Neo-Victorianism

Neo-Victorianism is a compound noun formed by the following two terms, ‘Neo’ and
‘Victorian’.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix neo refers to: a compound
referring to a new, revived, or modified form of some doctrine, belief, practice, language,
artistic style, etc. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, the word ‘neo’ as prefix,
was first used in Victorian times, in 1880.The term Victorian isn’t as straightforward as it
seems. It can refer to the period of Queen Victoria’s life (1819-1901) or her reign (1837-
1901). It can also refer to the 19th century in general, and some historians consider it spans
from the French Revolution in 1789 until the beginning of World War I in 1914. It is an
enormous amount of time, so many divide it into ‘early period’, ‘the Height of the Victorian
Era’, or ‘The Mid-Victorian Period’ (1848-1870), which was the greatest period of economic
prosperity and growth of the Empire, and the ‘late Victorian period’. According to Marie-
Luise Kohlke, founding editor of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Neo-Victorianism is
“the afterlife of the nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary.”

Neo-Victorianism can be divided into two distinct categories: creative works that in
some way engage with Victorian literature and culture, and scholarly works that seek to
explore the shifting relationship with the Victorian period since its close in 1901, often
through a critical investigation of Neo-Victorian creative works. Although critical discussions
of historical fiction and film set in or engaging with the Victorian period have a long history,
Neo-Victorianism, as an academic discipline, is a relatively new phenomenon. The plethora of
Neo-Victorian creative works that have emerged in the last twenty years or so have led to
increasing debate over the contemporary fascination with the Victorians and their art,
literature, and history. Neo-Victorianism is now firmly established as a genre for scholarly
investigation, though debates around what exactly constitutes a Neo-Victorian work continue.

A number of scholars have argued that not all works that employ a Victorian setting
can be identified as Neo-Victorian and that the term implies a “knowing” engagement with
the period. According to this definition, works that employ the period merely as backdrop are
excluded from the Neo-Victorian genre, and thus issues of inclusion and exclusion are
potentially problematic. Critical debates have also examined the origins of the genre of Neo-
Victorian works. Various critics locate the 1960s as the period in which the literary genre
emerges, citing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea(1966) and John Fowles’s The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) as early examples of the Neo-Victorian novel. This association
with the 1960s also serves to reinforce the genre’s links with Postmodernism. However, as the
genre has continued to expand, there has been an acknowledgment that its origins are earlier
than this. Works predating Rhys’s novel include Robert Graves’s The Real David
Copperfield (1933), Virginia Woolf’s Freshwater (1935), Michael Sadleir’s Fanny by
Gaslight (1944), and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953), while stage
and film adaptations of Victorian literature have an even longer history, raising questions
about the necessary chronological distance between the Victorian and the Neo-Victorian.

In 1972, Adrienne Rich wrote that re-vision is “the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction”. (Rich 1972: 18). More
importantly, she claimed that this act, when viewed in retrospect, would present itself as more
than just another moment in cultural history, but would distinguish itself rather as an act of
survival for women. Most readers of Neo-Victorian Studies will be familiar with Rich’s
pronouncement, which also contained a call to “understand the assumptions in which we are
drenched” and which prevent us from knowing ourselves (Rich 1972: 18). Here again, it is not
without significance that, for women, this drive to self-knowledge is necessarily more “than a
search for identity: it is part of [women’s] refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-
dominated society” (Rich 1972: 18). These are certainly no small claims, and in the same
breath Rich went on to demand that feminist writers, editors, publishers, and academics look
differently at the past and recognise that literature, in particular, should be a cornerstone of
this cultural revolution. Looking back, she argued, would help feminists of the 1970s to move
forward.

It is perhaps no coincidence that a similar impulse can be found in the neo-Victorian

fiction of that period. Quite famously, in fact, the oft-cited ur-texts of neo-Victorianism, Jean
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1969), both explore Victorian women’s limited roles “with fresh eyes”.

Neo-Victorian texts frequently associate science and technology with criminal acts,
which their perpetrators perceive as acts of progress, because of their potential to initiate the
world's passage to the future. Stemming from Victorian apprehensions of science, most
notably the possibility of the scientist's malevolence, the abuse of science by neo-Victorian
villains presents a criminal past that will give birth to a dystopian future. As the future of neo-
Victorian narratives constitutes the present or recent past of the time of narration, the
presuppositions of modernity are problematised both within the texts' Victorian narratives and
in retrospect; and especially when neo-Victorian employments of science and technology
echo concrete twentieth-century instances of scientific misapplication. Neo-Victorian texts
expose their complex temporality and defy their integration within genres such as steampunk
or science fiction. Considering the difficulty of generic classification, this essay suggests that
neo-Victorian instances of scientific crime manifest nineteenth-century scientific and
technological progress in a way that illuminates the Victorian era, while remaining relevant
for contemporary audiences. The relationship that is thus effected between past and present
underlines neo-Victorianism's perception of time as a continuum, in order to problematise
contemporary understandings of progress and modernity.

Considering the self-consciousness and meta-reflexivity which define neo-Victorian

fiction, the representation of the act of writing is of particular interest, be it in the
representation of Victorian writers as well as the self-staging of neo-Victorian writers
themselves – one may think of Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969).

John Fowles was born at Leighton-on-Sea, Essex in 1926, where he lived until the
outbreak of the Second World War. He was educated at Bedford School and New College,
Oxford, where he read French and German. After graduating he taught English at the
University of Poitiers and then at the Anagyriou School at Spetses. He became a full-time
writer in 1963. His best-known fiction includes his first novel, The Collector (1963), the story
of a young clerk, a butterfly collector, who kidnaps a young woman; The Magus (1966), set
on a Greek island where a schoolteacher confronts a series of disturbing events; and The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a formally experimental novel that tells the tale of
Victorian palaeontologist Charles Smithson and his involvement with the notorious and
enigmatic Sarah Woodruff. The French Lieutenant's Woman won the Silver Pen Award and
the WH Smith Literary Award and was adapted as a film in 1981 with a screenplay by Harold
Pinter. Fowles' other fiction includes Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982) and A Maggot
(1985). John Fowles enjoys a justifiably high standing as both a novelist of outstanding
imaginative power (in some ways a modern-day Thomas Hardy, especially as a chronicler of
his beloved Dorset), and as a highly self-conscious 'postmodernist' author who fully registers
the artifice inherent in the act of writing, the fictiveness of fiction itself.
 His novels began with an original psychological thriller, The Collector (1963), but his
reputation was made by his two best-known novels The Magus (1966), and especially The
French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) with its vivid pastiche of Victorian fiction and famous
device of 'alternative endings'. Fowles' writing is dominated by the consciousness of the
author as a figure within his own books, entering the narrative at certain points to comment on
the action, the characters' motives and possibilities, and explain how things might have been
different. Able with equal ease to transform futures or point out absurdities, the novelist is a
capricious, no longer an omnipotent god; a magician whose tricks may all be bogus; or simply
a late-arriving, rather seedy impresario, as in the denouement to The French Lieutenant's
Woman. Exercising free will, playing with fiction's constraints and conventions, the writer's
authority is nevertheless relative: appropriate for an era of relative not absolute values. All of
Fowles' large, capacious novels are incredibly rich reading experiences, from the labyrinthine
plot twists of The Magus and the international panoramas in Daniel Martin (1977) to the
brilliant recreation of the eighteenth century mind set in A Maggot (1985). They operate on
the reader's consciousness on several levels at once; as page-turning narratives with
memorable characters, demonstrations of the novelist's craft, historical and political
commentaries; and as profound reflections on the whole spectrum of human behaviours.

By his own account, Fowles was much influenced, during and after his student days at
Oxford in the late 1940s, by the cultures of ancient Greece (especially the philosopher
Heraclitus) and modern France, from Flaubert to post-war Existentialism and the nouveau
roman. In The Aristos (1965), Fowles set out his ideas on 'the essential mystery in art',
religion and its rituals, ethics, politics (no truck with 'quasi-emotional liberalism') that inform
much of the drama, as well as the author's commentary, within his subsequent novels. Fowles'
own fascination with the 'Circe-like quality' of Greece found unforgettable expression in his
first great novel, The Magus. Nick, a young Englishman escaping from an unsatisfactory love
affair and teaching at the Lord Byron School on the island of Phraxos, falls under the spell of
Conchis, a rich mystery man, and the two alluring young English women attached to him.
Nick is subjected to a disorientating succession of strange events, conflicting stories from
'actors', and erotic apparitions, during which he experiences echoes of the Greek mythic
culture. The book suggests a world beyond ordinary reality but also the bogus mystification of
a trickster: a multi-layered, ambiguous commentary on the nature of art and the artist's
situation.
 The French Lieutenant's Woman is a tale of seduction in two senses: of 'fallen woman'
Sarah Woodruff by the highly respectable gentleman geologist Charles Smithson; and of the
reader by the author.

Fowels used in his novel different postmodern stylistic and structural tecniques:
multiple endings, intertextuality and style of narration. At a first glimpse, the story seems to
be narrated by an omniscient narrator, from a third person point of view. Therefore, the
narrator is external to the action. However, there are ares when the narrator intrudes himself in
the action, indentifying himself as the author. He even voices his own opinions and thoughts
into the narrative, constantly reminding the reader that the story is all imagination, meaning a
fiction. For a few chapters, the narrator makes himself a minor character of the story. He uses
words such as us and our, chnaging his initial third person point of view into the first person
point of view. In addition, the narrator deliberately keepds certain characters from being
explained or explored, the most obvious example being Sarah.

The story is set in mid 19th century Victorian society. Most of the novel’s action takes
place at Lyme Regis, England, a city dotted with the large houses of the wealthy. Unlike the
larger metropolitan areas such as London, people there upheld the prevailing social norms.
People’s intransitive attitude toward Sarah succeed in driving her ti Exeter, a city where the
vice was plentiful, a place for shamed girls and women, namely unmarried mothers and
mistresses who were victims of social rejects or sexual abuse. It is here where Sarah and
Charles consume their relationship. Each character is constrained in some way by the
Victorian society. Tina has never been encouraged to explore her sexuality so she is afraid of
any intimacy with Charles. As a result, Charles gravitates to Sarah, who exhibits a more
sensual nature. Sarah has faced social constraints all of her life. She becomes a social pariah
when rumours surface that she has been seduced by a French lieutenant and are reinforced by
her daily position on the Cobb, gazing longingly out to sea. Charles is caught up by his
comfortable position as an English gentleman. Stirred by his interest in Sarah, he is pushed to
the margins of society. In the final ending, he gains absolute freedom from social and marital
constraints.

Evolution and the changing class system are huge concerns of the novel and one of the
recurring ways the author depicts the theme of social mobility is through the motif of
comparing Charles to the ammonite he loves to collect. Charles’ lack of free will is
represented by the analogy that Charles felt that he had no more free will that an ammonite.
He feels superior to them, as he is a thinking person and he is alive, but he is actually no freer
to shape his destiny than the ammonites are, so he too will be caught up and frozen in time.
Charles believes in Darwinism and one of the theories od Darwinism is that species have to
adapt in order to survive−the survival of the fittest theory. Although he views himself as a
man of progress, Charles and his fellow gentleman are unable to keep up with the changing
times. In the world of the novel, they are compared to dinosaurs. The crumbling cliffs of
Lyme Bay also symbolize the class structure and Charles’position being in danger to fall.

Sarah’s reputaion for sexual immorality is a source of irony. Sarah’s reputation as a

whore is painfully ironic as she is actually a virgin for the majority of the novel. She is
frequently likened to imagery related to fire and water, which represent how dangerous she is
to Charles. The fire hints as her passionate intensity. Charles is playing with fire by
continuing to meet Sarah. The metaphors related to water seem to suggest the profundity of
her character: she has eyes a man could drown in.

All Fowles’ critics generally argues that The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a
significant and thought-provoking contribution on the Victiorian gender ideology. But they
are eternally divided about which position Fowles endorses in relation to the Victorian
Woman Question. By providing more that one ending to his novel, he seems to occupy
multiple ideological positions about the treatment of Victorian gender issues. He can be
genuinely admiring, supportive, emphatic as well as subtly patronizing, highly duplicitous and
patriarchal in articulating his stand on the Victorian gender debates. While his responses to
manhood have been very critical, his attitude to womanhood has been deliberately ironical
and mutually conflicting.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Boehm-Schnitker, Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture, 2014,

Taylor&Francis Group, New York.
 Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, 1980,
London:Methuen.
 Kolhke, Marie Louise, 2008, Neo-Victorian Studies, Swansea University,
Wales, United Kingdom..
 Rich, Adrienne. 1972. ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’,
College English.