Negeen N. Nikravesh, “Unraveling the Baumgartenian Trinity: The Decay of Dorian Gray” (pp. 6–33) This article explores the aesthetic and cultural connections in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891) to read Wilde’s revision of aesthetic idealism as a social commentary. I suggest that Wilde upsets the Baumgartenian definition of aesthetic pleasure—the truth-beauty-goodness trinity at the root of idealist aesthetics—and instead offers a Wildean sense of pleasure rooted in decadence and stemming from hedonism. In the separation of body and soul in Dorian, his beautiful, never-aging exterior and grotesque interior presents a negative version of aesthetic transcendence found in the deformed union of beauty, truth, and goodness, with beauty linked instead to evil and artifice. This inversion of Baumgarten’s aesthetics points to a deterioration of art, as evil permeates pleasurable art and perfect form to deform these values from the inside out. However, Dorian’s simultaneous “beauty” and “imperfection” complicates Baumgarten’s definition, instead linking beauty and perfection with immoral hedonism. Unending pleasure, and all the evils that help one achieve such pleasures, become the only ideal for Dorian. This inversion allows Dorian to embody his sexual identity in a way that he would not have been able to in his historical moment. In an inadvertent way, Dorian’s mask of beauty allows him to tell his own truth. It paradoxically functions as a form of deception as well as an ultimate liberation from the façade of propriety. By realigning beauty to symbolize pleasure and immorality, the novel doubles as a social critique of Victorian morality and respectability. Wilde inscribes a new aesthetic ideal into art: ugliness (as opposed to beauty), hedonism (as opposed to goodness), and immorality (as a new truth). Unraveling these values undermines (and perhaps pokes fun at) the “Baumgartenian trinity,” and the visual deterioration of Dorian’s soul and its increasing depravity becomes elevated to the status of an ideal. Through Dorian’s decadent hedonism, Wilde disrupts the unity of idealist aesthetics and establishes a new form of aesthetic beauty—a rejection of societally dictated concepts of “goodness” and “truth” in favor of personal goodness and truth. As Wilde reveals in The Picture of Dorian Gray, this “beauty” can only be found in an inverted sense in fin de siècle society.
Joe McLaughlin, “Right-Wing Gothicism: Dracula’s Microfascist Modernity” (pp. 73–106) This essay argues for a thoroughgoing effort to historicize the cultural and intellectual tradition of the hard right, putting recent theoretical developments in fascist studies into conversation with texts from the period prior to the twentieth century as a way to better understand the resurgence of the hard right and its relationship to failing liberalisms today. It is impossible to properly understand the enduring fascination with fascist aesthetics, I argue, without an attempt to historicize and theorize the development of what Christopher Bollas terms “the Fascist state of mind,” or what Michel Foucault tantalizingly calls “the fascism in us all.” To this end, I revisit Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as one unexpected, yet prescient site of what Jack Bratich has recently described as “microfascism,” or the cultural and affective structuring logics of fascist thought, feeling, and fantasy. Looking at Dracula as a case study in the formation of “the Fascist state of mind,” I argue that the novel demonstrates how nineteenth-century liberal modernity was itself deeply imbricated in the formation of illiberal, authoritarian, and patriarchal aesthetics and values. I conclude by interrogating Dracula’s cryptic and paradoxical relationship to microfascist ideology and reflect on the gothic as a generic mode in order to make the case for the possibility of transhistorical antifascist reading practices.
Caroline Sumpter, “Women Writers, Magazines, and the Making of Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales” (pp. 34–72) This article is the first to show that key strategies in the fairy tales that have come to be seen as distinctively Wildean were pioneered by female writers and inspired by women’s magazines. Exploring both Wilde’s editorship of the monthly The Woman’s World and the publication of his fairy tale “The Young King” in the weekly Lady’s Pictorial, it recovers magazines as imaginative contexts for both Wilde and for the women readers activating his fairy tales. In the paratextual frame of the Lady’s Pictorial, Wilde’s readers were positioned as purchasers of colonial textiles and decorative objects as often as readers of fiction. Read as Wilde anticipated in 1888, alongside John Bernard Partridge’s illustrations, “The Young King’s” relationships with capitalism, empire, and race appear both unexpected and disconcerting. Revealing the close creative relationship between Wilde’s fairy-tale writing and his reviewing and editing of women magazine authors, this article shows the commercial as well as the political inspiration behind Wilde’s use of a socialist Christ, and recovers E. Nesbit and Olive Schreiner as major influences on some of Wilde’s best-known fairy tales.
Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge, “Birthing Fiction: Pregnancy and Nascent Realism in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life” (pp. 213–236) This analysis of George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) contributes to the recent surge of scholarship on pregnancy and its representation in nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that Eliot made pregnancy perceptible through contemporary literary strategies such as pregnancy calendaring (that is, dense time marking that enabled readers to track a character’s pregnancy), allusions to behaviors and care treatments advocated for pregnant women in medical advice manuals, and poignant metonyms of pregnancy and miscarriage such as babies’ caps and layette pincushions. However, Eliot suggests that not all characters—and not all readers—will perceive or respond to the text’s subtle indicators of pregnancy. Instead, the capacity to notice and respond to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or their possibilities with compassion and sympathy functions in her early realist fiction as an ethical test. In “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” the acts of perceiving and responding ethically to pregnancy (or its possibility) thus emerge as linchpins of Eliot’s developing realist and humanist fiction.
Jefferey Simons, “Supreme Music, Believable Eternity: Allegory in Dickinson Hearing the Wind” (pp. 237–264) Pursuing lyric allegory, a scarcely understood facet of Emily Dickinson’s figural thought, this essay argues that the poet hears the wind allegorically as human, Orphic, and theophanic, and as a momentary answer to the most searching question she faced, the afterlife. The essay’s argument develops in three steps. The first step distinguishes the poet as a keen naturalist from the poet as a lyric allegorist and shows that Dickinson hears the wind allegorically as human. The lyric allegory adduced here is “The Wind – tapped like a tired Man.” The essay’s second step surveys the contexts in which Dickinson perceived the wind and shows in “Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,” a second lyric allegory, that she hears it as Orphic. And the essay’s third step evidences the role of Dickinson’s imagination, alongside Scripture, when hearing the wind as theophanic in a third lyric allegory, “By my Window have I for Scenery.” Over the course of its argument, the essay relates Dickinson hearing the wind to her search for an answer to the question of the afterlife. She found one answer, if fleetingly, in the sounds of the moving air.
This article's reading of The Last Man (1826) employs the term trans*, an asterisked prefix signifying "across, into, and through," as an umbrella term that includes gender-fluid individuals and species-crossing tranimals. Applying this concept to the novel, the article contends that both characters who have been identified by scholars as the multigender plague's enraged female instigators, the Cumaean Sibyl and Evadne Zaimi, are trans*, as is the novel's narrator, Lionel Verney, who depicts himself as "manly," "womanlike," and "effeminate." Along with being genderqueer, Verney is a tranimal whose "life [is] like that of an animal" until he is "humanized" by the maternal Adrian, Earl of Windsor and who reverts to animal behavior after Adrian's death. Rather than the last man, a more accurate description of Verney would be the last surviving mammal assigned male and human at birth. His anthropocentrism ultimately evolves into a biocentric worldview that recognizes the rights of animals and his kinship with them. In the novel, the nonbinary plague strikes a deathblow against a humanity already infected by sexism, speciesism, transphobia, homophobia, racism, nationalism, and militarism. Along with liberating domestic animals, the plague eliminates oppressive gender and species categories and hierarchies.
(pp. This analysis of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) contributes to the recent surge of scholarship on pregnancy and its representation in nineteenth-century literature and culture. It argues that Eliot made pregnancy perceptible through contemporary literary strategies such as pregnancy calendaring (that is, dense time marking that enabled readers to track a character's pregnancy), allusions to behaviors and care treatments advocated for pregnant women in medical advice manuals, and poignant metonyms of pregnancy and miscarriage such as babies' caps and layette pincushions. However, Eliot suggests that not all characters-and not all readers-will perceive or respond to the text's subtle indicators of pregnancy. Instead, the capacity to notice and respond to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or their possibilities with compassion and sympathy functions in her early realist fiction as an ethical test. In "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton" and "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the acts of perceiving and responding ethically to pregnancy (or its possibility) thus emerge as linchpins of Eliot's developing realist and humanist fiction.
Thomas W. Howard, “‘Two Stories Tangled Together’: The Double Brain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins” (pp. 81–110) In this article, I examine Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) alongside nineteenth-century psychological theories, especially ideas about the double brain. While scholars have long acknowledged Twain’s fascination with twinship, I argue that the twinned and conjoined characters of these texts reflect deeper concerns about mental duality and the divided self. I begin by demonstrating Twain’s longstanding interest in psychological and psychical research, including his own investigation into “mental telegraphy,” his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, and his acquaintance with famed psychologists including William James. Next, I show how the conjoined characters Angelo and Luigi demonstrate characteristics that commonly appear in theories of the dual-hemispheric structure of the brain. I then turn to the two tales themselves as evidence of a further conjoinment, where Twain performs hypnotic whispers and subconscious suggestion through his careful revision of the texts. Instead of a straightforward narrative, Twain creates a twinned narrative that disrupts linear storytelling, requiring readers to navigate layered and shifting interpretations. Ultimately, Twain’s entangled stories serve as a literary experiment that engages multiple forms of attention, paralleling contemporary conceptions of the double brain and challenging readers to experience the reading of fictional narrative as a more psychological, nuanced process.
