The Little Professor

The History of a Bible

The History of a Bible is a tract with an odd provenance.  Like most American Tract Society publications, it appeared anonymously.  However, the ATS itself appeared to be under the impression that it was written by J. W. Cunningham, well-known in England for another religious it-narrative, The Velvet Cushion.(Incidentally, somebody ought to do a joint edition of that and the response to it.) While the tract is sometimes cataloged with Cunningham as author, there doesn't seem to be any actual proof for this ascription; given that the tract appears to have been pretty successful, it appears decidedly odd that nobody on the other side of the pond mentions it as part of Cunningham's oeuvre.  So, hmm.  To make matters more complicated, the tract also exists in multiple versions.  In this 1820 printing, for example, the narrative ends after the Bible's dissolute second owner, George, departs this earth in a state of proper repentance; my own copy, part of an omnibus reprinting that dates from approximately 1848, sees the Bible continuing to live out its life in the kind of domesticity it lacked with its first two bachelor owners. 

Unlike the Bible it-narratives I've discussed here before, the Bible narrates The History of a Bible.  The Bible thus speaks as an organic "I," a unified "self" guaranteed by the authority of divine inspiration; there are no Biblical books here, just a Book.   And this Book appropriates a number of roles to itself: "close prisoner" in the bookshop and, later, William's library (3), would-be "companion" (3), and, most importantly, evangelist.   It is the ultimate text in the library, preceded in William's textual pilgrim's progress by Oriental tales, Don Quixote, The Man of Feeling, and historians--the latter of whom speak not as their titles, but as their authors (Hume, Robertson, Rollins).  The implied progress of William's reading suggests the possibility that fiction might be a gateway drug to more serious texts, but that once the reader finally encounters the Bible, no other text is worthy of attention.   In a way, the Bible is the object of William's and, later, George's romantic yearnings, desired yet regarded with shame, famous yet treated as a dangerous secret.  The two men repeatedly hide and ignore the poor thing, only to always return.  But although Leah Price argues that "it-narratives anthropomorphize the book at its moments of greatest vulnerability," this Bible undergoes little in the way of figurative mutilation or torment, aside from its occasional imprisonments.¹ Instead, it becomes most powerfully "human" at the moment of reading--so powerful, in fact, that it swamps the human subject altogether.  "My first salutation struck William" (5), the Bible informs us, swapping its own verbal address for William's act of reading (and implying near-physical shock into the bargain).  Their encounter is a "conversation" (5), and yet it is one in which the balance of power is being constantly negotiated.  The Bible may repeatedly "speak," erasing William's own role as the reader, but it is William who can quite literally "clos[e] my mouth" (5-6) or "allo[w] me to talk" (6).  The figurative violence of the Bible's "salutation" returns upon itself in the reader's domineering response, finally climaxing in a fight of sorts over the Law: William rejects it, the Bible warns him of damnation, and the result is a "sick and feverish" fit (7).  This is a classic moment in conversion narratives, the moment of terror in which the not-yet-believer finds himself convicted of sin, but yet without hope of salvation.  But it is also represented in terms of a conversation in which William actively participates, talking back to the Bible instead of merely being lectured.   In Price's turn of phrase, "the virtuous" recognize the Book's "subjectivity" (125), yet such recognition occurs in the context of rejection as well as assent.   George, too, will have a similar moment on his deathbed, when he finally opens himself up to the Bible's charges.   Debates over free will thus emerge in these moments of decision-making: do I read or not? Do I listen or not? Do I resist or not?

One of the odder things about this tract, though, is the way in which it erases its own circulation.  "I was sent for" (12), the Bible says, when it moves from the deceased William to George; "I became the inmate of a respectable family" (16-17), it goes on, as it makes its transit from George to the unnamed married couple.  Scenes of sale and gifting are usually played up, not down, in Bible it-narratives.  Here, the Bible simply moves, or is moved.  The sole exception is when George "made a present of me to some poor native" (15), resulting in a problematic missionary moment: the native (a slave?) cannot read the language.  In this mockery of evangelization, the Word goes forth to someone who cannot hear it.  Other slaves are luckier in their grasp of English, and enjoy the kind of conversational relationship with the Book that William and, eventually, George will have.  But in effect, these encounters suggest that human evangelical efforts are less relevant than the direct encounter with the Bible's own "good news" (16).  Like the conversational relationship between the bachelor sinner and his Bible, this account of good works amongst slaves suggests that although language may be difficult, its content, paradoxically enough, is not--the self-interpreting Bible once again made manifest.  Nobody needs to analyze this Book; one merely listens and responds to its edifying conversation, and Christianity is sure to follow.  (One can hear nineteenth-century High Churchmen grumbling somewhere, far off in the distance.)  

The Bible's "reward," as it were, is its final migration to the unnamed nuclear family, where it finds itself installed in a position of new domestic authority.  In the family, the Bible simultaneously remains dependent (it is "permitted to speak," "brought out" [17]) and authoritative ("I addressed, "commanded," "told," "bade" [17-18]).  The family subjects itself, in a sense, to its most potent object.  Unlike the bachelor associations of William and George, where religion appears to spread rather hesitantly through random male companions and oppressed "natives," the family provides the Bible with an opportunity to develop a sort of program.  Moreover, the family turns out to be a miniaturized version of the colony as a whole, Christianizing the colony through force of example.  Within the family, the Bible turns out to have yet another role--that of surrogate parent.   Companion, evangelist, parent, yet potentially always a prisoner once again, the Bible turns out to be both spiritual magician, converting those who cross its path, and weak, passive object, awaiting the reader who will release its force. 

¹  Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012), 128. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Charlotte Rogan, The Lifeboat (Little Brown, 2012).  In 1914, a woman goes on trial for the fallout of events after a ship shinks.  (BOMC)
• Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (Garland, 1977).  This is the big companion volume to Wolff's "Novels of Faith and Doubt" reprint series.  Thank goodness for library discards, as I've been searching for an affordable copy for eons (it usually retails at around $200 for a used copy).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jason David Hall, ed., Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (Ohio, 2012).  Transformations in metrical theory and practice during the nineteenth century and their relation to other cultural phenomena.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012).  A study of how books came to be regarded as, in effect, precious objects with only one purpose.  (Review copy)
• Joyce Sugg, Ever Yours Affly: John Henry Newman and His Female Circle (Gracewing, 1996).  An account of Newman's female correspondents and friends, including several Victorian authors like Lady Georgiana Fullerton.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Here or there

I've been writing some version of this blog for about a decade (it originated on Blogspot), and so Dr. Crazy's questions did strike a nerve.  It was always my intention to write an academic blog, and not a political blog, a personal-life blog, a travel blog, or anything else of the sort. In my case, that meant de-anonymizing fairly early on: it's very difficult to anonymously write about your research when the research in question occupies the nichiest niche that ever niched.  (Religion and literature: big business.  Nineteenth-century non-canonical religious fiction, with occasional visits by poetry: let me introduce you to all ten of us.  In the known world.  Quite possibly the galaxy.)  Moreover, when I started, I was a non-tenured sort of academic.  Then I mutated into a tenured sort of academic.  And now I'm at the point of thinking about applying for promotion to full professor.  Does this affect blogging?

Yes and no.  This school year has seen the blogging slow down considerably, thanks to the trials and travails of revising Book Two; I imagine it will pick up again once I can get my new project(s) under way.  But more than that, going up the academic ladder means...I've accrued commitments that are not a weblog.  Even though I hardly qualify as an academic "star"--more of an academic streetlight, maybe, or perhaps a nightlight--I'm at that point in my career where people ask me to do things, whether it be referreeing a manuscript, writing an article, or sitting on Committee #3921.  (As I recall, a previous chair's congratulations on my tenure application included the line, "And now, I have a committee I need you to be on.")   At the same time, there are also fewer subjects that I can write about, in large part because I'm not anonymous; some of the strangest/most frustrating/most aggravating experiences I've had as an instructor or graduate director just can't put in an appearance here, because there's no safe way to keep other parties nameless.  Too, some things I might have once posted here are now over on Facebook or Twitter.

Still, Twitter is hardly a substitute for a long-form blog post when it comes to writing up the latest Victorian novel about baptism.  Although it might be fun to live-tweet a religious novel, come to think of it...         

The Curse of the Great Demon Xyeazzzaiban

I have decided that I must be living in a Gothic novel of some sort.  Evidence from the past forty-eight hours:

1) My bank cancelled my check card, thanks to a security breach on campus that has led to several instances of attempted fraud.

2) My car thought that  it would be a good idea to get a flat tire.  In the rain.  When I was twenty miles away from my mechanic.

3) One of my kitchen cabinet doors felt a burning desire to separate itself from its moorings.

4) And now, the roof at House the Original has (re)sprung a leak.

I can only conclude that I have somehow insulted some sort of demonic force, which is now taking out its rage upon my innocent possessions.  (Dude! Seriously! The check card did nothing to you!)

Sister Agatha: Or, "The New Catholic Teaching"

Of the many, many controversial novels I've discussed at this blog, the vast majority have involved Protestants and Catholics squaring off against each other, with occasional voyages into Jews and [insert Christian here] doing likewise.  William Henry Pinnock's Sister Agatha: Or,  "The New Catholic Teaching" (1876) is an interesting variant on the usual theme.  Not because the novel itself is remarkably well-executed, or because it has something to say that might come as a shock to the average reader (of this blog, at least), but because the controversy involved is really two modes of High Churchmanship squaring off against each other.  Instead of the relatively wide gap between, say, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, we have here two different claims to Catholicity and apostolicity, launched by someone who clearly fears that it is impossible to tell the difference between High Churchmanship (old style), Anglo-Catholicism (new style), and, of course, Roman Catholicism. 

Even though the novel's conflicts are set within the Church of England, the story itself takes place in France after the Commune.  At first glance, it's an odd choice of setting, underlined by the total lack of "fit" between the English characters and their environment: even though Mr. Stanhope, who carries part of the brief for traditional High Church positions, is a longtime resident, much of the novel's actual dialogue about France consists of complaints about the bureaucracy, the manners, and, of course, the Catholicism.  But this unease actually underlines the novel's point about the Church of England, which is that is a national institution in need of protection against incursions by the Catholic Other.  Even the title character is convinced that post-Communard France is intellectually, morally, and culturally degenerate, reduced to "'selfish brusquerie'" in the wake of calls for egalitarianism (107).  The novel's English are an enclave of Anglican good sense in a sea of French Catholic bad culture, bad ritual, bad theology, and bad art.  Railways treat passengers like "'beeves in a cattle truck'" (106), while the churches sport--or used to sport--statues of the Virgin Mary "with hideous features in jaundiced wax" and "eyes affected by strabismus" (53).  Pinnock paints France as somehow irredeemably ugly, despite all its associations (good food, good wine, good clothes...); it is what England could turn into, were the Catholic Church to take over.

In order to ward off this unfortunate event, the novel quickly devolves into its real purpose, which is to act as a manual for countering both Anglo- and Roman Catholic claims.   On the one hand, the novel supports Anglican sisterhoods; Mr. Perilyan, the Anglican clergyman who spouts most of the theological monologues, even has "'two daughters in two distinct Sisterhoods'" (164).  On the other hand, the book turns somersaults to distinguish the good Sisterhoods from the dangerous ones, those under the sway of the "'wide eirenic principle of Catholic union, charity, and large-heartedness'" (198).  Pinnock diagnoses a kind of slippery-slope problem in post-Puseyite theology, in which the Eirenicon's anti-Marian arguments have apparently vanished under the rolling rock of "Romanizing" sympathies.  Mr. Perilyan and the Stanhopes repeatedly accuse the sisterhood that Agatha is joining of being "'nothing less than a nursery of Roman Catholicism, under the guise of a Church of England sisterhood'" (137), warning readers in no uncertain terms that the "Anglo-Catholic" position actually constitutes a deceptive performance within the borders of Anglicanism.  All of the novel's tub-thumping is thus devoted to charting the precise boundaries separating Catholicity from Roman Catholicism, with a strong emphasis on eucharistic and sacramental doctrine.  (Sister Agatha's own High Churchmanship comes out most strongly in its attack on the right of private judgment.) 

The reason that nobody picks up on the distinctions, the novel argues, is lousy theological education.  In fact, our title character may qualify as one of the most inept fictional controversialists I've seen in some time.  No doubt the character's gender has something to do with it: she's unequipped with any of the languages she might need to study the relevant works.  But it gets worse, as they say.  Early on, she informs Mr. Stanhope that "'I must not venture upon argument: it is forbidden ground: and I dare not doubt the necessity of obedience to the injunctions of my spiritual superior'" (27), thereby wearisomely invoking every stereotype of intellectual self-abasement known to the reader of anti-Catholic polemic.  By no argument, of course, Agatha simply means no argument with her Mother Superior and confessor; she's perfectly happy to argue with Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Perilyan.  However, her contributions to the faux dialogues almost always fall into the forms of "But surely X did Y?" or "I heard somewhere that X."  Thus, on the question of whether or not Paul fasted before taking the Eucharist, she queries, "'But did not St. Paul in one of his journeys [...] adopt this very rule of fasting?'" (77)   One paragraph down, on the same topic, she does the same thing: "'But some ancient authority, I think, refers to this usage as prevailing immediately after the times of the Apostles'" (77).  And later, she tells Mr. Perilyan that she is "'almost certain'" that such fasting was practiced in the early Church (83).  Often relegated to one-sentence objections that are either heavily qualified or phrased as questions, Agatha consistently undermines both her voice and her authority to speak; she quite clearly has not mastered the "new Catholicity" (let alone the old one) that she wishes to preach to Stanhope and Co.  By the end of the novel, the new Catholicity has manifested itself as primarily an echoing theological void.

But the ending also does something unusual for a controversial novel: it declines to divert our heroine from her path.  When last we see her, she is off to "dissolve dear and loving family ties," preparatory to joining the convent she has been describing all along.  I've discussed paradoxically anti-controversialist controversial novels here before; this one too suggests the sheer uselessness of arguing theology with someone whose mind has already fixed on another position.   Despite the almost comically one-sided nature of the faux dialogues, Agatha's religious emptiness has not been filled by any solid Anglican knowledge.  It seems that force-feeding wandering Ritualists with a nourishing diet of old-fashioned High Churchmanship is not, after all, the way to go; those who have already proceeded well down the path to Roman Catholicism, the novel implies, probably cannot be reclaimed.   Only young women and men who have not yet fallen prey to stereotypically predatory priests in Anglican clothing can be saved from their fate...

This Week's Acquisitions

• Chris Bohjalian, The Night Strangers (Crown, 2011).  A family moves into an old house with a mysteriously-sealed room, and...you just know that this can't possibly go well.  (eBay)
• Alexi Zentner, Touch (Norton, 2011).  A visit to his old home leads a Canadian priest to dwell on the past--both his and his family's.  (Lift Bridge)
• Walter Scott, Reliquiae Trotcosienses; Or, the Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck, Esq., of Monkbarns (Edinburgh, 2004).  Scott's whimsical catalog/architectural description of Abbotsford.  (Columbia UP)
• Christian Miscellany, and Family Visiter (1846-51).  Four volumes, including #1, of this successful Methodist journal.  (private seller)
• Carmen M. Mangion, Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (Manchester, 2008).  Analyzes how nuns understood themselves in terms of work, gender, national origin, etc.  (Amazon)

ROTFL

I don't usually break out into uncontrollable laughter while teaching, but William Beckford drove me to it this afternoon.  We were looking at an excerpt from Beckford's satire Modern Novel Writing, and I called the students' attention to this--ah--remarkable paean to love:

And surely he well merited this faithful testimony at her hands, for it must be owned, that the arrows of true passion, when sharpened by the sceptre of disappointment, envelope the heart with a weight of woe, and forcibly obumbrate the finest feelings of the soul.

Never mind politely mixing your metaphors; this one has been stirred, shaken, violently blended, and then pureed.  It's "obumbrate," though, that really puts the whole thing over the top. 

(And then I laughed again when I realized that GoogleBooks has catalogued the novel's second volume only under Beckford's pseudonym, "Harriet Marlow," but that's another issue altogether.) 

 

A dancing card catalog (er, sort of)

For your delectation, some card catalogs at Yale University.  They sing! They dance! OK, the drawers move around in neat patterns.  But still!

 

In which I watch the second half of The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The most recent adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood starts off sticking pleasantly and, by and large, faithfully enough to what exists of Dickens' final novel.  It is at its best as a character study of an increasingly insane John Jasper, driven to (remarkably calm) madness by the combined effects of desire and opium.  Rosa Bud is more peppery than the usual Dickens ingenue and Drood is something of a twit, both of which are in line with the original text.  The Landless twins are now explicitly Anglo-Indian, which is a legitimate reading of their ambiguous racial status in the novel (they are "both very dark, and very rich in color" [ch. 6]).   As has been so frequently the case with Victorian literary adaptations, though, the production team introduces issues of race and empire without figuring out how to successfully integrate them with the original plot.  On the one hand, the Landless twins register the kind of unthinking pain inflicted by the nineteenth-century equivalent of sex tourism, abandoned as they are to a life of suffering by their English father; on the other, Jasper's persecution of Neville now has heavily racialized implications that the adaptation simply drops like the proverbial stone, and one can only imagine what E. M. Forster would have to say about the allegorical implications of the pretty tableau of reconciliation at the end (complete with marriage proposal). 

But good heavens, the wrap-up.  "Solving" Drood is one of literature's great parlor games, although we know perfectly well whodunnit (Dickens kept telling people, after all).  Here, the writer sticks to Dickens' villain, Jasper, but proceeds to throw all sorts of mind-blowing monkeywrenches into the plot.  My reactions went something like this (spoilers ahoy):

The Pleasures of Men

By now, it's something of a critical commonplace that neo-Victorian fiction is often "neo-sensation" fiction, drawing heavily on novelists like Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon for both forms and themes.¹  Even neo-Victorian--or neo-Edwardian, at least--ballet likes to trace this path. Kate Williams' first novel, The Pleasures of Men, is very much in this mode.  Strongly reminiscent of Sarah Waters' Fingersmith, The Pleasures of Men imagines a Jack the Ripper serial killer avant la lettre, the Man of Crows, hard at work in 1840.  The Man of Crows has a thing for primarily working-class women (although he later branches out) and what appears to be a fetish for braided hair. We perceive him through the heated imagination of the mysterious and possibly insane Catherine Sorgeuil (in other words, not the world's most reliable narrator), an orphan fresh out of an asylum who is forced to reside with her increasingly impoverished uncle.  Besieged by her own murderous dreams, her unsettled memories of how her family imploded, and her homoerotic desires, Catherine becomes obsessed with the Man of Crows and the women he murders.  In desperation, she begins to write about the Man of Crows and his victims, only to find that her narrative may or may not be leaking over into the real world and his actual activities. 

I might as well get my opinion of the novel out of the way, which is that while the atmosphere and historical details are handled vividly, the book as a whole is not a success.  At this phase in her novel-writing career, Williams does not understand how to manage pacing, make complex plot elements play off against each other, or write successful dialogue.  A flat exchange near the end between Catherine and a would-be male friend, Constantine, is the low point, even though it's supposed to be leading up to one of the novel's Big Reveals.   The Pleasures of Men runs through a smorgasboard of potential neo-Victorian hot topics, including race (Catherine's racial identity is called into question repeatedly), empire (her uncle's collections), class oppression (the maids, models, and other workers), madness (see my first paragraph), gender (women! treated badly!), and sexuality (for a change, it's women exploiting their maids, as opposed to men).    But it doesn't work through them with any seriousness, with perhaps the exception of gender issues and Catherine's fears of her own mind; the plot has a bric-a-brac-ish feel.   Why, for example, does the novel repeatedly "other" Catherine--as an Indian, as a Malay with "coppery brown" skin (251)--without ever exploring the meanings of such a difference? Are we to link this otherness to her violations of Victorian gender norms, to her fragmented mind, or to something else--and what, quite frankly, are the implications of doing such a thing? The "experiment" peformed by Catherine's uncle, which seems to owe something to the kind of psychological "vivisection" done by Oscar Wilde's Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray and, as Mark Ravenshill points out, to Gaslight as well, is more ludicrous than otherwise.  So too is the identity of the Man of Crows, which deflates the plot with a slow retreating hiss.  In its favor, at least, the novel actually manages to avoid most of the Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels, with the conspicuous exceptions of #5 and #9. 

However.  That being said, Williams does do something interesting with one of the tropes of both neo-Victorian fiction and feminist theory more generally: she deconstructs the connection between women's writing and self-empowerment.  Catherine's first epiphany about imagining the Man of Crows is that telling his tale, working her way into his consciousness, will liberate her from the prison of what she believes to be her own derangement: "I would throw myself into the Man of Crows, be bound up into him and his atrocity and find release" (43).  Her vision of authorship, with its sadomasochistic overtones (the orgasmic quality of "find release" playing off against "bound up"), is perversely Keatsian.  Writing is about the act of subjective self-erasure, becoming the character.  In the act, she is "the possession of the story, swept up in its arms and forced to write" (47): storytelling as classic (but implicitly violent) romance.   Yet Catherine also perceives the outcome of such writing in terms of adolescent heroics, for by imaginatively inhabiting the Man of Crows, she will "find him, and then, once I had helped the city, people would think me good, and I would be free" (44). Her fictional descent into violence thus takes on the air of a redemptive quest, in which being re-viewed by other people will finally liberate herself from herself.  This problem of being thought "good," or not, echoes one of the dominant problems of Jane Eyre.  "Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?" asks Mr. Brocklehurst; thinks Jane, "Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative; my little world held a contrary opinion; I was silent."   Like Jane, Catherine suffers because her mind has been invaded and taken over by others' assessments of her value, or lack thereof--in fact, the aunt who schleps Catherine off to the insane asylum is strongly reminiscent of Aunt Reed.  But in her fantasy, Catherine embraces, instead of undermining, this reliance on the judgment of others. 

In practice, Catherine's narrative identification with the Man of Crows, who carries out the murders she has always fantasized, turns out to be inflected with power imbalances that make it the opposite of liberating.  Although it's easy to miss, Catherine is the author of the plot's alternative POV narratives: the prologue, for example, features an "I" who is actually the Man of Crows, and Catherine's description of the Abigail section matches up with the prologue's contents ("I felt her unwashed hair catching at the sides of her face, the cramp in her back from bending" [47]).   There's a tension here between Catherine's fantasies about the murderer and her fantasies about the victims: she yearns to occupy both positions simultaneously, powerful man and comparatively weak woman.  To write her tales, she "must follow their route, go where they had been" (95), insinuating her own body into the gritty slums occupied by impoverished victims--and yet she does so under the aegis of class privilege, knowing that "he was a man who craved poor, lower-class girls" (97).  This is class masquerade, a woman slumming in search of "the real London" (98).  As it happens, this is also one of the core strategies of neo-Victorianism: produce your reality effects by multiplying all the ugly signifiers of the worst sort of poverty.  The success of this fantasy rests on Catherine's embrace of her own social status, even though she rejects it elsewhere in her refusal to act like a proper, marriageable young lady. 

On the one hand, the alternative POVs break down the easy gender binary of male predator/female victim, especially in the case of the sexually manipulative Grace Starling.   Similarly, one of Catherine's fantasies about the Man of Crows involves him sewing (246).   On the other hand, it's difficult to read incipient feminism into Catherine's choice of a murderous male alter ego, given that it allies her with the pathological masculinity of her uncle and his evil friend Mr. Trelawny.  "There are men, all over the country, thinking about these deaths" (93), says Catherine to herself, sure that these men fantasize about committing the very same deeds--but isn't she doing the same?  One notes the slippage as she thinks about the Man of Crows murdering Jenny Amber, as she moves from speculation about his sexual motives to definitive claims about how he felt when "he leant and seized a woman's throat" (172) to a detailed narrative about the origins of his obsession in his rejection by a French courtesan.   This last soon shifts, in turn, into vividly explicit renderings of "Frederick's" violent sexual and murderous escapades, in which the markers differentiating Catherine's voice from the third-person "he" quietly vanish altogether.   It's hard not to read this as the deformed expression of Catherine's own nascent eroticism, wish-fulfillment gone haywire (or is it?).

But as it turns out, Catherine's belief that finding the Man of Crows through storytelling will empower her falls apart.  To begin with, the Man of Crows writes back: "Write about your maid," he directs (258), and she does, only for him to come back and erase part of the manuscript (281).  Her dream of submerging self in this evil other runs aground on his own investment in the narrative.  Worse still, her uncle (or is he...?) and Mr. Trelawny have been reading her manuscript as it goes along, finding it "'so very original'" (347).  Not only do they trivialize the manuscript as a form of dilettantish pleasure for themselves, but they have also been circulating her true story (father, drowned; mother, suicided; brother, kidnapped) amongst their immediate circle; even her dreams of her own evil turn out to have been carefully amplified by her uncle (351).  Catherine's depravity, which she has identified all along as the core of her identity, thus turns out to have been somebody else's construct.   What self is there? Who, or what, has been writing all along? Worst of all, the Man of Crows mirrors back Catherine's own state as an individual whose mind has been forever warped by others.  "'You could complete your story,'" he tells her, "'write that I was seized by repentance, and then I would be so'" (363).  Who is the subject and who is the object here?  As fiction and reality braid together, it becomes harder and harder to discern how one might write a self into being who has not already been written by someone else.  The characters refuse to stay put.  Which, perhaps, is why Catherine ends the novel contemplating her students' hair, like the murderer she has supposedly laid to rest. 

¹ Beginning with Kelly A. Marsh, "The Neo-Sensation Novel: A Contemporary Genre in the Victorian Tradition," Philological Quarterly 74.1 (1995): 99-123, although Marsh is interested in how sensation novel conventions also play out in novels outside the neo-Victorian genre (e.g., A Thousand Acres).