GISSING'S THE
UNCLASSED AND THE PERILS OF NATURALISM
by CONSTANCE D. HARSH
First published in ELH 59 (1992) 911-938. Published here by permission of the author and The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Although Mr. Gissing neither writes, nor professes to
write, virginibus puerisque,
yet to the thoughtful reader anxious to see life thoroughly,
and to see it whole, The Unclassed contains
nothing that will give offence, and much that will repay perusal. It would be
interesting to compare the treatment of a similar theme by any living French
author with Mr. Gissing's serious and sincere work which is absolutely free either from pruriency or prudery, being
in fact, and in the best sense, English.1
In its qualified approval
of expanded fictional subject-matter, this passage from a review of 1884 evokes
a range of issues that engaged English literature at the end of the nineteenth
century. To this reviewer, the need for a truthful account of life justified
the consideration of potentially distasteful topics. But the qualifications
implied by his negative praise and by the article's title of "A Novel for
Men" are even more revealing of the distinctive nature of English
literature in the fin de siecle. For this anonymous nationalist
takes pride in the observance of boundaries, whether those of morality or
gender or geography.
In many respects, the
late-Victorian period saw conventional categories challenged and redefined,
whether by the decline of the circulating libraries that had enforced literary
morality or by the expansion in women's roles that potentially threatened
masculine identity. 2
However, despite the significance of these changes, it is curious how fundamentally
conservative English fiction remained. For the English novel did not fully
embrace the literature that then seemed to pose the most radical challenge to
standards of acceptability: the Continental naturalism associated with Emile
Zola. 3 Those critics who
reviewed the work of Zola and his contemporaries at once acknowledged the
consistency of naturalism with the intellectual developments of the nineteenth
century, and vehemently reprehended its drift. In contrast, their assessments
of contemporary English productions, while often negative, were significantly
less rabid in denunciation, implicitly acknowledging that no one in
I would like to address
the limits of naturalist fiction in the English tradition by examining an early
work by George Gissing, who is some times classified as an English naturalist. The
Unclassed (1884; second edition 1895) offers an
especially valuable site in Gissing's fiction for the examination of these
limits: its focus on the condition of unclassment
anticipates the insights of later work such as The Odd Women or Born
in Exile, while its serious consideration of literary aestheticism and
naturalism situates it at the heart of the critical debates of its time. This
novel explores a world in which the conventional hierarchies of English society
and thought have proved inadequate, and yet in which the systems that replace
them cannot support a coherent narrative. Gissing's solution to his dilemma
exemplifies the contradictions English writers faced - he can reach a
conclusion only by returning to a discredited traditional scheme. The
naturalist impulse proves impossible to reconcile with English fictional exigencies.
My use of the term
naturalism must necessarily be somewhat loose. By it I do not mean any
formalized theoretical doctrine (which, as David Baguley
has shown, can be misleading as a guide to actual fictional practice). Instead
I mean an essentially deterministic literature that focuses on the impingement
of natural processes on human agency and consciousness. Clear-cut generic
definitions are notoriously difficult to make, and the literary tendencies of
the fin de siecle provide no exceptions. Suzanne Nalbantian, for instance, has remarked upon the close
connections between "decadence" and both aestheticism and naturalism.
6 For Gissing in The Unclassed,
an aesthetic fascination with the impulses of the moment becomes
intertwined with a naturalistic concern for the physical conditions of the
moment that help determine those impulses; the result is that naturalism and
aestheticism are often indistinguishable in the novel. Indeed, one of the chief
preoccupations of contemporary English literary criticism was a somewhat
differently articulated tension between a focus on natural processes and an art
that could rise above them. I will begin by examining the threat that literary
reviewers perceived in the naturalistic literature that arose at the end of the
century. Their concern generally centers on a fear of
disorder, but their complaints specifically engage a trio of often overlapping
issues: sensation, art, and gender. I will then move on to The Unclassed by way of "The Hope of Pessimism,"
an early essay in which Gissing critiques Positivism. We will see that even a
writer who explicitly rejected conventional categories of thought in his
non-fictional (and much of his fictional) work engages the same terms as his
contemporaries and falls back on the same set of solutions.
It is ironic to bring
Gissing to bear on these issues, for he is frequently chided for being out of
touch with his own age - wedded to the outdated form of the three-decker novel
and blinded by an anachronistic love for classical literature. Yet critics have
also disdained him for writing too close to his experience of the age, simply
documenting his own personality and endlessly writing about his own material
circumstances. 7
But the continued undervaluation of Gissing reveals nothing so much as the
inadequacy of our own generic categories, and our continued affinity for
outdated aesthetic standards. Our discomfort with a writer who ambiguously
signals his own allegiances leads us to dismiss his writing as simply
autobiographical - lacking an achieved objective stance. The easiest way to
deal with Gissing is to state blandly that he is an inartistic pessimist and
stop reading him. But to read Gissing and to begin to think about his work is
to enter an almost impossibly complex network of ideas, in which virtually all
subject positions and philosophies are undercut by competing positions and
philosophies. Gissing's able creation of sustained inconclusiveness may
occasionally produce narrative confusion, but it is not reducible to artistic
ineptitude. 8
In a still-valuable
article of 1928, William Frierson examined what he
called "The English Controversy over Realism in Fiction, 1885-1895."
9 Although concern for English literature
provided the motivation for this decade-long discussion, the real wellspring of
controversy was not any body of work being produced in
This book
was written and sent forth a long, long time ago. Judge of its antiquity from
the fact that the original publishers were afraid to think what they had done -
that editors, for the most part, were unwilling to have the book noticed in
their columns - and that the few readers into whose hands it fell . . . drew
aside to make known in whispers their condemnation or their praise.
The date was
1884 - a long time ago.11
However,
a second source of English objections to French naturalism had less to do with
a horror of unclean subject matter than dismay at the elimination of a
metaphysical grounding for human experience.12 This criticism did not vanish: the 1890s continued to see a vehement
rejection of the school of Zola, as well as concern over the direction of a
broader range of modern literature.
A number of critics who
reviewed naturalism objected most strongly to its perceived rejection of
idealism. In an article that tries to discredit Zola in part by attacking
experimental medicine's use of vivisection, W. S. Lilly usefully sums up the
threat of the new fiction:
the writings
of M. Zola and his school . . . are the most popular literary outcome of the
doctrine which denies the personality, liberty, and spirituality of man and the
objective foundation on which these rest, which empties him of the moral sense,
the feeling of the infinite, the aspiration towards the Absolute, which makes
of him nothing more than a sequence of action and reaction, and the first and
last word of which is sensism. 13
Lilly
was not alone in rejecting the new emphasis on physical sensations that marked
a variety of this period's literature. On the one hand William Barry in 1891
questioned Rider Haggard's focus on "Thrills of excitement.
. . , [which] may well blunt the literary sense while they shock and arouse the
nerves."14
Arthur Waugh, in an 1894 article, dwelt at length on this new emphasis,
although he identified its originator as Swinburne rather than the French (whom
he held responsible for a "strong, robust, and muscular" coarseness).15 Literature's focus on sensation presented certain problems, according
to these critics, for to focus on the sensory was to privilege the anarchic
moment at the expense of a more historical perspective that could reveal
systems of larger meaning. William Barry's wide-ranging 1890 review of
nineteenth-century French literature encapsulates this concern nicely:
Zola, following, as he
supposes, the prophets of evolution, can find no "species," no fixed
quantities whatever in the universe at large. It is to him a perpetual flux,
and the one way to render it is by the "photography of the moment."16
In 1881 Leslie Stephen
had connected a focus on thrills of excitement to an absence of moral. standards: "The literary equivalent of moral
degradation is blunted feeling; the loss of the delicate perception which
enables a man to distinguish between exalted passion and brutish appetite. . .
. This gives the true meaning, I think, of the modern complaints about what is
called sensationalism." 17
For the creature unable to reach beyond the impressions of the moment cannot
live in history; as Barry observes of the French naturalists, "they are
not controlled by that reason which discerns the laws of life, morality, and
the Divine Presence in the world. . . . The man they delineate is not a being
of large discourse looking before and after; he is la bete
humaine." 18
Unable
to escape the economy of the instant, according to critics, modern forms of
writing collapse all categories that ensure the orderly, meaningful conduct of
human life. Accordingly, Lilly associates
naturalist writing with the spread of democracy. 19 Barry, bringing together Zola and the "Art for Art" movement,
observes that the latter "has not 'learned to see the beautiful in due
order and succession'" - as part of a larger system rather than an end in
itself; the ultimate result, Barry concludes, is "the end of a
civilization." 20
Waugh brings the
argument about artistic anarchy to bear on a different order: in his view
modern literature at once polarizes and breaks down systems of gender. The
gendering of literary movements is not a new trope in the decade's discussion:
in attacking the perniciously restraining influence of the circulating
libraries, George Moore plays with the idea that Mr. Mudie
is indeed "an old woman," and exhorts his audience, "Let us
renounce the effort to reconcile those two irreconcilable things - art and young
girls. 21 But for Waugh
the whole territory of modern literature is awash in disordered gendering. Of
his two tests of good literature, the first (taste) is to be "regulated by
the normal taste of the hale and cultured man of its age." The second standard
(morality) can best be judged by readers who "are become men."
22 How disturbing then to find that modern
writers beginning with Swinburne have become effeminate in their pursuit of
sensations! "The man lives by ideas; the woman by sensations. . . . It is
unmanly, it is effeminate, it is inartistic to gloat
over pleasure, to revel in immoderation. to become
passion's slave." 23
Without mentioning names, Waugh separates the literary schools of Swinburne
and. Zola along gender lines:
The two developments of realism of
which we have been speaking seem to me to typify the two excesses into which
frankness is inclined to fall; on the one hand, the excess prompted by
effeminacy - that is to say, by the want of restraints which starts from
enervated sensation; and on the other, the excess which results from a certain
brutal virility, which proceeds from coarse familiarity with indulgence.
24
Bad as each of these is,
there is worse to come: "the latest development of literary frankness is,
I think, the most insidious and fraught with the greatest danger to art. A new
school has arisen which combines the characteristics of effeminacy and
brutality." 25 When
sex traits first unnaturally exaggerated, and then promiscuously combined,
there can be no morality in art. Without the order that conventional categories
provide - specifically, without the detached, cultured man of the world in
control at the top of a hierarchy - literature cannot survive: "that
mortal who would put on immortality must first assume that habit of reticence .
. . by which true greatness is best known. To endure restraint - that is
to be strong." 26
To achieve lasting value in art, these critics all proclaim, some mechanism of
control - over the masses, over knowledge, over the senses, over constructions
of gender - is necessary.
Waugh works out the
details of the connection made in the first Lilly quotation: we begin to see
how an emphasis on the sensations of the moment threatens the foundation of
nineteenth-century self and society. In a world that provides no opportunity
for the subject to rise above fleeting impressions, humans are at the mercy of
the forces that construct the internal and external environments. As Barry
asked rhetorically in 1890, "What freedom can there be in sensation?"
But if developments in
modern literature threatened the autonomous self and the realm of the ideal,
what they more immediately and practically threatened was the social status of
art itself. 29
Late-century critics lamented, even more than the loss of reticence and
religion, the loss of a quasi-sacramental status for the novelist. It is
suggestive to remember the gap in English letters that was left by the death of
George Eliot in 1880. As Elaine Showalter has recently explained, for
English writers of the fin de siecle, Eliot was a
precursor of imposing and even intimidating magnitude.
George Eliot, they clearly hoped that one of her moral
stature would emerge to guide English society - remember that for Arthur Waugh
"art and ethics must always be allied. 34 Lilly and Barry write even more explicitly of the properly didactic role
of literature:
"The man of letters
has a cure of souls," a great French writer has well said. This is
particularly true of those who work in that department of romantic fiction, the
influence of which in this age is so great and is ever increasing. It is their
vocation to refine, to elevate, to moralise."
35
Fiction has a
civilizing, spiritualizing influence for Lilly, while for Barry it has a
specifically Christian mission:
[It] will leave him [the
reader] with grander or deeper conceptions, with an enlarged view, if it cannot
bestow on him a creed.
We seem, here, to have
touched the quick of our subject, but only those who have seen into the
function and the power of literature will be inclined to take it as seriously
as we think they ought. . . . We are contending for an ether,
a pure transparency of perfect sky, to be spread over the Darwinian earth. It
is nothing less than asking, with due regard for modern discoveries but not for
merely wide-spread superstitions, that the ideal which is still revered by tens
of millions as the Christian ideal, as religion, may not be utterly forgotten
when we would lift our prose literature to the heights of sovereignty.36
What these critics
demand of literature is that it hold on to its social function as teacher, and
continue to try to hold together a social organism that had been challenged by
the advances of science. They seek, and fail to find in the modern fiction they
survey, art that will fulfill the function Matthew
Arnold and other nineteenth-century humanists imagined: the production of both
the "best self" and an effective bulwark against anarchy.
Significantly, this is the same cultural mission for art imagined by those who
designed the classical education George Gissing received in the 1870s.
37
George Gissing's
reaction to new developments in fiction was quite different from the
reviewers'. Unlike early critics of naturalism, Gissing had no trouble with the
notion of expanding the subject matter of English fiction. When George Moore
published his first blast against the circulating libraries in the Pall Mall
Gazette on 10 December 1884, Gissing reacted by writing a generally supportive
letter to the editor in response. In his 1882 essay on Positivism, unpublished
in his lifetime, his response to the threat of a rampant materialist ethic
initially takes a different form from that of reviewers. In "The Hope of
Pessimism" Gissing is reacting against Positivism rather than Zolaism, but his objection to the immorality produced by
the carpe diem mentality unwittingly fostered by the Religion of
Humanity is familiar. Gissing's rejoinder to this creed is that it fails to
provide the two necessities of religion (or philosophy, since for Gissing the
two terms are now interchangeable) 38 "A religion . . . must serve a twofold purpose; it must, on the one
hand, supply an explanation of being, on the other, present a guarantee for
human morality" (HP, 78). For literary critics, naturalist art failed in
its religious task by reducing being to the merely material, and promoted
immorality by its subject matter and focus on the moment. Similarly, for
Gissing, Positivism denies "the metaphysical tendencies of the human
mind" (HP, 82), and promotes the immorality of universal competition by
encouraging hedonism.
However, unlike Barry or
others, Gissing takes the obsolescence of a Christian world view for granted.
Man has progressed beyond it, and now is left with the awareness of his own
inevitable suffering and mortality: "Science comes with its doctrine of
determinism to realize the image of a relentless Fate, which brings into
existence but to torture and then destroy" (HP, 92). The consolation
Gissing offers, clearly mediated by his reading of Schopenhauer, is a kind of
fellow- feeling that could result from the universal recognition of human
vulnerability. The great human task, Gissing suggests, will be to facilitate
the gradual dying-out of the human race as painlessly as possible.
Gissing's acceptance of
determinism separates him from reviewers who sought a realm for the operation
of the transcendent human soul. But an odd foray by Gissing into a discussion
of art reveals the inexorable appeal of the more conventional argument. For,
although the hope of pessimism he has in mind involves resignation to the evil
of the world, his description of art offers another conceivable means of
consolation. The fellow-feeling he has extolled provides merely a way of
solacing those tortured beings who await the comfort of the grave. Salvation
itself lies in ascetic renunciation: "Man can only approach [good] in
proportion as he denies himself, un-wills the instinct of life" (HP, 92).
And the most complete method of achieving this seems to lie in art:
There is, in truth, only
one kind of worldly optimism which justifies itself in the light of reason, and that is the optimism of the artist. The artistic
mind, as Schopenhauer demonstrates, is das reine
Subject (sic) des Erkennens, the subject
contemplating the object without disturbing consciousness of self. In the mood
of artistic contemplation the will is destroyed, self is eliminated, the world
of phenomena resolves itself into pictures of absolute significance, and the
heart rejoices itself before images of pure beauty. Here, indeed, good does
prevail over evil. (HP, 95)
At this point an
inconsistency in Gissing's argument seems to appear: if we are left with a
framework within which the world is largely good, how accurate a representation
can it be? Moreover, although Gissing has been describing a state of individual
transcendence, the very next sentence takes us back into the social world - a
community of the past:
Herein is one
explanation of the optimism of the Hellenic religion: it was the faith of a
people of artists. The thought did not go behind phenomena and instinct
embraced the world in the artistic sense. The earth was the abode of loveliness
and delight; life was a hymn to the spirit of beauty; the state ensuing upon
death was a negation, a horrid absence of the active joy which possesses all
things under the sun. (HP, 95-96)
We find that Gissing
cannot completely abandon the notion of a socially salvific
role for art. Even in borrowing the Schopenhauerian
formulation of art, he alters his forebear's conception of the aesthetic state
so that it leads back into the world of sensation and sensual pleasure. For
Schopenhauer, the work of art is important precisely because it leads us beyond
the individual phenomena of the moment to an understanding of the transcendent:
it "raises us more readily than does reality to the apprehension of a
(Platonic) Idea. 39 Despite
his intellectual commitment to pessimism, Gissing ultimately embraces an
essentially Arnoldian view of art reconcilable with
the literary critics' hopes for literature.
When we turn to The Unclassed we find a work that explores both the terms
that concerned reviewers and the Schopenhauerian
pessimism that informs "The Hope of Pessimism." I would like to pay
particular attention to how Gissing's problematization
of sensation, gender, and art confounds the reviewers' propositions yet
ultimately remains constrained by their (and the culture's) hopes for art. By
working through this complicated network of ideas I hope to show Gissing's
disruption of the convenient categories that were the province of critics and,
at the same time, his inescapable allegiance to them in his novel's conclusion.
The text of The Unclassed presents some problems for the critic:
initially published in three volumes in 1884, the novel underwent significant
change prior to the publication of the second, one-volume edition in
In his "Preface to
the New Edition," Gissing offers a clarification of the meaning of his
title:
I should like to say
that by "unclassed" I meant, not, of
course, declasse, nor yet a condition
technically represented by the heroine. Male and female, all the prominent
persons of the story dwell in a limbo external to society. They refuse the
statistic badge - will not, like Bishop Blougram's
respectabilities, be "classed and done with." (v)
It is useful to remember
that one of the fears of the reviewers discussed above was that new approaches
would dissolve all hierarchies and classes. Here Gissing selects precisely the
subject of men and women who stand outside the old structuring principles.
However, for Gissing (at least at this point), this is a proudly chosen
position: characters "refuse the statistic badge." One is reminded of
Gissing's emphasis throughout his novels on the spirit of rebellion that
characterizes his heroes. And in "The Hope of Pessimism" he
associates this with the Schopenhauerian "metaphysische Bedurfnig (sic),
- that standing revolt of the intellect against its circumscribed conditions,
which has given birth to every form of supernatural religion, and has been
hitherto the prime motive of philosophical enquiry" (HP, 81). So for
Gissing, unlike the reviewers, being unclassed is an
expression of free will and an affinity for the metaphysical rather than a sign
of imprisonment in the world of phenomena.
Two examples from fairly
early in the novel suggest some of the implications of being outside society,
whether voluntarily or not. The experience of Osmond Waymark,
here and elsewhere, comes closest to replicating Gissing's explicitly expressed
opinions. After suffering for some time the indignities of tutoring in a boys'
school, Waymark dramatically resigns his position.
Although there are several reasons for his action, one is a desire "to
assert [his] freedom" (79). Despite his awareness that this freedom is
largely delusory, his lack of employment (and the presence of "six pounds
ten in his pocket" [79]) gives him a feeling of having transcended the
troubles of the everyday world. "His mood was still complete recklessness,
a revolt against the idea of responsibility, indifference to all beyond the
moment" (79)
Our friend walked on,
regarding all he passed with a good- humoured pity. In this madly ordered world
he had no place. He stood on one side, and looked at it all with unclouded
eyes. Yesterday he had himself borne the burden; to-morrow he would have to
resume it, most likely with added bitterness, if that were possible. In the
mean while his faculties called no man master; he had regained the dignity of
freedom. (1:228)
Yet an earlier episode
calls into question the cheerfulness with which Waymark
rejects a constraining educational institution. For The Unclassed
begins literally in class, with a fight between Harriet Smales
and Ida Starr in Miss Rutherford's school for girls. The following pages detail
the "unclassing" of Ida: her expulsion from
school and her subsequent fall into menial labor and
prostitution. Ida's alienation is an ambiguous operation. On the one hand Miss
Rutherford is not dispensing high culture to her pupils: she is "fairly
competent" (3), but no more. But to be part of an institution is to be
constructed as well as obstructed, both for students and teachers: Ida will
later praise her early education's role in creating self-consciousness (131).
So placement in an institutional framework is not a trivial matter, and there
is something appalling in the force of the conventions that compel Miss
Rutherford to dismiss Ida to preserve the school's reputation. Moreover, Waymark's arrogant assumption that he, unlike the
struggling workers around him, has escaped construction by virtue of a free choice, seems highly questionable. To be free of his job is
simply to be constructed more randomly by his chance encounters in the street.
This pair of examples
effectively introduces a dynamic that will continue to operate throughout The
Unclassed. Osmond Waymark's
consciousness dominates the novel, and his strongly expressed philosophy finds
repeated support in the narrator's explicit moralizing.
Yet events in the novel
relentlessly expose both the inadequacy of Waymark's
positions and his own inability to retain allegiance to any of them. Despite Waymark's undoubtedly central position in the narrative, it
is important to note that he does not appear until chapter 6. So, despite our
interest in Waymark's perception of reality, that
reality exists prior to his interpretation of it. This is true as well of his
relations with the two chief female characters, Maud and Ida. He interprets
them as the two sides of his ideal (92): the respectable middle-class woman and
the sensual woman of the people. But our prior knowledge of them, as well as
our occasional access to their consciousness, leaves us in no doubt that they
have a reality independent of and more complex than his construction of them.
In interpreting Waymark we must remember that we have
not actually witnessed the formative influences of his childhood, as we have
for all the other major characters. At first this may foster the illusion that
he is a free agent; eventually, however, it can only undercut his authority as
observer in a novel that scrupulously traces the determinants of every
character's personality. To lack grounding is somehow to lack reality, or, to
use one of the novel's terms, sincerity.
If the very title of the
novel introduces one of the contentious issues of nineteenth-century criticism,
Waymark's professional goals bespeak another. For he
is a budding artist: a struggling novelist with proclivities for an
aestheticism of the nether world. And, as with the issue of being classed, the
issue of art becomes more complicated the more we trace the network of its
determinants. Waymark sees his theory of art as an
evolutionary step beyond his former interest in social reform, which was the
product of his own material conditions: "I identified myself with the poor
and ignorant; I did not make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved
for freedom because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable
longing" (211). From that early position he has moved on to an ostensibly
superior sensibility, most clearly expressed in the much-cited scene in which
he lays out his artistic principles to Casti:
The fact is, the novel of every-day life is getting worn out. We must
dig deeper, get to untouched social strata. . . . Not virginibus
puerisque will be my book, I assure you,
but for men and women who like to look beneath the surface, and who understand
that only as artistic material has human life any significance. . . . The
artist is the only sane man. . . . Life as the source of splendid pictures,
inexhaustible material for effects - that can reconcile me to existence, and that only. (116-17)
This is a provocative
passage that should not simply be accepted as a straightforward statement of
Gissing's own creed, as some critics are tempted to do.45 Instead,
it offers several highly problematic suggestions about the nature of art. First
of all, like many writers at the end of the century, Waymark
is arguing for an expansion of literary subject-matter beyond the polite
conventions of the realist tradition. But, unlike George Moore or Emile Zola,
his aim is not to reveal truth, but to create new sensations for the jaded
public, now that the realist novel has ceased to astonish. Waymark
is being not merely unnaturalistic, but un-Schopenhauerian, for he is advocating an art that provides
a subject/reader with exquisite special effects, not one that elevates the
subject beyond individuality and will.
The narrative by no
means consistently endorses Waymark's position. Early
on we learn that as schoolmates Ida Starr and Maud Enderby
jointly tried to understand the latter's mysterious dreams, "for it was an
article of faith with both that there were meanings to be discovered,
and deep ones" (28). This creed might be dismissed as a childish belief if
we did not subsequently learn that Maud does have at least one vision
(of her mother's suicide) that comes true. Evidently there are meanings of
significance, and not mere sense impressions, contrary to what Waymark would say. Perhaps even more interesting is a
passage deleted in the 1895 edition that suggests a privileged reader undergo
the disheartening experience Ida Starr must suffer: 46
If you, dear madam, who
read this in the ease of assured leisure, should ever feel disposed to vary the
monotony of your life with a distinctly new sensation, permit me to suggest
that you should disguise yourself as a simple work-girl, and, supposing
yourself for the moment quite friendless and "character"-less, go
about from place to place begging for leave to toil. Of course there will be
lacking the real piquancy of despair, yet I doubt not a very tolerable misery
will be produced in the process. . . . A few hours of such experience will
suffice to you; Ida had to endure it day after day, till the days grew to
weeks. (2:261)
In this bitterly ironic
passage we find a rather different appropriation of the language of sensation.
The narrator is clearly contemptuous of one who would feed off the misery of
others by using lower-class life as a source of striking sensation - yet this
fashioning of life into startling scenes is the essence of Waymark's
aesthetic. Nevertheless, this passage represents a reformulation of that
aesthetic rather than a total rejection of it. The narrator is
suggesting that a lady of leisure sympathize with Ida by imaginatively putting
herself in her place; that is what the narrative is doing for the reader at
this point. Appeals to sensation have value in this context because they offer
the only means of bridging the gap between differently situated human beings
creating the sort of fellow-feeling advocated by "The Hope of
Pessimism." This passage s implicit argument discredits the oversimple characterization of sensation offered by both Waymark and the reviewers.
Waymark's creed holds yet another level of interest for our purposes by
connecting artistic theory to the problematic decentering
of the autonomous individual we began to see in Gissing s exploration of unclassment. Waymark endorses an
almost Paterian view of the purpose of art, but oddly
mixed with the gritty language of excavation. For Waymark
does not promise his audience beauty, but thrills: he is certainly not
"proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments
as they pass." But his creed does ally Waymark
with an emerging sensibility that Jonathan Freedman has linked to Pater's world
view: that of "the mobile, perceptually organized self of a consumer
society, a self that 'fines itself down' (to use Pater's terms) to a series of
sensual engagements with the world - the very process consumer culture depends
on and induces." Like the outcome reviewers feared from an emphasis on
momentary feelings, the implications of this fining-down are frightening:
"The reduction of all seemingly stable entities to an increasingly
unstable and wavering set of relations."
47 Rachel Bowlby
has usefully articulated Gissing's opposition to mass culture's transformation
of culture and gender. 48 Although consumer culture plays a relatively limited role in The Unclassed, its association with Waymark
offers a suggestive means of further undercutting his aesthetic position. For
we first meet Waymark, not (like the other
characters) in any stable relational setting, such as an educational
institution or a family unit, but as an advertisement:
"WANTED,
human companionship. A
young man of four-and-twenty wishes to find a congenial associate of about his
own age. He is a student of ancient and modern literatures, a
free-thinker in religion, a lover of art in all its forms, a hater of
conventionalism. Would like to correspond in the first
instance. Address 0. W., City News Rooms, W.C."
(39-40)
We therefore initially
see the hero of the novel as consumer goods. With such an advertisement Waymark at once reveals his marketable qualities, conceals
his unique identity (by controlling access to his person, name, and address),
and reduces himself to a commodity in the competitive economy that "The
Hope of Pessimism" so deplores.
49
A passage deleted in the
second edition elaborates the significance of this means of communication:
See here disclosed,
working without disguise, the central motor of our common life. . . . The
lecture platform resounds its praises in economic
eloquence, lauding the principle of universal Competition. Every-day
experience, and its concentrated index the advertisement column, put the matter
in plainer language, do not care to hide the fact of a brutal fight for
livelihood, and sum up in intelligible terms all the meanness, ruthlessness,
anguish, and degradation which such a system implies. (I:106-7)
Although the next
sentence emphasizes the "incongruity" of Waymark's
advertisement with this medium, the connection of protagonist to economy has
nonetheless been made.
Our subsequent
acquaintance with Waymark tends partially to support
his identification with a fiercely competitive and materialistic economy. The
friendship he establishes with Julian Casti as a
result of the advertisement is a largely positive relationship. Nevertheless,
there is more than a touch of pontificating patronage in Waymark's
behavior to his friend. The narrator observes that
"Waymark unconsciously displayed something of
that egoism which is inseparable from force of character" (52) in his
dealings with Julian. While Julian's happy acceptance of Waymark's
attitude does little to dramatize this less- than-damning criticism, we are
reminded that "The Hope of Pessimism" associated egotism with both a Schopenhauerian will to live and a desire for material
success in the competitive modern social order (HP, 90-91). More seriously, Waymark's cynical understanding of the determining power of
wealth is frequently indistinguishable from a crassly reductive point of view. 50 The clearest example of this comes
in his relations with Ida Starr. Recognizing her unusual qualities, treating
her socially as a respectable woman rather than a prostitute, Waymark nonetheless cannot escape seeing their relationship
in economic terms. During their visit to
"The end of your story should not be an unhappy
one, if I had the disposing of it. And I might have - but for one thing."
"What's that?" she asked, with sudden
interest.
"My miserable poverty. If I only had money - money" -
"Money!" she exclaimed, turning away almost
angrily. (143)
While Waymark is unconscious of giving offense, Ida immediately
recognizes that his remark indicates that at base he takes her at society's
valuation: as a sexual commodity. More generally, his observation provides
further evidence of his acceptance of the terms endorsed by competitive
capitalist society, and his genuine affinity for the world of the
advertisement. 51
Freedman's observations
about the similarities of Paterian aestheticism and
consumer culture usefully frame a feature of the delineation of Waymark that is crucial to our understanding of the novel.
Freedman remarks that the Paterian and consumer
economies "[work] to corrode any principle of stability whatsoever, both
within and without; both commodity and consumer are reduced to the state of
flux by the strategies of a commodity culture." 52 Waymark
represents the modern subject reduced to precisely this state of flux, unable
to maintain a consistent personality or philosophy in the face of the
instability of relations in his environment. One indication of the state of Waymark's consciousness is his inability to maintain the
consistent detachment his aesthetic philosophy mandates. The first edition
underscores this characteristic more than the second; for instance, Waymark tells himself that he views Ida's arrest as merely
"a situation," but the narrator adds the observation, "and, for
all that, his heart was beating violently" (2:277). However, it is not
simply that Waymark believes he is indifferent, and
that there is a secret reality in which he is not indifferent. Gissing provides
repeated examples of Waymark's coldness, as when he
recognizes immediately after his initial encounters with the two women that his
feeling of interest in them was "artificial" (93). In conversation
with Julian in the first edition, Waymark explicitly
links his state of mental flux to his poverty:
There is no such cant as
that which prates of the soul's independence of external things. Give me a
fortune to-morrow, and I shall be in scarcely one respect the man that I am
to-day. . . . Now I am a miserable shifting fellow, paltering with my own
conscience, and despising myself every other moment for the thought which came
the moment before. (2:234)
It might be even more
accurate to attribute his vagaries to the condition of being unclassed. The Unclassed presents
a society in which it is possible to be radically inconsistent as a character
because the determinants of human reactions can be so widely disparate. Waymark's philosophy of art has brought us back to the
consequences of living in a world without the hierarchies that could control
the influx of sensations.
The characterization of
Maud Enderby connects art to the third preoccupation
of literary critics - gender. By presenting the case of a young woman torn
between the attractions of art and of ascetic Christianity, Gissing can
interrogate both conventional gendered associations and one of the two
consolations he offered in "The Hope of Pessimism." Maud embodies a
challenge to Waymark's aesthetic and a problematization of any "religion of art." For
the key to Maud's nature is not that she is too conventional or too Christian,
but that "her soul in reality was that of an artist" (150). 53 We are given several indications
that her gift is genuine, perhaps more genuine than Waymark's
talent. When she tells him her life story, he is struck not only by her
"natural command of impressive language," but by a sincerity of
narration that he recognizes he would be unable to match (222). Gissing
legitimizes her aesthetic impulses in the first edition by drawing an analogy
between her response to the music of a distant organ and Wordsworth's to the
music of humanity in "Tintern Abbey"
(2:161-62). In this particular passage Maud uses the impressions of solitary
pleasure to reach beyond the momentary sensation to a realm of transcendent
meaning - that "something far more deeply interfused" to which Wordsworth refers in the lines
Gissing quotes. There is a sense here that Maud employs Waymark's
artistic principle of excavating the moment for the purposes of rising above
it.
However, Maud's
experience makes a mockery of Waymark's assertion
that "The artist is the only sane man" (117). Her sensibility is
repeatedly figured as a type of mental pathology: witnessing scenes of emotion
or beauty brings her to the verge of a swoon. In the first edition, the
excitement of being called home mysteriously by her aunt confines her to bed
for several days (2:132) - a reaction explicable in Schopenhauerian
terms.
Knowledge of the second
[will-less, artistic] kind . . . is an abnormal activity, unnatural to the
intellect; accordingly, it is conditioned by a decidedly abnormal and thus very
rare excess of intellect and of its objective phenomenon, the brain, over the
rest of the organism and beyond the measure required by the aims of the will.
Just because this excess of intellect is abnormal, the phenomena springing therefrom sometimes remind one of madness.54
Her violent reactions
are always conditioned by their relationship to some individual need of her
own. At one point we get some indication of the nature of her
"irrepressible delight and interest in the active life of the world":
The sight of a mother
fondling her child would often cause her to all but faint, a terrible tumult in
her blood blinded her, and made her stagger for a moment. It was the same when
one of Waymark's letters arrived. The touch of the
paper was like fire; it was minutes before she could distinguish the words when
she endeavoured to read. (2:13 1) 55
Maud for the most part
lacks the detachment Waymark advocates; even when she
approaches a level of perception detached from material reality she does not
achieve the state of joyful knowledge his theory would predict. Instead she
feels a "dark melancholy" at the sense that in becoming alienated
from the world of will she has entered into some "fantastic
unreality," a dream "out of which she would presently awake"
(215). For a time she achieves a sort of physical and spiritual equilibrium by
embracing Rossetti's art of beauty and romantic love: "Her spirit and
flesh became one and indivisible; the old antagonism seemed at an end for
ever" (217). However, Maud's experience demonstrates that she is
fundamentally a physical organism at the mercy of the physical world; art can effect only a temporary rapprochement between body and soul.
Maud's reliance on romantic love as a transcendent ground for her philosophy
undergoes a series of shocks. For the Religion of Art fails to still the
"tumult . . . in her blood" that compels her to visit Waymark's lower-class haunts (218-19). During this visit
she witnesses a vicious fight between mother and daughter that makes her faint,
not so much from shock at this barbarity as from the recognition of a
corresponding capacity for violence within herself.
The other two moments of horrified recognition similarly come as moments of
mother-daughter connection. In a very fine scene, Maud's frustration at Waymark's sexual unresponsiveness gives way to self-disgust
when she sees her mother kissing Mr. Rudge.
It was as though some
ghastly vision of the night had shaken her soul. The habit of her mind
overwhelmed her with the conviction that she knew at last the meaning of that
mystery of horror which had of late been strengthening its* hold upon her
imagination. ... Her eyes fell upon the pages she had written [her impassioned
love letter to Waymark]. These now came before her as
a proof of contagion which had seized upon her own nature. (266-67)
Since Maud inherits her
aesthetic nature from her mother, it is appropriate that an artistic
"vision" discloses to her the inexorability of that maternal legacy.
Maud's final moment of recognition comes in the fulfilment of a precognitive
vision: as she had foreseen, Mrs. Enderby commits
suicide by cutting her throat. After asking her aunt if madness is hereditary,
Maud decides not to go through with her marriage to Waymark,
despite the struggle of feeling this renunciation costs her. She has come to
see that heredity rather than the free choice of a transcendent philosophy is
the determinant of her nature. The playing out of the artistic personality does
not, as "The Hope of Pessimism" would suggest, lead to any detached
perception that good predominates in the world; instead, it leads to a fuller,
almost purely naturalistic appreciation of the evil power of material
pressures.
The example of Maud not
only demolishes the pieties of Waymark's theory of
art, but challenges the sort of gendered interpretations in which George Moore
and Arthur Waugh dealt. In a time of rapidly expanding roles for women, the
threatening feminine becomes demonized and used as a generic term of abuse.
Depending on the situation, different features of society become identified as
female: for instance, Andreas Huyssen has traced the
figuration of mass culture as a woman, while Bowlby
has noted that the arena of culture was "associated with femininity." 56 George Moore and Arthur Waugh
anathematize as female their respective opponents: those moralizing censors who
would hold back literature's search for the truth, and those Swinburnians who wallow in sensation. Waugh, interestingly
enough, deals with precisely the same categories as Gissing: women, sensation,
madness, art.
The man lives by ideas;
the woman by sensations; and while the man remains an artist so long as he
holds true to his own view of life, the woman becomes one as soon as she throws
off the habit of her sex, and learns to rely upon her judgment, and not upon
her senses.
When creative literature
satisfies these three requirements - when it is sane, equable, and well spoken,
then it is safe to say it conforms to the moral idea, and is consonant with
art. By its sanity it eludes the risk of effeminate demonstration. 57
But Gissing, unlike
Moore and Waugh, does not define art as an agonistic process: art is not
achieved by suppressing unruly femininity. Instead art is an innate propensity
that blossoms or decays in response to stimulus from an individual's
environment. In Maud, a combination of heredity and upbringing, rather than
anything in the essential nature of women, is responsible for the form of her
aesthetic impulses. Self-consciousness is a great good in the world of The Unclassed, and it is precisely the lack of this that
inhibits Maud's artistic development: "She could not understand herself,
seeing that her opportunities had never allowed her to obtain an idea of the
artistic character" (150). Those conventional categories that Waugh so
self-assuredly wields can only limit the individual development of someone like
Maud: they are the equivalent of that puritanical religious upbringing that so
distorts her consciousness. So Gissing's worldview reveals a pat generalization
like
Most of The Unclassed
reveals the untenability of contemporary
constructions of art and the difficulty of self-knowledge when the self is
subject to continual flux. However, in both editions, as the end of the
narrative approaches, the need for a fictional resolution drives the novel into
inconsistently rigid subject positions for its characters. The clearest example
of this comes with the sudden reconception of the
Ida-Wavmark-Maud triangle. Waymark
is like other Gissing heroes in that the choice of a romantic partner is
crucial in the definition of the self. But Waymark is
unusual in the extremity of his swings between of the two women, so that his
very indecision becomes a subject of the novel and undermines both the apparent
cohesiveness of his personal philosophy and his status as the dominant
intelligence of the novel. Critical appraisals of The Unclassed,
reading in light of the novel's conclusion, tend to take Waymark's choice of Ida for granted as the natural outcome
of the narrative. But one of the interesting features of the book is that for
most of its course the suitable partner for the hero remains indecipherable.
Certainly Waymark's true feelings provide no
guidance, for it is unclear what these are or even whether they exist. However,
this indeterminacy comes to an end in chapter 28, "Slimy's
Day" (in the first edition entitled "Bondage"). In this chapter Waymark is kept from meeting Ida on her release from prison
when Slimy robs him of the collected rent money and ties him up. Slimy's action proves to have consequences both for Waymark's self-conception and the novel's narrative. At
first Waymark views his predicament with typical
detachment, even observing that "to lie gagged and bound on a garret-
floor for some few hours. . . might well be suggestive of useful hints" to
an artist (234). Yet as time passes Waymark can no longer
aestheticize his physical condition: pain drives away
his nonchalance, and he begins to fear that he will
be unable to make his appointment with Ida.
Significantly, Waymark begins to know his own mind only in this situation
of extreme constraint. In his state of imagined freedom he oscillated between
Maud and Ida, convinced that each in turn was his favorite
but unable to develop a consistent attitude towards them. In the previous
chapter he has become engaged to Maud, and has felt certain that Ida means
nothing to him. But now, stripped of the semblance of freedom he has enjoyed
since the abandonment of his teaching post, he is forced into
self-confrontation:
He recognised now, for
the first time fully, how much it meant to him, that meeting with Ida. . . . He
had come to regard the event [her imprisonment] as finally severing him from
Ida and a certain calm ensuing hereupon led to the phase which ultimately
brought him to Maud once more. But Waymark's
introspection was at fault; he understood himself less in proportion as he felt
that the ground was growing firmer under his feet. . . . It needed a chance
such as the present to open his eyes. (235)
In one sense Waymark's acknowledgment, while bound, that he is also
bound by his feelings for Ida follows logically from the novel's insistence on
the inescapability of experience and personal needs. It begins to give him that
"sincerity" he lacks but which both Ida and Maud possess. However,
this recognition poses certain problems for the narrative, since up to this
time there has been no indication that there is a stable, centered
self for Waymark to know. This scene represents a
step towards the resolution necessary in a conventional nineteenth-century
novel, but this resolution can be achieved only by the complete reformulation
of the central character.
Almost as if in
recognition of the problems he has created for himself, Gissing follows this
chapter with several in which he drastically reduces access to Waymark's consciousness. Whereas The Unclassed
has largely focused on Waymark's sensibility
since his introduction, it now switches its emphasis to the inner lives of Maud
and especially Ida. Since Ida has now been clearly identified as the heroine of
the piece, the suitable partner for the hero, Gissing proceeds to reshape her
character in order to give the close of the book an adequate center. Central to this endeavor
is the transformation of Ida's social status when
turn to the business of social reform, which she
initiates by holding tea parties for scruffy but lovable urchins. Ida has
always been guided by feelings of affiliation - to her mother, to another
prostitute - but now she emerges clearly as a participant in that
fellow-feeling that Gissing identified as the second hope of pessimism.
With Ida's emergence as
heroine, we enter a realm more typical of mid-Victorian sentimentalism than of
a fin-de-siecle artistic sensibility. Ida insists
that Waymark be true to his engagement with Maud in
the language of melodrama: "There is such a thing as duty; it speaks in
your heart and in mine, and tells us that we must part" (298). More
disturbingly, discussion of Ida's past life in this part of the novel
continually threatens to embrace the commonplaces of Victorian thinking about
the fallen woman. Ida now indicates that Waymark's
earlier insensitive wish that he could buy her prompted her reform, and
asserts, "It is no arrogance to say that I am become a pure woman; not my
own merits, but love of you has made me so" (292). Now, redeemed by love,
she has entered into the state of purity the narrative had earlier problematized. Unlike other expressions of conventional
thought in The Unclassed, these are not
undercut by the simultaneous presence of elements that challenge this view.
The end of the novel
balances the apotheosis of Ida with the increased representation of Maud as
pathological. By the eve of her planned marriage to Waymark,
she has attained an eerily inhuman state, in which aesthetic visions have been
reduced to indications of incipient madness: "To Maud's eyes the intruding
fog shaped itself into ghostly visages, which looked upon her with weird and
woeful compassion" (299). Indeed, through Maud the artistic has become
merely a psychological category, a state conditioned by heredity and escapable
only by a religious asceticism. Maud's resolution of her personal dilemma
involves breaking off her engagement and joining her aunt in Christian
devotion. But what this resolution does for the novel is eliminate the
aesthetic sensibility as a player in the world of human suffering. In the first
edition Waymark proclaims his continuing devotion to
art, though now combined with social combat; however, in the second edition
Gissing (I think more consistently) removes explicit suggestions of Waymark's ongoing interest in art. Of the two consolations
in "The Hope of Pessimism," only fellow-feeling has survived. Art has
proved to be a dangerous method of engaging with one's own physical
constitution rather than a means of escape.
But even that
fellow-feeling survives only by becoming a sentimentalized commitment to social
reform. John Goode has perceptively remarked that "Gissing poses
unanswerable questions and tries to answer them with an ending which is part of
the stock-in-trade of the romantic novelist."
58 By the end of The Unclassed,
all its characters have become classed: Maud is a nun; Waymark and Ida are leisured social reformers; and
In Gissing's The Unclassed we can begin to understand the failure of
naturalism to catch hold in
NOTES
1. "A Novel for Men," Evening News 25 June
1884: 1; Reprinted in Gissing: The Critical Heritage, ed. Pierre Coustillas and Colin Partridge (1972;
2. On the perceived threat to masculine identity, see
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Viking, 1990). Bram Dijkstra illustrates the representation of this threat in
art in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).
Another useful book in this context is Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
the Twentieth Century. Volume 1: The War of the Words (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1988).
3. David Baguley, in Naturalist
Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1990), extensively surveys accounts of naturalism in English
literary histories. He identifies "significant disparities" (30) in
critical assessments of this movement, but notes that many omit naturalism
altogether, and that those that propose adherents to the movement for the most
part offer only short lists, in which "the only common factor . . . seems
to be a text or two by George Moore" (31). By using a generic approach
that focuses on the interrelatedness of texts, Baguley
himself offers a broader appreciation of the influence of naturalism. L. S. Dembo, Detotalized
Totalities: Synthesis and Disintegration in Naturalist, Existential, and
Socialist Fiction (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989) offers a
different but nonetheless valuable approach to naturalism by focusing on
textual analysis.
4. Two nearly contemporary articles by William Barry
provide a clear example of this distinction. In "Realism and Decadence in
French Fiction," Quarterly Review 171 (1890): 57-90, Barry
suggests that such writers as Zola and Bourget foretell "the end of a
civilization" (90). In "English Realism and Romance," Quarterly
Review 173 (1891): 468-94, he questions whether Meredith, Haggard,
and Stevenson have provided suitably uplifting fictions, but is willing to
offer them conditional praise.
5. George Moore, Literature at Nurse, Or
Circulating Morals: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship, ed. Pierre Coustillas (Brighton: Harvester, 1976).
6. Suzanne Nalbantian, Seeds
of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel (New York: St. Martin's,
1983), 6-7.
7. Virginia Woolf is perhaps the most distinguished
exponent of this view: "Gissing is one of those imperfect novelists
through whose books one sees the life of the author faintly covered by the
lives of fictitious people. With such writers we establish a personal rather
than an artistic relationship." Virginia Woolf,
Introduction, Selections Autobigraphical and
Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing (New York: Jonathan Cape, 1929),
9. The tradition continues in the most recent biography, John Halperin's Gissing: A Life in
Books (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982). Two distinguished
exceptions to this approach are the pioneering studies of Adrian Poole, Gissing
in Context (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1975); and John Goode, George Gissing: Ideology and
Fiction (New York: Barnes, 1979).
8. David Grylls has recently
argued that Gissing's "tendency to emotional and intellectual division. . . is the hallmark of his individual works,
making them either confused or complex" (The Paradox of Gissing [London:
Allen & Unwin,1986], xiii). Grylls identifies as
the central paradox of Gissing's life and work a "conflict between
energetic aspiration and a certainty that all ambitions are vain" (1). My
own assessment of Gissing similarly emphasizes self-contradiction, but without
identifying any particular duality as central.
9. William Frierson,
"The English Controversy over Realism in Fiction, 1885-1895," PMLA
43 (1928): 533-50.
10. Frierson (note 9), 538.
11. George Gissing, "Preface to the New
Edition," The Unclassed, ed. Jacob Korg (1895;
12. Frierson characterizes
this oversimply as a "[protest] against
naturalism as a social philosophy. . . [that] was deterministic
and therefore disillusioning and depressing" (538).
13. W. S. Lilly, "The New Naturalism," Fortnightly
Review 44 (1885): 251.
14. Barry, "English Realism and Romance"
(note 4), 487.
15. Arthur Waugh, "Reticence in Literature,"
Yellow Book 1 (1894): 216.
16. Barry, "Realism and Decadence" (note 4),
68. This quotation also reveals another interesting feature of criticism
in this decade: an impulse to suggest that naturalist writers have
misappropriated science. Lilly (note 13), for instance, quotes Tennyson to
demonstrate that naturalists are missing the spiritual point of evolution:
"The true law of progress is to 'Move upwards, working out the beast, / And let the ape and tiger die'" (252). Similarly, Barry
in 1891 argues for a metaphysical understanding of science's
conceptualization of evolutionary progress: "The central problem of
literature. . . [is] the true method of marrying science with art, so that we
may attain once more to the prose drama, which is a criticism of life, and an
inspiration to lift life towards the ideal" (473).
17. [Leslie Stephen], "The Moral Element in
Literature," Cornhill Magazine 43 (1881): 47. This piece was the
published version of a lecture given in December 1880. The quotation
reminds us that
18. Barry, "Realism and Decadence" (note 4),
89.
19. Lilly (note 13), 245. Even more emphatically, he
asserts, "M. Zola's . . . contention that the fiction of his school is a
popular literary expression of that movement which in the political order has
issued in Jacobinism, seems to me unquestionably true" (251). Barry, in
his condemnation of the "decadence" of French civilization, argues
that "
20. Barry, "Realism and Decadence," 70, 90.
21.
22. Waugh (note 15), 208, 209. The particular context
of this quotation is a discussion of the morality of Hogarth, in which
Waugh observes that only schoolboys look to him for titillation: "when we
are become men, we put away such childish satisfactions. Then we begin to
appreciate the idea which underlies the subject. . ." (209-10). But,
although Waugh is opposing men to boys rather than to women, and using a
Biblical allusion to underscore his point, he is nonetheless gendering his
characterization of the moral reader.
23. Waugh, 210.
24. Waugh, 217.
25. Waugh, 217. See Ann Ardis,
New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism
(New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), 48-49, for a different reading
of Waugh's essay. Ardis's book is an important
contribution to our understanding of the New Woman novel of the end of the
century. However, her conflation of Waugh's general assessment of contemporary
literature and his concluding attack on women writers obscures the focus of his
critique.
26. Waugh, 219.
27. Barry, "Realism and Decadence" (note 4),
77.
28. Barry, "Realism and Decadence," 75. See
also Lilly (note 13), 247: "What M. Zola inherits from Diderot is the
dogma that there is nothing sacred in man or in the universe, and the nauseous
bestiality which is the outcome of that persuasion."
29. Baguley (note 3)
identifies this phenomenon somewhat similarly, although he separates moralizing
and literary considerations: "It seems . . . that the naturalist fiction,
whether English or foreign in origin, in which the traditional morality of the
text was superseded by some other principal motivating factor, scientific,
sociological or biological, clashed not only with the moral expectations of the
English public, but also with the literary expectations of writers, critics and
readers accustomed to the realist novels of the English tradition or the
romances supplied by the circulating libraries (35).
30. See Showalter (note 2), especially chapter
four, "Queen George."
31. [Leslie Stephen], "George Eliot," Cornhill
Magazine 43 (1881): 168.
32. [Leslie Stephen], "The Decay of
Literature," Cornhill Magazine 46 (1882): 602-12.
33. Edmund Gosse, "The Tyranny of the
Novel," Questions at Issue (London: Heinemann, 1893), 1-31.
34. Waugh (note 15), 209.
35. Lilly (note 13), 253-54.
36. Barry, "English Realism and Romance"
(note 4), 491.
37. John Sloan offers a very helpful discussion of
Gissing's education in the introduction to George Gissing: The Cultural Challenge (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1989).
38. George Gissing, "The Hope of Pessimism,"
George Gissing: Essays and Fiction, ed. Pierre Coustillas
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), 82; hereafter cited
parenthetically by page in the text and abbreviated HP.
39. Arthur Schopenhauer, "On the
Metaphysics of the Beautiful and Aesthetics," Parerga
and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 2:423.
Schopenhauer is particularly enamored of art that isolates form rather than precisely
reproducing physical experience (as do wax figures, which he discounts as art
[2:422]). It is known that Gissing was acquainted with Parerga
and Paralipomena. In Workers in the Dawn, Dr.
Gmelin gives this book to Helen Norman, advising that
it contains "the kernel of the philosopher's theories." George
Gissing, Workers in the Dawn, ed. Pierre Coustillas
(1880;
41. Korg (note 40) argues in
particular that one deleted set of Waymark's speeches
directly reflects the idea of "The Hope of Pessimism" and therefore
"constitutes a very suggestive link between Gissing's real views and those
of his protagonist" (558).
42. The two editions I cite are as follows: George
Gissing, The Unclassed, 3 vols. (London:
Chapman & Hall, 1884); and George Gissing, The Unclassed,
ed. Jacob Korg (1895;
43. The first edition at this point works through some
of the implications of Waymark's focus on the moment:
"Only in strange junctures is the mind capable of thus neglecting palpable
difficulties and letting the day suffice to itself. . . . Thought is for a
while thrown off its balance; reflection and foresight are for the moment
faculties fallen out of use. Perhaps the only quite happy
moments of existence" (1:225).
44. Here I disagree with Francis (note 40), who
believes that Gissing's extensive presentation of the independent reality of
these women is an artistic flaw (7). I would argue that Gissing's ability to
present people's inaccurate, continually shifting representations of one
another is one of his outstanding features as a writer.
45. See for example
46. Wolff (note 40) may be right in his theory that
Gissing deleted this passage as part of his efforts "to remove the
appearances of subjectivity so numerous in" the first edition (46).
47. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry
James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford
Univ. Press, 1990), 67, 68.
48. Rachel Bowlby, Just
Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen,
1985). I would argue that, as usual, Gissing is ambivalent about popular
culture rather than inexorably opposed to it: witness the vitality as well as
the sleaziness of such scenes as the Jubilee festival of In the Year of
Jubilee, the "friendly lead" in Thyrza,
and the
49. At this point in Gissing criticism it is customary
to observe that Gissing met his good friend Eduard Bertz
through a similar advertisement. While this is an interesting biographical
fact, I do not see that it provides us with conclusive evidence of how we
should value Waymark's ad in The Unclassed.
50. One of Waymark's
addresses to Julian provides a good example. "What cannot be purchased
with coin of the realm? First and foremost, freedom. . . . Even death [the
moneyed man] faces with the comforting consciousness that his defeat will only
coincide with that of human science. He buys culture, he buys peace of mind, he buys love. - You think not? . . . Make me a millionaire,
and I will purchase the passionate devotion of any free-hearted woman the world
contains!" The new paragraph immediately succeeding this begins with the
deflationary remark, "Waymark's pipe had gone
out. . . (53).
51. The 1884 text provides an even clearer example of Waymark's thinking as he meditates on the future of his
relationship with Ida. "Were he but rich, he could buy her,
make her his property, as did any other of the men on whom she lived. .
. . In fact it amounted to this: any hint of love on his part was a request
that she would yield him gratis what others paid for; he would become a
pensioner on her bounty. Needless to say, a wholly
intolerable situation" (2:17-18).
52. Freedman (note 47), 68.
53. It is interesting to note that many of the
passages that illuminate the nature of Maud's sensibility were deleted in 1895.
Her character in the second edition is at once less pathological and less
visionary. I would suggest that there is an impulse to take her somewhat less
seriously in 1895; perhaps one indication of this is that we do not witness her
final triumph over the flesh, but we learn indirectly that she and her aunt
have become nuns (something that does not happen in 1884).
54. Schopenhauer (note 39), 2:419.
55. This passage exists only in the 1884 edition;
however, the preceding sentence does remain in 1895, making the same point but
largely reducing Maud's interest in world to a sexual one: "These
heart-burnings whenever she witnessed men and women rejoicing in the exercise
of their natural affections, what could that be but the proneness to evil in
its grossest form?" (150).
56. Andreas Huyssen,
"Mass Culture as Woman: "Modernism's Other,"
After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington:
Indiana Uni Press, 1986), 44-62; and Bowlby (note 48), 11,
57. Waugh (note 15), 210, 211.
58. Good (note 7), 79.
59. Freedman (note 47) offers a very useful
examination of "the positing of art as a principle of order"
(245) in Henry James's work as part of the movement from aestheticism to
modernism.