General Materials

Abstract

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• General Materials
• Albert D. Pionke (bio)

This year’s survey of general materials features four monographs and one substantial chapter from a broader genre history. All are committed to positioning Victorian poetry relative to its many predecessors—from gothic fictions and forms, to Enlightenment debates about speech, to classical Greek models of conversation, to Romantic theories of the lyric, to the multinational history of sonneteering—and all feature a mix of canonical and less-well-remembered authors and texts. In something of a departure from past years, Dante Gabriel Rossetti features particularly prominently.

Acknowledging that the “lineage connecting Romantic Gothic fiction with nineteenth-century poetry is not an obvious one” (p. 3), Olivia Loksing Moy’s The Gothic Forms of Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2022) nevertheless seeks to bridge the genealogical gap between fiction of the 1790s and poetry of the 1830s through 1880s by reconceiving “of Gothic through a new fundamental organizing principle: as a set of formal structures that configure the relationships between speakers and their imagined audiences” (p. 4). Neither “a conventional influence study . . . nor one that insists on ‘anticipation’” (p. 15), the book remains invested a familiar model of “formal influence” (p. 2), according to which “the looming figure of ‘Mother [Ann] Radcliffe’” (p. 19)—and, to a lesser extent, her contemporaries William Godwin, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Wollstonecraft—bequeath “structural positionings and patterns of confinement” that are ironically re-presented in the Victorian period as “a distinctive poetics of Gothic enclosure” (p. 7). Moy’s principal “structural positionings,” that is, forms, include “Gothic confinement,” “forced confessions,” “Gothic framing,” and “Gothic swaps,” the ironized iterations of which are collectively traced through selected poetry from Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB), Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Brontë (p. 7).

This process begins in chapter 1, which pairs passages from The Italian (1796), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Monk (1796) that feature [End Page 337] incidents of overhearing with examples of dramatic monologic confession “overheard” by readers of Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes (1841), “The Confessional” (1845), “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842), “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), and “Mister Sludge, ‘The Medium’” (1864). On the strength of these examples, Moy asserts that the “Gothic thus provides a thematic, structural, and cultural framework to better understand Victorian dramatic monologues,” whether written by Browning or others (p. 78). Chapter 2 revisits Radcliffe’s numerous “elegiac sonneteers” (p. 90), who, Moy argues, “helped define the cultural image of the nineteenth-century poetess” (p. 91), a figure represented by EBB’s 1844 Poems and an embedded sonnet from Aurora Leigh (1856) and Christina Rossetti’s “The Thread of Life” (1881) and Maude (comp. 1850). Featuring the book’s most convincing reading, of EBB’s “The Prisoner,” this chapter connects the gothic trope of “creativity in confinement” (p. 91) with Victorian poetesses’ “poetics of self-enclosure [as] a source of Gothic power and agency” (p. 95). Chapter 3 investigates the permutations of “uncanny body switches, what I am calling the device of Gothic ‘shock and swap’”—recall the revelations of the waxen corpse in Udolpho—found in four “Sonnets for Pictures” from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life (1870/1881) (p. 150). Attending to both the literal frames and the metaphorical framing of Proserpine, Astarte Syriaca, Lady Lilith, and Sibylla Palmifera, Moy also seeks to account for original critics’ largely pejorative reactions: “Pre-Raphaelite and Gothic writers alike manufacture a condition of disorientation on the part of their readers, who, due to meta-artistic turns in the text, also become spectators of art” (p. 197).

Adopting a more synthetic approach to the gothic forms discussed in the previous chapters, chapter 4 attempts to show that even “if Hopkins had little to no contact with Lewis and Radcliffe, their writings are linked through a shared Gothic language” (p. 216). Although there are moments of exceptional close reading of individual poetic passages, including from “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (comp. 1875–1876), in this chapter, its more analogical arguments and relative silence about the other influences at work in Hopkins’s poetry, for example, the theology of John Duns Scotus, make it...