Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the NationBy Charlotte MathiesonPalgrave MacMillan 2016
Yet all experience is an arch wherethroughGleams that untravelled world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.— Tennyson, “Ulysses”
Earlier this month, I happened to tune into CBC Newsworld precisely as a replica of the Palmyra Monumental Arch, an architectural marvel dating from 3rd century Syria, was being unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square. The new arch was produced by the UK’s Institute of Digital Archaeology with the wonders of 3D printing technology. Although my immediate response was suspicion about what seemed like an imperialist gesture, I soon had to correct my own reflexive “correctness,” as I listened to the words of a man originally from Syria being interviewed by a CBC reporter. The man stood in utter amazement just a few feet before the arch and expressed his deep joy to be able to see again this beautiful structure from his home country, whose original is believed to have been destroyed by ISIS.The re-creation and exhibition of such an artifact in Trafalgar Square seemed remarkable, and I have pondered it — and the man’s heartfelt response — many times since. The new arch was not only a monument of technological achievement, but also a visual rendering of a new world that simultaneously produces the images (at least) of revered history as it confronts an intensifying modernity marked by extensive cultural destruction and violence. The latter reality was emphatically underscored by the man’s displacement from his home country. The recreated arch at once signifies, memorializes, and seemingly defies one nation’s cultural destruction. Its erection in Trafalgar Square seems an act of resistance and progress and — for the man interviewed — a reconstitution of home. Yet, this act remains to me deeply haunting, occurring as it does necessarily outside the borders of that nation whose history it strives to preserve. And, furthermore, might its location — in Trafalgar Square, in the shadow of Nelson’s Column — also prompt us to ask if the exhibition of the arch and its reproduction are also a form of cultural appropriation? When we look at the new arch do we not only wonder at its arrival, but also ask, Just where are we? and How did we get here?The experience of cultural disorientation that the new Palmyra Arch produces is in many ways the subject at the heart of Charlotte Mathieson’s book, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. The world that developed in the wake of Lord Nelson’s naval victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, its technological and industrial advances, especially in terms of transport, are the chief subjects of this book, which shows in some measure how we got from there to here — from the days of nineteenth-century imperialism to the moment that a symbol of ancient achievement would be erected in Trafalgar Square. And today, we hope, the arch is not seen merely as a symbol of foreign exoticism and imperial triumph as it may have been one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago.Mathieson’s book considers the connection between national identity and the increasing individual mobility made possible by the expansion of modes of travel in the Victorian period — a process that she terms “placing the nation.” This is a worthy thesis. I agree heartily with her opening claims for the journey’s centrality to the Victorian novel, its “vital and active presence there.” As she explains early on, “The journey creates a mapping-out of the space of the nation, unfolding a vision of what the nation is, who inhabits it, and how its interconnections are forged.” Although Victorianists such as myself may have considered such issues at length in the heady days of cultural materialism in, say, the 1990 (a time when little seemed more exciting than introducing a class of undergraduates to the relationship between the Victorian novel and the railway, the telegraph, or the typewriter) the time is right to revitalize the assumptions that accompanied such courses of study.Taking up the challenge, Mathieson strives to reconsider the “placing [of] the nation” over the course of four chapters. Drawing upon theories of mobility and space, as well as imperialism and national identity, she addresses novels by Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Villette), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret), George Eliot (Adam Bede), Charles Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield), Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, Cranford), and Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone). Other less well-known works also receive mention.Given the length of this list, Thomas Hardy’s novels, obsessed as they are with mobility, travel, and dislocation, seem a glaring omission: Jude the Obscure, for instance, is a novel whose six parts correspond to railway stops, and Tess Durbeyfield’s walk to Stonehenge in Hardy’s 1895 Tess of the d’Urbervilles is arguably the most famous “death march” in nineteenth-century literature. Mathieson’s chosen chronological parameters, however, conclude at 1868: Collins’s detective novel of that year, The Moonstone, forms the focus of the book’s conclusion, which examines the novel’s well-known treatment of empire — especially Britain’s relationship to India — in order to claim that it marks a movement toward those “new structures of narration [required] to delineate and understand the new structures of nation.” Mathieson’s conclusion is thus outward- and forward-looking as it seeks to bring together those strands of national contact and modes of mobility that she examined hitherto.Unfortunately, Mathieson has a hard time maintaining the connection between these strands of inquiry throughout her study, and the result is an overall lack of argumentative coherence. There are two significant reasons for this. The chief of these is, broadly speaking, a structural problem: the first two chapters focus primarily on modes of transportation, Chapter One examining the way that characters’ walks serve to delimit or expand the individual’s position as a national subject, and Chapter Two turning to the railway’s role in inscribing individual and national identity both in the individual body and the landscape of the nation. Following these chapters, I naturally assumed that the author would move on to consider other significant modes of transport, such as the steamship, and their attendant technological developments, in relation to nineteenth-century ideas of nation and place. Instead, in Chapter Three Mathieson turns to examine the novel’s depiction of travels to Europe and, finally, in Chapter Four we find ourselves “Travelling Beyond,” as we first witness the “collapse of the local” in David Copperfield and then turn to the repeated importation of “the Orient” into the ostensibly small world of Gaskell’s Cranford.In this way, the very structure of the book seems to replicate the structures of imperialism identified by Edward Said (whom the author draws upon) and others since, as it moves from the “center” of things outward, first toward Europe and then finally to the periphery of India and “the antipodes.” But even setting that reservation aside, it sometimes feels as if one is reading two separate studies, the first concerned with how we get there, the second with where we are going. Showing in a convincing way the significance of the connection between these two central questions requires a deepening of the overall argumentative framework of the study from the outset.The range of authors and texts addressed in the study may in part contribute to — or be symptomatic of — the book’s second, and perhaps more frustrating, limitation. Frequently the author moves away from sustained argument and analysis, lapsing instead into cataloguing images in a manner that fails to sufficiently explore their connection to the central thematic issues at stake in the novels examined. In such moments it is as if the reader is herself roving across a landscape populated by Victorian texts, finding here and there illustrations of the use of various forms of transport technology or references to India, the Orient, and elsewhere. For example, while a novel such as Mary Barton may indeed include a railway journey, the reader is left wanting to know much more about the way that journey — and the gossip about Mary overheard by the heroine herself while aboard the train — significantly contributes to the novel’s treatment of ideas about what it means to be a “public woman” — about testimony, truth, and exposure. How, we might ask, is travel in general and the railway in particular thus linked to the law’s privileging of male-authored narratives of history? We would do well to remember that it is not finally Mary’s truth-telling on the witness stand but rather the last-minute arrival of Will Wilson (the sailor) that provides the alibi necessary to ensure that Mary’s beloved Jem Wilson escapes the scaffold.In many ways, I really did admire Mathieson’s approach — take her pairing of Jane Eyre’s and Hetty Sorrel’s walks, for instance. The narratives, Mathieson claims, use the “experience of moving into the vast world as a means by which to reorient the undefined nation-space into a mapped, knowable space.” Yet, at the same time, it seems impossible that one could address Jane’s movement across the land and to understand her journeys as “moments of rupture” and potential liberation in the context of Victorian “nation-space” without so much as mentioning her infamous imprisoned — and foreign — alter ego, Bertha Mason. Bertha’s very presence within the walls of Thornfield has been made possible by expansive imperial transport networks that Mathieson’s study documents. Here, Hetty’s imprisonment, like her eventual transportation, seemed a natural opportunity to tie together the two texts’ representation of women in bondage and would have deepened the author’s analysis.Form and content, as I tell my students ad nauseum, remain inextricable: Mathieson’s book is a case in point. For just as the overarching structure of the book’s argument suffers from some conceptual fuzziness, so too does Mathieson’s language repeatedly lapse into imprecision and repetition in a manner that insufficiently represents the depth of the author’s ideas and the profundity of texts that she examines. Discussing, for instance, the significance of the image of the individual aboard the train wrapped up in railway blankets in a novel such as Lady Audley’s Secret, Mathieson claims that
the image of the wrapped-up body brings to the forefront the role of modern mobilities in producing space, making visible how space, mobility, and the human subject are connected in the landscapes of mobile modernity. The mobility of the body becomes a point through which to make sense of the new landscapes of modern mobility and the situation of the human subject within, because, as these representations register, it is through the mobility of the body that space is produced.
If nothing else, this is disorienting prose.The book’s claims become most fulsome and compelling in Chapter Three, especially in Mathieson’s discussion of Little Dorrit’s depiction of its characters’ travels to Italy and the idea of the foreign tour. Here the author writes clearly and effectively about the appeal of the Continent for British travellers and the expansion of travel to Europe in the early nineteenth century as she examines the “growing ideological unity” of Europeans. Mathieson, of course, could have not predicted how resonant her discussion of Belgium in relation to Charlotte Brontë’s Villette would become by the time I began reading her book earlier this year. I could not read her discussion of the way that Brussels “occupied a distinct position in the British imagination” without thinking constantly of the place that Brussels has assumed in the Western cultural imagination since the terrorist bombings there in March. It seems so striking that Europe seems to be coming unfixed as an entity in a manner already documented by the likes of Brontë and Dickens, the latter for whom, according to Mathieson, “Europe appears as a confused landscape in which the relative certainties of space collapse.”This, our own cultural moment, is likewise one of spatial and geographical collapse — a collapse that may be taking place directly at the site of its resistance: beneath the Palmyra Arch in Trafalgar Square. The arch’s reconstruction suggests that a book like Mathieson’s is in many ways timely, as the world is once more confronted with the unraveling of the idea of nation, what Mathieson terms the “collapse of the global.” In the fallout of the expansion of ISIS, the ongoing refugee crisis, and the potential of Brexit, we, like Mathieson, might do well to call on Dickens and his literary compatriots for an understanding of the new world around us: “Borders, the novel finally suggests, are ineffectual.”____Sara Malton teaches nineteenth-century literature at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
