Stacks
Responding to a review forum devoted to her book, Between Women, Sharon Marcus comments:
...Rather than generalize about Victorian society using fiction alone or only a few kinds of historical documents, in Between Women I draw on prescriptive and descriptive sources, polemic and policy, image and text, fiction and reportage...The sources I use included biographies, memoirs, diaries, letters, popular magazines, children's books, pornographic literature, fashion imagery, debates in the periodical press about marriage and single life for women, anthropological treatises about the history of kinship, and novels by major and minor Victorian writers. I hope that one effect of my book will be to encourage us to use a wider variety of sources when teaching and thinking about gender and sexuality in both the past and the present. We continue to rely disproportionately on one or two sources, such as William Acton's essay on prostitution or W. R. Greg's on single women. Those who cast a wider net still usually focus on only a few types of discourse, such as medical writing and advice literature, which inaccurately suggest that all Victorians considered women asexual, hysterical, or redundant unless married. By placing prescriptive documents alongside visual and verbal sources designed both to prompt fantasy and register mundane reality, we can develop a more complex picture of women's lives. [1]
A historian, I suspect, would be startled to discover that this is a different approach to "Victorian society" and "women's lives," although we English professors probably still need such reminders. Nevertheless, from the point of view of a literary historian who works on Super-Duper-Ultra-Non-Canonical texts, Marcus' comment is worth highlighting, albeit from an alternate angle. One of the difficulties of working on SDUNC texts is that the literary field appears, for lack of a better term, "flat." That is, beyond the distant borders tenanted by, say, G. P. R. James and W. H. Ainsworth, we have a surfeit of novels produced by a wide variety of publishers in multiple forms (newspaper serial, magazine serial, single-volume, triple-decker, etc.), which may or may not have been successful. These novels may or may not have been noticed in newspaper or magazine reviews--more often not, especially as we travel further beyond those borders. The usual reference points--the reviews, sometimes the interviews, allusions in other texts--do not necessarily exist. In my line of work, a novel like Father Clement sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb because it was widely noticed outside the niche of specifically Christian journals and deployed as a cultural referent in what are now canonical texts (e.g., Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life).
Hence the need, which even other academics occasionally don't understand, to read vast quantities of material before charting the field. We cannot argue for what's "different" (in terms of language, narrative structures, subject matter, etc.) until we know what's "normal," and vice-versa. In fact, it's very tempting to simply make Big Generalizations after reading just a few books, on the (dangerous) assumption that ephemeral texts are effectively interchangeable. A Victorianist raised on a diet of the first- , second- , and even third-ranked novelists may not realize what preconceptions she has about how Victorian fiction works until she approaches entirely non-canonical texts (which, of course, far outnumber their canonical and demi-canonical cousins). Random example: the literary histories of masculinity undertaken by James Eli Adams and Christopher Lane do not align at all (and I do mean at all) with ideas about masculinity circulating in religious fiction, even at the end of the century. Non-canonical/demi-canonical works have a rude habit of shoving back at theoretical projects explicitly based on canonical works.
[1] Sharon Marcus, "Book Review Forum: Response," Victorian Studies 50.1 (Autumn 2007): 51-52.