741

instructing her lawyers “to surrender the title of the property to her stepson, thus in
effect admitting her guilt” (103, 176). Even Edward Casaubon, writing a “codicil” with
his “dead hand,” suggests the fictional and non-fictional power of law (304). Casaubon
has at last, as Blakey Vermeule notes, managed to write something, and though he may
not have gotten the results he wanted (Dorothea Brooke marries Will Ladislaw in defi-
ance of his will), he has (like any good lawyer) done something with his words. We may
not want, as this volume beseeches us, to hand a copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) to
every law student in America (or even to every sexual harassment committee), but the
Victorian novel is more than just fun in a package (135). It can be a way of interrogating
the ways fictions bind, the way language slips and slides, and the way law, like any form
of writing, can also set us free.
Hilary M. Schor
University of Southern California

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.58.4.15

The Victorian Novel and Masculinity,  edited by Phillip Mallett; pp. xv + 217.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, £58.00, £55.00 paper, $95.00,
$90.00 paper.

George W. Joy’s painting of “General Gordon’s Last Stand” (1893) is a surprising cover
choice for a collection in which nursing and trembling masculinities feature much
more prominently than stoic or belligerent varieties. These essays as a whole continue
an overdue and necessary reassessment of Victorian masculinity, developing a revi-
sionist line of work that undoes stubborn stereotypes of the emotionally buttoned up,
stiff-upper-lipped Victorian male. This recognition of a multiplicity of masculinities,
none of which are entirely secure and can only be made to appear so through effort-
ful performance, has gained pace since the field-changing interventions of John Tosh
and Herbert Sussman in particular, whose works are, rightly, referenced throughout.
The content of the collection invites us to look more closely at Joy’s representation of
Gordon and to recognize that among the racist and imperialist narrative of superior
British character is threaded also a potential counter-narrative of the fatal unsustain-
ability of empire and of imperial masculinity. It is notable that Gordon is depicted with
weapons unraised, calmly preparing to be killed rather than to kill.
Non-belligerent, nurturing masculinity is a touchstone of the collection, with
essays ranging across the Victorian period that show the persistence of ideals of the
tender, homemaking and nursing man through the era. Examples abound in Natalie
McKnight’s readings of Charles Dickens and Chris Louttit’s of Elizabeth Gaskell, and
recur later in the century in the preface’s discussion of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of
an African Farm (1883) and in Emma Sutton’s interpretation of Walter Pater. In this
context the editor’s own essay on the way in which adventure fiction deploys limited
models of masculinity, “the scout, the discoverer, the warrior” to “prepare the way for
imperial action” feels out of step, as ambivalence about appropriate masculinity—reg-
istered throughout the rest of the collection—is set aside in order to create a causal argu-
ment about the links between fiction and “imperial action” (153). I believe a wealth of

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counterevidence, including, perhaps, Joy’s depiction of Gordon and the other essays
here focused on the later century, could be advanced to complicate Phillip Mallett’s
conclusion that “by the end of the nineteenth century manliness had become an end in
itself, typified by an unfailing readiness to ‘come on’” (168).
Shelley Trower’s essay on the prevalence of the trembling male in George Eliot’s fic-
tion defines another pulsing thread of connection through the body of the collection,
with (un)sympathetic vibrations in and between men recurring in some less expected
places. In Jane Thomas’s reading of Thomas Hardy, Jude undergoes a “sort of shud-
dering,” Somerset’s moustache hides the “tremulous” “subtleties of his mouth” while
Knight, another vibrating man, misreads Elfride’s tremors with disastrous consequences
(143, 131, 126-27). Linda M. Shires’s intriguing discussion of Joseph Conrad reconsiders
the binding ties between self and other, as Smithean notions of sympathy are reworked
into a powerful admixture of feeling, including powerfully bad feeling.
The majority of essays in the collection offer valuable surveys of the existing crit-
ical field and new readings of the novels discussed, sometimes with reference to gen-
der theory, and with Judith Butler’s work on gender performance as, understandably,
a recurrent theoretical node. Most richly researched is Thomas’s (not coincidentally
much longer) essay, which places Hardy’s sense of self-division and creation of frac-
tured characters within a nineteenth-century psychological context. I particularly
enjoyed Thomas’s discussion of the first use of the term “liminality” within a psycho-
logical context in 1884, and her treatment of the early theorization of neurasthenia as
a “result of the strains and stresses of modern living on men,” produced by new tech-
nologies and gender relations, including (as diagnosed by George Beard) “steam power,
the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences and the mental activity of women” (117).
I would have liked to see more of this richly historicized approach in other essays, but
the short length of most contributions does seem to have precluded this kind of inter-
disciplinary approach, which is usually a hallmark of Victorian studies.
I was also hoping for a more sustained interrogation of the connections between
novel forms and the negotiation of gender. The promise in this direction is signaled
by Mallett’s brilliant, condensed description in the preface, of Hardy’s Jude as “hero of
a Bildungsroman manqué. He acquires learning but to no avail; he marries twice, but
dies alone, and childless; and he ends still obscure, unable to prove his manhood either
by remaining within and serving his class, or rising out of it” (xi). This description of
Hardy’s novel resonates with recent work in queer theory, narratology, and affect stud-
ies that critiques the reproductive goals and narrative structure of capitalist and het-
erosexist societies, pointing out resistances to and miseries produced by limited stock
narratives of the good life (seen especially in the works of Sara Ahmed and Lauren
Berlant). The penultimate essay of the collection finally offers the arguments I had
anticipated about the ways in which, as Sutton puts it, “critiques and constructions of
gender were intrinsically related to debates about the novel itself” (185). Sutton’s essay
on the gendered significance of the aesthetic novel’s departures from realist form is a
vital contribution: “Marius’s resistance to the foundational elements—including char-
acterization, plot, dialogue, and prose style—of the realist novel is inextricable from its
resistance to constructions of normative middle-class masculinity” (176). Throughout
the collection I wanted to hear more about form, and form of publication. Seriality
and variations and revisions between different modes of publication are discussed in

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various contributions in passing, but more might have been said about the effects of
this on gender construction, and on readers’ apprehensions of character.
Taken together, this is an important collection that advances our understanding
of the plural and strenuously negotiated nature of masculinities within Victorian fic-
tion, even if it tells us less about the connections between form and gender. Let’s give the
last word to Dickens’s gentle hook-handed veteran seafarer Captain Cuttle (as quoted
by McKnight). Captain Cuttle sums up a debate central to this collection’s emphasis on
male nurture and sympathy, and their limits:

Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision, which is the
more beautiful evidence of the Almighty’s goodness—the delicate fingers that are
formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of touch, and made to minister to pain and
grief, or the rough hard Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and
softens in a moment (qtd. 55).

Holly Furneaux
Cardiff University

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.58.4.16

George Moore: Influence and Collaboration,  edited by Ann Heilmann and Mark
Llewellyn; pp. vii + 302. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2014, $90.00, $44.99
paper.

Irish author George Moore has always been a difficult writer to classify. In the late
nineteenth century and early twentieth century, he, at various times, associated with
nearly half a dozen literary movements, including decadence, aestheticism, natural-
ism, the Irish literary revival, and modernism. He would passionately embrace a new
current before eventually souring and moving to another. Likewise, Moore freely
shifted between the genres of autobiography, criticism, drama, fiction, and poetry,
sometimes combining two or more in the same work. In addition, he frequently revised
his works, making substantive changes to his texts (and in some cases titles), such as the
four editions of Esther Waters (1894). Moore’s changeable nature may have benefited his
creativity, but it has proved vexing to literary critics who (let’s be honest) prefer less mer-
curial authors, those who can be more confidently associated with a smaller number of
movements and forms. Thus, in any literary history of the turn of the century, Moore
generally rates discussion but usually as a secondary example. For instance, in most his-
tories of naturalism, Moore gets credit for pioneering the naturalist novel in England,
but George Gissing usually gets lauded for perfecting the form.
In the past twenty years or so, however, literary scholars have begun to reconsider
Moore on his own terms, and Ann Heilmann’s and Mark Llewellyn’s edited collection,
George Moore: Influence and Collaboration, joins a growing body of work on this hith-
erto slighted author. As the editors point out in their very good introduction, several
books dedicated to the author have appeared, such as the critical study George Moore
and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (1994) by Elizabeth Grubgeld
and the critical biography George Moore, 1852–1933 (2000) by Adrian Frazier (both also

SUMMER 2016
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Holly Furneaux (furneauxh@cardiff.ac.uk) is Professor in English at Cardiff Uni­

versity. She is the author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (2009). She is
also co-editor, with Sally Ledger, of Charles Dickens in Context (2011) and editor of John
Forster’s Life of Dickens: The Illustrated Edition (2011). Her latest book, Military Men of
Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War was published in spring 2016.

Paul Fyfe (paul.fyfe@ncsu.edu) is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina

State University. He has authored By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis
(2015) and co-authored Victoria’s Lost Pavilion: From Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics to
Digital Humanities (forthcoming 2016) in support of a project to virtually model Queen
Victoria’s summer house in Buckingham Palace G.ardens
(http://go.ncsu.edu/pavilion).

Beth Bevis Gallick (elbevis@indiana.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate and Associate Instruc­

tor in the English department at Indiana University, Bloomington. A former manag-
ing editor of Victorian Studies (2011–2013), she is currently completing her dissertation
on religious conviction and Victorian literary form, tentatively titled “The (Anti)social
Life of Conviction: Religion and the Limits of Expression in Victorian Literature.”

Jennifer Green-Lewis (jmgl@gwu.edu) is Associate Professor of English at The

George Washington University. Her latest book, Victorian Photography, Literature, and
the Inven­tion of Modern Memory: Already the Past, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury, 2017.

Dominic Janes (d.janes@keele.ac.uk) is Professor of Modern History at Keele Univer­

sity. He has recently published Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to
Derek Jarman (2015) and Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in
Britain (2015). His next book will be Oscar Wilde Prefigured: Queer Fashioning and British
Caricature, 1750–1900.

Suzanne Keen (skeen@wlu.edu) is Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English and Dean

at Washington and Lee University. Her recent book Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology,
Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (2014) was shortlisted for Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian
Gauss Award. Author of Empathy and the Novel (2007), Romances of the Archive in
Contemporary British Fiction (2001), Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes
and the Boundaries of Representation (1998), and Narrative Form (2003), she is also co-
editor of Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Kurt Koenigsberger (kmk25@case.edu) is Associate Professor of English and Direc­

tor of Graduate Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of The
Novel and the Menagerie: Totality, Englishness, and Empire (2007) and is currently at work
on a study of Edwardian literature and periodical culture.

Nancy LoPatin-Lummis (nlopatin@uwsp.edu) is Professor of History and Associate

Dean, University College at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point. She has
published Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (1999), edited
Public Life and Public Lives: Politics and Religion in Modern British History, Essays in
Honour of Richard W. Davis (2008), co-edited the Lives of Victorian Political Figures series
from Pickering and Chatto (2005–09), and published several journal articles on elec-
toral reform in the Victorian era.

VICTORIAN STUDIES / VOLUME 58, NO. 4

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