“Introduction: These Other Victorians.”

Abstract

In Oscar Wilde's Portrait of WH we have an essay on the exigencies of interpretation presented to us as though it were a melodramatic murder mystery. As Scott Wilson describes it: After an opening discussion about Art as the realization of personality beyond and its ethical demands, Lord Erskine tells the story of his dead friend Cyril Graham, who devised a theory about the young man of Shakespeare's sonnets. Graham, an effeminate boy player of Shakespeare's roles at Trinity, decided that the Mr. WH of the sonnets must have been, like him, a boy player on Shakespeare's stage called Willy [sic] Hughes. Graham assembles what he believes is convincing textual evidence for his theory and attempts to persuade Erskine who, while accepting the internal evidence, will not be converted until he has seen external proof of the boy's existence. Graham provides a miniature painting. It is exposed as a fake, a simulacrum, and he shoots himself, substituting the reality of his own life and death for that of Willy Hughes. (231-232) Wilde's endlessly interpretable tale points to, among other things, the impossibility of ever really knowing the difference between the fake and the real--even in a situation in which the end result is a death caused by the illusion of evidence. In addition to raising questions about what we might now call post-structuralist hermeneutics, Wilde also warns that the mistaking of the fake for the (and vice versa) can have a material effect. The essays for this special issue investigate just what is at stake in the idea of the real as defined by the artists and thinkers of the Victorian era. Rather than approaching the dichotomy of realism vs. artificiality as it is usually defined for the period--that is, realism vs. any number of complementary binary terms such as neo-mediaevalism, Hellenism, etc.--I would like to call into question just how stable such a binary really was. That is, Victorians were always extremely invested in the fake--even in the authenticity of fakery, such as Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's Gothic designs for Notre Dame de Paris or A. C. Swinburne's invented rural dialects in which he would write the epics of a region and recite them to the people living there who were convinced that he had indeed uncovered a real poem. If so much of Victorian culture was based upon the elaborate creation of simulacra--whether Pre-Raphaelitism or the legends of Tannhauser and Arthur--then why do we persist in seeing the Victorian period as the height of realism, and how might we explain how that period managed to derive so much pleasure from the inability to tell the fake from the real? If the origins of modernism are in the Victorian period, then it behooves us to understand also how postmodernism can trace some of its own origins to the dyadic quality of the Victorian pleasure in simulacra. As clearly obsessed with finding origins as the Victorians were, they seemed always to re-create the past in a form that expressed more about their anxieties about the future (or the present) than it did a clear understanding of even the immediate past. In a similar attempt to turn away from modernism and back toward history, the postmodern artist is often not interested in the past as material reality but as the quotation of a style--a temporal fragment that metonymically stands in for an entire era but may go no deeper than the glossy surface of a label. The extent to which Victorian writers manipulated the surfaces of commodification--and were likewise taken over by them in their own interest in the question of origins and authenticity--is what this volume attempts to explore. The Victorians knew they had the opportunity to be mythmakers, and they took this role on with all the earnestness they could muster; that more was going on than (sometimes) met the eye is proof that the Victorians themselves could be lost in the dizzying simulacra that their culture produced. …