Édouard Manet, Étude Biographique et Critique,” in Écrits sur
l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 159.
5 Lillian R. Furst, “Zola’s Art Criticism,” in Ulrich Finke, ed., French 19th
Century Painting and Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 170–71.
Zola’s formula concerning nature and “temperament” is from his review of the
1866 Salon.
6 Zola, “Édouard Manet,” 161. One measure of the difficulty might be the
existence of a bizarre theory, reported by Furst, that Zola’s initial enthusiasm
for the Impressionists might be attributed to a myopic astigmatism. Apparently,
he could see better by the 1890s, an improvement that “coincide[d] with his
increasing dissatisfaction with the blurred effect of Impressionist style”! See
Furst, 173–4, citing a theory first proposed in the 1950s by Jean Adhémar.
7 Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 151.
8 See F. W. J. Hemmings, “Zola, Manet, and the Impressionists (1875–80),”
PMLA 73:4 (September 1958), 407–17.
9 Hemmings, “Zola, Manet, and the Impressionists,” 416.
10 Zola, “Le Salon de 1876,” Écrits sur l’art, 349.
11 See Lethbridge, “Zola and Contemporary Painting,” in Brian Nelson, ed.,
Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 76.
12 Jensen, Marketing Modernism, 101.
13 Zola, “Le Salon de 1875,” Écrits sur l’art, 296.
14 See John A. Lambeth, “Zola Photographer,” in Jean-Max Guieu and Alison
Hilton, eds., Émile Zola and the Arts (Georgetown: Georgetown University
Press, 1988), 55.
15 Zola, The Experimental Novel, 47–8.
16 Zola, “Le Salon de 1875,” 295.
17 My reading here is indebted to T. J. Clark’s groundbreaking study of Manet
and modernity, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
18 Zola, The Experimental Novel, 8.
19 Zola, L’Assommoir, 76–8; Les Rougon-Macquart volume 2, 444–6.
20 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 41; 54.
21 In Lily’s picture, there is a “triangular purple shape” that is supposed to
represent Mrs. Ramsay and her son James, and yet, when asked by Mrs. Bankes
“for what reason she had introduced them,” Lily thinks, “Why indeed? – except
that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of
darkness.” Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 52.
22 Lethbridge, “Zola and Contemporary Painting,” 83.
23 For the reception of L’Œuvre among Parisian painters and writers, see Frederick
Brown, Zola: A Life, 560–66.
24 Zola, The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 29; Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1967),
4:33.
25 Jensen, Marketing Modernism, 151. Jensen’s Chapter 5 is devoted to a study of
“The Juste Milieu International.”
26 See Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 17. “The problem,” Clark suggests,
“is to rediscover the force of these terms – light, looking, strict adherence to
the facts of vision – since they have nowadays become anodyne,” in large part
because they have been addressed as purely formal categories with no relation
to the thematics of impressionism (16).
27 Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) remains a useful account
of these cultural tropes.
28 In “L’école française de peinture en 1878,” Zola wrote that “Les théories artis-
tiques de Gustave Moreau sont diamétralement opposées aux miennes” (Écrits sur
l’art, 390).
29 “If we follow determinist ideas to their logical conclusion,” Howard suggests,
“readers and critics may reasonably ask how anyone can get outside the fabric
of causality. Are the possibilities for self-awareness not themselves contin-
gent – surely all the characters of naturalism and indeed we ourselves must be
vulnerable to impersonal forces?” See Form and History in American Literary
Naturalism, 126; emphasis in original.
30 Moore, letter to Zola (February 1884), quoted in Adrian Frazier, George Moore,
1852–1933 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 104.
31 Moore, letters to Frans Netscher (March or April and August 1886), rept. in
J. G. Riewald, “From Naturalism to Lyrical Realism: Fourteen Unpublished
Letters from George Moore to Frans Netscher,” English Studies 58:2 (April
1977), 142; 145 (emphasis in original).
32 Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1972),
103.
33 See Moore, “My Impressions of Zola” (1894), rept. in Impressions and Opinions
(New York: Brentano’s, 1913), 66.
34 Moore, Hail and Farewell (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), 531.
35 For Moore’s unfolding response to L’Œuvre, see Frazier, 132–7.
36 Moore, Confessions, 110.
37 Moore, “My Impressions of Zola,” 70.
39 Moore wrote in the book’s original 1889 Preface that “I owe much of my mind
to Schopenhauer,” and added in 1904 that “My book was written before I
heard that splendid name, before Zarathoustra was written; and the doctrine,
though, hardly formulated, is in the ‘Confessions’ as Darwin is in Wallace”
(Confessions, 36; 41).
40 Elizabeth Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography
and Fiction (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 38.
41 Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self, 44.
42 In a slightly different reading of the complexities of Moore’s thought, Adam
Parkes attributes Moore’s advocacy of temperament to the influence of Walter
Pater. See Parkes, A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern
British and Irish Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49–54.
43 Frazier, George Moore, 166.
44 Moore, A Drama in Muslin: A Realistic Novel (London: Walter Scott, 1893),
196–7. Even the project’s origins, in “a couple of review articles” that in time
“will come out in book form” (148), recalls the genesis of Parnell and His
Island.
46 Moore, Hail and Farewell, 137. For a more positive rendering of the same
idea, written while he actually believed in it and thus free from retrospective
reworking, see Moore’s Preface to 1900’s The Bending of the Bough: “Art has
left France and Germany and Russia; it is still in Norway, and when it leaves
Norway it must find another small nation, one which has not yet achieved
its destiny . . . In the western hemisphere Ireland is the only place which seems
to fulfill these conditions, but Ireland, maybe, is still too poor to nourish an
art, for, although art shuns wealth, art needs some ease of life. But Ireland is
just beginning to find her way into subsistence; for the first time for centuries
starvation and oppression seem fading from her face. The language is reviving,
serious poetry is beginning again, and plays, written without desire of gain,
for love of art, are offered to the Irish rather than to the English public” (New
York: Tucker Publishing Co, 1900, 7–8).
47 Indeed, Adam Parkes has suggested that the position of the exile is what
connects Moore’s phases, as he continually shifted identities as a Francophile,
Anglophile, and Irish nationalist: “Driven by a virtually irresistible desire for
personal and artistic freedom, . . . ” Parkes suggests, “Moore always sought
somewhere new, a place hospitable to an exilic, eccentric state of mind” (A
Sense of Shock, 97).
48 Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), 293.
49 See Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self, 16.
50 Moore, Parnell and His Island (Dublin: UCD Press, 2004), 22.
52 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture
(London: Verso, 1995), 218.
53 In a 1921 Preface to The Lake, Moore would list it among his books that “if
they are ever to be reprinted again, should be issued as the works of a disciple –
Amico Moorini I put forward as a suggestion.” See Moore, The Lake (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980), xi.
CHAPTER THREE: A NATURALISM FOR IRELAND

1 Emer Nolan, Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James
Joyce (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 125; xvii–xviii.
2 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 147. The best Ireland can
offer, Eagleton insists, is Ulysses: “a masterpiece of ironic totalization” (150;
emphasis in original). In a similar vein, Joe Cleary argues that “far from being
vulnerable to Lukács’s critique, Ulysses seems all too cognizant of the sense of
lost totality that he diagnoses as the defining condition of modern fiction”
(Outrageous Fortune, 137).
3 Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 112.
4 Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge
5 W. B. Yeats, Collected Works, Volume 3 (Autobiographies), eds. William H.
O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 248.
6 Yeats, Autobiographies, 247.
7 Yeats, Memoirs, cited in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons, 125.
8 Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, xx.
9 Symons, Symbolist Movement, 3–5.
10 Yeats, Autobiographies, 219. Perhaps tellingly, this moment of witnessing the
first English performance of an Ibsen pay (A Doll’s House) in 1889 opens Yeats’
recollections of what he had come to see as “The Tragic Generation.”
11 Autobiographies, 322–4.
12 Moore, “A Plea for the Soul of the Irish People,” Nineteenth Century and After,
No. 288 (February 1901), 286.
13 Moore, “Salve,” Hail and Farewell, 293. He goes on to acknowledge the obvious
irony: “Now it was the other way round; I was angry with this little fellow
because he had no Irish” (293–4).
14 Moore, “Ave,” Hail and Farewell, 84.
15 Moore, “Vale,” Hail and Farewell, 543.
17 1887 advertisement for A Drama in Muslin from Court and Society Review, cited
in Joseph Hone, Life of George Moore (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 117;
Moore’s emphasis.
18 Moore, “Ave,” Hail and Farewell, 215–16.
19 “Ave,” Hail and Farewell, 186.
20 “Salve,” Hail and Farewell, 257; 269.
21 See Riewald, “From Naturalism to Lyrical Realism,” 137.
22 Moore would claim in “Some of Balzac’s Minor Pieces” (1889) that “every inci-
dent of the land war in Ireland” was anticipated by Balzac in his posthumous
1855 novel Les Paysans. See “Balzac,” rept. in Impressions and Opinions, 5. The
detective work of Brendan Fleming has detected the same sentiment in an
unsigned article, “Balzac and the Land League,” published in the Irish Free-
man’s Journal in March 1886; if Fleming’s attribution of the article to Moore is
correct, it would substantiate the argument that he was thinking about lessons
drawn from Balzac while writing A Drama in Muslin. See Fleming, “‘Balzac
and the Land League’: A ‘New’ Article by George Moore,” ELT 46:4 (2003),
356–9.
23 Moore, Drama in Muslin, 203–4.
24 Kiberd, Irish Classics, 288.
25 See Judith Mitchell, “A Drama in Muslin: George Moore’s Victorian Novel,”
ELT 25:4 (1982), 218–19.
26 Mitchell, 214; 219.
27 Kiberd, 299.
28 The novel goes on to insist (in a way that suggests Alice as a partial projection
of Moore himself ) that her strange typicality manifests itself as a capacity to
have “in an obscure and formless way, divined the doctrines of Eduard van
Hartman [sic],” the German philosopher of the Unconscious – and this at a
time when “the influence of the German pessimists had not penetrated into
England; [and] Schopenhauer was an unknown name” (228–9).
29 Joseph Hone’s Life of George Moore nicely indicates the national/ethnic ambiva-
lence underpinning the writing of the novel: Moore “began to take an interest
in the history of his family,” Hone argues, “because it seemed to him that this
history might account for Esther Waters. The Moores, he remembered, were
comparatively newcomers in Ireland, and it seemed to him that he might trace
his love of England to ‘atavism’ . . . All the same, he seems to have been con-
scious that he was not an Englishman for he spoke of the love of England that
he was ‘pouring into Esther Waters’ as ‘monstrous and preposterous’” (185–6).
30 Eagleton, Heathcliff, 221; Moore, Parnell and His Island, 28.
31 George Moore, Esther Waters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 172.
32 David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1990), 119. Baguley’s immediate point of contrast here
is with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a superficially similar “fallen woman”
novel that Moore used as an explicit foil for Esther Waters.
33 Eagleton, Heathcliff, 221. Cleary’s version of this idea is, if anything, more
explicit, that “In Moore’s best English fiction his main protagonists, Kate Ede
[from A Mummer’s Wife] or Esther Waters, are working class but, when dealing
with Ireland, Moore seems generally more comfortable with educated, upper-
class types . . . or with middle-class types such as priests and schoolteachers”
(Outrageous Fortune, 127).
34 Frazier, George Moore, 309.
35 Moore, “Literature and the Irish Language,” rept. in Lady Augusta Gregory,
ed., Ideas in Ireland (London: At the Unicorn, 1901), 48–9.
36 Pascale Casanova suggests that Moore’s point here was more widespread among
Irish nationalist thinkers at the time, describing how “The example of a small
European nation recently liberated from the colonial yoke imposed several
centuries earlier by the Danes that, through the efforts of a small band of
writers, had managed to create a new national language was immediately
adopted by Irish Catholic nationalists in their campaign to bring about the
renaissance of Gaelic and restrict literary production to plays and novels having
a national character.” See Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 248.
37 Moore, “A Plea for the Soul,” 287.
38 As was typical of Moore’s work, The Untilled Field underwent a persistent series
of revisions that would restructure the design and arc of the collection. For a
useful discussion of these changes, see Jane Roberts, “George Moore: A Wild
Goose’s Portrait of His Country,” Irish Universities Review 22:2 (Autumn–
Winter 1992), 305–18.
39 Moore, The Untilled Field (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), 387.
40 Moore, “Salve,” Hail and Farewell, 335–6.
41 It seems to me possible, in other words, that exchanges like those between
Father Macguire and Biddy M’Hale literally occur in two different languages,
with priestly English confronting native Gaelic. The history of the text, trans-
lated into and then back out of an Irish that Moore himself didn’t know,
makes this impossible to verify. We might, however, consider the testimony
of the key Revival figure Douglas Hyde, who told this illustrative story about
encountering an Anglophone boy in County Mayo in his famous 1892 lecture
on “The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland”: “At last I said to him, ‘Nach
labhrann tú Gaedheig?’ (i.e., ‘Don’t you speak Irish?’) and his answer was, ‘And
isn’t it Irish I’m spaking?’” See David Pierce, ed., Irish Writing in the Twentieth
Century: A Reader (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 12.
42 It is now generally agreed that V. N. Voloshinov, the author of Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language, was actually Bakhtin writing under a pseudonym.
43 See M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981), 292.
44 Neil R. Davidson, “Representations of ‘Irishness’ in The Untilled Field: Decon-
structing Ideological Ethnicity,” Textual Practice 12:2 (1998), 292.
45 Moore, Untilled Field, 158; 167; Tina O’Toole, The Irish New Woman
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 146.
46 This classic statement of this paradox is Clym Yeobright from Thomas Hardy’s
1878 novel The Return of the Native, a protagonist whose superior education
helps him both to escape from and to fetishize a life of rural poverty. In
Raymond Williams’ insightful analysis, “the separation of the returned native
is not only a separation from the standards of the educated and affluent
world ‘outside.’ It is also, to some degree inevitably, a separation from the
people who have not made his journey; or more often a separation which
can mask itself as a romantic attachment to a way of life in which the people
are merely instrumental.” See Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 203.
47 Useful summaries are provided by Patrick A. McCarthy, “The Moore–Joyce
Nexus: An Irish Literary Comedy,” in Janet Egleson Dunleavy, ed., George
Moore in Perspective (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), 99–116; Conor
Montague, “A Class Apart: The Baptism of Stephen Dedalus,” in Montague
and Adrian Frazier, eds., George Moore: Dublin, Paris, Hollywood (Dublin:
Irish Academic Press, 2012), 123–36; and Philip Raisor, “Grist for the Mill:
James Joyce and the Naturalists,” Contemporary Literature 15:4 (Autumn 1974),
457–73.
48 Moore, in a 1922 conversation with Barrett Clark, recorded in Richard Ell-
mann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 529; Joyce, letter
to Grant Richards (13 May 1906), in Ellmann, ed., Letters of James Joyce
(New York: Viking Press, 1966), 2:137.
49 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 92–3.
50 Raisor, “Grist for the Mill,” 460. As the survey of reviews contained in the first
volume of Robert H. Deming’s James Joyce: The Critical Heritage (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) makes clear, reviewers consistently compared
Dubliners with Moore and Gissing as well as the Zolaistes, and the same critical
framework was still in place for the initial assessments of Ulysses: “Mr. Joyce is
a modern Naturaliste,” Richard Aldington declared in 1921, while Holbrook
Jackson would remark the following year that “Compared with Joyce, Zola is
respectable and George Moore merely mincing” (187; 198).
51 Stephen Sicari, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), xiv.
52 Ellmann, James Joyce, 233, and “The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism,” Sewanee
Review 63 (Autumn 1955), 570.
53 Raisor, 457; 459.
54 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1993), 220.
55 Ellmann, “The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism,” 572.
56 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211; Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 41.
57 Joyce, letter to Richards (5 May 1906), in Ellmann, Letters of James Joyce 2:134.
58 Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1992), 107.
59 Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 133–4.
60 As Katherine Mullin first pointed out, Buenos Aires may have been read, in the
context of popular Irish anti-emigration fiction, as encoding a threat of sexual
enslavement. See Mullin, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina: ‘Eveline’ and the
Seduction of Emigrant Propaganda,” in Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes,
eds., Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
172–200.
61 Stephen has earlier been signalled as an imitator of Byron, writing “To E– C–”
as the title of his verse effort because “he had seen similar titles in the collected
poems of Lord Byron” (73).
62 See in particular Joseph Valente, “Thrilled by His Touch: The Aestheticizing of
Homosexual Panic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and Tim Dean,
“Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce’s Impersonalist Aesthetic,”
both collected in Valente, ed., Quare Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998), 47–75 and 241–72.
63 Dean, “Paring His Fingernails,” 247–8.
64 Sicari, Joyce’s Modernist Allegory, 35.
65 Gregory Dobbins, Lazy Idle Schemers: Irish Modernism and the Cultural Politics
of Idleness (Dublin: Field Day, 2010), 97.
66 Larbaud, “James Joyce” (April 1922), rept. in Deming, ed., James Joyce: The
Critical Heritage, 1: 255.
67 Ellmann, “The Limits of Joyce’s Naturalism,” 575.
68 Shane Leslie, review of Ulysses in Quarterly Review (1922), rept. in Deming, 1:
208.
69 Joyce, letter to Stanislaus Joyce (7 December 1906), in Letters 2:202. He
continues the letter with a characteristic put-down of Moore, asking “Who
called Moore the English Zola? I wonder: he must have had large powers of
comparison.”
71 William James, “The Stream of Thought,” in The Principles of Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890), 1: 275–6.
72 William James, “Stream of Thought,” 287; emphasis in original.
73 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” 58; emphasis in original.
74 Douglas Mao, Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development,
and Literature, 1860–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008),
124.
CHAPTER FOUR: PHOTO-SENSITIVITY: NATURALISM,

AESTHETICISM, AND THE NEW WOMAN NOVEL
1 Joyce, “Ibsen’s New Drama” (1900), rept. in Occasional, Critical, and Political
Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45–6.
2 See O’Toole, The Irish New Woman, for an extended discussion of the national
identities of Egerton and Grand.
3 Hugh E. M. Stutfiled, “Tommyrotics” (1895), rept. in Carolyn Christensen
Nelson, ed., A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s
(Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), 237. Stutfield expanded the claim two years
later in “The Psychology of Feminism,” in which Ibsen appears as “the founder
of the new so-called science of feminine psychology” (rept. in Nelson, 249).
4 Ibsen, speech to the Norwegian Association for the Cause of Women (1898),
cited in Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, 229–30.
5 For background on this earlier reading, see Sally Ledger, “Eleanor Marx and
Henrik Ibsen,” in John Stokes, ed., Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work,
Contacts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 53–4.
6 Edith Lees, “Olive Schreiner and Her Relation to the Woman Movement”
(1915), cited in Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminist Perfor-
mance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
147.
7 See Mona Caird, “Marriage” (August 1888), rept. in Nelson, A New Woman
Reader, 185–99; and Harry Quilter, ed., Is Marriage a Failure? (London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1888).
8 Robert Buchanan, “The Modern Drama and Its Minor Critics,” Contemporary
Review (December 1889), 908.
9 Ibsen, A Doll’s House, trans. William Archer, in Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003), 270.
10 Buchanan, “The Modern Drama,” 920. The play’s translator, William Archer,
would remark that exaggerated reactions like this one caused confusion among
audiences: “I have more than once been reproached,” he claimed, “by people
who had seen A Doll’s House at the Novelty, with having cut the speeches
which the first-night critics pronounced objectionable. It has cost me some
trouble to persuade them that not a word had been cut, and that the text they
found so innocent contained every word of the enormities denounced by the
critics.” Archer, “Ibsen and English Criticism,” Fortnightly Review (July 1889),
36.
11 Editorial Comment, Daily Telegraph (14 March 1891), rept. in Sally Ledger
and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.
1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128.
12 For a discussion of the cultural meanings of sexually transmitted diseases for
men and women in this period, see Elaine Showalter, “Syphilis, Sexuality, and
the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle,” in Lyn Pykett, ed., Reading Fin de Siècle
Fictions (London: Longman, 1996), 166–83.
13 See Keating, The Haunted Study, 126–7.
14 Zola, Nana, trans. Douglas Parmée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
364.
15 Eleanor Marx and Israel Zangwill, “A Doll’s House Repaired” (1891), accessed at
www.marxists.org/archive/eleanor-marx/1891/dolls-house-repaired.htm, May
2012. As Ledger elaborates, this was one among many parodies and rewritings
of the play, including Walter Besant’s “The Doll’s House – and After” (January
1890) and Shaw’s response the following month, “Still after the Doll’s House:
A Sequel to Mr. Besant’s Sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s Play.” See Ledger, “Eleanor
Marx and Henrik Ibsen,” 58–61.
16 Grand, letters from 1894 and 1897, respectively, cited in Ann Heilmann, New
Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), 56.
17 Grand, 1894 letter, cited in Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Mil-
itant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1998), 250.
18 George Egerton, “Now Spring Has Come,” in Keynotes (London: Elkin
Matthews and John Lane, 1893), 39; 62–3.
19 Arthur Symons, “George Moore,” from Memoirs of Arthur Symons, 59.
20 See Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 88.
21 Arthur Waugh, “Reticence in Literature,” 212.
22 George Egerton, “A Keynote to Keynotes,” cited in Sally Ledger, The New
Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), 187
23 Zola, “Le Salon de 1876,” Écrits sur l’art, 314. The term Zola uses here, “le
décalque,” signals an impersonation or mimicry of the subject that is devoid
of any interpretive or critical mediation.
24 Hugh E. M. Stutfield, “The Psychology of Women” (1897), rept. in Nelson,
A New Woman Reader, 243.
25 See James Ashcroft Noble, “The Fiction of Sexuality,” Contemporary Review 67
(1895), 493; and Stutfield, “Tommyrotics” (Nelson, 237) on the “erotomaniacs”
populating New Woman fiction.
26 Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the
New Woman Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), 40–41.
27 Waugh, “Reticence,” 216.
28 Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 36–7.
29 Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave Feminism
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 58.
30 See Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona
Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 50.
31 Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992), 3; 13.
32 June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, 38.
33 Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1982),
171. Reviewing the novel, H. G. Wells criticized this eugenic line of think-
ing, pointing out that its conclusions were not entirely supported by the
text: “the fact is that neither ignorance, wrong moral suggestions, nor par-
asites are inherited,” Wells asserted, when the reality was that “the Jago
people are racially indistinguishable from the people who send their chil-
dren to Oxford.” See “A Slum Novel,” Saturday Review (28 November 1896),
573.
34 Morrison, Child of the Jago, 202–3. Moments earlier, Dicky had been thinking
to himself that “It would be a comfortable thing for himself if he could die
quietly then and there” (201).
35 Cited in Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 166.
36 Zola, Experimental Novel, 26.
37 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 197.
38 Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant, 114.
39 Sarah Grand, The Beth Book (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 120.
40 Ardis, New Women, New Novels, 101.
41 See O’Toole, Irish New Woman, 96. For discussions of the uses and limi-
tations of “strategic essentialism,” see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subal-
tern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha and Spivak,
eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
3–32, and Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference
(New York: Routledge, 1989).
42 Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” (1894), rept. in Nelson, A
New Woman Reader, 142–3.
43 Henry Fox Talbot, “The Pencil of Nature” (1844), rept. in Mike Weaver, ed.,
Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993),
75. For further discussion of arguments concerning photography’s status as an
art form, see Jennifer Greene-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and
the Culture of Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), Chapter 2.
44 Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalisation: On the Rela-
tionship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
92.
45 See Stutfield, “The Psychology of Feminism,” in Nelson, A New Woman
Reader, 247.
46 Waugh, “Reticence in Literature,” 210.
47 Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fic-
tion in England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 61; Heilmann,
New Woman Strategies, 2.
48 See John Kucich, “Curious Dualities: The Heavenly Twins (1893) and Sarah
Grand’s Belated Modernist Aesthetics,” rept. in Barbara Leah Harman and
Susan Meyer, eds., The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of Under-
read Victorian Fiction (New York: Garland, 1996), 197.
49 For a reading of “The Tenor and the Boy” in relation to decadent writing of
the 1890s, see Tina O’Toole, “The New Woman and the Boy in Fin de Siècle
Irish Fiction,” in Ruth Connolly and Ann Coughlan, eds., New Voices in Irish
Criticism 5 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), 129–37.
50 See Mangum, 140–41, for an insightful analysis of this passage, and the ways
it resonated with Grand’s own reception of a novelist.
51 For useful discussions of the relationship between decadence and the New
Woman, including the tendencies of the popular press to conflate the two,
see Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s,” in
Pykett, ed., Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, 47–63; and Mangum, “Style Wars
of the 1890s: The New Woman and the Decadent,” in Nikki Lee Manos and
Meri-Jane Rochelson, eds., Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British
Fiction of the 1890s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 47–66.
52 See Emily Crawford, “Émile Zola,” Contemporary Review 55 (January 1889),
103–4.
53 Beatrix Potter, cited in David Trotter, English Novel in History, 116.
54 Heilmann, New Woman Fiction, 45. As Heilmann goes on to hypothesize,
“Perhaps she was constructed as the New Woman par excellence (just as today’s
French feminists have been adopted by the academic malestream) because her
tribute to the feminine mystique was easier to handle than the iconoclasm of
‘hard-liners’ like Sarah Grand or Mona Caird. At the end of the day, Egerton’s
sexual fantasies proved considerably less challenging than the feminists’ polit-
ical demands” (46).
55 Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 144.
56 William James, Principles of Psychology, 1: 247–8.
57 George Egerton, “A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ’93,” The Yellow
Book Volume 1 (April 1894), 190.
58 Kate Krueger Henderson, “Mobility and Modern Consciousness in George
Egerton’s and Charlotte Mews’s Yellow Book Stories,” ELT 54:2 (2011),
190.
59 Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993), 56.
60 James, Principles of Psychology, 1:247–8; 1:404. As Jonathan Crary has argued,
the problem of attention, and its capacity at any moment to turn into its
opposite, was a prominent one from the 1870s onwards and symptomatic of “a
generalized crisis in the status of the perceiving subject.” See Crary, “Unbinding
Vision: Manet and the Attentive Observer in the Late Nineteenth Century,”
in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 50.
61 See Higgins, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetics and Gender Politics
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), and Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin
De Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996).
62 Claude recognizes at one point that he is “forever finding fault with his
women” (i.e., those that he has been painting), but assumes it as a technical
question rather than an ethical one: “What was it he lacked, he wondered, to
make them really alive?” (“Que lui manquait-il donc, pour les créer vivantes?”)
Readers might well respond that a starting point might be to see women like
Christine as themselves “really alive” and not simply models for artworks.
Zola, The Masterpiece, 282; L’Œuvre, 245.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE VOICE OF WITLESSNESS: VIRGINIA

WOOLF AND THE POOR
1 Sally Ledger, The New Woman, 181; Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine, 195–6.
2 Jameson, The Modernist Papers, xviii.
3 Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), 98.
4 Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, 96–7.
5 Alison Light, Virginia Woolf and the Servants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008),
xix.
6 See Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way, 27.
7 Patrick Brantlinger, “‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’ versus War and Empire,”
in Carola M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson, eds., Seeing Double: Revisioning
Edwardian and Modernist Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 164.
For a comparable defense, see Marcus’ Introduction to Woolf, Three Guineas
(Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), xxv–lxxii.
8 Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” in John Higgins, ed., The Raymond
Williams Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), 235.
9 On the issue of Woolf as snob, see Sean Latham, Am I a Snob? Modernism and
the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), Chapters 3 and 4.
10 Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966),
2:106.
11 See Richard Cave, Afterword to George Moore, The Lake (Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe, 1980), 213.
12 Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalisation, 92.
13 Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobio-
graphical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976),
69–70.
14 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925), 17–28.
15 Woolf, To the Lighthouse (San Diego: Harcourt, 1927), 56.
16 Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary, 79.
17 Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays (New York: Harcourt
Brace and World) 1: 328.
18 See, for instance, J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 190.
19 Mary Childers, “Virginia Woolf on the Outside Looking Down: Reflections
on the Class of Women,” Modern Fiction Studies 38:1 (Spring 1992), 61–79.
20 Tamar Katz, Impressionist Subjects, 179–80.
21 June Howard, Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, 105.
22 Frank Norris, “‘Man Proposes’ – No. 1,” in Collected Writings (Garden City:
Doubleday Doran and Co., 1928), 10:56.
23 Norris, “‘Man Proposes’ – No. 2,” in Collected Writings 10:61–2. This is actually
the second of five numbered sketches deploying the same generic title.
24 Howard, Form and History, 89–90.
25 Stephen Crane, “An Experiment in Misery” and “An Experiment in Luxury,”
from The New York Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. R. W. Stallman and E. R.
Hagemann (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 33; 44.
26 Alan Trachtenberg, “Experiments in Another Country: Stephen Crane’s City
Sketches,” rept. in Eric Sunquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 150.
27 Trachtenberg, 153.
28 Woolf, “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild,” in Collected Essays
(New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1950), 4:136.
29 Woolf, “Middlebrow,” in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966),
2:196–7.
30 Another surprising assertion in the “Middlebrow” letter, seemingly driven
by this same logic of binary opposition, emerges in the following passage
on gender: “And then my thoughts, as Freud assures us thoughts will do,
rush . . . to sex, and I ask . . . what will become of us, men and women, if
Middlebrow has his way with us, and there is only a middle sex but no
husbands or wives?” (159). Coming from a principled advocate of androgyny,
this feels like mock horror – and yet, if it is, then it becomes hard to tell exactly
what (if anything) in the letter is meant to be taken seriously.
31 Among other places, Barthes develops this distinction between the readerly and
writerly in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1974).
32 Shakespeare is also the limit case for Leavis, who agrees with the sentiment
that the playwright was “not a high-brow” (a term he refers to as “an ominous
addition to the English language”). “True: there were no ‘high-brows’ in
Shakespeare’s time,” Leavis argues. “It was possible for Shakespeare to write
plays that were at once popular drama and poetry that could be appreciated
only by an educated minority.” See “Mass Civilization and Minority Culture”
(1930), in John Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader
(Harlow: Pearson, 1998), 17.
33 Woolf, “Street-Haunting: A London Adventure,” in Collected Essays 4:155–66.
34 Janet Wolff has written about the limits of women’s city-walking in “The
Invisible Flȃneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” rept. in Feminine
Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 34–50.
35 The locus classicus of this argument remains Georg Simmel’s “Metropolis and
Modern Life” (1903), rept. in David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds.,
Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997), 174–85.
36 Katz, Impressionist Subjects, 177.
37 Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1890), in Collected Works
of Oscar Wilde (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 1041.
38 See my Capital Offenses, Chapter 5. Wilde’s discussion of Zola appears in “The
Decay of Lying” (1891), Collected Works 925.
39 Woolf, “The Leaning Tower,” in The Moment, and Other Essays (New York:
Harcourt Brace and Co., 1948). 133–4.
40 Jane Marcus, Introduction to Three Guineas, liii–liv.
41 Howard, Form and History, 144–5.
AFTERWORD: NIETZSCHE CONTRA NATURALISM

(CONTRA NIETZSCHEANS)
1 Nordau, Decadence, 415.
2 See Ann Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144; Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the
Leeds Art Club, 1893–1923 (Aldershot: SCOLAR, 1990), 15.
3 Steele, “From Gentleman to Superman: Alfred Orage and Aristocratic Social-
ism,” in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase, eds., The Imagined Past:
History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989),
114.
4 Orage and Jackson, “The Future of the ‘New Age,’” The New Age 1:1 (20 May
1907), 8.
5 A. M. Ludovici, “Nietzsche and Art,” The New Age 9:19 (7 September 1911),
455.
6 Frank Swinnerton, “Modern Realism,” The New Age 6:22 (23 March 1910),
517.
7 Dr. Angelo S. Rappaport, “Ibsen, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard” (Part I), The
New Age 3:21 (19 September 1908), 408.
8 Keating, The Haunted Study, 124.
9 Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, 264; emphasis in original.
10 R. H. C. [Orage], “Readers and Writers,” The New Age 17:13 (29 July 1915),
309.
11 E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Signet, 1992), 36; 43.
12 See my The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (Athens: Ohio University Press,
2007), Chapter 2.
13 Keating, The Haunted Study, 319–20.
14 James Joyce, “A Painful Case,” in Dubliners, 108–9.
15 Antonio Gramsci, cited in Steele, “From Gentleman to Superman,” 123.
16 Steele, “From Gentleman to Superman,” 123. Orage’s admiration for the heroes
of Lytton and Disraeli was expressed in “Modern Novels,” The New Age
(29 December 1910), 204.
17 J. Benjamin Townsend, John Davidson: Poet of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale
18 See Townsend, 468–9, for Davidson’s difficult relations with British fellow
Nietzscheans; and 478–82 on his agreements with and differences from the
German philosopher.
19 See Townsend, 244–6 for Davidson’s attitude toward realism and naturalism.
20 John Davidson, “Ibsen’s Plays,” in Sentences and Paragraphs (London:
Lawrence and Bullen, 1893), 16.
21 John Davidson, “Thirty Bob a Week,” The Yellow Book, Volume II (July 1894),
99–102.
22 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 226.
23 John Sloan, John Davidson, First of the Moderns: A Literary Biography (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 113.
24 Raimund Schäffner, “‘Better to Reign in Hell . . . ’: Social Darwinism in John
Davidson’s Poetry,” Journal of European Studies 33:2 (2003), 123.
25 Schäffner, 122–3.
26 T. S. Eliot, Preface to John Davidson, A Selection of His Poems (London:
Hutchinson, 1961), ix.
27 Sloan, John Davidson, ix. Sloan cites the testimony of Eliot’s fellow student
Conrad Aiken that Davidson “satisfied the need of the young Harvard men
for the feeling of ‘a double life – bi-lingual, bi-focal.’”
Index
“A Doll’s House Revisited” (Marx and Zangwill), Brecht, Bertolt, 15

123 Bristow, Joseph, 30
Agamben, Giorgio, 115 Broadbent, Muriel, 3, 46
agency, 18, 47, 97, 103, 187 Browning, Oscar, 2
Aldrich, T. B., 33 Buchanan, Robert, 2, 121, 122
Allen, Grant, 2 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 185
American naturalism, 4, 9, 85, 163–69, 178 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 2
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 112 Buzard, James, 23–24, 79
Ardis, Ann, 127, 132, 180 Byron, George Gordon, 32, 112
Aristotle, 27, 112
Armstrong, Nancy, 12–13, 14, 21, 23, 95 Caillebotte, Gustave, 59, 68, 125
Arnold, Matthew, 175 Caird, Mona, 2, 121, 206
“Art of Fiction” debate, 28, 29, 48, 193 Carlyle, Thomas, 175
Auden, W. H., 177 Carolus Duran, Charles, 86
“Auden generation,” 176, 177, 178 Casanova, Pascale, 10, 200
Austen, Jane, 96 Castle, Gregory, 85
Authors’ Club, 1, 2, 3, 28, 31, 41, 43 Cave, Richard, 154, 164
autoethnography, 23, 24, 79, 82, 88, 94, 109, 111, Cézanne, Paul, 20, 25, 62, 67
118, 122, 124, 157 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 31, 33
Aveling, Edward, 120 Chesterton, G. K., 180
Childers, Mary, 162
Baguley, David, 97 Clark, T. J., 65
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 105 Cleary, Joe, 12, 84, 89, 99, 112, 116, 198, 200
Balzac, Honoré de, 13, 17, 67, 74, 91, 116, 117 Conrad, Joseph, 8, 25–27, 44, 61, 140
Barthes, Roland, 171 Count of Monte Cristo, The (Dumas), 114, 116,
Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 86 185
Baudelaire, Charles, 35, 69, 86 Courbet, Gustave, 67
Beckett, Samuel, 26 Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 1–2, 3, 8, 22, 41, 44
Beckson, Karl, 20, 44 Crane, Stephen, 8, 130, 157, 162, 163, 165–68, 176
Bennett, Arnold, 4, 8, 158, 180, 184 Crawford, Emily, 144
Bertz, Eduard, 1, 2
Besant, Walter, 2, 3, 28–29, 49, 204, See “Art of Daily Telegraph, 121
Fiction” debate Darwin, Charles, 186
Bloomsbury Group, 153, 158, 162, 175, 177 Daudet, Alphonse, 48, 128
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 32, 33 Davidson, John, 184, 185–89
Booth, Charles, 9 Davidson, Neil, 105
Bourdieu, Pierre, 60, 64 Dean, Tim, 113
Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlane, James, Debussy, Claude, 184
14 decadence, 7, 22, 35, 36, 42, 44, 46, 86, 87, 89,
Bradlaugh, Charles, 2 100, 128, 137, 140, 143, 144, 145, 180
Brantlinger, Patrick, 153 Defoe, Daniel, 32
211
212 Index
Degas, Edgar, 75 free indirect discourse, 94, 161
Delacroix, Eugène, 67 Freud, Sigmund, 173, 208
determinism, environmental, 4, 6, 9, 15, 17, Fried, Michael, 54, 55
18, 24, 71, 84, 112, 129, 157, 183, 186, 187, Frierson, William C., 41, 42, 43, 51
188 Fry, Roger, 25
determinism, hereditary, 17, 95–96, 121, 122, 123, Furst, Lillian, 54, 55, 58
129, 132
Dickens, Charles, 13, 17, 152, 173, 176 Gaelic language, 83, 87, 88, 100, 101, 104, 105,
diseases, hereditary, 121 106, 107, 200
diseases, sexually transmitted, 122, 123, 125, 127, Gaelic League, 101, 105
128, 129, 130, 135 Gagnier, Regenia, 140, 146, 154, 164
Disraeli, Benjamin, 12, 185 Galsworthy, John, 8, 9, 158, 184
Dobbins, Gregory, 115 Galton, Francis, 128
Dos Passos, John, 151 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 12
Dowling, Linda, 206 Gay, Peter, 54
Dowson, Ernest, 3, 44 Géricault, Théodore, 60
Dreiser, Theodore, 5 Gissing, George, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 43, 130
Dreyfus Affair, 53 Goncourt brothers, 34, 45, 46, 47, 48, 53, 75,
Dryden, John, 30, 32 86
Du Maurier, George, 2 Gosse, Edmund, 2, 3, 6–7
Dujardin, Ėdouard, 154 Gramsci, Antonio, 184
Grand, Sarah (Frances Bellenden Clarke
Eagleton, Terry, 83, 84, 91, 97, 99 McFall), 7, 24, 56, 118, 119, 120, 123, 127,
Egerton, George (Mary Chevelita Dunne 137, 138, 140–45, 149, 206
Bright), 21, 23, 24, 25, 41, 56, 108, 118, 119, and naturalism, 142, 143–44
120, 123, 130, 132, 137, 140, 141, 145–50, 151, Beth Book, The, 127, 132, 135, 137–38, 141,
153, 154, 189 143–44
Keynotes, 124, 129, 135, 138–40, 145–46, 149, Heavenly Twins, The, 122, 124, 125, 127, 128,
151, 154 129, 130–32, 135, 136, 141–43
“Keynote to Keynotes,” 125 Ideala, 127
“A Lost Masterpiece,” 147–48, 149, 180 “New Aspect of the Woman Question,”
Eliot, George, 13, 95 136
Eliot, T. S., 159, 189 Great International Exhibition, 137
Ellis, Havelock, 2, 44, 120 Gregory, Augusta, 87, 88, 100
Ellmann, Richard, 109, 110, 116 Griffith, Richard John, 91
essentialism, 132–35 Grubgeld, Elizabeth, 77, 78, 80
expressionism, 15, 182
Haggard, H. Rider, 2
“fallen woman,” 47, 97, 99 Hardy, Thomas, 2, 7, 8, 13, 28, 42, 95, 119, 200,
“Field, Michael” (Bradley and Cooper), 3 201
Fielding, Henry, 32 Harland, Henry, 41, 42, See Yellow Book
Finlay, Father Tom, 101, 105 Harris, Frank, 2
Flaubert, Gustave, 42, 43, 86, 115 Heilmann, Ann, 127, 140, 145
Fleissner, Jennifer, 19, 26, 191 Hemmings, F. W. J., 56
Ford, Ford Madox, 25 Henderson, Kate Krueger, 148
form/content, 5, 6, 10, 15, 20, 33, 36, 41, 43, 48, Higgins, Leslie, 149
54, 55, 66, 152 Hill, Christopher, 9–11, 12
formalism, 5, 25, 52, 54, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66, Home Rule (Ireland), 106, 148
138 Horne, Herbert, 3
Forster, E. M., 9, 177, 183, 184, 186, 188 Howard, June, 19, 23, 71, 129, 163, 165,
Fox Talbot, Henry, 137 178
Francophilia, 1, 7, 8, 14, 143 Howells, William Dean, 48
Francophobia, 7, 14, 17, 143 Hugo, Victor, 67
Frankfurt School, 172 Huxley, Thomas, 86
Frazier, Adrian, 75, 78, 79, 90, 100 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 53, 62, 70, 75
Index 213
Ibsen, Henrik, 14, 20, 21, 42, 86, 100, 109, 124, Lane, John, 124
127, 133, 145, 180, 182 Larbaud, Valery, 115
Doll’s House, A, 120–22, 135, 199 Lasner, Mark Samuels, 44
Ghosts, 121, 122, 123 Lawrence, D. H., 21, 22, 23, 25, 126, 151
idealism, 13–14, 15, 17, 123 Leavis, F. R., 171, 172, 176, 177, 208
Image, Selwyn, 3 Ledger, Sally, 151, 203
Impressionism, 7, 20, 25, 46, 52, 53, 54, 55–56, Lee, Vernon (Violet Paget), 41, 43, 51–52
57–58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 70, 73, Lees, Edith, 120
74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 85, 119, See literary Leninism, 176
impressionism Leslie, Shane, 116, 117
interior monologue, 18, 20, 107, 109, 146, 163 Lethbridge, Robert, 57, 62
Irish emigration, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107 Levy, Amy, 120
Irish Literary Revival, 80, 85, 105, 115 Lewis, Wyndham, 180, 182, 183
Irish Literary Theatre, 87, 100 Light, Alison, 152
Irish naturalism, 4, 12, 84–85, 89, 91, 107, 109 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 28
Irving, Henry, 2 literary impressionism, 9, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23,
24–26, 34, 44, 45–46, 55, 82, 85, 88, 109,
Jackson, Holbrook, 20, 35, 180, 201 110, 120, 140, 141, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154, 166,
James, Henry, 3, 8, 16, 17, 25, 28, 33, 34, 35, 41, 167, 168, See Impressionism
48–51, 52, 53, 117, 140, 144, See “Art of Lowry, H. D., 41
Fiction” debate Ludovici, Anthony, 181, 187
James, William, 117, 120, 147, 149 Lukács, Georg, 12, 16–19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 36,
Jameson, Fredric, 5, 15, 130, 152 38, 60, 84, 98, 115, 158, 178, 182
Jensen, Robert, 55, 58, 65
Jepson, Edgar, 43, 44 Mackenzie, Compton, 8
Jerome, Jerome K., 3 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35, 62, 81
Johnson, Alan, 47 Manet, Ėdouard, 20, 21, 25, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57–58,
Johnson, Lionel, 20, 21 59, 60, 62, 63, 65, 70, 74, 75, 77
Joyce, James, 5, 8, 9, 21, 23, 24, 47, 56, 84, 85, 88, Mangum, Teresa, 131, 142, 206
107, 108–18, 120, 126, 151, 152, 154, 184, 186, Mao, Douglas, 5, 117
188, 189 Marcus, Jane, 153, 177
criticism of, 109–10, 117, 152, 201 Marcus, Sharon, 14
on Ibsen, 108, 119, 133 Martyn, Edward, 87, 89, 90, 100, 101
on Moore, 108, 202 Marx, Eleanor, 120, 123
and naturalism, 108, 109–10, 111, 114, 116, 117 Mattos, A. Teixeira de, 44
and Zola, 108–09 Matz, Jesse, 25–26
Dubliners, 24, 102, 108, 110, 112, 115, 116, 159, Maugham, Somerset, 8
180, 184 Maupassant, Guy de, 75, 115
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 102, Meredith, George, 35, 95, 119
108, 109, 112–15, 116, 117, 185 Mitchell, Judith, 94, 95
Stephen Hero, 108, 110, 112 Moi, Toril, 14, 15
Ulysses, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 198 Monet, Claude, 56, 62, 74, 75, 184
Joyce, Stanislaus, 116 Moore, George, 2, 7, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 41, 56, 62,
71, 74–83, 84, 87–90, 109, 110, 111, 117, 118,
Kafka, Franz, 18, 19, 26 120, 123, 126, 141, 151, 154, 181, 185, 189
Katz, Tamar, 140, 162, 174 commitment to determinism, 77, 78, 83, 90,
Keating, Peter, 2, 3, 7–9, 11, 48, 50, 122, 182, 184 180, 185
Kiberd, Declan, 80, 94, 95 cosmopolitanism of, 80, 97
Kierkegaard, Søren, 182 on Joyce, 108
Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 185, 186 style of, 88, 94
Kucich, John, 141, 144 Confessions of a Young Man, 74, 75–76, 77–78,
80, 81, 87, 89
Laity, Cassandra, 149 Drama in Muslin, A, 79–80, 81, 82, 88, 89,
Lambeth, John, 58 90–97, 100, 104, 105, 107
Land League (Ireland), 75, 79, 91–92 Esther Waters, 88, 89, 90, 96–100, 103, 200
214 Index
Moore, George (cont.) Pissarro, Camille, 62, 75
Hail and Farewell, 74, 80, 101–02 Plarr, Victor, 44
Lake, The, 108, 198 Potter, Beatrix, 144
Mere Accident, A, 89 Pound, Ezra, 180
Modern Lover, A, 79 Pratt, Mary Louise, 23, 24
Mummer’s Wife, A, 22, 79, 89, 200 prostitution, 46, 47, 97, 98, 122, 130
Parnell and His Island, 79, 80, 81–83, 97, 168 protomodernism, 9, 140, 146
“Plea for the Soul of the Irish People, A,” 100 Proust, Marcel, 147
“Reminiscences of M. Zola,” 76–77 purity campaigns, 122, 129, 144
Untilled Field, The, 24, 85, 88, 96, 99–107, Pykett, Lyn, 126, 127, 151
108, 159
Moreau, Gustave, 70, 85 Rabelais, Francois, 33
Moretti, Franco, 10 Radford, Dolly, 120
Morice, Charles, 25 Raisor, Philip, 109, 201
Morris, May, 120 Rappaport, Angelo S., 182
Morrison, Arthur, 8, 9, 11, 129, 130, 186 realism, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12–13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21,
“Mrs. Grundy,” 28, 49, 50 22, 44, 45, 52, 84, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98,
99, 140, 141, 158, 181, 182, 185
National Vigilance Association, 32 Richardson, Dorothy, 21, 151
naturalism Romanticism, 10, 16, 44, 55, 62, 67, 69, 72, 73,
and determinism, 23, 71, 79, 97, 107, 108, 122, 78
129, 146, 183 Rothenstein, Will, 3
and typology, 47 Rowntree, Seebohm, 9
as anti-style, 15, 20, 168 Rubens, Peter Paul, 60
as style, 9, 36, 85, 168 Ruskin, John, 184
ethics of, 24, 71, 157, 168, 170, 179, 189 Russell, George (“Æ”), 88, 101
introjected, 21, 22, 108, 120, 151
reflexivity of, 6, 9, 54, 74, 107, 179 Sand, George, 13, 128
ventriloquism in, 23, 93, 166, 186 Savoy, The, 44, 46, 47, See Symons, Arthur
Netscher, Frans, 74, 75, 87, 90 Schäffner, Raimund, 188
New Age, The, 180–83, 184, 185 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 77, 78, 79, 89, 121, 199
“New Woman, The,” 11, 22, 96, 120, 137, 148 Schor, Naomi, 13, 14
New Woman writers, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–28, Schreiner, Olive, 2, 120
136, 137, 140, 141, 151 Scott, Clement, 121, 122
and naturalism, 123, 125, 126, 132, 136 selection, as literary technique, 6, 17, 19, 21, 33,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77, 111, 133, 134, 145, 147, 40, 43, 45, 49, 50, 51, 52, 75, 117, 137
180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 188 Seurat, Georges, 25
Nietzscheans, 111, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188 Shakespeare, William, 31, 32, 74, 121, 171,
Noble, James Ashcroft, 126 172
Nolan, Emer, 84, 95 Shaw, George Bernard, 20, 120, 180, 204
Nordau, Max, 148, 149, 180 Sicari, Stephen, 109, 113, 114
Norris, Frank, 157, 162, 163–65, 166, 168, 176 Sloan, John, 188, 189
slum fiction, 4, 8, 9, 11, 186
O’Connell, Daniel, 94 Smithers, Leonard, 43, 44
Odyssey, The (Homer), 116 Social Darwinism, 83, 128, 135, 186, 188
Olson, Liesl, 111, 157 socialism, 111, 120, 123, 129, 175, 177, 181,
Orage, Alfred, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185 185
O’Toole, Tina, 107, 134, 206 Spencer, Herbert, 128, 135
Ovid, 30 Spender, Stephen, 177
Spinoza, Baruch, 121
Pater, Walter, 5, 100, 197 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 134
photography, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 58, 59, 60, 68, Stead, W. T., 31
136–37, 139, 140, 181 Steele, Tom, 180, 182, 185
Pinero, A. W., 2 Stein, Gertrude, 151
Index 215
Stephen, Leslie, 2 Wedmore, Frederic, 41, 44
Stetz, Margaret, 44 Wells, H. G., 8, 9, 158, 177, 184, 205
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8, 28 West, Rebecca, 151
Strauss, Richard, 159 Whistler, James McNeill, 52, 75
stream of consciousness, 20, 23, 25, 108, 109, 117, Wilde, Oscar, 5, 32, 35, 81, 175–76, 188
147, 151, 153, 154, 156 Williams, Raymond, 14–15, 153, 175, 186, 201
Strindberg, August, 124, 133, 134, 145 Women’s Co-operative Guild, 27, 169, 171, 175
Stutfield, Hugh, 125–26, 140, 149 Woolf, Leonard, 27, 153
Swift, Jonathan, 32 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 8, 21, 25, 27, 46, 47, 109, 140,
Swinnerton, Frank, 181 147, 151–53, 175, 188
symbolists, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 19, 25, 33, 35, 36, 40, and Dickens, 173, 174
44, 45, 52, 62, 63, 85, 86, 87, 88, 109, 128, and ethics of representation, 152, 163, 168–75,
182 176, 178
Symonds, John Addington, 2 and naturalism, 163, 172, 173
Symons, Arthur, 2, 3, 8, 15, 20, 21, 34, 35–36, 38, and snobbery, 152, 153, 170
40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 56, 86, 124, and sympathy, 169, 170, 173
182, See Savoy, The and the poor, 21, 27, 152, 157, 162, 163, 164,
“Decadent Movement in Literature,” 45 169–70, 173, 174, 178
“Lucy Newcome” stories, 46–48 vagrants in, 158–60
“Note on Zola’s Method, A,” 42–43, 45 “Leaning Tower, The,” 27, 176–78
Symbolist Movement in Literature, 35, 36, 42, “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild,”
45, 85–86 169–70
synesthesia, 35, 52, 60, 66 “Middlebrow,” 170–72, 176, 178
Synge, John Millington, 88 “Modern Fiction,” 153, 176
“Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 158, 174, 176
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 112, 194 Mrs. Dalloway, 154, 155–56, 158–60, 161, 162,
Times, The, 2, 30, 32 172, 175
Titian, 60 “Sketch of the Past, A,” 154, 157
Tolstoy, Leo, 17, 20 “Street-Haunting,” 173–74
totalization, 16, 51, 82, 84, 92, 110 “Three Pictures,” 27
Trachtenberg, Alan, 165, 168 To the Lighthouse, 27, 61, 154, 156–57, 159,
Traill, H. D., 8 160–61, 172
Trollope, Anthony, 95
Trotter, David, 7 Yeats, W. B., 85–87, 88, 92, 100, 182
Turgenev, Ivan, 35 Yellow Book, The, 1, 22, 42, 44, 108, 124, 147,
Tyndall, John, 86 185
typology, 18, 96, 98, 146, 158, 159, 178
Zangwill, Israel, 123
Van Gogh, Vincent, 25 Zola, Emile, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 16–17, 19, 20,
Verlaine, Paul, 3, 35, 42, 81 21, 22, 28, 29–31, 32, 33, 35, 44, 45, 46, 48,
Victorian novel, 4, 12, 13, 23, 95, 177, 178 56, 59, 74, 75, 77, 79, 82, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90,
Vizetelly, Ernest, 29, 31 97, 107, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128,
Vizetelly, Henry, 1, 29, 30, 31, 32, 43, 44, See 138, 143, 144, 151, 167, 176, 180, 181, 182, 189
Vizetelly trials art criticism, 25, 52, 53–56, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65,
Vizetelly trials, 1, 2, 4, 28, 29–33, 43, 121, 128, 142, 66, 70, 74, 119
144 critical response to, 1, 4, 5, 8, 14, 17, 21, 29,
Voloshinov, V. N., 105, See Bakhtin, Mikhail 41–43, 45, 48–52, 53, 75–78, 85, 117, 124, 125,
126, 142, 144
Wagner, Richard, 184 metaphor in, 6, 36–40, 51, 52, 61, 125
Wake Cook, Ebenezer, 181 method in, 16, 34, 51
Walkowitz, Rebecca, 5 morality of, 2, 30, 31
Ward, Mary Augusta, 12 on Romanticism, 36
Waugh, Arthur, 1, 22–23, 108, 124–25, 127, 140, style of, 5, 33–34, 35–50, 51–52
149 translations of, 30, 43–44, 121
216 Index
Zola, Emile (cont.) La Terre, 30, 32, 33, 44
Au Bonheur des Dames, 144 “Letter to the Young People of France,”
Experimental Novel, The, 33–34, 36, 54, 58, 59, 36
60, 67, 78, 125, 130, 163 Nana, 32, 123, 128
L’Assommoir, 27, 36–40, 44, 60–61, 71, 74, 130 Pot-Bouille, 30
L’Œuvre, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 62–74, 75, 78, Thérèse Raquin, 144
80, 83, 107, 145, 146, 150, 168 Zwerdling, Alex, 152, 155, 158, 161, 172

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MODERNISM AND NATURALISM IN B RIT IS H

AND I RISH FICTION, 1 8 8 0 –1 9 3 0

This book argues that the history of literary modernism is inextrica-

simon joyce is the Margaret Hamilton Professor of English at the

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

Acknowledgments page vii

Introduction: A modernism on all fours 1

I’ve come, perhaps unfairly, to think of this book as a darker counterpart

Discussions of naturalism in Britain frequently take their bearings from

Naturalism in the global literary market

The question of style: Naturalism/impressionism

the nineteenth-century novel anticipates modern fieldworking ethnog-

What I take this to designate is a carefully poised balance between a position

How Zola crossed (and didn’t cross)

When Zola addressed the Authors’ Club in London in September 1893, it

that I am aware what I ought to think of my conquest? In the midst of all

We might wonder about the force of a counterargument that relies so

Naturalism and metaphor

By the end of a novel that traces Gervaise’s sequential succumbing to

Strange signs in the literary zodiac: Symons and Zola

It would be hard to find a description of a novelistic practice that sounds

Unlikely defenders: Henry James and Vernon Lee

art means rose-coloured window-panes, and selection means picking a bou-

Portraits and artists

While not an exact transcription of Manet’s, enough details make Claude’s

We’re resentful because, in a matter of a hundred years, science hasn’t given

While Sandoz/Zola finds immediate comfort in the idea of transition,

(Self)-portraits of the artists as naturalists

Landlord M – From County Mayo

If this sounds like a lukewarm affirmation, couched in negatives, we will

A naturalism for Ireland

(Irish) determinism and (English) agency

The Untilled Field

Joycean naturalism: A style of scrupulous meanness

(Anti-)naturalism and the New Woman

Determinism and essentialism

Evidently, her early training in scientific investigation had in fact been

Contrastingly, figures such as Angelica or the protagonist of The Beth

“A strong developing fluid upon a highly sensitized plate”

Sarah Grand and the politics of reception

The voice of witlessness

From the foregoing analysis of Egerton’s fiction, and in particular her

Mrs. McNab and the rusty pump

The passage is a fascinating conjoining of the certainty of knowable detail

Misery or luxury: The metafictions of Norris and Crane

Writerly ethics and social observation

Representation and agitation

In Max Nordau’s encyclopedic (or, some said, pathological) cataloging of

These claims to social superiority in time swell to absurd proportions,

INTRODUCTION: A MODERNISM ON ALL FOURS

CHAPTER ONE: HOW ZOLA CROSSED (AND DIDN’T CROSS)

CHAPTER TWO: PORTRAITS AND ARTISTS: IMPRESSIONISM

CHAPTER THREE: A NATURALISM FOR IRELAND

CHAPTER FOUR: PHOTO-SENSITIVITY: NATURALISM,

CHAPTER FIVE: THE VOICE OF WITLESSNESS: VIRGINIA

AFTERWORD: NIETZSCHE CONTRA NATURALISM

“A Doll’s House Revisited” (Marx and Zangwill), Brecht, Bertolt, 15

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