Keeping Faith in Victorian Poetry

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Keeping Faith in Victorian Poetry
• Erik Gray (bio)

I felt honored to be one of the young scholars invited in 2003 to contribute to the special issue of this journal, “Whither Victorian Poetry?” on the current and future state of the field. Taking its title from Tennyson, my essay, “A Bounded Field: Situating Victorian Poetry in the Literary Landscape,” argued that studies of Victorian poetry tended to look inward rather than reaching across temporal, geographic, and generic boundaries. Focusing on the surge of interest in female Victorian poets that had begun about fifteen years earlier, I noted the critical tendency to consider those poets primarily either in isolation or in relationship to each other, and I urged the importance of studying them in relation to a more expansive context. Unable to resist another pun on “field,” I chose to illustrate my point using Michael Field’s “The Sleeping Venus” (1892). Field’s poem describes a 1510 painting by Giorgione that depicts the nude Venus reclining full-length in an idealized landscape. The poets describe the figure’s posture, not unreasonably, as suggesting an act of autoeroticism. But they also emphasize the way the central figure echoes and participates in the interplay of shapes and lines of the broader landscape in which she appears. The point of my reading, explicitly, was to take the figure of Venus as a symbol for Victorian poetry: we should not become so fascinated with our field and its internal relations, I argued, that we ignore its relation to a wider context; rather we should follow the example of Michael Field and try to see the whole picture. Implicitly, though, my argument seemed to offer Venus as a symbol of the critic of Victorian poetry. Do you see this figure (I said, in essence, to my colleagues)—somnolent, oblivious, self-pleasuring? That’s you.

Rereading the essay now for the first time in twenty years, I am surprised by a few things. I’m surprised at my presumptuousness. I’m a little surprised that I have continued to have a career in this field and even to be welcomed within it. Even so, I stand by what I wrote. It’s always a safe [End Page 437] bet, of course, to call for breadth and inclusiveness rather than narrowness and strictly defined boundaries—nothing remarkable there. But what strikes me in retrospect is how my plea for expanding our field of vision prefigured, however faintly, the two most significant calls to action to have appeared in Victorian studies since that time (both of them, as it happens, jointly authored): the Manifesto of the V21 Collective (2015) and “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” (2020), by Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, which introduced a special issue of Victorian Studies on the same topic.

I say “faintly” because “A Bounded Field” proposed, rather modestly, that Victorian poetry studies should pay more heed to broader literary and artistic contexts, whereas both of the later statements are far more ambitious. The V21 Manifesto, published online by a group of early-career scholars, decries the prevalence in Victorian studies of “positivist historicism,” meaning the accumulation of ever more detailed information and theses about the past. This critical methodology “is enabled by and sustains a situation in which Victorianists are our own and only interlocutors. It fails to imagine paths of argument compelling to scholars who do not care about Victorians as Victorians.”¹ The Manifesto therefore calls for post-historicist ways of thinking that will make our field interesting to those outside of it by embracing “theory” (broadly conceived) and “a new openness to presentism.”² “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” meanwhile, is at once more narrowly focused and more far-reaching, in that it urges scholars of Victorian literature and culture to reconsider every aspect of their practice. “[O]ur goal is to interrogate and challenge our field’s marked resistance to centering racial logic,” the authors write. “[W]e want to illuminate how race and racial difference subtend our most cherished objects of study, our most familiar historical and theoretical frameworks, our most engrained scholarly protocols, and the very demographics of our field.”³ Both pieces thus call for us...