What does the caricature talk of the Romantic period have to do with literary criticism’s persistent notion of ‘caricature’ as a technique or style of characterisation in an author’s work? Does caricature have a formal existence, a set of stylistic markers, which can be identified in fictive characters across literary works?
Most of the time, this book keeps ‘caricature’ shut up in inverted commas to remind us that authors and critics have different concepts of caricature, rather than caricature being a discrete genre, technique or other object of analysis. But this is not to say that caricature talk has no relationship with novelists’ characterisation techniques; on the contrary, when novelists use the language-game of character talk, use caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric in their writings – as they often do – caricature talk helps constitute literary character for realism.
There is no ‘caricature-writing’ technique or style without a corresponding ‘caricature-reading’ method dictated by caricature talk. The incorporation of caricature talk into novels recognises that exaggeration, humour and satire are contingent on cultural specifics (regional, historical, linguistic) and that responsibly ‘real’ (realist) fiction might find ways to tell readers when, how and why exaggeration, humour and satire are happening in the text. With caricature talk being necessarily always about things other than caricature (gender, ethnicity, nation, class, morality, civility), in the realist novel it recommends particular characterisation techniques and styles as just and accurate representations of such things. Whereas some realisms are quite ready to assume that the reader shares, to a greater or lesser extent, the author’s view of real people’s characters, other realisms scrupulously provide terms of caricature talk for the reader. Caricature talk puts the -ism in character realism. Caricature talk ‘tells’ us about the characterisation techniques with which the author supposedly ‘shows’ us characters.
Chapter 4 in particular illustrates this principle, analysing how caricature talk co-operates with characterisation technique in Austen’s novels. We are told in Sense and Sensibility that John Dashwood’s new wife is a ‘strong caricature of himself’; and in Pride and Prejudice, when Mr Bennet is compared with his wife, that ‘[h]er mind was less difficult to develope’. We are told, in Emma, that Miss Bates is humorous to imitate; we are told, in Sanditon, that Charlotte can ‘scarce keep her countenance’ around Arthur Parker. Austen’s moral concept of caricature participates in such moments that tell the reader how to read characters. In Chapter 5, I turn my attention to Scott’s use of caricature talk to construct historical characters for compendious realism. Chapter 6 looks at Shelley’s and Scott’s use of literalised caricature in ‘horrid realism’, contemplating the effacement of character by physical peculiarity. Wherever caricature talk tells us how to read characters, framing them as comic, historical or grotesque, fiction manipulates and manufactures the reader’s sense of a social reality shared with the author.
Critics have often claimed that Jane Austen ‘never stooped to caricature’,1 and that avoidance of caricature made her fiction superior and distinctively ‘natural’ in its realism. The first part of this chapter traces the development of a critical tradition which, in the nineteenth century and beyond, insisted on Austen’s ‘delicacy’ and ‘accuracy’, and posited caricature as the antithesis of her literary achievement. More than any other novelist of the period, Austen has been seen as fundamentally ‘anti-caricature’. I argue that the critical tradition’s tendency to deny caricature in Austen’s works has substantially helped to secure the reputation of her realism: critics continually use anti-caricature rhetoric to express the author’s exemplary femininity and promote a homogeneous Englishness – picking up on the vocabulary and imagery of the ‘snug’ aesthetic that the novels themselves present as metonymic of their distinctive reality. Moving on to twentieth-century criticism and recent studies more sceptical of the anti-caricature consensus, I consider how the critical tradition has used ‘caricature’ to distinguish Austen’s early works from the mature novels and to position Sanditon as an outlier.
I offer a new definition of Austen’s ‘anti-caricature’ in the second part of this chapter, refocusing the discussion on the moral concept of caricature that operates within Austen’s novels, and showing how caricature talk works in concert with characterisation techniques. I examine how the narrator’s ‘character appreciations’ take the word ‘caricature’ for ethical criticism, modelling the language-game of talking about fictional characters as though they were real people and vice versa. I argue that in Austen’s realism, caricature is the aesthetic effect of self-interestedness, is self-reflexive and self-inflicted. Austen’s textual styling of character is bound up with her moral concept of caricature, so that the writer’s comic and satirical characterisation techniques can pretend to be ethical criticism of real people. Thus Austen’s characters are ‘explained caricatures’; by this sleight of hand, realism substitutes humour and satire for reportage and analysis.
To look in detail at this co-operation of caricature talk and characterisation technique, I explore how Austen’s moral concept of self-reflexive caricature interacts with characterisation techniques in Austen’s depictions of fat bodies. I argue that Austen deploys an ethics of fatness in conjunction with formal techniques that represent fat bodies as comic, making ‘corpulence’ representative of the ‘real’ or ‘explained’ caricature. Discussing the key stylistic features Austen typically uses in dialogue to characterise the explained caricature – prolonging, repeating, reiterating – I demonstrate that the third-person narrator shifts into that same formal pattern when she talks about fatness and fat bodies. This stylistic resonance between narrator and caricature, I suggest, makes openings for the reader to identify Austen’s fat-hating as an eccentricity and subject it to ethical or psychological criticism.
While Austen’s reputation as a superlatively feminine and English realist has insisted on her refusal to caricature, in fact her novels present their own characterisation techniques under the aegis of a moral concept of caricature, telling readers what ‘caricature’ means in the social world that Austen’s realism purports to show them. Through caricature talk, Austen’s realism offers readers the pleasure of comic and satiric characterisations packaged as accurate, instructive and morally principled, where ‘explained caricatures’ are supposed to pre-exist the text as objects of ethical or psychological criticism. My broader argument about caricature talk’s constitution of realism responds to Jane Stabler’s provocative insight that Austen’s novels show how ‘our notion of realistic characterization needs to include caricature, not exclude it’.2
Looking beyond Austen, the ‘anti-caricature’ of nineteenth-century realism has less to do with the avoidance of caricature through ‘restraint’ or ‘simplicity’ of technique or style, than with the appropriate framing of characterisation techniques through caricature talk. The artifice of a writer’s comic or satiric characterisation can be naturalised, rationalised and moralised into the ‘explained caricatures’ of a reality supposedly already populated by caricatures, where distortions of character are attributed to the external and internal forces that shape people.
Austen in the ‘Age of Caricature’
The phrase ‘the Age of Caricature’ has done some heavy lifting where critics have wanted to align the characterisation techniques of Austen’s writing with the distinctive features of late-Georgian satirical prints. Asking for Austen to be recognised and admired as a ‘caricaturist’, Donald Greene writes: ‘One needs to remember that she grew up in the great age of English caricature, when Hogarth’s engravings were on every wall, and Gillray, Rowlandson, and the Cruikshanks were producing their twisted, grotesque distortions of the human frame.’3 Though it is reasonable to assume that Austen would have come across single-sheet satirical prints (perhaps pasted to a wall or screen, or interleaved with cuttings and drawings in a borrowed portfolio), it is more difficult to ascertain what ‘caricature’ her writing could have gained from satirical prints that it did not gain from elsewhere. As yet, we have no concrete evidence – textual or material – of Austen’s engagement with the single-sheet satirical print, a genre with socio-economic contexts and formal properties that should complicate our assumptions about how late-Georgian graphic caricature parallels contemporaneous comic and satirical literary works. ‘Hogarth and Gillray’ is itself a problematic pairing for the Romantic period; so too, I think, is ‘Gillray and Austen’.
Later in this chapter, I briefly refer to John Kay’s caricature portraits and to Diana Beauclerk’s and Lavinia Spencer’s caricature drawings of Edward Gibbon as a counterpoint to Austen’s characterisation of fat bodies as explained caricatures; I suggest some nuances in the ways that late-Georgian parliamentary satirical prints use fatness and thinness; and I point the reader to new studies of fatness in Georgian culture. So, I do address the ‘visualising’ aspects of Austen’s representation of fat bodies as caricatures – without fully exploring parallels in contemporaneous graphic caricature or visual culture more broadly. Readers looking for analyses of Austen’s writing alongside particular satirical prints might start with Rachel Brownstein’s 2015 article ‘Character and Caricature: Jane Austen and James Gillray’ and Jane Stabler’s 2007 article ‘Jane Austen and Caricature’. Readers who want to know about possible links between Austen and graphic caricature might consider Cassandra Austen’s portrait of her sister, and their collaborative History of England, in relation to the amateur caricaturing I discuss in Chapter 1.
I am cautious of relying on the ‘Age of Caricature’ as a context for literature’s caricature as it existed during roughly the same historical period. But the phrase has enabled, in Austen’s case, some scepticism of the ‘anti-caricature’ rhetoric in the critical tradition and some willingness to contemplate how caricature might be constructive in literary texts. This is because print historians’ work and consequent increased scholarly interest in Georgian satirical prints has made caricature a less dirty word in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies. ‘Fifty years ago’, Brownstein points out, ‘it would have been unthinkable to speak in the same breath, or the same paper, as Jane Austen and [graphic] caricature’.4 Analysing Austen’s writing alongside prints by James Gillray, Brownstein suggests that Austen ‘saw caricature as a mode of characterization’.5 We need not establish direct influences or shared contexts, to gain insights from the comparison of textual and pictorial characterisation.
While my approach does not put Austen and graphic satirists on parallel tracks, for reasons discussed here and in Chapter 1, I share other critics’ interest in stepping away from the debate over which of Austen’s characters are ‘caricatures’ and when – to think instead about caricature in terms of forms and concepts, in ways facilitated by exploring what caricature means in different media and contexts of the late-Georgian period.
Austen and Anti-caricature
Before surveying the longer critical tradition on caricature in Austen’s novels, I want to consider a manuscript that registers Austen’s interest in how her comic and satirically rendered characters were received by her first readers. The text, untitled by Austen, is known as ‘Opinions of Mansfield Park and Opinions of Emma’ (British Library, Add. MSS. 41253A). ‘Opinions’ ostensibly transcribes the opinions of other people, but inevitably it is Austen’s reception of her reception: at least partly a subjective interpretation of the opinions’ content, and probably using some of Austen’s own vocabulary and linguistic constructions. For one thing, the Opinions are written in the third person, suggesting that verbatim transcription was not Austen’s overriding priority. It is impossible to know either how closely the Opinions reflect the readers’ original responses, or how spontaneous or authentic those opinions were to begin with. Did they come to Austen via letters, or in conversation? Did Austen actively elicit them, and did she question friends and family on particular topics? In the absence of evidence on such issues, I understand the Opinions as ‘belonging’ to their author. This is literally true of the manuscript – but the opinions also belong to Austen in the sense that she believed them worth shaping into a private document for (presumably) some combination of self-reflection and self-congratulation on her authorship. Seen this way, the Opinions are all the more helpful as a document for understanding how Austen might have used caricature talk for comic and satiric characterisation in anticipation of the reception of her novels by contemporary readers.
The Opinions pay ample attention to the comically and satirically rendered characters in Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma. In this respect, the Opinions present Emma – a novel that twentieth-century critics have often seen as Austen’s subtlest, most restrained and ‘mature’ work – as relatively slim pickings after Pride and Prejudice. Austen notes her friends and family apparently seizing on Mrs Elton and Miss Bates as highlights, with one reader ‘delighted with Miss Bates, but thought Mrs Elton the best-drawn Character in the book’. One declares that ‘Miss Bates is incomparable’; another that, on reading Emma a second time, they ‘liked Miss Bates much better than at first’. Phrases evocative of ‘strong’ characters, and familiar tropes from anti-caricature rhetoric, appear in words and phrases such as ‘rather too much’, ‘highly-drawn’, ‘strongly marked’ and ‘interesting’, as opposed to ‘natural’ – without using the words ‘overcharged’ or ‘caricature’, which would judge unequivocally that Austen had gone too far. References to comic exaggeration and satirical emphasis are carefully understated and balanced by praise in opinions such as ‘Miss Bates excellent, but rather too much of her’ and a diplomatic statement attributed to Anna Lefroy, that the characters in Emma are ‘perhaps less strongly marked than some, but only the more natural for that reason—Mr Knightley Mrs Elton & Miss Bates her favourites’. Austen records a blunter opinion about the effect of the characterisations in Emma: Mrs Guiton apparently ‘thought her [Emma] too natural to be interesting’. Austen’s mother similarly finds Emma ‘not so interesting as P. & P.’, a judgement recorded in proximity to her remark that there are ‘no characters in it equal to Ly Catherine & Mr Collins’. This disappointment with Emma’s characters is echoed by a contemporaneous review in the Gentleman’s Magazine, that the latest novel ‘has not the highly-drawn characters’ of Pride and Prejudice.6
When it comes to Mansfield Park, the Opinions seem to dwell on readers’ reactions to the character most emphatically presented as comic and satirical, Mrs Norris. One reader ‘admired [the novel] very much—particularly Mrs Norris’; other opinions are: ‘Delighted with Mrs Norris’, ‘Enjoyed Mrs Norris’, ‘Mrs Norris is a great favourite of mine’. Did Austen seek opinions about Mrs Norris specifically, because Mrs Norris was a great favourite of hers or because she was concerned that she might have gone too far in creating such a ‘strongly marked’ character? At any rate, the Opinions suggest an author conscious that ‘favourites’ are a crucial part of her literary achievement; and if we own that Austen’s novels might have been shaped by anticipating and responding to feedback from family and friends, she was not under pressure to excise all ‘caricature’ from her novels – quite the opposite.
This chapter argues that Austen’s ‘anti-caricature’ is not, and has never been, the mere avoidance of techniques that could be described as ‘caricaturing’. In the critical tradition, anti-caricature is the strategic insistence on Austen’s understatement and her supposed avoidance of caricature; in Austen’s writing practice, ‘anti-caricature’ is the strategic overstatement of literary understatement, and the framing of ‘explained caricatures’ as referential to a real social world. While my account, in the next few pages, of how literary critics have insisted on the femininity and ‘delicacy’ of Austen’s satire, might give the impression that ‘anti-caricature’ was a set of ideas imposed on her work, I will be arguing later that anti-caricature was – as the Opinions suggest – intrinsic to Austen’s realism.
Anti-caricature and Femininity in the Early Critical Tradition
From the 1820s to the mid-twentieth century, critics frequently complimented Austen on her avoidance of caricature. Sometimes they did so with relatively gender-neutral language. The Retrospective Review refrains from many tropes of femininity that would become associated with Austen’s anti-caricature, when it positions the author – who by 1823 had been dead for several years – as a contemporary cultural touchstone: ‘In the lively and spirited caricatures of Evelina and Cecilia, we may see the style of portrait-painting relished by our fathers. Turning from them to the soberly coloured and faithful likenesses of Jane Austen, we may behold that approved by ourselves.’7 Most of the time, however, anti-caricature was bundled up with femininity and domesticity. Richard Whately, in 1829, uses a range of phrases linking anti-caricature and femininity that would become clichés in later nineteenth-century criticism on Austen: he praises the author’s ‘accurate and unexaggerated delineation of events and characters’, her ‘minute fidelity of detail’ and ‘minute fidelity to nature’.8 George Henry Lewes, in 1859, maintains that in Emma, Mrs Elton’s vulgarity is never tainted ‘by caricature of any kind’.9 Julia Kavanagh approves Austen’s ‘most delicate portrait of character […] no caricature, no exaggeration’; Margaret Oliphant approves her ‘finesse’ and ‘self-restraint’ in creating works so ‘softly feminine and polite’.10 Words such as ‘gentleness’, ‘softness’, ‘delicacy’, ‘minuteness’, ‘neatness’, ‘nicety’, ‘precision’, ‘exactness’, ‘faithfulness’ – referring to literary works by women – insistently cluster together, fabricating a femininity for anti-caricature.
Based on the claim that she avoided caricature, Austen was favourably contrasted to other women novelists, as in The Retrospective Review’s opposition of Fanny Burney’s ‘caricatures’ to Austen’s ‘likenesses’. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who was generally wary in her British Novelists essays of the potential vulgarity of literary caricature, notes Burney’s use of different linguistic registers for ‘vulgar characters’; and The Retrospective Review deprecates Burney’s ‘exaggeration of nature’ and ‘everlasting sameness of character’, reprising the theme of Horace Walpole’s observation that Burney ‘never lets [characters] say a syllable but what is to mark their character, which is very unnatural’.11 This contrast with Burney’s ‘caricatures’ continued to feature in Austen’s reception throughout the nineteenth century. In 1843, Thomas Babington Macaulay contrasts Burney’s ‘extravagantly overcharged’ characters to Austen’s ‘touches so delicate […] that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed’.12 In 1862, Julia Kavanagh notes Burney’s ‘turn for caricature’, supposing that her ability to ‘verg[e] on caricature’ secured her more popularity than Charlotte Smith, whose best characters are ‘wholly free from caricature or exaggeration’.13 A reviewer for The Standard judges Austen’s work, with its ‘rarest delicacy and refinement of mind […] more subdued and subtle than Miss Burney’s’, in 1884.14 Susan Ferrier and Maria Edgeworth were also perceived as less womanly for the ‘breadth’ and ‘force’ of their fictional characterisations. Edgeworth is accused of caricature as early as 1815, when a writer for The Edinburgh Review observes that Edgeworth’s characters ‘are all caricatures […] distinctly marked’.15 In 1834, praising Austen’s ‘delicate mirth […] gently hinted satire […] feminine decorous humour’, Sara Coleridge writes that ‘Austen’s works are essentially feminine, but the best part of Miss Edgeworth’s seem as if they had been written by a man’.16 Mary Ward, in 1884, comments that in Ferrier’s novels, ‘everything is done to death […] everything superabundant and second-rate’.17
Austen herself would have recognised the rhetoric in this gendering of delicacy, which reveres and belittles simultaneously. In a much-quoted letter to her nephew, Austen compares her writing to a bird’s building of a humble nest, and to a miniature-painter working on a ‘little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory […] with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’.18 It was a short step from the miniaturist’s two inches of ivory – small, delicate, private – to the hinged sets of ivory tablets (polyptychs) where women’s memoranda were pencilled and effaced. One example of a simple two-leaf ivory memorandum tablet, made in London circa 1760, was kept in an agate mounted dressing case or necessaire among toiletries and other personal items.19 Ivory memorandum tablets and miniatures were, to pun on Austen’s phrase, ‘little effects’, kept close to the body, their contents concealed by hinged lids. By the time Austen described her work this way, in 1816, she had published several novels. Her self-deprecating imagery in this letter – ‘a Nest of my own’ – can be read both as humorously exaggerated humility and as appropriately feminine self-effacement, in a personal missive that depends on the existing understanding between sender and receiver for the (in)stability of its meaning. Critics in the nineteenth century take these images seriously as fitting metaphors for the supposed domesticity, simplicity and finitude of Austen’s work, as when R. H. Hutton locates her appeal in ‘the reduced scale […] of her exquisite pictures’, their ‘delicate touches’ and ‘lightest tracing’ made by a ‘fine feminine sieve’.20 Many refer to her novels as miniatures, while James Edward Leigh in 1869 and Anne Thackeray in 1871 compare a novel to a nest ‘which some little bird builds of the materials nearest at hand […] curiously constructed out of the simplest matters’, imagining Austen’s literary work as a confined yet cosy habitation.21
When we date these metaphors of homemaking and handiwork that appear in anti-caricature rhetoric about Austen’s novels, it seems that they were facilitated by posthumous accounts of Austen’s domestic and feminine virtues: the ‘dear Aunt Jane’ of Austen-Leigh’s 1869 memoir. Thus, in an essay responding to the memoir, Richard Simpson links Austen’s novel-writing to her domestic offices: ‘Her handwriting was beautiful, her needlework delicate. She was neat-handed in any operation that required steadiness and precision.’22 The critical tradition associates Austen’s anti-caricature with the respectable labours permitted to gentility – pencil-drawing, letter-writing, needlework – using imagery and idioms relating to hands, or which imply the action of fingers, such as the word ‘touches’. Critics’ references to genteel femininity and respectability, both explicit and implicit, dovetail with defences of Austen’s reputation against accusations of ‘caricature’. As discussed in Chapter 1, pictorial caricaturing was associated with the social and political elite; it was primarily through the novel, where writers seemed often to slip into ‘caricature’ when focusing on lower-class, provincial or criminal characters, that textual caricature became strongly associated with vulgarity. When E. M. Forster recognises, in 1927, the century-long consensus that Austen ‘never stooped to caricature’, his choice of image – physical abasement – captures the critical tradition’s suspicion of the ways literary works seemed to lower themselves to the level of the ‘vulgar’ people whom genteel writers represented in caricatured ways. Austen did not deal in such ‘vulgar’ characters; nor did she deal in foreign ones.
‘Pure English’: Anti-caricature in Austen’s Novels
In 1818, after twenty years of commercial success and critical attention for novels set in European, Irish and Scottish locations, The Edinburgh Magazine looks forward to a new cycle in literary fashion: unmixed Englishness. In an essay on Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the writer admits to being wearied of the national peculiarities of vulgar characters exhibited in some contemporary novels. Austen’s novels, plainer and simpler, ‘have fallen […] upon an age whose taste can only be gratified by the highest seasoned food’. Austen will only be fully appreciated once readers return to the fictional English characters – ‘the Partridges and the Trullibers […] the Clementinas and Clarissas’, that made them laugh ‘while [they] could enjoy a work that was written all in pure English, without ever dreaming how great would be the embellishment to have at least one half of it in the dialect of Scotland or of Ireland’.23 Indeed, Austen’s characters typically return from their travels beyond England’s borders apparently ‘uncoloured’ by their experience, literally and figuratively. Austen’s Colonel Brandon, blandly ‘not unpleasing’, returns from India with no peculiarities, no talk of ‘“nabobs, gold mohrs, and palanquins”’; whereas Scott’s nabob Touchwood in Saint Ronan’s Well is full of his acquired knowledge, his face ‘burned to a brick-colour’ and ‘seamed by a million of wrinkles’.24 In 1818, readers were still avidly consuming art and literature set in strange times and exotic places with characters to match, and Austen’s novels could easily be seen as lacking interest because they exclude foreign picturesque and peculiarity.
Austen’s choice to set every one of her novels in England – a deliberate, even contrarian, choice for the time – fits with her self-reflexive presentation of her writing as adhering to an aesthetic of cultivation and habitation. This ‘snug’ aesthetic specifically idealises rural southern England, as a cultivated and productive yet tidy and comfortable landscape, organised by working estates, farms and dwellings. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor’s future husband delivers a manifesto of the snug:
‘“I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farmhouse than a watch-tower—and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world.”’25
The land is beautiful because it is worked, because it is good and useful. Walking purposelessly around an unproductive landscape is, for Austen’s characters, a dangerous sign: we are told that Catherine Morland is not a sedentary person, and that she is not industrious, in the same breath. Weighing up Catherine’s ‘defects of that sort’, Mrs Morland ‘could not but perceive them now to be greatly increased. […] In her rambling and her idleness she [was] a caricature of herself’.26 Her mother tells her, ‘“there is a time for work”’ and ‘“now you must try to be useful”’. Since Catherine Morland lacks the mountains or moorland that would necessitate real ‘rambling’ and make a fitting backdrop for the feelings of a romantic heroine, she wanders sadly around her family’s comfortable house and productive orchard. In her purposeless, twisting and circular path, ‘caricature’ Catherine is out of step with the order and practicality of her surroundings.
Edward Ferrars’s descriptions of English landscape in Sense and Sensibility can be read as the kind of satire on eighteenth-century picturesque conventions that had itself become conventional and even affected. Elinor says as much (jokingly) to Edward and Marianne: ‘“Because he believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really feel […] he affects greater indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses”’. Edward, however, positively asserts his preference for the snug aesthetic, his right to discriminate in favour of neatness, utility and comfort:
‘I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere. I call it a very fine country—the hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber, and the valley looks comfortable and snug—with rich meadows and several neat farmhouses scattered here and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country because it unites beauty with utility.’27
The aesthetic includes preferences for language as well as for landscape: preferences for specific items of vocabulary, and also high tolerance for repetition of general terms of approbation. Edward forgoes ‘bold’ for ‘steep’, ‘rugged’ for ‘strange’ and ‘indistinct’ for ‘out of sight’; he uses the word ‘fine’ four times and ‘snug’ twice in the space of a few sentences. His contentedness with unpoetic and unpretentious language aligns the snug aesthetic with ‘plain English’, disdaining the artifice that ‘caricatures’ nature by striving for great effects.
The English landscape is aligned in Northanger Abbey, too, with a nature enclosed and made safe and useful. Henry Tilney ironically invites Catherine to imagine ‘a piece of rocky fragment and […] withered oak’ to romanticise the summit of Beechen Cliff; he then transitions to instructing Catherine and Eleanor on ‘forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government’. Following this discussion of land management issues, Tilney’s speech aimed at dispelling Catherine’s Gothic illusions (‘“Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians”’) maps out a landscape of enclosed fields, open roads and watchful neighbours. To the south, to the north, and to the west, the landscapes might be mountainous and the people monstrous – these are for other writers to exploit. Austen sets out her plot in a snugly enclosed ‘midlands’, all the more real for being in the middle, which still – as Catherine learns – has cruelty and inequality enough to furnish plots for a thousand and one English novels:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and the Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security. […] Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. […] But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad.28
The professed anti-caricature of Austen’s work is perhaps most obviously spelled out here in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, the first two full-length novels she completed, through the future husbands’ pragmatic attitudes to rural landscape and to England. Contemporary readers could have recalled numerous examples of the sublime massifs in foreign lands that feature in Catherine and Isabella’s favourite Gothic novels.
That kind of scenery, and its associations with ‘horrors’ and ‘vices’, are taken to the extreme in Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), John Thorpe’s preferred reading material and the most notorious Gothic fiction of the 1790s. The story, set in Spain, chronicles the protagonist-villain Ambrosio’s swift transformation from angelic to demonic. He signs his soul over to the Devil, writing in his own blood with an intravenous iron pen. In exchange, the Devil rescues Ambrosio from the Inquisition – but flies him straight from Madrid to the steepest part of the Sierra Morena. The novel culminates in a fantastic scene where the Devil drops the monk from ‘a dreadful height’29 onto the top of a mountain peak, and Ambrosio then dies slowly over the course of seven days, giving him full opportunity to experience sharp rocks, oppressive temperatures, bloodthirsty animals and torrential rain. In Lewis’s enthusiastic parody of the Gothic sublime, the natural features that would usually impress the protagonist with exhilaration or dread become literally painful and deadly. Whereas a protagonist in a Radcliffean Gothic novel might be awed, yet excited, to see eagles at a distance, Ambrosio becomes their prey: as he lies paralysed with ‘broken and dislocated limbs’, ‘[t]he Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks’.30 Whereas a protagonist in a realist novel might become ill after being caught in the rain, in The Monk Ambrosio’s body is carried away when a river burst its banks in a lightning storm. It can be read as a parody of the Gothic, as totally ridiculous; but read dramatically, with reverence, it could be Biblically serious; and staged and filmed as horror, it could be a straight-faced torture scene. In Austen’s novels, injuries are incurred more by people’s risk-taking than by the obstacles themselves: dangerous driving (e.g. Northanger Abbey, Persuasion) and attempting bad roads (Sanditon), jumping off steps onto hard pavements (Persuasion), sitting in wet grass and running at full speed down hills (Sense and Sensibility) are all dangerous enough. Austen’s anti-caricature landscapes participate in the snug aesthetic while providing realistic dangers to move plots along.
By explaining and regularly emphasising the distinctive ‘Englishness’ of their aesthetic and subject matter, by setting themselves in opposition to the perceived exaggerations of the sentimental, the romantic and the Gothic, Austen’s novels lay claim to their own representation of the real, one that is emphatically not the inclusively ‘full and authentic report’ of Watt’s formal realism. There is much that the novels leave out – and these limitations and enclosures are explicitly part of the novels’ anti-caricature reality, of their supposedly unmixed Englishness. Thus, Austen provides the vocabulary and the oppositions by which she wishes her novels to be defined. Scott’s essay in the Quarterly Review, analysing the determined ordinariness of Austen’s novelistic reality, uses language that might have come straight from Ferrars’s manifesto: Austen’s novels, he explains, ‘bear the same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape.’31 Sanditon provides a comic dramatisation of this difference, in the Parkers’ ‘bad exchange’ of a snug rural setting for a windswept coast. Their ancestral home is a ‘moderate-sized house, well fenced & planted, & rich in the Garden, Ground <Orchard> & Orchards <Meadows>’, situated in a ‘sheltered Dip’ which Tom describes as a ‘“contracted Nook, without Air or Veiw”’ [sic]. His wife looks back at ‘such an excellent Garden’ as a paradise lost.32 Like Ferrars’s manifesto, the novels are so consistent and unabashed in their purported aesthetic, that those who most disparage the snugness of Austen’s fictional world are those who have seen its distinctive character most clearly. If Austen had heard of a reader’s dislike for her ‘carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders […] no open country, no fresh air’ (in Charlotte Brontë’s phrase), she might have thought it a kind of compliment to her novels’ declared differences to other novels.33 Actually the novels’ settings and aesthetic effects are more diverse than this – recall the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park, or even the winding glen in Mr Darcy’s Derbyshire estate in Pride and Prejudice – but Brontë has taken up Austen’s own rhetoric and selection of imagery as metonymic for a novelistic reality that relies on limitations and exclusions.
Limitations placed on the English language – on a version of Southern Standard English, specifically – is another key facet of Austen’s characterisation techniques interacting with caricature talk. The figures who would presumably speak most differently from the genteel characters on which the novels focus – servants, farmers, itinerants, the working poor – never speak even when named, as in Mansfield Park and Emma. For example, Austen avoids direct reportage of the speech and writing of two minor but key characters in Emma, the tenant farmer Robert Martin and Mr Knightley’s bailiff William Larkins. Although Knightley’s relative intimacy with these men helps characterise him as a responsible and kind landlord, their voices are not allowed to interrupt the novel’s ‘pure English’ style. Austen’s linguistic narrowness helps to avoid drastic switches between styles for characterisation, an effect that was criticised in Scott, whose interactions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ characters struck some readers as jarring mixtures of history, tragedy and comedy. At the same time, the linguistic homogeneity of Austen’s novels increases readers’ sensitivity to irony created through structural and quantitative variations in language (a technique long used in the writing of comic dialogue).34 Rather than widely varying characters’ vocabularies, or using orthographic difference to render characters’ different phonetic realisations of the same words, Austen uses ‘disorganised’ syntax, oral punctuation and repetition. W. F. Pollock, in 1860, contends that ‘there are no catch words or phrases perpetually recurring from the same person’ in Austen’s novels, which is not true – but I agree with Mary Lascelle’s statement that Austen individualises her characters in relatively ‘low relief’.35 Marilyn Butler, in her response to J. F. Burrows’s findings that Austen’s ‘pure narrative’ is interspersed with ‘character narratives’ more divergent and heterogenous than in the novels of Henry James, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, points out that when Austen is compared with her contemporaries and with eighteenth-century novelists, her characters’ dialogue actually appears relatively homogenous. Austen’s dialogue, Butler argues, represents a change in the novel’s well-established trade in peculiar characters: ‘Minor characters become more vivacious, eccentric, linguistically distinctive as the 18th century wears on. […] Novelists go on portraying the social panorama through minor characters’ diversity until this dispersed, atomistic emphasis is superseded by a generalizing one.’36
Austen’s writing in particular might be seen as a decisive move in that gradual shift towards linguistic generality in narrative fiction. As well as limiting linguistic variation in reported dialogue with speech tags, she famously uses a formal technique that encloses characters’ voices and (incompletely) assimilates them to the narrator’s voice: free indirect discourse has become nearly synonymous with Austen’s name in anglophone literary criticism. I see Austen’s version of free indirect discourse less as a method for ironically and subtly introducing characters’ differences, more as a method of conservation for the purity of the narrator’s style. As Frances Ferguson observes, ‘the novel of free indirect style has characters and society speaking the same language’,37 whether that speech be ‘real’ and its rendering in the novel ‘realistic’ or not. The linguistic errors and tics of Austen’s comic characters are actually more descriptive of spoken language, more realistic than the implausibly fluent speech of the serious characters – but in anti-caricature’s contract with realism, linguistic features that are actually realistic and natural are prescriptively framed as distortions of the English language.
Many other factors can account for the qualities of Austen’s English that I have discussed here: some critics have wondered, for example, whether Austen could reasonably have felt unable to represent ‘low’ characters convincingly, or politely. I have shown that her homogenisation of English – through the formal limits she places on text’s capacity to represent linguistic variety, and through the techniques of free indirect discourse and free indirect style – aligns with her commitment to an aesthetic and a rhetoric of English anti-caricature. Austen’s characterisations, I argue, are conscious of their tactical exclusions and assimilations. As incorporated in Austen’s novels, anti-caricature strategically overstates realism’s understatement.
Sanditon and Caricature’s Threat to Permanence
Anti-caricature rhetoric has played a significant part in the critical tradition’s efforts to justify a permanent place for Austen in English Literature. Macaulay contends, in his 1843 essay on Burney, that ‘the chief seats’ among the literary classics, ‘the places on the dias and under the canopy, are reserved for the few who have excelled in the difficult art of portraying characters in which no single feature is extravagantly overcharged’.38 Earlier reviewers trust that Austen’s understated Englishness represents a return to the imagined timelessness of ‘English classics’. In the Edinburgh Magazine, Austen’s characters will join those of Fielding and Richardson as a source of ‘permanent delight’ and ‘pure English’ to be enjoyed by an intergenerational readership; in the Retrospective Review, Austen’s characters surpass those ‘spirited caricatures’ beloved merely by ‘our fathers’. Austen is both legitimised by a connection to the literary past and projected into the future, kept current by a readership that will always circle back to uncaricatured works of literary permanence while satirical ‘temporary characters’ and ‘originals’ grow ever less intelligible and amusing – at best, puzzling embellishments and textual hangers-on to a work still worth reading. Posterity is not kind to literary ‘caricatures’, as I discuss further in Chapter 5.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth, critics increasingly concede to the presence of caricatures or ‘caricature touches’ in Austen, but typically contextualise them within the development of Austen’s art over time. In 1870, Richard Simpson identifies a tendency to caricature in the early novels that is then surpassed: ‘Miss Austen in her later novels has given us new and improved versions [of these characters …] Sir Walter is a character constructed in the same way as Mr. Collins, with simpler means and less caricature.’39 I disagree with this view of Sir Walter: it seems necessary to misconstrue or misremember characterisations in order to place the novels on what Donald Greene has described as the ‘generally descending’ curve on a graph of Austen’s supposed ‘caricaturing’, a curve that Sanditon has seemed to disrupt.40 With anti-caricature rhetoric, Emma and Persuasion have been elevated as the mature and ‘mellowed’ works. Barbara Thaden, for example, suggests that in Emma Austen ‘attempts to broaden the sphere of her characterisation’ by taking for her protagonist a rich young snob whose shortcomings she might otherwise have ‘painted with the bold, harsh, and spare strokes of the caricaturist’. By giving so much of the novel from Emma’s perspective, ‘the quality of all other caricatures is softened […] they must be painted with a softer brush because they are the heroine’s friends’. Thaden speculates that Austen ‘perhaps realized by this time that her unsympathetic characters were mere caricatures, entertaining but unconvincing’.41
On the basis of the thesis that Austen’s satire softened over time, Sanditon – the work most susceptible to being accused of caricature – has often been grouped with Austen’s early manuscripts: as Anne Toner warily observes, ‘the style of the juvenilia is most commonly thought to re-emerge in the caricatures of Austen’s last work Sanditon, especially in its improbable hypochondriacs’.42 Austen’s last novel, the unfinished work of fiction conventionally titled Sanditon, has been the most serious obstacle for the anti-caricature school of Austen criticism. As it exists only in manuscript form, however, its ‘caricature’ can be seen as provisional, its forms unstable. Critics have not found it easy to reconcile Sanditon with a literary career defined by maturity, consistency and permanence. R. W. Chapman seems shocked by the manuscript’s ‘roughness and harshness of satire […] which at its worst amounts to caricature’, and assumes that a later draft would have ‘smoothed these coarse strokes, so strikingly different from the mellow pencillings of Persuasion’.43 Michelle Levy argues that Sanditon, in its unfinished state, provides evidence for a composition process whereby Austen softened and relegated her ‘satirical renderings of minor eccentric figures’ before sending a final version to print.44 On the other hand, B. C. Southam observes that the revisions Austen made to the manuscript do not (yet) ‘mellow’ or ‘soften’ the caricatures – ‘she was not toning down but heightening their traits and eccentricities’ – and asks whether Sanditon’s excess might have been ‘the product of an imagination stimulated in ill-health’.45 In Southam’s view, caricature is so essentially uncharacteristic of Austen that its seemingly deliberate practice can be taken for a symptom of disease. Kathryn Sutherland sees Sanditon’s eccentric formal properties in more positive terms, as ‘the imprint of a peculiar imagination’ and ‘the vivid emergence of imagination and perception from the decay of form’.46
A fun and fascinating document in itself, Sanditon is also an opportunity to revisit our opinions about caricature in Austen’s published novels. I have argued that key elements of the anti-caricature rhetoric that so dominates Austen’s critical reception can be derived directly from the novels themselves. In the following pages, I argue that Austen’s snug aesthetic and anti-caricature rhetoric cooperate with a moral concept that frames and exculpates the author’s use of characterisation techniques that might be accused of caricature. In the final section of the chapter, I focus on Austen’s depictions of fat bodies in Persuasion and Sanditon, aiming to challenge the notion that Austen’s ‘caricature’ of Mrs Musgrove is inconsistent with her approach to satirical characterisation elsewhere in the novels, and likewise to problematise the idea that Sanditon’s ‘caricatures’ are atypical of Austen’s oeuvre.
Austen’s Moral Concept of the Self-Reflexive Caricature
In modern literary studies, the first critic to enthusiastically acknowledge literary caricature’s relationship with ethics in Austen’s novels was D. W. Harding, in his 1940 lecture on ‘Regulated Hatred’ and the less known essay ‘Character and Caricature’. However, Harding’s detailed account of Austen’s satirical characterisation is underpinned by the faulty assumption that textual caricature was perceived as ‘innocuous’ by Austen and her contemporaries, and thus was an acceptable means of ‘regulating hatred’. Harding writes that Austen’s caricatures relied on ‘one of the most useful peculiarities of her society […] its willingness to remain blind to the implications of caricature’, and that caricature in Austen becomes ‘a means not of admonition but of self-preservation’.47 While this book contradicts a key aspect of that idea, the essence of Harding’s thesis – that Austen’s caricature must be innocuous – is borne out by the methods Austen used to frame her characterisations, and those which her readers used to promote the idea of her ‘anti-caricature’.
Austen’s characterisation techniques – both the content of what characters do and say, and the formal presentation of their dialogue, actions and bodies – operate not only in the frameworks of anti-caricature rhetoric and the snug aesthetic, but also under the aegis of a moral concept of caricature. By this concept, caricature is moralised as an effect of self-interest: absorption in one’s individual experiences and in one’s social and material wants, acted out through the distribution of social and material goods (information, food, affection, money and so on).
Stabler engages with this moral concept of caricature when she ‘recognize[s] a pervasive role of caricature as an extreme, necessarily truncated expression of self – a psychological peculiarity […] that might be unleashed when the interests of the self override the almost instinctive self-surveillance that preserves the interest of the general’ in Austen’s novels.48 In Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, Austen uses the word ‘caricature’ in pre-emptive analyses or ‘character appreciations’ of the self-interested Dashwoods and the self-absorbed Catherine as though they were real people. I have already touched on Mrs Morland’s character analysis of her daughter in Northanger Abbey, which portrays Catherine as idle and selfish. Returned from Northanger, Catherine’s character is not matured as her mother hoped: ‘In her rambling and idleness she [was] a caricature of herself.’49 This passage should be read alongside the double portrait of Mr and Mrs John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, where the word ‘caricature’ is also used to represent a character who fails their family by being too much themselves: more selfish, less helpful, more oblivious to other people’s disapproval or disgust than they have hitherto proved themselves capable of. Elinor and Marianne’s already ‘rather cold hearted and rather selfish’ brother takes a wife who, far from being his better half, is ‘a strong caricature of himself:—more narrow-minded and selfish’.50
The self-reflexive grammatical constructions in both passages – ‘caricature of himself’, ‘caricature of herself’ – position caricature almost as an uncanny aesthetic effect, where familiar people behave in ways so typical of themselves that they actually become strange. The description of the Dashwoods has an interesting pronoun mismatch: ‘she was a strong caricature of himself’ technically should be ‘she was a strong caricature of him’, as ‘himself’ would ordinarily pair with ‘he’. The disjuncture in the grammar makes each partner in the marriage both the subject and the object of the sentence, that is, John Dashwood and the new Mrs John Dashwood are both ‘more narrow-minded and selfish’ than the original John Dashwood. The woman’s name is revealed later to be ‘Fanny’, but the convention of using the man’s first name for both partners happens to underline the idea of John Dashwood doubling his self-interest. This kind of narcissism by relationship, crossing the boundaries of gender and rank, is redescribed in the patronage of Mr Collins by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, where Collins makes the self-absorbed aristocrat an extension of his own self-importance. Collins’s dialogue recurs to Lady Catherine so that the reader often encounters the two ‘caricatures’ simultaneously, while Collins’s sense of entitlement to the Bennet daughters and the legal entailment of Bennet estate complements the droit de seigneur outlook of the entitled Lady Catherine.
In this ‘explained caricature’ – explained as an effect of psychological self-indulgence – the ‘true’ self is conflated with the self-interested distortion ‘of himself’ or ‘of herself’. The characterisation simultaneously manages to tell us what a particularised fiction character is ‘really like now’, through the intensification, doubling or extension of their self as a ‘caricature’, and to estrange them (to a lesser or greater extent) from that caricature as a distortion of their better self. This ontological claim does not seem odd once contextualised in precepts about self-reflection and self-regulation that are familiar from studies of ethics and religion in Austen’s writing. As a term in Austen’s character talk, and a concept in ethical criticism about fictive characters, ‘caricature’ posits the existence of a better self that remains essentially flawed – ‘rather selfish’, ‘not very industrious’ – but with less pernicious material effect. Her moral concept of caricature evokes a ‘moral realism’ lacking in puritanical fervour: it does not imagine human beings able to free themselves from sin; it describes people who cannot be made ideal (or evil), cannot be made radically or even qualitatively different, but who might be improved (or worsened) in some measure.
The Greedy Caricature: Austen’s Morally Meaningful Fatness
Austen’s association between caricature and quantitative increase participates in the meanings generated in the process of abstracting caricatúra from its equivalence with graphic portraiture. As discussed in Chapter 1, by the time Austen was writing, caricatúra and ‘caricature’ were well established in the English lexicon such that they could be freely used to describe representation in any medium or art form. Once British readers could be expected to know what Browne’s ‘Caricatura Draughts’ were, writers increasingly used the word independently of references to pictorial art, and in ways that played on the associations the Italian word caricatúra derived from its grammatical elements and the idioms in which it figured. For Austen, caricature’s fundamental meaning of overstated peculiarity, while abstracted from the concrete techniques of ritratti carichi, remains grounded in caricatúra’s etymological associations with corporeality, size and force. In Austen’s moral concept, caricature involves the increase of weight, defined as a body or object’s relative mass as it occupies space and produces downward force.
Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian–English dictionary, as discussed in Chapter 1, contextualises the definition of caricatúra in its linguistic constituents and the phrases in which these were used. Among these, a common theme is material objects – including objectified human bodies and body parts – being filled and laden, heavier and bigger. This would be inconsistent with an understanding of caricature as the shrinking of smaller things as well as the enlarging of bigger things, of ‘exaggeration’ as comprising extreme understatement as well as overstatement. However, the prevailing concept of caricature is biased to giganticism, to addition and enlargement. Cárica (weight, freight, load, charge, burden) is an object defined by being added to, or pressed on, something else. Among Baretti’s illustrations for the verb caricare is the figurative usage of caricare for speech and writing: ‘accrescere in parlando la cosa più che veramente sia’ (to make something bigger, in the telling, than it really is), which Baretti translates as ‘to enlarge, to be more vehement than it is need [sic], to exaggerate’. Other examples register caricature’s semantic associations, via caricare, with gluttony and other forms of surfeit: ‘Caricar l’orza (mangier molto) to eat one’s belly full. A vulgar expression’, ‘Carico di vino, drunk’.51 Moral concepts of caricature are thus etymologically underpinned by ideas about aggrandisement and by idioms that use caricare more literally, to describe the filling of the stomach.
Austen’s moral concept of caricature refers to caricare’s suggestion that full satisfaction is vulgar: to eat or drink one’s fill, to have as much as you can hold, is to alter oneself for the worse. Austen’s caricature talk attempts to circle back from the figurative usage of caricare (accrescere in parlando) for an increase created ‘in the telling’, to the literalised meaning of a real increase in the mass, the downward force, of a person’s social and material existence. Crucially, when Austen thus moralises caricature as an effect of self-interested satisfaction, caricature’s increase becomes self-inflicted: not something the author does to the character, but something the character does to themselves. ‘Caricature’ becomes something real and ordinary, taking up space in the world – and taking up more space than it should: in Persuasion and Sanditon, Austen depicts fat bodies in ways that link corporeal fatness, more than any other physical attribute, with the moral failings of the self-made caricature. The characterisation of Arthur Parker’s sisters in Sanditon – ‘slender’, ‘delicate’, ‘thin & worn by Illness & Medecine’ – suggests a more general sizeism that points out a family resemblance between too fat and too thin, and moralises them both as failures to self-regulate.52 In practice, with the special attention that Arthur Parker’s and Mrs Musgrove’s bodies receive and the textual space that they are made to occupy, the novels construct ‘too fat’ and ‘too thin’ as inequal failures. Fatness is a special occasion for anti-caricature rhetoric’s pretence to moral criticism.
We might be tempted to read Austen’s emphatically comic and satirical characterisations of fat bodies – which moralise corpulence as the outward attribute of an inwardly ‘fat self’ – as an almost unintended consequence of the bias to enlargement in concepts of caricature. I would argue, however, that the etymological underpinnings of caricare (to weight, to enlarge) and exaggerare (to unrestrictedly heap up) are simply convenient to the decided antipathy to fatness that exists in Austen’s novels. It is because the fat body, for Austen, is a particular target for humour and satire that the fat character becomes a special occasion for anti-caricature’s claims to accuracy and moral rectitude.
Ideas about ‘corpulence’ or ‘fatness’ contemporary with Austen’s novels are constructed by historically specific concepts of race, gender, sexuality, beauty, health, affluence and so on. Texts and images that might seem, to us, to represent or comment on fatness, do so through different media and genres. Georgian-period fatness can too easily be read through any and every idea about fatness that might occur to modern readers, while phenomena such as the wearing of false stomachs or the gravitas of the ‘power paunch’ require explanation.53 While graphic satire, for example, might play a particularly important role in our understanding of Georgian fatness and fat-hating, the depictions of fat bodies in satirical prints are perhaps also particularly fraught with interpretive pitfalls. Is corpulence meaningful by default, in these images; to what aspect of the satire does it belong; and what are its precise meanings in the depiction of individuals? I would argue that while satirical prints do make fatness part of a moral commentary on an individual’s particular vices sometimes, most prints use fatness for more general satirical purposes. Fat bodies are often in dyads with thin bodies, in straightforward visual gags and in claims about modern statesmen generally falling short of classical ideals. Well-fed fatness is apparently linked with nationalism and masculinity in propagandist satirical prints where John Bull’s body represents British prosperity in contrast with scrawny sans-coulottes and an emaciated ‘French liberty’. Does this reflect ideas about fatness in the period, and how far did such ideas extend beyond the elites and gentility who consumed satirical prints? When – and to what extent – can we read fatness as a moral critique of an individual, for example in graphic caricatures of the Prince Regent? New scholarship on late-Georgian representations of fatness is adding to our knowledge and transforming our understanding of the various ways in which graphic satire, among other forms of visual and material culture, has historically constructed fatness.54
The problematic status of fatness in graphic caricature can help us to begin contextualising and relativising the attitude to fatness in Persuasion and Sanditon. Are Austen’s depictions of fat bodies and fat characters in Persuasion and Sanditon typical of her period, or in some way anomalous? Could satirical prints or caricature drawings have influenced the way she looks at fat bodies in her novels? Austen did not belong to the West-End world that primarily drove the production and consumption of commercial single-sheet satirical prints, but she was a member of the genteel classes that had adopted the aristocracy’s leisure pursuit of drawing caricature portraits without commercial motives, a practice that predated and outlasted the ‘Age of Caricature’. Because such portraits were occasions for polite amusement confidentially shared between the artist, the subject and their circle, we would expect them to be relatively polite and tactful about fatness, as about all physical features subject to framing as ‘peculiarities’. It is fair to suppose that many amateur caricaturists, with intimate knowledge of their subjects’ sensitivities, and with relationships to maintain, would have deliberately avoided the exaggeration of particular characteristics – trying to achieve a balance of flattery and honesty that could be acknowledged as ‘more like’ the subject than an idealising painting or miniature would be, while still participating in portraiture’s sociability.
Many surviving examples of amateur rittrati carichi are not at all recognisably satirical to us – at least not by comparison with the single-sheet prints, which have political points to score. Notwithstanding the techniques for parsing and exaggerating physiognomy that Mary Darly’s and Francis Grose’s manuals attempted to teach, many of the amateur drawings that contemporaries understood to be ‘caricatures’ – like the portraits of the Edinburgh caricaturist John Kay discussed in Chapters 1 and 5 – do not follow the conventions of visual exaggeration that we might expect to find in something described as a caricature portrait. There are graphic caricatures in which it is difficult to detect pointed satire, and where any deliberate visual exaggeration is far from the grotesqueness of the single-sheet prints. Frequently it is the size and shape of clothing that is most obviously exaggerated for comic effect. Frequently in caricature prints and drawings, the physical attributes that modern readers might identify as ‘fat’ lack physiognomic meaning, and it is far from clear that all such depictions disapprove of fatness in itself.
Arguably, fatness is even valorised in pictorial caricature when it is key to a celebrity’s real physical presence and recognisability. In the ink and graphite drawings of Edward Gibbon by the noblewomen Diana Beauclerk and Lavinia Spencer, for example, the subject’s fatness is not made to say anything about a ‘fat character’, and fatness is not depicted as repellent. If we were to insist that these drawings involve fatness in graphic satire, our claims about these ritratti carichi – which do not depict actions or use text to make fat something of moral consequence – would speak to the culturally and historically specific ways that we read fatness and its cultural meanings into portraits. I argue that these high-society caricatures, like many others, allow the viewer opportunities for some acknowledgement of body mass that need not be forced into a meaningful ‘fatness’, but which simply is there.
Not so, I think, in Austen’s writing. Turning our attention to the realist novel, we do not have to look far for characters whose fatness is made physiognomically meaningful. In these cases, we might be able to distinguish at least two types of culturally constructed fatness: first, the application of physiognomic principles that deplore fatness as a violation of classical proportions and make it one of many indices to a generally bad character; second, the forging of semantic and/or causal links between the character’s fatness and their individual flaws or failures. There is an example of the former in Fielding’s Amelia (1751), where initially Mrs Ellison’s fatness seems incidental to her character: Amelia’s first impression is of a woman ‘short and immoderately fat’, a ‘good woman’ whose ‘good humour and complaisance […] were highly pleasing’.55 When Amelia discovers that Mrs Ellison is a pimp, the fatness that was framed as merely superficially unappealing retrospectively becomes a minor physical manifestation of her fundamentally unappealing character. Here, Fielding ascribes fatness to the character’s enemy in a way that makes fat physiognomically meaningful, yes – but as one of several qualities judged to be aesthetically unpleasing. The text describes Mrs Ellison’s body only briefly and does not use fatness to make a particular ethical point by linking it with specific character traits. In Persuasion and Sanditon on the other hand, Austen frames fatness both as aesthetically unpleasing in itself and as symbolic of an individual’s specific flaws and failures. Austen’s view of fatness as the literalised caricaturing of the body describes the fat body not simply as a reflection of the character’s general moral imperfection, but as the physical manifestation of a ‘fat character’, a self that makes too much of itself.
In developing this argument, I have encountered some pushback on my claim that Austen’s writing is fat-hating. Working on an earlier draft of the material in this chapter, I was advised to alter phrases that ‘might sound as though you are saying that Austen is fatphobic’. My response is to make it clear that I do see Austen’s writing as dehumanising people by moralising fatness, and that I am suspicious of attempts to distance this writing from Austen herself. I argue that Austen’s novels despise fatness, not fleetingly or trivially, but consistently and substantially; and I would suggest that Austen engages with fatness in ways that anticipate mainstream moral panic about an ‘obesity epidemic’, where preconceptions about fatness – and the consequent medical and social treatment of individuals perceived as ‘overweight’ – can have significant impacts on people’s health and happiness.
Here, I propose that Austen’s novels engage with fatness in ways that were distinctive within British literary culture of the eighteenth century and Romantic period, and which would have been objectionable to some of her contemporaries. In Persuasion, for example, we can read the narrator’s pre-emptive justification of her disdain for the fatness of a fictive character as a kind of insurance against the negative reactions that Austen must have anticipated from some readers. ‘There are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain’ is a statement explicitly precluding a rational response to fatness, explicitly naturalising fat-hating as an inevitable response to something intrinsically distasteful and ridiculous. I see no harm in contemplating the question: if the author herself possessed no negative emotions, no animus towards fatness, why would she write passages that call on readers to accept as normal certain emotional responses to fat bodies?
I have tried to analyse the role of fatness in Austen’s textual styling of caricature without dismissing the complexity of her writing about bodies, or forgetting that fat-hating can be just as focused on one’s own body as on other people’s. To be plain, however: ‘Austen was fatphobic’ is a valid enough shorthand for what I describe in this chapter. I think that the word ‘fatphobia’, while certainly anachronous, is more helpful for placing Austen’s depictions of fat characters in the history of moral panics about body size and shape than more scrupulously historical phrasing might be. However, for the purposes of this chapter, I have settled for ‘fat-hating’, another term not used by Austen’s contemporaries. This is an attempt both to recognise the distinctiveness of new concepts of ‘fatphobia’ (a term coined in the 1990s), and to convey the intensity of the anxious aversion to fatness which, I argue, comes out through what Austen’s novels say about fat bodies, and how they back it up through caricature talk expressing the idea that a fat individual is already a caricature of themselves.
The Exceptional Caricature of Fat Bodies in Austen’s Novels
It has become a truism that Austen avoided the description of character’s physical bodies. Lewes suggests that, by having to visualise Austen’s fictive characters for themselves, readers are unfortunately ‘missing many of the subtle connections between physical and mental organisation’. He regrets this particularly in the case of a satirically rendered character such as Mr Collins, whose caricature might have been given a physiognomic dimension:
[W]e might imagine that this was a purblind world, wherein nobody saw anybody, except in a dim vagueness that obscured all peculiarities. It is impossible that Mr. Collins should not have been endowed by nature with an appearance in some way heralding the delicious folly of the inward man. […] Balzac and Dickens would not have been content without making the reader see this Mr. Collins […]. It is not stated whether [Austen] was shortsighted, but the absence of all sense of the outward world – either scenery or personal appearance – is more remarkable in her than in any writer we remember.56
In this respect, Lewes seems not to remember Austen’s writing very well: he has come away from the novels with no lasting impression of the many settings that are described there, even in Pride and Prejudice alone. He is far from the only reader to claim that Austen did not visualise characters.
This may be true as a rule – but not when it comes to fat characters. Fat bodies are exceptionally caricatured by Austen, compared with other physical attributes mentioned in the novels. To start with, in Pride and Prejudice there is the richly vague description of Mr Collins as ‘heavy-looking’.57 This is a physiognomic clue to individual character, associating a visualised heaviness with the self-involvement of a ‘fat self’, which is echoed in Sanditon’s description of Arthur Parker, ‘<heavy in Eye as well as figure> He had in every respect a heavy look’.58 The negative associations of fatness come to the foreground in Mansfield Park and Persuasion as well as in Sanditon, where fat bodies visualise the selfishness of self-made caricatures who indulge themselves without restraint. Brownstein suggests that Austen’s ‘satire on selfishness’ is particularly conspicuous in her depictions of self-interested relationships with food: ‘[w]hen Mr Woodhouse refuses to serve enough food to guests, when Dr Grant dies of gluttony, when Mrs. Norris steals away from Southerton with a cream cheese for her own consumption, the dining room and the table are identified as the arena where gobblers give themselves away’.59 (Mr. Woodhouse’s selfishness around food has to do with hypochondria, self-superiority and the tyranny of the invalid rather than the greed of a gourmand.) In Sanditon, Arthur Parker fits the pattern Michael Parrish Lee discovers in Austen’s published novels, of social maturity being constructed against the desire for food. There is a lot of not eating in Sense and Sensibility: Parrish points out, for example, that when the prepubescent Margaret Dashwood regrets missing her dinner, her ‘un-blunted appetite signals a social immaturity that contrasts with the deeply sympathetic feelings of the older Dashwoods’.60 Sanditon discounts Arthur Parker as a marriage prospect almost as soon as he is introduced: he is more concerned about dinner than he is about Charlotte.
Not only making fatness metonymic of psychological self-indulgence and self-involvement, Austen’s oeuvre also frames fatness as the direct result of self-indulgent overeating. Among the published novels, it is in Mansfield Park that Austen puts fatness in a cause-and-effect narrative: first, the moral character faults of idleness and selfishness; second, fatness; third, ill health and premature death. Dr Grant’s inactivity and gustatory self-indulgence are discussed in third-person narration and in several characters’ dialogue: for example, Tom Bertram, who hopes for the clergyman’s speedy death, describes him as ‘“a short-necked, apoplectic sort of fellow [… who], plied well with good things, would soon pop off”’. Throughout Mansfield Park, Dr Grant’s appetite provides a series of small comic moments, with some detail about what he is eating and drinking: goose, pheasant, turkey or mutton, raids on the sandwich tray and claret every day. He suffers from ‘gouty symptoms’, and in the novel’s dénouement he is said to have ‘brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week’. In a humorous conversation about ‘“slovenly and selfish”’ clergymen, his sister-in-law Mary Crawford describes Dr Grant as ‘“an indolent, selfish bon vivant, who must have his palate consulted in everything; who will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one; and who, moreover, if the cook makes a blunder, is out of humour with his excellent wife”’. Whereas Fanny attempts to defend Dr Grant on the grounds that he ‘“would have been in a greater danger of becoming worse in a more active and worldly profession”’, since weekly sermons ‘“must make him think”’ and ‘“restrain himself”’, Edmund holds the opinion that Dr Grant has caricatured himself, by ‘“a great defect of temper, made worse by a very faulty habit of self-indulgence”’. When Mary accuses him of ‘“preferring an income ready made, to the trouble of working for one […] doing nothing all the rest of his days but eat, drink, and grow fat”’, Dr Grant’s fatness is causally linked with unrestrained eating and drinking.61
Sanditon likewise draws a causal link between fatness and self-indulgence: in the context of its satirical focus on invalidism, the text positions Arthur’s fatness as the natural product of gourmandism, hypochondria and reluctance to undergo the discomforts of abstinence and activity.62 The character of Arthur combines the self-interest of a gourmand such as Dr Grant with that of a valetudinarian such as Mr Woodhouse. Observing Arthur closely, Charlotte gathers details of a self-indulgent lifestyle:
Certainly, Mr. Arthur P.’s enjoyments in Invalidism were very different from his Sisters – by no means so spiritualized. – A good deal of Earthy <Dross> hung about him. He seemed of haveing [sic] chosen <Charlotte could not but suspect him of adopting that line of Life,> cheifly [sic] <principally> for the indulgent of an indolent Temper – & to be determined on having no Disorders but such as called for warm rooms & good Nourishment.63
Arthur enjoys heavily buttered toast, strong cocoa and wine every day, for his nerves. Charlotte presses him to take ‘“daily, regular Exercise, – and I should recommend rather more of it to you than I suspect you are in the habit of taking”’, then questions the efficacy of his existing exercise regime.64 As in Mansfield Park, the fat person is lazy and vulgarly debased in their habit of making food the centre of their social life.
The fat character’s supposed obstructiveness and inertia in society links Austen’s fat gourmands Dr Grant and Arthur Parker with the ‘Mrs Musgrove’ character in Persuasion. In Sanditon, when Arthur is absorbed in food he loses interest in Charlotte, ‘turning completely to the Fire’ and saying nothing but ‘a few broken sentences of <self->approbation of his own Doings & prosperity >& success’.65 When Arthur finally turns back to Charlotte, she finds that his bulk comes in useful, and repositions herself ‘to have all the advantage of him for <his Person as> a screen’.66 Struck through and replaced by ‘his Person’ as Austen was writing, the fat character is experienced more like the surface of an object than an individual. In Persuasion, Mary Elliot complains to Anne that her new in-laws, the Musgroves, ‘“are both so very large, and take up so much room”’,67 anticipating Anne’s experience of the fat body as an inconvenient object later in the novel, when Mrs Musgrove obstructs the developing relationship between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth:
They were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs Musgrove had most readily made room for him; they were divided only by Mrs Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and humour, than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of Anne’s slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for.68
Here, corporeal fatness associates with the self-affliction of emotional pain. While Mrs Musgrove’s body takes up too much space, she grieves for ‘a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done any thing to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead’, her ‘large fat sighings’ exceeding her proper feelings. It was Wentworth who induced Dick to write ‘the only two disinterested letters’ he ever sent to his parents, whom he was always asking for money.69 That last phrase – ‘whom alive nobody had cared for’ – implies that not even Mrs Musgrove cared for her son while he lived. Her fat body and its ‘fat feelings’ are positioned as barriers to more genuine social connection and introspection.
Marvin Mudrick points out that Persuasion’s satirical portrait of a grieving fat woman echoes humorous remarks about self-indulgent mourners in Austen’s letters: Austen refers to a Mrs Bromley as ‘a fat woman in mourning’, and seizes on the idea that excessive mourning betrays self-absorption: ‘Dr Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead’.70 Disproportionate, self-absorbed and self-stimulated grief is similarly characterised in Sense and Sensibility. When Henry Dashwood dies and the new Mrs John Dashwood arrives, immediately and unannounced, to move into the property occupied by his widow, Mrs Henry Dashwood abandons herself to her feelings – ‘in sorrow […] carried away by her fancy’ – and encourages Marianne to do the same:
Elinor saw, with great concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility; but by Mrs. Dashwood it was valued and cherished. They encouraged each other now in the violence of their affliction. The agony of grief which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again. They gave themselves up wholly in their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against any consolation in future.71
This is a critique, in a form suited to the realist novel, of the unchecked sentimentality that Austen parodies in Edgar and Emma (1787), where the heroine literally never stops crying: ‘having no check to the overflowings of her greif [sic], she gave free vent to them, & retiring to her own room, continued in tears the remainder of her Life’.72 In Persuasion’s satirical characterisation of Mrs Musgrove’s ‘large fat sighings’, Austen’s consistent attention to the comic potential of tears and sighs combines with the disapproving, even hostile attitude to fat bodies in Mansfield Park as well as Sanditon. I have argued that fatness is exceptionally visualised compared with other physical attributes in Austen’s novels; that there are several precedents in Austen’s oeuvre for the comic and satirical portraits of Mrs Musgrove and Arthur Parker as ‘fat characters’; and that the ‘fat character’ is presented as a self-inflicted ‘explained caricature’ that pre-exists textual characterisation.
Next, I investigate the textual styling of caricature in Austen’s depictions of Mrs Musgrove and Arthur Parker. I show that, while Austen’s narrator claims in Persuasion that distaste for fat bodies is universal and inevitable, the stylistic features of the passages about Mrs Musgrove and Arthur Parker – which prolong, repeat and reiterate with variations what they have to say about fatness – suggest an author implicated in her own moral concept of caricature.
Fat-Hating and Narrative Style in Persuasion and Sanditon
Austen’s textual styling for explained caricature, in Persuasion’s and Sanditon’s passages about fat characters, makes openings for the reader to identify the text’s fixation on fatness. The narration palpably makes too much of the fat characters – ‘goes on’ about them for too long, too digressively and too emphatically – as if we have been cornered by an eccentric who wants to lecture us about fat people. In these passages, Austen’s third-person narrator takes on key stylistic features that she ordinarily uses to render characters comically and satirically through dialogue, creating a resonance between narrator and caricature. The style becomes more discursive and cumulative, seemingly to accommodate a compulsion to describe fat characters and moralise fatness.
In Sanditon, third-person narration prolongs the scenes where Arthur interacts with Charlotte, with minutiae, redundancy and variations on themes. Charlotte sums up Arthur’s vices as indolence and self-indulgence – but only once the scene has accumulated several pages of evidence for this judgement, using a series of examples to position his invalidism, again and again, as a form of hedonism. Arthur’s dialogue is styled as explained caricature, with dashes, exclamation marks, hyperbole and a tic of emphasis: ‘very fond of standing at an open window’, ‘very nervous’, ‘a very poor creature’, ‘very fond of exercise’, ‘a very good Toaster’, ‘very bad for the Stomach’, ‘very bad indeed’.73 The satirical import and comic effect of the dialogue’s content – which all revolves around Arthur’s body – is pointed up by these formal features. Repetitive use of an intensifier such as ‘very’ or ‘really’ is not unusual in natural speech, but in literary language it conventionally signifies unsophisticated, unselfconscious and recursive thought patterns. While Arthur’s dialogue – itself characterised by detail, redundancy, repetition and variation – takes up considerable space in the scene, much of its content is replicated by the third-person narration, in Charlotte’s minutely observed running commentary on Arthur’s activities. The account of Arthur making toast and cocoa, then talking to Charlotte about toast, then eating his toast with butter, goes on for pages of the manuscript. Charlotte watches him closely enough to notice him, after having ‘scrupulously scraped off <almost> as much butter as he put on […] seize an odd moment for adding a great dab just before it went into his Mouth’.74 Watching Arthur sneak butter this way, Charlotte ‘cd. hardly contain himself <herself>’. Despite her supposed distaste for the ‘Physics’ of a body which, Arthur shares, is ‘very subject to Perspiration’,75 Charlotte’s disapproval of fatness involves some self-gratification, for which she keeps Arthur under continuous surveillance. The pleasure that Arthur self-administers through food, warmth and rest becomes ‘food’ for Charlotte’s own self-gratification.
One of Austen’s own favourite meals was cheese on toast, a recipe which in the Austen household called for careful measuring of quantities: Martha Lloyd’s method was to ‘[g]rate the Cheese & add to it one egg, & a teaspoonful of Mustard, & a little Butter’. A more indulgent recipe in Hannah Glasse’s cookbook gives instructions to soak toast in red wine, ‘then cut some cheese very thin and lay it very thick over the bread, and put it in a tin oven before the fire’, a lengthier process closer to Arthur’s fireside ‘coddling’ of his meal.76 Charlotte, who prefers her own toast with a ‘reasonable quantity of butter spread over it’,77 can support and supplement any self-denial she might need with the self-satisfaction she derives from quantifying what Arthur eats and drinks.
In Persuasion, too, the fat body is described redundantly, through synonyms, intensifiers and variations. ‘Mrs Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size’, we are told, ‘no insignificant barrier’ between Wentworth and Anne, who is ‘very completely screened’ by Mrs Musgrove and her ‘large fat sighings’: ‘comfortable’ and ‘substantial’ are synonyms for ‘fat’, Mrs Musgrove is both a ‘screen’ and a ‘barrier’, and her sighs are immediately ‘large’ and ‘fat’.78 Then, in Persuasion’s notorious three sentences about the ‘unbecoming conjunction’ of fatness and feelings, Austen justifies her characterisation of Mrs Musgrove with a statement couched as a universal aesthetic principle:
Personal size and mental sorrow certainly have no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain, —which taste cannot tolerate, —which ridicule will seize.79
I see no irony here, no indication that this straight-faced statement should be attributed to anyone but the narrator, and every indication that the author expects the rational and tasteful reader to share her opinion – as long as they have a sense of humour. In these three sentences, where action, dialogue and setting are dropped completely, Austen uses several rhetorical devices (concession, variation, repetition) as well as intensifiers to get her point across. In the first two sentences, there are three ways of expressing the same concession: there are ‘certainly […] no necessary proportions’ between body mass and mental suffering; larger bodies have the same ‘right to be in deep affliction’; and it is ‘not fair’ for a fat person’s suffering to be ridiculous. As in the description of Mrs Murgrove, fatness is conveyed through an immediate pair of synonyms, ‘large bulky’. In the third sentence, Austen’s aesthetic principle of ‘unbecoming conjunctions’ takes the form of a distinctive rhetorical device (isocolon) whose serious tripartite structure is punctuated with long dashes that ask the reader to pause and consider each clause as a separate facet of the argument that a fat person’s suffering is aesthetically unpleasing. The digression into aesthetic principles reframes Mrs Musgrove’s ‘large fat sighings’: even if her grief were in proportion to its object (if her true feelings were deeper, if Dick better deserved them), she still would be ridiculous.
Some critics have found here an acid antidote to the innocuously pleasant ‘Aunt Jane’; others have ascribed the ‘unbecoming conjunctions’ statement to someone other than Austen, for example by arguing that the narrator is ventriloquising a conventional opinion that Austen might actually disapprove.80 Marvin Mudrick has called the passage ‘a savage caricature’ that ‘serves as a pretext for abusing Mrs. Musgrove’.81 Reflecting on parallels with Gillray’s prints, Brownstein suggests that: ‘At their most disturbing, [Austen and Gillray] pair the organic with the elaborately artificial, the beautiful with the disgusting. As either Anne Elliot or the narrator reflects, some people – physically and/or morally – are sometimes simply comical.’82
But interpreting the ‘unbecoming conjunctions’ passage either in very specific terms (as ‘abuse of Mrs Musgrove’ as an individual) or in very general terms (as a remark about ‘some people, sometimes’) might gloss over the fact that Austen’s theory of unbecoming conjunctions refers to fat (specifically) people (generally). It states that they are unbeautiful, and comical when they express sadness or distress. In her picturing of characters’ personal appearances, Austen makes an exception for fat bodies: fatness is a special occasion for characterisation. This exceptionalism plays out in the narrative voice, which loses the stylistic concision and proportion that seem to contribute so much, elsewhere, to its composed, rational impersonality – laying its author open, like her own characters, to questions of ethical or psychological criticism like the ones I have asked here. There are other such passages, on different topics: the ones I have analysed here are relatively conspicuous due to the theme of fat-hating. For the duration of these lapses in style, the narrator might seem to share the formalised and framed ‘eccentricity’ of her satirically rendered characters. Throughout, Austen’s characterisation techniques operate under a moral concept of caricature as self-inflicted, which works (not always successfully) to present us with a narrator who is essentially likeable and believable, and to show us people as they really are.
There is a tendency to judge the ‘realism’ of Austen’s novels – to distinguish Austen’s ‘caricatures’ from her ‘characters’ or one character’s ‘roundness’ from another’s ‘flatness’ – according to the reader’s own conceptions of what is plausible or realistic. ‘Most often’, Woloch notes, ‘readers have understood Austen’s flat characters as a reasonable imitation of actual life. If there are round and flat characters in Austen, this is an accurate representation of the real social universe […]. Other critics take an opposite tack, noting the way that Austen’s minor characters are clearly distorted and, therefore, cannot be interpreted as the transparent reflections of credible persons’.83 Woloch’s identification of Mr Collins as a minor character must still assume that one can discern a writer’s ‘simple exaggeration’ of what could be more credibly represented, as well as recognising the formal elements of caricaturing. The (in)credibility of the character’s content, Woloch suggests, is fundamental to the caricature: ‘Collins’s caricatured personality, the symptom and sign of his minorness, emerges through three interrelated registers: the simple exaggeration of his faults, his incessant repetition of these faults, and the continual annoyance or disruption that these faults provoke.’84 Perhaps we cannot avoid, when engaging in (anti-)caricature talk about Austen’s novels, participating in ‘naive realism’ by implying the existence of some actual person or people like Mr Collins, whom it might be possible to extricate from the text’s caricaturing. In this chapter, I have shown that caricature talk is crucial to Austen’s realism, not only in the critical tradition but also because her co-operations of caricature talk with characterisation techniques work so hard to persuade us that her comic and satirically rendered characters are ‘real’ or ‘explained’ caricatures, pre-distorted, made ridiculous by what they are and not by how the writer presents them.
Perhaps we must, to be sceptical of that strategy, assume our familiarity with what has been ‘simply exaggerated’ or ‘clearly distorted’, and believe ourselves capable of making ethical judgements about it. For example, if we agree with Woloch that writing one character’s negative reaction to another – contradicting what they say, or laughing at them – can be a ‘caricaturing’ technique, our character talk will probably have to make some reference to our real social universes; that is, we believe there are real people like Mr Collins, who are actually annoying, and thus that the other characters are reasonably annoyed.
In this chapter, where I describe how Austen’s caricature talk interacts with her characterisation techniques, I have tended to emphasise the how of characterisation (formal and rhetorical devices) over the what of characterisation (the content of a character’s history, actions and dialogue). This is not because I want to attempt reading fictive characters as purely formal constructions that can be understood independently of assumptions about their imitation and distortion of actual life. In fact, our tendency to assume the what of caricature, as well the impulse to question our assumptions, is a necessity for full, interminable and shared caricature talk that participates in writers’ self-conscious realisms.
We use caricature talk when we discuss fictive characters that have what McKeon calls ‘the concrete particularity of probabilistic “realism”’,85 and particularly to examine the moments when we might lose faith in the fiction’s heightened or selective reality. In these discussions, the anti-caricature claim that humorous or satirical characterisations accurately reflect the distorted forms of people in the real world can be strongest where the fictional text provides its own compelling rules for understanding ‘explained caricatures’ with underpinning concepts of morality, psychology, society or history that explain how such ‘caricatures’ come to be. George Lukács describes how Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ‘draws characters in whom the specialization, brought about by the capitalist division of labour, ossifies one feature of their personality to the point of caricature, leaving the rest of their humanity to atrophy completely’.86 The artifice of the writer’s characterisation technique is caught up and partly concealed in a realism that attributes caricature to the structures and forces that externally and internally shape people – away from what they might have been, into what they are.
Walter Scott was open to the concept of caricature’s potential for accuracy, particularly for documenting the varied textures of historical reality. In his novels and other writings, Scott explores caricatúra’s possible associations with particularity, accuracy and actual reference, as opposed to distortion, oversimplification and misrepresentation.
To begin this chapter, I contextualise Scott’s individual concept of caricature in his knowledge of ritratti carichi and his admiration for John Kay’s ‘caricatures’ of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, analysing passages in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Rob Roy. I argue that Scott looked to Kay’s caricature prints as a model for comically and satirically rendered non-protagonists to populate a compendious historical realism. In the second part of the chapter, I look at how compendious realism attracted accusations of ‘caricature’ for its perceived artificiality and heterogeneity – drawing on caricatúra’s meanings of effort and contrast – and how Scott anticipated and responded to those accusations. I consider the connection Scott makes between caricature and the picturesque in Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, which offer justifications for ‘caricature’ as an effect of artificial combinations that cater to readers’ mixed tastes with a synthetic compendious realism. I describe how, in the later part of his novel-writing career, Scott imagined that romance-readers were becoming bored and sceptical of characterisations that luxuriated in peculiarity and contrast. I analyse his efforts – in an 1821 essay on Tobias Smollett for the Novelist’s Library and in a selection of Magnum Opus editions – to explain these characters’ historical accuracy and to come to terms with their literary obsolescence. Caleb Balderstone (The Bride of Lammermoor) and Sir Piercie Shafton (The Monastery) exemplify the problem of the ‘historically explained caricature’ whose literary value is especially dependent on readers’ understanding of a specific historical context.
While some of Scott’s historically peculiar characters were criticised for being superficially different ‘temporary characters’, in other cases he develops figures of romanticised ‘deep peculiarity’ extending through historical time periods. In the third part of the chapter, I argue that Scott romanticises dwarfism and gigantism in order to perform the factualisation of these supposedly legendary figures, with the extraordinary bodies of Sir Edward Mauley and Rob Roy MacGregor being based on accounts of real individuals. (The techniques in Scott’s grotesquing descriptions of dwarf characters – used across The Black Dwarf, Rob Roy, The Pirate, The Talisman and Peveril of the Peak – are discussed further in Chapter 6 alongside Shelley’s ‘horrid realist’ depictions of dwarf and giant characters.)
The last part of the chapter returns to the idea of the explained caricature, looking through the lens of ‘sympathy’ at Scott’s characterisations of national and ethnic minorities, where sympathy is extended to Scots and withdrawn from Jews. First, I close-read Scott’s sympathetic account of the Scots ‘body-corporate’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian against unsympathetic representations in Rob Roy and Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Scotch Character’. Then, I look at Scott’s version of the ‘self-inflicted caricature’ in Ivanhoe’s anti-Semitic characterisation of ‘Isaac of York’ (with reference to the real person ‘Abraham of Bristol’), making comparisons with Edgeworth’s references to Abraham’s torture in her 1817 novel Harrington. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of explained caricature can participate in national prejudices ‘more rationally’ and ‘more sympathetically’, by identifying historical points of origin for unpleasant traits and behaviours perceived as national characteristics, and assigning those characteristics noble or pragmatic motives – which is what happens in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Rob Roy. In Ivanhoe, on the other hand, the same rhetorical strategy is used both to intellectualise racism – rationalising it and bestowing an intellectual character on it – and to shift blame for historical anti-Semitism and persecution onto Jews. ‘Historical caricature’ is latent in Scott’s compendious realism that extensively (and self-consciously) relies on readers acquiring and being complicit in a shared understanding of history. The historical romance, its diverse characterisations concerned with how people really were, seems to generate a disturbingly accelerated process of realism being disintegrated by sceptical readers.
Kay’s Caricatures
When Scott sets the scene in the second chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, he aligns his recovery of historical characters with the artist John Kay’s first-hand attention to the details that might escape dignified historiographies or flattering painted portraits. Scott embellishes the historical background to the Porteous riots with a description of Edinburgh’s city guard, a civic militia originally formed in 1513 in response to the violent unrest following the Battle of Flodden.1 The City Guard was eventually rendered unnecessary by the passage of the 1805 Edinburgh Police Act and the formation of a new police force – but the Guard was not disbanded until 1817, when the medieval Tolbooth was demolished.2 Writing in 1818, with the knowledge that the Guard would soon pass out of living memory, Scott records the peculiar appearance of the militia men who were still employed in the later decades of the eighteenth century, many of them Highlanders, with the intended purpose of keeping order on Edinburgh’s streets. Scott’s epigraph to the chapter quotes the last stanza of Robert Fergusson’s poem ‘The Daft-Days’ (1772), which praises drinking and music in Edinburgh during the twelve days between Christmas and the new year, and ends with an ominous reference to ‘that black banditti, / The City Guard’; Scott also refers to Fergusson’s ‘Hallow-Fair’ (1772), which warns of ‘this black squad’. Fergusson’s poems are particularly well qualified to evoke the City Guard, Scott notes, because they are based on the poet’s first-hand drunken encounters with the militia when they were on duty during public holidays.3
Scott imagines Fergusson’s poetic record of personal experience, together with his own childhood memories, becoming a textual accompaniment or ‘illustration’ to John Kay’s pictorial ‘caricatures’ of the City Guard:
A spectre may indeed here and there still be seen, of an old grey-headed and grey-bearded Highlander, with war-worn features, but bent double by age; dressed in an old fashioned cocked-hat, bound with white tape instead of silver lace; and in coat, waistcoat, and breeches, of a muddy-coloured red, bearing in his withered hand an ancient weapon, called a Lochaber-axe; a long pole, namely, with an axe at the extremity, and a hook at the back of the hatchet. Such a phantom of former days still creeps, I have been informed, round the statue of Charles the Second, in the Parliament Square, as if the image of a Stuart were the last refuge for any memorial of our ancient manners; and one or two others are supposed to glide around the door of the guardhouse assigned to them in the Luckenbooths, when their ancient refuge in the High Street was laid low.
But the fate of manuscripts bequeathed to friends and executors is so uncertain, that the narrative containing these frail memorials of the old Town Guard of Edinburgh, who, with their grim and valiant corporal, John Dhu (the fiercest-looking fellow I ever saw), may, perhaps, only come to light when all memory of the institution has faded away, and then serve as an illustration of Kay’s caricatures, who has preserved the features of some of their heroes.4
Pictorial caricature is construed here as a uniquely evocative witness to history: it is visually particular, unflatteringly accurate and concerned with actual reference such that it can substitute for personal memories of people in all their regional and individual peculiarity.
The caricature of ritratti carichi might find a place in Nancy Armstrong’s ‘prehistory’ of visual realism,5 with portraits like Kay’s seen by his contemporaries as material traces able to preserve the actual living qualities of the dead, rather than paying tribute to idealised versions of the person. In this concept of caricature, accuracy and particularity are supposed to derive from the artist’s personal familiarity with his or her subject, whether through an on-the-spot encounter or continual acquaintance. Kay, supported by an annuity from Sir William Nisbet of Dirleton (who had employed Kay as a body-servant), was known to draw most of his subjects from life, opportunistically. Hugh Paton’s testimony that people rarely posed for Kay to draw them helps explain why so many of his portraits, particularly the ‘society caricatures’, show people in the street, in profile, conversing with their peers or passing by the artist’s viewpoint.6 Quick, on-the-spot drawings, attempting to capture the distinguishing features of individuals as seen in action, are described admiringly by Scott as ‘caricatures’. Scott owned a copy of the anonymous Scots English poem The Unwelcome Guest (1799), which praises Kay as the ‘wonderfu true visage taker’.7 In Redgauntlet, drawing inspiration from Lockhart’s penchant for caricaturing as a law student, Darsie Lattimer’s law school notebook is ‘“filled with caricatures of the professors and my fellow students”’.8 Such drawings held out the possibility of a visual representation approximating how people appeared when physically encountered in a social setting. Because they put unflattering emphasis on the distinctive features that other portraits would minimise or leave out, even the caricature portraits in deliberately disapproving single-sheet prints could be judged good likenesses – as in the Dublin Literary Gazette’s claim about the satirical prints of the Duke of Wellington produced around the time of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, mentioned in Chapter 1: ‘Those who judge of the Duke of Wellington’s countenance by the highly finished prints sold in the shops, judge erroneously; the caricatures give much more accurate resemblances, and some of them possess an exactness of similitude to the original [such that] one forgets that it is a caricature, and feels as if one were actually looking at the Duke.’9
Caricatúra was often used to suggest that a portrait focused too exclusively on accuracy, however, particularly when it was at the expense of the subject’s feelings. Scott’s journal entry for 1 March 1826 records how his bankrupt drawing master, George Walker,10 effaced a portrait of himself by a well-known artist:
[Archibald] Skirving made an admirable likeness of poor Walker; not a single scar or mark of the small-pox which seamd [sic] his countenance but the too accurate brother of the brush had faithfully laid it down in longitude and latitude. Poor Walker destroyd [sic] it (being in crayons) rather than let the caricatura of his ugliness appear at the sale of his effects.11
The offensive caricatúra here is ‘faithful’, only ‘too accurate’, an ‘admirable likeness’. In Rob Roy, Scott suggests the difficulty of separating the supposedly ‘unjust’ caricature from genuine likeness, when caricatúra possesses its own perverse realism. When Frank overhears Andrew’s ‘perverted account of my temper and studies’, he admits that ‘my self-love, while revolting against it as a caricature, could not, nevertheless, refuse to recognise it as a likeness’; later in the novel, Frank relies on distinct meanings of ‘caricature’ and ‘likeness’ to protest Rashleigh’s remarks about his father: ‘“Mine was a likeness, Rashleigh; yours is a caricatura.”’12 Accurate pictorial ‘caricatures’ – Skirving’s drawing of Walker and Kay’s portraits of the Edinburgh city guard – demonstrated for Scott the power and perverse realism of the unflattering caricatúra.
Scott owned at least one Kay print relevant to the City Guard passage in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the 1796 etching James McKean at the Bar Edinr (NPG D31984), where the accused McKean is guarded by two soldiers with smart uniforms, grim faces and sharp swords. He must also have seen one or more of Kay’s several prints that portray members of the City Guard as individuals, and carrying Lochaber axes. John Dhu features in at least three of these, appearing in Three Edinr Bucks (1784) and The Old City Guard of Edinburgh (1786) as well as being the subject of Shon Dow (1784).13 A comparison with David Allan’s numerous prints of the City Guard clarifies why Scott would allude to Kay’s portraits, with their individualising and particularising qualities. Kay depicted many other individuals who were fixtures of Edinburgh street life in the late eighteenth century: the fops and ‘bucks’ of the volunteers, members of the aristocracy, shopkeepers, hawkers and beggars. Local ‘eccentrics’ portrayed by Kay include James Robertson of Kincraigie, continually thwarted in his ambition to be hanged as a martyr to the Stuart cause, and Jamie Duff, an ‘idiot boy’ who attended all the funeral processions that took place in the city. Many others practised traditional occupations that were becoming ‘picturesque’ in the aesthetic taste of the Romantic period, or whose advanced age made them objects of historical interest: John Steele, a Perthshire beggar; Geordie Syme, official Piper of Dalkeith; John Tait, a broom-maker; Margaret Suttie, a salt hawker; and William Wilson, ‘Mortar Willie’, a chemist’s assistant who lived to be over a hundred years old. Ancient, antiquated or parochial: these were individuals perceived to make Edinburgh more ‘interesting’, and for whose portraits Kay often adopted more detailed, individualising and realist styles than for his portraits of lawyers, ministers and academics. Whereas some of his portraits are polite ‘society caricatures’, minimally individualised and holding little interest for anyone not acquainted with their subjects, Kay’s ‘romantic’ portraits present minute details, such as the texture of a heavy cloak, or the wrinkles round the eyes, as a documented reality that substitutes for really encountering the person. Whereas the society caricatures give an overall impression of sameness, these present an array of distinctive, heterogeneous elements – various professions, classes, regions and even historical periods – all existing compendiously in a single part of Scotland.
Scott’s admiration for ‘Kay’s caricatures’ suggests a parallel with how his novels’ compendious realism uses non-protagonist characters not only to provide humour and facilitate plots, but also to immerse the reader in a wealth of minute historical differences, presenting a world of visual and aural variety where it is worth attending to the different ways people look and speak.
Anti-caricature and Compendious Realism
By offering this concept of caricature as a tool for compendious realism, Scott’s novels anticipate readers’ objections to their deliberately contrasting characters, settings, moods and language. In anti-caricature rhetoric objecting to compendious realism, ‘caricature’ denotes an unpleasant effect resulting from the artist’s or writer’s labour to synthesise in one work the disparate things that readers might expect of it. Such realism squashes things together in ways readers might find implausible or distasteful. They might like comedy to be kept separate from tragedy, or a modern Glasgow separate from a romantic Scottish Highlands, or a garrulous smuggler from a dignified lady, or Lallans from ‘pure English’. Scott works to bring these disparate things together, in the knowledge that such synthesis can be read as failure to conceal the novel’s artificiality – a belaboured ‘caricature’ that strikes the reader with too many effects and contrasts.
Scott’s concept of caricature’s realism collides with anti-caricature rhetoric in Guy Mannering (1815), where a landscape sketch exemplifies caricature’s association with conspicuous artistic labour and artificial combination, but from which emerges a remarkable likeness of reality. The novel’s central character, Henry Bertram alias Vanbeest Brown, was kidnapped by smugglers as a child, and conveyed from his native Scotland to Holland. Bertram experiences the ‘levels of the isle of Zealand’ as a flat ‘blank’ conspicuously lacking in glens and mountains. Scott had not seen this flatness for himself at the time of writing Guy Mannering, but may have read published accounts of the Walcheren campaign that include descriptions of the island. Letters from Flushing (1809) observes that while ‘there are some elevations which the people are pleased to call hills […] the island has a very near resemblance to a billiard-table; so level, that a ball rolled from one side, would pass without impediment to the other’.14 Leaving flat Holland behind, Bertram catches his friend Delaserre’s ‘Swiss fanaticism for mountains and torrents’ while retaining an ‘indelible impression’ of Scotland. Returning to Britain and travelling through Cumbria on his way to his estate in Galloway, Bertram is struck by the peculiarities of the hilly landscape. Like a good tourist of the picturesque, he tries to capture them on paper.15 When he compares his drawings with a friend’s, he realises that in trying to render the heterogeneity of a landscape characterised by contrasts, he has exaggerated it: ‘“Some drawings have I attempted, but I succeed vilely—Dudley, on the contrary, draws delightfully, with a rapid touch that seems like magic, while I labour and botch, and make this too heavy, and that too light, and produce at last a base caricature.’”16 Bertram attributes the ‘caricature’ of his drawing to lack of skill in pictorial art. The better artist cultivates restraint, compromising between peculiarity and plausibility – as a connoisseur says of Tyrell’s landscape drawing in Saint Ronan’s Well (1824), ‘“[h]ere is both force and keeping.”’17 In Bertram’s landscape, as elsewhere, caricature is visible in the effort of artificially recreating the picturesque: Hazlitt, in his essay on the Elgin Marbles, remarks that lesser artists’ representations of mountains ‘lose probability and effect by striving at too much’.18
However, in Guy Mannering, the ‘base caricature’ of northern landscape is not a complete failure. Bertram’s exaggerations have a fidelity of their own, evoking the exile’s palimpsestic view of landscape: the drawings are Cumbria viewed through a childhood memory, indelible though perhaps dreamlike and distorted, of Scotland; they are Cumbria viewed through his difficult travels through mountain ranges in Europe. The drawings are ‘a vile success’, as Bertram suggests. Their deformities implicitly created by the pressures of the past, they fail to represent Cumbria but succeed in representing something else. Whereas Dudley’s talent and training enable him to draw accurately what is in front of him, Bertram’s aesthetic sensibility is synthetic, preoccupied with what is not there, and seeing all landscapes in a compendium of memory and desire. By juxtaposing Bertram’s bad drawing with his impressions of the landscapes he has passed through, Guy Mannering quietly offers a counterpoint to grumbles about picturesque artists ‘caricaturing’ the natural world.
It was understood in the Romantic period that the picturesque tips easily into a caricature of itself.19 Writing about John Martin’s popular landscape paintings,20 Hazlitt complains that ‘his mountains are piled up one upon the back of the other, like the stories of houses’, striving for sublime effects through multiplication and elevation. Thus caricatured, nature acquires a manufactured quality. ‘A landscape’, Hazlitt says, ‘is not an architectural elevation. You may build a house as high as you can lift up stones with pulleys and levers, but you cannot raise mountains into the sky merely with the pencil’.21 Hazlitt refers to the topographical features in Edinburgh’s Royal Park, mentioned in James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788), to illustrate nature’s superior creative powers:
We defy any landscape-painter to invent out of his own head, and by jumbling together all the different forms of hills he ever saw, by adding a bit to one, and taking a bit from another, any thing equal to Arthur’s seat, with the appendage of Salisbury Crags, that overlooks Edinburgh. Why so? Because there are no levers in the mind of man equal to those with which nature works at her utmost need. No imagination can toss and tumble about huge heaps of earth as the ocean in its fury can. A volcano is more potent to rend rocks asunder than the most splashing pencil.22
Reality tips into fantasy when an artist attempts to heighten our view of a topographical structure made by violent mechanisms which have already gone to the edge of what is materially impossible, and whose every creation is completely and original. The landscape artist should observe and copy, not improvise and fantasise. In ‘caricature’, the industrious hand of the artist is too conspicuous.
Non-protagonist characters in Scott’s novels have sometimes been seen as too miscellaneous and as conspicuous in ways that make the author’s labour visible and shake the reader’s illusion of reality. A novelist desperately in want of novelty could also be tempted into overworking familiar materials, and mixing them in unlikely new combinations. In his 1822 essay for the Quarterly Review, Nassau Senior cautions writers against ‘introducing something of overcolouring and caricature, into figures, in his endeavours to render striking, the representations of a well-known class. A painter may be tempted to put horses and cows into some studied attitude, or group them too artificially, who would not thinking of anything more than an unaffected resemblance of a hippopotamus’.23 Senior is concerned with Scott’s comic and satirically rendered characters, disapproving the ‘fools and bores […] from Monk Barns down to the Euphuist’ (Sir Piercie Shafton) as an expedient means of mixing humour with tragedy: ‘an artificial effort after the contrasts of tragi-comedy, to have the broadest and most extravagant caricature continually dragged into studied opposition to the tragic characters and incidents’.24 Picturesque landscape gardening becomes a helpful analogy both for Scott’s seemingly artificial contrasts of mood and for the diversity of the social panorama in his novels: ‘It is the old mistake’, writes Senior, ‘of the first landscape gardeners, who, in their rage to imitate nature, used to plant dead trees, and build ant-hills, close to a house’ – an allusion to William Kent, who was accused of inserting incongruous objects into his picturesque garden designs.25 Senior singles out Caleb Balderstone, an important character in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), as ‘the most pertinacious, the most intrusive’ of Scott’s attempts to create comic diversions with characters.26 Perhaps as a result of such criticisms, Scott himself came to wonder (according to Lockhart’s Memoirs) that with Caleb, ‘he might have sprinkled rather too much parsley over his chicken’.27 When artists and writers are seen deliberately to select, combine and present miscellaneous products – rather than seeming to present what already exists contiguously in nature – they become builders, planters, cooks, caricaturists.
Such caricature talk about over-seasoned and out-of-place non-protagonist characters is already anticipated by Scott’s own gestures at the artificiality of novelistic realism in his novels. Scott is often explicit about picturesque landscapes, characters, customs and objects as supplies for a reader, viewer or consumer whose appetite simultaneously demands novelty and variety, yet also consistency. Novel-readers are like Andrew Fairservice’s lady clients, ‘“aye crying for apricocks, pears, plums, and apples […] without distinction o’ seasons”’ – wanting this and that, and all the time.28 Rob Roy provides the terms for Senior’s objections to eccentric characters as the excrescences of an over-enthusiastic landscape gardener, where Andrew’s preoccupation with the delicious fruits of his horticulture ironically parallels Frank’s taste for the picturesque. Mocking his employer’s preference for untended landscape, Andrew claims that ‘“[Frank]’ll glower at an auld warld barkit aik-snag as if it were a quizmaddam in full bearing, and a naked craig wi’ a burn jawing out ower’t is unto him as a garden garnisht with flowering knots and choice pot-herbs.”’29 Andrew’s juxtapositions, of a broken tree stump with a fruit tree imported from France, and a rock formation with a herb garden, supplant the picturesque nature of the ‘romanticist’ with the productive nature of the ‘realist’. Andrew’s taste has a proprietorial, as well as a pragmatic, dimension: when he visits Andrew’s cottage, Frank notices his jargonelle pear tree, nicknamed cuisse-madame in reference to the fruit’s bulge, the same prized ‘quizmaddam’ Andrew contrasts with Frank’s preferred oak tree later in the novel.30 Fruits and vegetables are substituted for feminine beauty again in Andrew’s remark that when ‘“a kail-blade, or a colliflour, glances sae glegly by moonlight—it’s like a leddy in her diamonds”’.31 Andrew’s appreciation of the beautiful is just as partial as Frank’s: one would rather look at a crag, the other a cauliflower. When we first see Diana Vernon, she is not a lady in diamonds, but something much more exciting to Frank, a lady in masculine riding clothes. By the time of the novel’s setting, that fashion had been around for a while: Samuel Pepys wrote of ‘Ladies of Honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just, for all the world, like mine […] which was an odde [sic] sight, and a sight did not please me.’32 The style is ‘perfectly new’ and pleasing to Frank, however, and he is struck by ‘the wild gaiety of the scene, and the romance of her singular dress and unexpected appearance’.33 Frank wants to see what he has not seen, and what exceeds his control – novelty, romance, wildness, female masculinity – the opposite of Andrew’s well-kept garden. Thus, Rob Roy’s comedy of tastes suggests the problem that compendious realism proposes to solve: how to satisfy readers with such different preferences, without offering variety and incongruity? You cannot please everyone all the time – but put Andrew Fairservice by Die Vernon, a cabbage in moonlight by a lady in coat skirts, and you might increase your chances. Compendious realism anticipates a mixture of readers, and hopes for readers with mixed taste. Like Henry Bertram’s perversely realist ‘caricature’ of Cumbria, Scott’s compendious realism is a fixed viewpoint on a labour-intensive assemblage of people and things that might strictly belong to different layers but which appear to be present in the same place and moment.
The earliest readers of Scott’s novels were keenly interested in his highly individualised fictive characters, many of whom became household names. At the same time, early readers’ objections to Scott’s compendious realism as artificial, aesthetically inconsistent and/or empirically implausible often focus on the most comic, satirically rendered and peculiar characters in the novels. In the 1820s, Scott began to see these characters as particularly vulnerable to changing tastes. More than landscapes, these characters determined readers’ opinions of how successfully compendious realism seemed to comprehend different genres and to gratify taste. Non-protagonist characters strongly differentiated by historically specific national, religious, ethnic and professional traits also became targets for readers’ scepticism about the novels’ claims to combine the real with the romantic. The first chapter of Saint Ronan’s Well pre-emptively defends its characterisation of Meg Dods – a character, Scott’s narrator admits, ‘somewhat overcharged in the features’ – as belonging to ‘a peculiar class’ whom the narrator’s contemporaries north of the border will remember. The novel’s opening portrays Meg’s peculiarities of physique, temper and manners, introducing her catchphrase ‘and what for no?’34 Scott felt the need to justify peculiar characters as accurate of particular nations, classes and historical periods. When readers rejected these historically specific characters, would they soon reject the novels altogether, refusing credit for Scott’s speculative combination of history with romance? In his review of Frankenstein, Scott imagines the novel-reader as a bank, advancing the author credulity: ‘The author opens a sort of account-current with the reader; drawing upon him, in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvellous which he proposes to employ.’35 This connection between the author’s creative liability and the author’s financial liability became personal for Scott in the depressing atmosphere of the 1820s.
In an essay written for the Novelist’s Library in 1821, and his revisions to that essay in 1827, Scott responds to the accusations of ‘caricature’ in the critical reception of Smollett’s novels, and justifies his own peculiar characters by proxy. This defence of Smollett seemed necessary because in the early nineteenth century Smollett’s place in the canon was threatened by an association with ‘caricature’. Previously, it had been generally accepted that Smollett’s depictions of sailors, based on his personal experience of working as a naval surgeon, were true to life. John Dunlop refers to this consensus in his History of Fiction (1814): ‘No one wishes to be told, for the twentieth time, that [Smollett] is distinguished for his delineation of […] naval characters.’36 But taste was turning against Smollett and his sailors, and Dunlop ventures that the characters in Peregrine Pickle (1751) are ‘a little caricatured’.37 An essay in The Retrospective Review contrasts Smollett’s peculiar sailors with Defoe’s naval characters, who possess an ‘air of truth and reality’, and pairs Smollett with Fielding as writers whose imaginative talents have ‘unfitted them to be the humble copyists of nature, and the faithful historians of human life’.38 Later, Smollett’s comic rendition of eighteenth-century naval life was given short shrift by a new generation with experience of the professionalised nineteenth-century navy. A passage on Allan Cunningham’s novel Paul Jones (1826) in the Noctes Ambrosianae compares Cunningham not with Smollett, but with ‘the truly naval author of the Pilot’, James Fenimore Cooper.39 William Glascock, who served in the Royal Navy between 1800 and 1855, describes Smollett in his essay on ‘naval novels’ as ‘not […] a painter of real life [but] a caricaturist’.40 When The North American Review pits Scott against Smollett in a fantasy tournament of British novelists, Smollett’s defeat is down to ‘the coarse caricature of his pencil’.41 Anna Letitia Barbauld, in 1810, is an early voice of opposition to Smollett’s ‘caricatures’: she describes Commodore Trunnion, in her essay on Smollett for The British Novelists, as ‘scarcely like anything human […] the Caliban of Smollett’, and Trunnion’s wife as ‘still more overcharged’.42
Reissued in 1820 and foundational to the canonisation of the English-language novel, Barbauld’s popular series was a model for Scott’s Novelist’s Library. Her treatment of Smollett put Scott on the defensive. Whereas Barbauld includes only The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) in her thirty-volume series, Scott makes room for Smollett’s entire oeuvre in the much smaller Novelist’s Library: a move that was part of the series’s ‘remasculinisation’ of the novel, with only two women among the fourteen writers represented.43 The Novelist’s Library also addresses Barbauld’s critique of Smollett’s sailors as ‘caricatures’, a judgement that may well have played a part in her decision to include Humphry Clinker but not Roderick Random (1748) or Peregrine Pickle in her series. Scott’s approving remarks on Smollett’s peculiar characters could also be applied to his own. His defence of Smollett’s ‘striking’ yet ‘accurate’ characters was presented to the public in 1821, the same year as the essay for the Quarterly Review where Nassau William Senior gives his opinion that eccentric characters are blots on all the novels Scott had written since 1817; and in 1817, Francis Jeffrey had criticised some of Scott’s characters as ‘caricatures […] after the fashion of the caricatures in the novels of Smollett’.44 While Scott acknowledges the grounds for seeing Smollett’s sailors as caricatures, he insists that their extravagance does not make them inaccurate. There are sailor characters in Peregrine Pickle, he thinks, which ‘border on caricature’ (Trunnion, Pipes and Hatchway); others in Roderick Random are ‘truth and nature itself’ (Lieutenant Bowling and Jack Rattlin).
Into the established consensus on the verisimilitude of Smollett’s sailors, Scott incorporates the idea that proximity to ‘caricature’ actually makes a character more vividly real: they are ‘striking’, ‘characteristic’ and ‘historic’, perhaps like Kay’s caricatures of the Edinburgh city guard. The peculiarities that make a character liable to be seen as a caricature, especially by later generations, can serve as a record of characteristics that might not be tasteful or even credible, but which give the reader a window on the past as a many-textured combination of distinctive elements, whose looks and manners do not conform to the dignity of Tragedy or History:
Smollett’s sea characters have been deservedly considered as inimitable; and the power with which he has diversified them […] we have noticed as his chief advantage over Fielding […]. These striking portraits have now the merit that is cherished by antiquaries—they preserve the memory of the school of Benbow and Boscawen, whose manners are now banished from the quarterdeck to the fore-castle.45
Scott concludes his essay on Smollett with a redemption of the naval ‘caricatures’ on aesthetic grounds, praising their vividness and diversity by comparison with the paintings of Rubens.46 Leigh Hunt, in Table-Talk, would agree with Scott’s view that Smollett incorporated truth in extravagance, allowing the novelist to have been ‘a masterly observer’ as well as ‘the finest of caricaturists’: one whose ‘caricatures are always substantially true: it is only the complexional vehemence of his gusto that leads him to toss them up as he does, and tumble them on our plates’.47 Here, Smollett’s energy, his tossing and tumbling, makes him conspicuous as a cook of characters – but, Scott and Hunt insist, strong seasoning and varied combinations do not interfere too much with the substance.
In the 1821 essay, Scott states his special admiration for Smollett’s comic character Obadiah Lismahago, the Scottish lieutenant who appears in Humphry Clinker as the Don Quixote of eighteenth-century British imperialism. Smollett explicitly presents Lismahago to the reader as a mixture and an ‘original’, pointing out his peculiar and heterogeneous traits. Physically, Lismahago is a cadaver exquis of odd body parts: a skull scalped, ‘patched and plastered’, joined to a face ‘half a yard in length, brown and shrivelled’, on top of a figure ‘very narrow’ in places and ‘very thick’ in others.48 Other characters in the novel relish Lismahago as a ‘high flavoured dish’ whose peculiarities fascinate them,49 and who is caught in farcical incidents. When he is forced to climb out of a window in his nightshirt, ‘long lank limbs and posteriors […] illumined by the links and torches which the servants held up’, an onlooker laughs: ‘“O, what a subject!—O, what caricatura!”’50 Lismahago’s most continually accentuated peculiarity is his patriotism, which leads him into specious reasoning, ‘undertak[ing] to prove that poverty was a blessing to a nation; that oatmeal was preferable to wheat-flour’.51 When Scott argues that Smollett’s characterisation of Lismahago is grounded in historical reality, he holds out the possibility of an actual referent:
Captain Lismahago was probably no violent caricature, owing for the manners of the time. We can remember a good and gallant officer who was said to have been his prototype, but believe the opinion was only entertained from the striking resemblance he bore in externals to the doughty captain.52
Scott employed this kind of authentication technique again when he revised the essay on Smollett for his Miscellaneous Prose Works. To the paragraph on Smollett’s sailors, he added a final sentence that addresses criticisms of Smollett’s characters based on ignorance of eighteenth-century naval manners:
The naval officers of the present day, the splendour of whose actions has thrown into shadow the exploits of a thousand years, do not now affect the manners of foremast-men […]. <But these, when memory carries them back thirty or forty years, must remember many a weather-beaten veteran, whose appearance, language, and sentiments free Smollett from the charge of extravagance in his characteristic sketches of British seamen of the last century.>53
As in his defences of Lismahago and Meg Dods, Scott refers to personal memory as the best way to authenticate characters whose peculiar appearances and ways of speaking are not recorded anywhere else.
But how to rehabilitate these characters for readers who do not possess the memory to carry themselves back sixty or more years since? Smollett, his novels riddled with historical ‘caricatures’, would need advocacy for inclusion in the canon of the English-language novel. New processes of literary canonisation took place not only in the expert judgements of men and women of letters, but also in the selling of new editions to new generations of readers. Senior might disparage Scott’s ‘fools and bores’ as unnecessary additions to narratives involving more dignified characters – but since the eccentric characters, being enjoyed by so many of the novels’ first readers, were often integral to plots and to the characterisation of the other characters, they could not possibly be excised. Perhaps it would do, rather than toning them down or abridging them, to justify them by explaining their historical accuracy. The sentence Scott added to his essay on Smollett, to defend the accuracy of his historical ‘caricatures’, belongs with the material Scott chose to include in the Magnum Opus edition of his novels between 1829 and 1833.
Defending Historical ‘Caricatures’ in the Magnum Opus
By the 1830s, there was a widespread sense that Scott’s reputation, and the immense popularity of his works, was insecure.54 In the decade that closed with the publication of the Magnum Opus edition of his novels, and even as he was assured of the profits from Woodstock (1826) and his Life of Napoleon (1827), Scott anticipated falling out of favour. He wrote in 1826 that ‘fashion changes and I am getting old and may become unpopular’. In 1827, he comforted himself, ‘[t]he public favour may wane indeed but it has not yet faild [sic] as yet and I must not be too anxious about that possibility’.55 Scott’s speculation on his writing as an increasingly risky investment – the apprehensive repetition of ‘it has not yet faild as yet’ – chimes with Angela Esterhammer’s description of ‘a climate of speculation that reached its peak in 1824 […] when British culture was profoundly affected by a rapid and severe boom-and-bust cycle’.56 The 1825 crash, and the financial collapse of the publishing enterprise in which he had heavily and profitably invested, had left Scott owing over £120,000. While this immense personal financial obligation loaded him with stress and depression, he was troubled by the idea of himself as a boom-and-bust author:
I should mention that the plan about the new edition of the novels was considerd [sic] at a meeting of trustees and finally approved of. Yet, who can warrant the continuance of popularity? Old Corri […] entered into many projects and could never sett [sic] the sails of a windmill so as to catch the aura popularis […]. I have had better luck to dress my sails to every wind. And so blow on, God’s wind, and spin round, whirlagig.57
Recording the trustees’ assent to the Magnum Opus edition, Scott has windmills in his head. Reminiscent of Don Quixote’s most famous adventure, the windmill spun by popular taste corresponds with his view of chivalry as a problematic intersection of fantasy and reality in Ivanhoe, and about the mixed reception of the knight Sir Piercie Shafton, a comic character in The Monastery.
Scott’s Magnum Introduction to The Monastery devotes whole pages to defending this single character, a disproportionate attention that suggests a chain of associations in Scott’s speculation on the Magnum Opus: that chivalry might resolve the contradiction between history and romance; that the ‘chivalrous’ Sir Piercie is a synecdoche for the inherent absurdities of historical romance; and that readers’ ambivalence about Sir Pierce is, therefore, cause for worry. Once taken as a ridiculous caricature of Euphuism, Sir Piercie appears to represent the unravelling of historical romance’s contract between author and reader. Scott’s emphasis in the Magnum Introduction on apologising for ‘characters formed on the extravagances of temporary fashion’58 echoes his sense of himself in the 1820s as dependent on specific literary fashions and tastes. His novels would remain giants only as long as public favour blew in the right direction.
When Constable first suggested a new edition of the novels in March 1823, he put it to Scott that a set of authoritative notes would secure the novel’s reputation as romances about real things, for which plausible – if not actual – referents could be found:
There will be attempts at illustrations and notes of all sorts, kinds and designations, full of absurdities and blunders—and in my opinion it is the Author only who could do anything at all acceptable in the way of genuine illustration—the Characters Incidents and descriptions in which all of them so fully abound have either originated in what may be termed reality or are drawn from sources but little known.59
Among the volumes of annotations already being sold, the most notable was Robert Chambers’s Illustrations of the Author of Waverley: Being Notices and Anecdotes of Real Characters, Scenes, and Incidents, Supposed to Be Described in His Works (1822), a second edition being issued in 1825. William Chambers published an invasive biography uncovering the ‘real’ identity of Scott’s character Sir Edward Mauley, The Life and Anecdotes of the Black Dwarf, or David Ritchie (1820). The public’s bankable interest in such characters meant that Scott, like other authors, was frequently in the position of needing to deny that his more peculiar or satirically rendered characters were portraits of real people. This was the case from the very beginning: the last chapter of Waverley assures the reader that its ‘Lowland Scottish gentlemen and the subordinate characters are not given as individual portraits, but are drawn from the general habits of the period.’60 At the same time, the perceived popularity of highly individualised comic characters may partly explain the accretive and amplifying revisions Scott made, in the process of bringing new editions of Waverley and Guy Mannering to press, to the characterisations of Dominie Sampson, Paulus Pleydell, Dandie Dinmont and the Baron of Bradwardine. The Magnum adjusts these characters’ idiolects with attention to their professional vocabularies and the orthographic representation of non-standard pronunciations; and, as J. H. Alexander notes, the Magnum Introductions posit the most memorably eccentric characters as inceptive to Scott’s early novels with Scottish settings.61
Scott thus resists Nassau Senior’s view of peculiar non-protagonist characters as superfluous additions to the novel. As well as claiming that the peculiar characters are foundational to the Scottish novels, the Magnum Introductions work hard to establish the historical reality of Scott’s subordinate eccentric characters more generally. This is clearest in the Magnum Introduction to The Monastery (1820), which devotes several pages of caricature talk to apologising for Sir Piercie Shafton. Scott seems to have observed that this character was underappreciated by the novel’s first readers. The first edition of The Monastery was no commercial or critical failure, but coming on the heels of Ivanhoe, its reception was relatively disappointing.
In the Magnum Introduction, Scott focuses his defence of the novel on its most remarkable characters, not to dispute their extravagance or implausibility, but to assert their basis in reality despite extravagance and implausibility. Historical facts, he insists, include things that are peculiar, implausible, fantastic, absurd. This fictive historical ‘reality’ does not necessitate actual referents, he reminds us, taking Robert Chambers to task for mistakenly identifying The Monastery’s pseudoepigraphic narrator, Captain Clutterbuck, as a ‘Mr. O—n of Melrose’, a neighbour and friend of Scott’s. Clutterbuck is like Susan Ferrier’s Mrs Gawffaw and Mrs Macshake: individualised enough to suggest that a real person might exist, but all the more historically real for Scott’s and Ferrier’s framing them as representatives of larger populations. It is only as fictive characters that they are individualised: while they are artificially made singular within the text of the novel, they are reproducible under a particular set of historical conditions. Without knowledge of those conditions, however, readers might understand the character as the novelist’s fanciful or downright absurd invention. This applies also to supernatural characters: Scott justifies the White Lady of Avenel as not only an imitation of literary example, but also a superstition local to the novel’s historical setting in the Scottish Borders, and a figure of some historical substance. Implicitly, the White Lady is excused from the charge of artificiality both by the fact of general belief in such phenomena, and by the idea that this general belief is confined to a time and place: elsewhere, at another time, she would not exist. She is not, like some other ghostly figures in other novels of the Romantic period, an example of the ‘explained supernatural’ – but her historical and regional credentials lend her the concrete particularity of literary realism. Lockhart recalls that while readers were scornful of Sir Piercie’s ‘grotesque absurdity’, it was actually the White Lady who was criticised as the ‘primary blot’ in The Monastery, with Sir Piercie ‘loudly, though not quite so generally, condemned’.
Despite the public’s more decisive judgement against the White Lady, however, the Magnum Introduction offers a much longer justification for Sir Piercie, perhaps suggesting that Scott was substituting Sir Piercie for more engrossing problem that stretched beyond this single character. If Clutterbuck could be generally real, and the White Lady contingently real, could Sir Piercie not be like Smollett’s sailors, styled as a ‘caricature’ but real in substance? Such ‘historical caricatures’, Scott recognised, might seem especially well suited to his historical fiction, since they would seem bizarre in a novel with an imprecise or contemporary setting. Literary ‘caricatures’ might be ultra-historical when they exaggerated temporal differences over ‘timeless’ human qualities, creating a strong effect of period authenticity. A caricature might be more ‘historically real’ than a serious and subtle character – more artefactual, a thing more palpably made by history – because the caricature’s reality is more exclusive to its precise historical context. But deprive the reader’s knowledge of that context, or lose the reader’s memory of the referent, and the character might become obnoxiously unreal.
Scott appears convinced in the Magnum Introduction to the 1830 edition of The Monastery that Sir Piercie fails as a character because readers’ knowledge of Euphuism is insufficient. While the Introduction attempts to correct that, it also risks prejudicing new readers against Sir Piercie by presenting him as a weak point in the novel and implying that his eccentricities are not adequately contextualised or explained within the novel itself. Scott’s rendering of euphuistic speech was regarded as absurd by several generations of readers, many of whom would have encountered him through the Magnum Opus’s apologies for him. Moreover, in its effort to defend Sir Piercie against the charge of absurdity, the Magnum Introduction and footnotes to The Monastery accuse Euphuism itself of being absurd. Within a few decades, Scott came to be seen as chiefly responsible for widespread misunderstanding of historical Euphuism, and Sir Piercie was notoriously a caricature. George Lillie Craik’s Pictorial History of England (1841) calls Sir Piercie ‘rather a caricature than a fair sample of Euphuism’.62 In a lecture first given in Edinburgh in 1870, Trollope identifies Scott’s over-dressed knight as the foremost example of courtly euphuism for modern readers: ‘We know it best in the caricature of Sir Piercie Shafton, “the Euphuist.”’63 The OED mentions the character in its prescriptive note on ‘loose uses’ of euphuism, apparently ‘chiefly suggested by the absurd bombast which Scott puts into the mouth of Sir Piercie Shafton (who is described as a “Euphuist”) in The Monastery; this caricature, however, bears very little resemblance to the genuine “euphuism”’.64 No wonder that when John Dover Wilson wrote a critical biography of John Lyly, author of Euphues, in 1970, he felt that Scott had already been ‘sufficiently called to account for his caricature of Lyly […] a historical faux pas’.65 Reactions to the character were likely influenced by Scott’s attack on Lyly, ‘a clever but conceited author’, his mental powers ‘deformed by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page’.66 I will discuss two excerpts from the Magnum Introduction’s long and recursive passage inspired by Sir Piercie – characterised by continual repetition of the words extremity, peculiarity, affectation, extravagance and absurdity – which both defends and admits the limitations of the characters Scott calls ‘temporary pieces’.67
Reckoning with the built-in obsolescence of characters whose leading features must be historically explained, Scott appeals to his reader’s supposed familiarity with Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s satirically rendered courtiers, on whose dialogue he based Sir Piercie’s. Even ‘Shakspeare himself’, Scott pleads, drew characters too fashionable to retain either their realism or their entertainment value:
With the whole sum of idolatry which affects us at his name, the mass of readers peruse, without amusement, the characters formed on the extravagances of temporary fashion; and the Euphuist Don Armado, the pedant Holofernes, even Nym and Pistol, are read with little pleasure by the mass of the public, as portraits of which we cannot recognise the humour, because the originals cease to exist. In like manner, while the distresses of Romeo and Juliet continue to interest every bosom, Mercutio, drawn as an accurate representation of the finished fine gentleman of the period, and as such received by the unanimous approbation of contemporaries, has so little to interest the present age, that, stripped of all his puns and quirks of verbal wit, he only retains his place in the scene, in virtue of his fine and fanciful speech upon dreaming, which belongs to no age, and as a personage whose presence is indispensable to the plot.68
As a work whose subordinate yet indispensable characters bring comedy into close proximity with tragedy, Romeo and Juliet is a good model for the problem Scott identifies: that the satirising of peculiarities closely based on the manners, costume and other ‘temporary’ signifiers of a particular historical period will inevitably, sooner or later, leave readers with intermittent gaps in their comprehension of the literary work. The very characters initially intended as light entertainment might require the densest critical apparatus to explain why they were originally funny. All this amounts to an argument against Sir Piercie, since Scott is admitting that most early nineteenth-century readers coming to The Monastery would not have the knowledge to understand a satirical rendering of Euphuism even in the works of Shakespeare.
Scott was at disadvantage here, of course: whereas Jonson, Shakespeare and Smollett had depicted the absurd fashions of their own times, Scott had taken his from times and places with which many contemporary readers were unfamiliar. They might come to Scott’s novels with some idea, from history books, of the moral characters of famous historical figures, but they were learning the minutiae of historical texture largely from the novels themselves. For The Monastery, this texture included Euphues, something very few readers would have read. It was a considerable burden for the novel to be responsible for educating its reader into understanding its jokes – and was it worth it, if the (con)temporary characters that were intended to spark recognition and spontaneous amusement were actually, for most readers, wearying homework assignments? Nor would footnotes and critical introductions do anything to mend some readers’ perceptions that Scott gave peculiar characters too many appearances and too much dialogue in his novels. In his review of Tales of My Landlord, Francis Jeffrey complains that:
[Scott’s] most striking and highly coloured characters appear rather too often, and go on rather too long. It is astonishing, indeed, with what spirit they are supported, and how fresh and animated they are to the very last;—but still there is something too much of them,—and they would be more waited for and welcomed, if they were not quite so lavish of their presence.69
Jeffrey might have recommended that Scott abridge Sir Piercie’s presence in a new edition of The Monastery, not make him a main subject of its introductory pages.
The worrying concept of a temporary ‘historical caricature’ was the counterpart of the comic type seen to stretch continuously through the ages. Scott’s ‘Essay on the Drama’ (1819), first published as a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, quotes the antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker’s writing on commedia dell’arte characters: descended from the types of the Roman New Comedy yet with new peculiarities belonging to the districts, towns and professions of sixteenth-century Italy, commedia characters seemed to inhabit both categories.70 Il Dottore spoke, as Richard Andrews describes it, ‘Bolognese interlarded with Latin and outright garbled nonsense’, reflecting Bologna’s status as the university city.71 The specificity of a (con)temporary character can give audiences pleasure in their shared knowledge and narcissism of small differences. In the long eighteenth century, when Scott and other British writers made their Latin-quoting pedantic characters Scottish – Smollett’s Maclaymore in The Reprisal, Scott’s Cleishbotham in Tales of My Landlord, Peacock’s Mac Quedy in Crotchet Castle – they were playing on readers’ notions that socially obtrusive learning and specious reasoning often had Scottish accents. Smollett has his Irish character ‘Oclabber’ tell Maclaymore, ‘You’re a man of learning Honey […] I am always happy when you are spaiking, whether I’m asleep or awake’.72 Coleridge includes ‘presumptuous sciolism’ in his list of vices that ‘caledonianize the human face’.73 Scott’s consciousness of the Scottish pedant being a temporary character, like his predecessor the Dottore, ties in with his conviction that comic characters, once fixed in print, were liable to pass quickly from the circulating library into the cabinet of curiosities. Typological ‘systems’ on which peculiar characters could be based, such as the physiological theory of cardinal humours, were themselves historically specific and could not be relied on to carry a character forward indefinitely:
[T]he comedies of Ben Jonson, founded upon system, on what the age termed humours […], in spite of acute satire, deep scholarship, and strong sense, do not now afford general pleasure, but are confined to the closet of the antiquary, whose studies have assured him that the personages of the dramatist were once, though they are now no longer, portraits of existing nature.74
As readers begin to require corroborating sources for character’s seemingly improbable peculiarities, the critical apparatus of the antiquary’s closet prolongs temporary characters beyond their natural lives. A Magnum footnote to The Bride of Lammermoor, for example, acknowledges that Caleb’s method of providing dinner for Ravenswood and his guests ‘has been universally considered on the southern side of the Tweed as grotesquely and absurdly extravagant’.75 Scott insists that, while the scenario may not be plausible, it must be accurate because it can be likened to an actual historical referent, preserved in memory and conveyed vividly through oral storytelling:
The author can only say, that a similar anecdote was communicated to him, with date and names of the parties, by a noble Earl lately deceased, whose remembrances of former days, both in Scotland and England, while they were given with a felicity and power of humour never to be forgotten […] were especially valuable from their extreme accuracy.
The strategic phrase ‘date and names’ begs the reader to accept the authenticating move of specifying, without actually giving specifics.
Inevitably however, such footnotes cannot substitute for the reading experience of recognising, unmediated, the reality conveyed through the power of caricature. Caleb, like Sir Piercie, is founded on ‘some forgotten model’ and is ‘more likely to awaken the disgust of the reader, as unnatural, than find him food for laughter’.76 There is too much parsley, Scott concedes – but removing it would compromise the novel’s design, would diminish the artificial combinations of high and low, tragic and comic, ideal and real, timeless and historical, which define its compendious realism. In the Magnum Introduction to The Monastery, Scott puts himself in the role of a waiter extolling an exotic sprig or mysterious purée. He feels the difficulty of countering readers’ distaste for characters they do not recognise or believe, ‘the formidable objection of incredulus odi’.77 When readers cannot be reconciled to the unlikeliness of the real, then the conjunction of history and romance is a bad investment.
Temporary and Deep Peculiarity in the Historical Romance
Scott was concerned anew with balancing peculiarity and credulity when he decided to novelise English history, a challenge he addresses in Ivanhoe’s ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ and in the Magnum Introduction to the second edition of Ivanhoe ten years later. To Scott’s mind, seeking new material might help him avoid over-egging familiar materials, but basing novels on English history ran a new risk: that English readers, complacent in long-established modernity, would balk at highly differentiated characters and social peculiarities.
Ivanhoe’s ‘Epistle’ and Magnum Introduction explain this trade-off. Turning to English subjects will be a refreshing change for both author and readers: to a writer ‘employed in catering for public amusement, a fresh topic […] is the untasted spring of the desert’. Returning to Scottish subjects, the author will struggle to provide readers with something new: ‘in order to obtain the indispensable charm of novelty, he is forced upon caricature, and, to avoid being trite, must become extravagant’.78 But English readers, Scott thinks, are less willing to believe the peculiarities of their own country’s history – England being a place where ‘civilization has been so long complete’ and where ‘all that gives verisimilitude to a narrative and individuality to the persons introduced’ is forgotten.79 Due to the ‘uneven development’ of the two countries, Scotland’s peculiar characters – Edinburgh’s city guard, for example – are still within living memory. In the dedication to Ivanhoe, the antiquarian Dryasdust compares the author of the Scottish novels to the legendary witch Erichtho, who reanimates corpses ‘whose limbs had recently quivered with existence’ whereas Templeton – the fictive narrator presented as the author of Ivanhoe – must dig for material in ‘dry, sapless, mouldering and disjointed bones’.80 These dry bones are history stripped of its distinctive textures, its conflicting energies. Everyone looks the same. Scott must differentiate these characters, strongly enough that they seem historically real, but not so extravagantly that their peculiarities seem artificial – silly outfits and quaint language making ordinary people temporarily ridiculous.
In The Monastery, Scott illustrates this point with Sir Piercie’s character. The courtier’s peculiarities are mere fashions, silly and shallow. A devotee of Euphuism and Italian conventions of swordsmanship,81 his over-elaborate dialogue – the ‘embroidery of his conversation’82 – is repeatedly pulled before the reader. At the end of novel, Sir Piercie’s whole identity is unravelled: he is revealed as the son of a tailor’s daughter, in an ironic twist on his penchant for fine clothing; and he himself takes a miller’s daughter, rather than a high-born lady, for his wife. This connects with the skeptical view of chivalric character as a foreign affectation in Ivanhoe, where Cedric the Saxon speaks dismissively of ‘“the fantastic fashions of Norman chivalry”’; and with the idea that chivalry is acquired through copying other people and following formulae in the 1832 Magnum Introduction to The Talisman, where Scott describes Richard I as ‘a pattern of chivalry, with all its extravagant virtues, and its no less absurd errors’.83 The first edition of The Monastery, attempting to inoculate the characterisation of Sir Piercie, to make him a historically explained caricature, blames the knight’s ability ‘to parler Euphuisme’ on Lyly’s being ‘at the very zenith of his absurdity and his reputation’, his influence ‘a fashion as rapid as it was momentary’.84 Sir Piercie’s historical peculiarities are costume drama, exhumed from the closet, not genuine flesh reanimated. Whether or not this deliberate irony was lost on readers, their reactions to the Euphuist’s sartorial and linguistic flourishes are echoed in more general criticisms that Scott’s appeal was due to the superficial attractions of ‘colour’ and ‘costume’. Comparing Scott’s historical fiction with Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720),85 pitting a romantic realism against a realism of reportage, the Retrospective Review praises the ordinariness of Defoe’s fictional cavalier. A romance-reader might find him dull and commonplace, but to the discerning reader he is satisfyingly like reality. Captain Delgatty, the inspiration for Scott’s character in A Legend of Montrose (1819), may have been ‘an infinitely more amusing personage than any cavalier who ever served in Flanders or elsewhere, but it is precisely because he is more amusing that we lose our confidence in his reality’.86 The critic expresses a classical preference for the general, recalling a line from Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709): ‘The variety of nature is such, as to distinguish every thing she forms, by a peculiar original character; which, if strictly observed, will make the subject appear unlike to anything extant in the world besides.’87 Jeffrey had made a similar point about some characters in Scott’s fiction being ‘pictures, at best, of individuals who must always have been unique and extraordinary’.88 There is no one like Delgatty, regardless of the fact that he actually existed, whereas Defoe’s cavalier is historically real because he represents other cavaliers like him. Founded on particular historical facts, Scott’s most peculiar historical characters seem like inventions ‘called into existence by the hand of a mighty magician, and presented to the wondering eyes of the present curious generation, man and horse, in full costume’.89 Scott’s allusions to actual referents – to the real Captain Delgatty or the real followers of Lyly – do not excuse the ways in which highly individualised characters interfere with literary realism.
Sir Piercie, the costumed knight Scott intended to be a timelessly pretentious character with historically specific pretentions, converges with the unsympathetic view of Scott’s antiquarian details as merely decorative. The historical peculiarities of the character are a superficial texture antiquating familiar things in order to make them novel; the Euphuist is ‘really’ nothing but a fop or dandy in old-fashioned clothing. Lukács distinguishes the historical richness of Scott’s novels – his characters real ‘historical-social types’ – from the luxury of the ‘false historicism’ endemic to lesser fiction:
[T]he German Romantics, in particular, place extreme emphasis upon the historical faithfulness of every detail. They discover the picturesque charm of the Middle Ages and produce it with ‘nazarene’ accuracy: everything, from medieval Catholicism to antique furniture is reproduced with craftsmanlike [sic] precision, which often becomes mere decorative pedantry. […] This decorative caricature of historical faithfulness was firmly rejected in Germany by the great champions of progress in literature and culture, Goethe and Hegel.90
Whereas Lukács stresses that ‘local colour’ is only one of many features in Scott’s ‘artistic demonstration of historical reality’,91 others have seen it as crucial to readers’ taste for – if not Scott’s actual composition of – the novels’ historical representations.
Readers’ taste for this kind of period costuming will prove as temporary as the sartorial fashions themselves, Thomas Carlyle suggests, reviewing Lockhart’s Memoirs a few years after the publication of the Magnum Opus:
Much of the interests of [Scott’s] novels results from what may be called contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress and life, belonging to one age, is brought suddenly, with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it, an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall we not too, one day be antiques, and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? The stuffed dandy, only give him time, will become one of the wonderfullest […] mummies.
What then is the result of these Waverley romances? Are they to amuse one generation only? One or more. As many generations as they can, but not all generations: ah no, when our swallow-tail has become fantastic as trunk-hose, they will cease to amuse!92
Sartorial fashions were not only new or strange in themselves, but were also signs of the accelerating newness and strangeness of modernity, whose cast-offs would soon join Scott’s historically ‘costumed’ characters in the dust. Timothy Campbell argues that eighteenth-century Britons’ ‘increased sensitivity to cycles of fashion – and to now-familiar dynamics of currency and obsolescence in everyday commercial life […] both shaped and vexed the period’s projects of historical representation’.93 Campbell reveals in Kenilworth (1821) a ‘commercializing pastiche’ of Elizabethan fashion viewed through the consumer culture of the Romantic period.94 While Scott used sartorial fashion as a system of historical representation across the Waverley novels, as Campbell demonstrates, it seems appropriate that Scott wrote Kenilworth – with its heightened consciousness of fashion as a means of sorting and marketing history – shortly after The Monastery’s satirical rendering of an Elizabethan courtier seemed to have disappointed readers. Rather than sartorial consumerism being attributed exaggeratedly to a single character, and made part and parcel of that character’s silliness, commercialised fashion is woven throughout Kenilworth. This has the effect of giving a sense of the peculiarities – superficial though they might be – of a historical milieu, immersing the reader in an old-fashioned ‘fashionable’ world.
The methods of compendious realism opened Scott up to charges of ‘caricature’ not only on the grounds that historical romance’s heightened peculiarities and contrasts were artificial, but also on the grounds that its historical representations were often superficially concerned with ‘costume’ and ‘colour’. Characters with dwarfish and gigantic physical features, on the other hand, were an opportunity to incorporate ‘deep peculiarity’ in the novels’ historical realism. By including references to the credulity of older generations and children, and quoting from their folklore, while using actual referents to factualise the fantastic beings of myth and legend, Scott romanticises and historicises non-normative bodies in such a way that readers can both indulge in the ‘“auld-warld stories”’ and reserve their distance from the original scene of storytelling, with its participants ‘“sitting on the broomy knowe and cracking about Black Dwarfs, and siccan clavers, as was the gate lang syne, when the short sheep were in fashion”’.95 Whereas Sir Piercie’s and Caleb Balderstone’s manners are ‘temporary’, absurdly peculiar because of the historical reality that shapes them, the physically disproportioned Rob Roy MacGregor and Sir Edward Mauley are fantastic in spite of their historical reality. Whereas historical fashions are quickly changed, put on and taken off, dwarfish and gigantic figures supply a deeper peculiarity that connects real, historical people to the figures of storybook romance and oral legend. Whereas Sir Piercie Shafton is a ‘historically explained caricature’ made peculiar by Euphuism and Elizabethan court manners, Scott’s novels present dwarfish and gigantic figures as deeply peculiar: ‘caricatures’ who embody the most fantastic qualities of romance in historical characters appropriate to particular times and places.
Scott’s dwarfs are invariably connected with necromancy and supernatural beings, often with reference to popular beliefs. Sir Edward Mauley, the titular character of The Black Dwarf (1816), is first seen as a witch, then as a ghost, before being likened to ‘a giant in a romance’ and finally accepted as ‘a being of blood and bone’ yet ‘in close league with the invisible world’, a wizard.96 In Kenilworth, the ‘gigantic porter’ enlisted to play the part of Hercules in Dudley’s courtly entertainments ‘represented excellently one of those giants of popular romance, who figure in every fairy tale or legend of knight-errantry’.97 In The Pirate (1822), Nick Strumpfer is the real version of ‘Trolld’, the saga-famed inhabitant of the Dwarfie Stone; Magnus Troil likens him to ‘Pacolet’, a character in the Carolingian romance Valentine and Orson, and he is described as ‘the hideous mis-shapen figure of Pacolet’; Triptolemus, taking him for a goblin, addresses him in Latin; and he is associated with dragons, being seen to emerge from behind a stone ‘like some overgrown reptile’ and (unreliably) reported as flying on a dragon.98 ‘Sir’ Geoffrey Hudson, in Peveril of the Peak (1822) is associated with ‘the fraternity of gnomes, or fairies, whom he resembled so much in point of size’, and likened to ‘an alchemist, or […] necromancer’.99 Dwarfism also has romantic connections in The Talisman (1825), where the female court dwarf calls herself ‘Guenevra’ after the queen of Arthurian legend, while the male court dwarf has taken on the identity of ‘Nectabanus’, referring to the ‘Nectanebus’ character of Egyptian legend (based on the real pharaoh Nectanebo II) who disguises himself as a dragon and fathers Alexander the Great in the Alexander Romance. Looking on the two dwarfs ‘as if spellbound’, Sir Kenneth remembers ‘the popular creed … concerning the gnomes or earthly spirits which make their abode in the caverns of the earth’.100 Additional tropes in Scott’s representation of dwarfs include emerging from rocks or subterranean passages, supernatural strength (for moving rocks), being illuminated by lamps or moonlight, unearthly voices, outlandish clothing, overgrown facial hair, and disproportioned, even gigantic, physical features. (I discuss the gigantism of Scott’s dwarfs in Chapter 6, alongside my commentary on the dwarf character in Mary Shelley’s story ‘The Transformation’.) Overall, Scott frames physiological dwarfism as a deep peculiarity, specifically located in history yet with a consistent aesthetic that recalls the supernatural and necromantic beings of old romances and rumours.
Dwarfs, in Scott’s novels, can be objects of fun. However, bodies perceived to combine ‘dwarfish’ and ‘gigantic’ qualities easily become objects of apprehension, recalling tales supposedly more widely believed in ancient times. Scott repeatedly professes feelings of revulsion and pity towards the dwarf characters, an attitude which he frames as enlightened by contrast with amused contempt or credulous fear. The Talisman, for example, contextualises the historical phenomenon of employing court dwarfs as jesters by referring to the unenlightened mindset of an earlier age: Sir Kenneth ‘could not, from their language, manners, and appearance, doubt that they belonged to the degraded class of beings whom deformity of person and weakness of intellect recommended to the painful situation of appendages to great families, where their personal appearance and imbecility were food for merriment to the household’; and the knight, ‘[s]uperior in no respect to the ideas and manners of his time, […] might, at another period, have been much amused by the mummery of these poor effigies of humanity’.101 Unable to sympathise with the view of court dwarfs as amusing, Scott asks the reader to share in his feelings of disgust and pity, the words ‘poor’ and ‘unhappy’ occurring in all his characterisations of dwarfs.
By far the most complex and humanised of Scott’s dwarf characters is ‘Sir’ Geoffrey Hudson, in Peveril of the Peak (1822), who is described as ‘rather ludicrous than disagreeable to look upon’, having ‘nothing positively ugly in his countenance, or actually distorted in his limbs’.102 Geoffrey combines the role of a court dwarf with the Quixotic fanaticism of a romance-reader, the pretensions of a cavalier and the comedy typical of a garrulous servant character. The novel suggests that the court’s treatment of him is a kind of abuse, even while hypocritically partaking in some scenes as ‘food for merriment’. As well as the more dramatic humiliations, Geoffrey is subject to quotidian ableism: ‘“Confusion to the scoundrel Clink, he has put the spice-box out of my reach!–Will you hand it to me from the mantelpiece?”’103 In varying its language for continual references to Geoffrey’s size, the narrative uses phrases such as ‘little Knight’, ‘dwarfish hero’ and ‘this diminutive person’, as well as the term ‘pigmy’ (from the Greek pugmaios, ‘dwarf’), rather than likening him to an animal. Scott’s relatively measured and sympathetic accounting of Hudson’s physique, atypical of descriptions of dwarfs elsewhere in his novels, has techniques in common with the description, in Rob Roy, of the hero’s disproportioned body: Geoffrey’s body is ‘much thicker than was consistent with symmetry’, while Rob’s shoulders and arms exceed ‘the rules of symmetry’.104 Rob’s body is a deep peculiarity, connecting him with the beings in the tales of ‘ancient times’ told by Frank’s Northumbrian nurse: ‘according to her traditions, […] a sort of half goblin half human beings, distinguished, like this man, for courage, cunning, ferocity, the length of their arms, and the squareness of their shoulders’.105 The Black Dwarf, having recounted the discovery of the Black Dwarf’s true identity of Sir Edward Mauley, concludes with a reassertion of the common beliefs and tales, among the local people, about ‘the Man of the Moors, whose feats were quoted by Mrs Elliot to her grandsons’. Over time, Mauley’s association with the malignant supernatural has only increased, such that ‘the evils most dreaded and deprecated by the inhabitants of that pastoral country, are ascribed to the agency of the Black Dwarf’.106 Scott qualifies this in the Magnum Introduction to the novel with a note that ‘some of the poor and ignorant, as well as all the children, in the neighbourhood, held [David Ritchie] to be what is called uncanny’, and that ‘even in a rude Scottish glen thirty years back, the fear of sorcery was very much out of date’.107 The novels make ‘interest’ out of the ‘deep peculiarity’ they ascribe to dwarf characters – presenting their bodies for reader’s awe and amusement – while also consigning that attitude to the past.
While the texts of the novels inhabit the credulity of local, common and ancient attitudes to dwarfs generally, the Magnum editions of The Black Dwarf, Rob Roy and Peveril of the Peak ground the novels’ ‘personal descriptions’ in anecdotes about specific historical people. The Magnum Opus Rob Roy repeats words from Frank’s description in the form of a historical anecdote, changing Frank’s phrase ‘I afterwards heard’ to ‘it was said’, and giving a measurement in inches (something also done in the Magnum notes on the other dwarf characters):
His stature was not of the tallest, but his person was uncommonly strong and compact. The greatest peculiarities of his frame were the breadth of his shoulders, and the great and almost disproportioned length of his arms; so remarkable, indeed, that it was said that he could, without stooping, tie the garters of his Highland hose, which are placed two inches below the knee.108
Giving evidence for the character Sir Geoffrey Hudson in the Magnum Opus notes to Peveril, Scott begins by clarifying that this is the name of a real individual: ‘Geoffrey or Jeffrey Hudson is often mentioned in anecdotes of Charles I.’s time’.109 The Magnum notes specify Jeffrey Hudson’s height in feet and inches at different times of life, substantiate the character’s own tales of the pie and the duel, and allude to ‘many squabbles with the King’s gigantic porter’ (suggesting an echo with Kenilworth’s ‘gigantic porter’ who finds a ‘“dwarfish auxiliary”’ in Dickie Sludge), who is mentioned in the novel as a ‘“tall fellow”’ who ‘“carried you about in his pocket, Sir Geoffrey, as all the world heard tell”’.110 Scott refers the reader to Van Dyck’s painting Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1633) and to Hudson’s clothes, ‘said to be preserved as articles of curiosity in Sir Hans Sloan’s [sic] Museum’.111 The Van Dyck painting, which physically idealises both subjects and registers the queen’s favouritism for Hudson (who became valued as an advisor as well as an entertainer) makes an ironic contrast with Scott’s description of Geoffrey – equipped with a simmering pot and a massive codex ‘well-nigh and tall and bulky as himself’ – as fit for a more ‘romantic’ sort of painting, where the sitter takes on an exotic character:
The singularity of his features, and of the eyes, armed with spectacles […] now directed towards his little cauldron, would have tempted Rembrandt to exhibit him on canvas, either in the character of an alchymist, or of a necromancer, engaged in some strange experiment, under the direction of one of the huge manuals which treat of the theory of these mystic arts.
In fact, Scott’s narrator reveals, Geoffrey is making soup for breakfast.
Fleshing out anecdotes of a historical person of whom little is known, Scott builds a relatively sympathetic many-sided portrait that nevertheless has dwarfism at the centre of it, as the shaping force of Geoffrey’s character. There is a touch of Lismahago’s perverse arguments in Geoffrey’s obsession with proving ‘the superiority of men of little stature’, a topic ‘so great a favourite with him, that […] the dwarf had collected almost all the instances of their victories over giants, which history or romance afforded’.112 Peveril, like Dwarf, attempts a sympathetic view of the misanthropy expressed by the persecuted dwarfs, imagining through the character of Geoffrey that the real Jeffrey Hudson must have possessed ‘great jealousy of being despised, on account of the peculiarity of his outward form’.113 Following Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘a perpetual Spur’ within the deformed person,114 Scott speculates that dwarfism engenders ‘restless desire’ for importance, framing Geoffrey’s Piercie-like vanity for lavish clothes and large moustaches as the result of ‘the unhappy taste which frequently induces those whom nature has marked by personal deformity, to distinguish, and at the same time to render themselves ridiculous, by the use of showy colours, and garments fantastically and extraordinarily fashioned’.115 Geoffrey first appears to Peveril as ‘a small bundle of crimson cloth’ and the court dwarfs in The Talisman also wear red cloth, luxurious ‘samite, fantastically cut and flounced’.116 Scott’s dwarf characters are rendered either ridiculous or repulsive by their clothing, with ‘the richness of [Nectabanus’s clothing] render[ing] his ugliness more conspicuous’, and the Black Dwarf’s ‘cap made of badger’s skin, or some other rough fur, […] add[ing] considerably to the grotesque effect of his whole appearance, and overshadowed features’.117 This was a romantic departure from the existing anecdotes about Ritchie, with Robert Chambers’s essay for the Scots Magazine (1817) noting ‘nothing very uncommon about his dress’.118 The Magnum Introduction to The Black Dwarf is Scott’s most extensive grounding of a character in a recently living person – breaking the taboo against creating particularised portraits of contemporary individuals.
The Body-Corporate: National Caricatures
In this final part of the chapter, I consider a selection of ‘explained caricatures’ of national and ethnic minorities in Scott’s novels. First, I look at how Rashleigh’s caricature of a Scottish national character in Rob Roy, like Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Scotch Character’, views the Scottish character as a self-inflicted caricature of itself. I suggest a link with Austen’s moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-importance and self-interest, here applied to a national character distinguished primarily by its ‘corporate’ self-regard for national character and national interests. Scott uses Rashleigh’s cynical voice to theorise that individual self-love is the psychological complex underlying clannishness and beyond that a ‘selfish nationalism’. I analyse how The Heart of Mid-Lothian uses Jeanie Deans’s interactions with fellow Scots to agree with Rashleigh’s essential premise, as part of a sympathetic account of Scots’ conflation of self and nation. The last pages of the chapter examine Scott’s hateful account of Jewish character in Ivanhoe. I show how Scott offers a historical explanation for Jewish character being an actual and self-inflicted caricature of itself, and how he uses the story of Abraham of Bristol to illustrate his idea that Jewish self-defence under international persecution was self-demeaning in ways that perpetuated anti-Semitism. Scott’s idea that a group of people can ‘distort’ and ‘dwarf’ itself into a literal caricature through adapting to cope with oppression echoes the rhetoric from Wollstonecraft’s comparison of women with the English Dissenters, as groups self-caricatured through a combination of passiveness and energy expended in a restricted sphere. In contrast to these histories of excluded groups resorting to evasive, reactive tactics, the self-interested wariness of the Scottish national character – made so offensive by Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s characterisations – is framed by Scott as an active strategy, taken independently of other groups.
In Rashleigh’s characterisation of Scottish nationalism, the Scotsman is the architect and defender of a fortified castle, a castle that represents the limitations placed on the individual’s humanitarian impulses by a nationalism that is merely an extension of self-interest. The castle simultaneously prevents outsiders from entering and prevents inhabitants from leaving. Mixing metaphors, Rashleigh also imagines the Scottish national corporation as a failing circulatory system, unable to pump blood far from its heart. He describes:
[A] narrow spirited, but yet ardent patriotism, which forms as it were the outmost of the concentric bulwarks with which a Scotchman fortifies himself against all the attacks of a generous philanthropic principle. Surmount this mound, you find an inner and yet dearer barrier – the love of his province, his village, or, most probably of his clan; storm this second obstacle, you have a third – his attachment to his own family, his father, mother, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, and cousins, to the ninth generation. It is only within these circles that a Scotchman’s social affection expands itself, never reaching those which are outermost, till all means of discharging itself in the interior circles have been exhausted. It is within these circles that his heart throbs, each pulsation beating fainter and fainter, till, beyond the widest boundary, it is almost unfelt. And what is worst of all, could you surmount these concentric outworks, you have an inner citadel, deeper, higher, and more efficient than them all – a Scotchman’s love for himself.
Terms such as ‘philanthropic’, ‘attachment’ and ‘social affection’ only partly conceal that Rashleigh is talking about love in order to talk about money. When Diana objects that the caricature ‘“is not true’” – Rashleigh retorts that ‘“is true, […] because you cannot deny I know the country and people intimately, and the character is drawn from deep and accurate consideration”’.119 He speaks from experience, he says, when he accuses Campbell (really Rob MacGregor) of being too efficient a businessman, hesitating to help Frank due to ‘“seeing no prospect of personal advantage, but, on the contrary, much hazard of loss of time and delay of business”’. Diana is forced to concede the point when Rashleigh points out Campbell’s business concern in the matter.120 The ‘discharging’ and ‘pulsation’ of the heart’s blood is an expenditure that must be strictly rationed, and must be spent in ways that will yield some personal return. Rashleigh’s Scotsman is like Austen’s John Dashwood on a national scale, extending help to others only so far as his generosity guards his own interest, his selfishness doubled by the joining of others’ interests to his own.
The satirical characterisation of the Scots corporation in Rob Roy draws somewhat on the common perceptions, frequently expressed by English natives throughout the long eighteenth century, that England was overrun with Scots ‘placemen’; that Scots were conspicuously partial to working with each other; and that Scots advocated too much for Scotland (and, directly or indirectly, for themselves). In his essay ‘On Scotch Character’ Hazlitt holds up Smollett’s character Lismahago as a humorously exaggerated portrait of Scottish patriotism – pointing out, however, that in everyday life this patriotism might be unpleasantly militant and take hostile forms. Whereas Rashleigh’s self-interested Scot is a besieged and isolated castle – a Scot in Scotland – Hazlitt’s is one of many mobile mercenaries prepared to go anywhere for what he can get:
The Scotch nation are a body-corporate. They hang together like a swarm of bees, I do not know how it may be among themselves, but with us they are all united as one man. They are not straggling individuals, but embodied, formidable abstractions – determined personifications of the land they come from. A Scotchman gets on in the world, because he is not one, but many. He moves in himself a host, drawn up in battle-array, and armed at all points against impugners. His is a double existence – he stands for himself and his country. Every Scotchman is bond and surety for every other Scotchman […]. Lismahago in Smollett is a striking and laughable picture of this national propensity. He maintained with good discretion and method that oat-cakes were better than wheaten-bread, and that the air of the old town of Edinburgh was sweet and salubrious. […] In general his countrymen only plod on with the national character fastened behind them, looking around with wary eye and warning voice to those who would pick out a single article of their precious charge.121
In the Scots body-corporate, the nation and the individual are one and the same, patriotism a means of self-importance and self-interest. Hazlitt’s image of the Scots as ‘a swarm of bees’ recalls satirical prints representing Scots as locusts and bringers of plague to England,122 a prejudice ironically reversed in Rob Roy when Andrew complains about new British taxmen with references to the spoiling of Egypt in Exodus 12:36.123 As in Rashleigh’s caricature, the characterisation of Scots as stingy with their love, trust and assistance barely conceals the anxiety about how well Scots might be ‘getting on in the world’ financially.
Scott, himself named in Hazlitt’s essay as a self-interested member of the Scots body-corporate,124 joins Smollett in the role of cosmopolitan Scotsman professing a good-humoured, self-deprecating attitude to English characterisations of Scottish patriotism. Commenting on the propagandistic characterisations of the French, the Scots and the Irish in Smollett’s 1757 farce The Reprisal,125 Scott opines that ‘[t]he Scotchman and Irishman are hit off with the touch of a caricaturist of skill and spirit’.126 An exiled Highlander turned ensign in the French service, the Latin-spouting Jacobite is obsessed with his family connections. The Englishman ‘Heartly’ and his clever English servant ‘Brush’ play on Maclaymore’s clannishness to secure his assistance against the French: ‘I won his heart’, says Brush, ‘with some transient encomiums on his country. I affected to admire his plaid, as an improvement on the Roman toga […] and in order to clinch my remonstrance, told him that my master’s great grandmother’s aunt was a Scotchwoman of the name of Mackintosh, and that Mr. Heartly piqued himself on the Highland blood that ran in his veins’.127 Playing to an English crowd, Scott and Smollett acknowledge the truth of the body-corporate and use it to flatter and entertain readers.
Scott was well aware that national ‘caricatures’ of the Scots and Irish were popular among English audiences – and the less they knew about Scotland and Ireland, the more exaggerated the characters had to be. Writing to London friends in June 1821, Scott urged them to attend a one-night performance of Rob Roy featuring a Scots actor, a ‘Monsieur Mackay’, who played the role of Baillie Nicol Jarvie – ‘the purseproud [sic] consequential magistrate humane and irritable in the same moment’ – ‘with a degree of national truth and individuality which makes the part equal to any thing I have ever seen on stage’. Scott supposed that Mackay’s acting would be underappreciated by the majority of the audience, ‘doubt[ing] whether the exhibition will prove as satisfactory to those who do not know the original from which the resemblance is taken’, and ‘observ[ing that] the English demand (as is natural) broad caricature in the depicting of national peculiarities’ and Mackay’s Baillie is ‘not sufficiently caricatured for their apprehensions’.128 Scott does his bit to secure Mackay a Scottish reception at Covent Garden. Writing to Lord Montagu, he supposes that Mackay will be ‘like a cow in a fremd loaning and glad of Scots countenance’. Writing to Baillie, he encourages her ‘to collect a party of Scotch friends’ to see Mackay: ‘let it not be said that a dramatic genius of Scotland wanted the countenance and protection of Joanna Baillie’. Without ‘broad caricature’, Mackay’s performance of a distinctively Scottish character relies on Scottish patronage. Despite making a great success of the part in Edinburgh, he will be at Covent Garden for one night only. Scott hoped that by expanding his English readers’ knowledge of Scotland, and by providing historical explanations for ‘substantially true’ renderings of national peculiarities, he could help to nuance appetites for ‘caricature’ and problematise antagonistic characterisations like Rashleigh’s, which could scarcely ameliorate relations between inhabitants of the two countries. Since the writing of Rob Roy overlapped with the planning of The Heart of Mid-Lothian,129 the second novel’s depiction of the Scots corporation can be seen as Scott’s immediate response to Rashleigh’s caricature of stingy sympathy.
In Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott takes the concept of Scottish self-interest expressed unsympathetically by the outsiders Rashleigh and by Hazlitt – and turns it around, revealing the intimacy on the other side of exclusivity. Passages about Scots ‘intimacy’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian use very different language and imagery to describe what is essentially the same concept of the Scots body-corporate, countering Rashleigh’s satirical tone while agreeing with the premise of his caricature. Where Rashleigh’s vocabulary focuses on what the Scots body excludes by means of ‘bulwarks’, ‘barrier’, ‘obstacle’ and ‘boundary’, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, acknowledging the diversity of Scottish society, focuses on how the body-corporate can include Scots people of different classes and regions. Where Rashleigh depicts a Scots sympathy soon ‘exhausted’, Heart of Mid-Lothian sees it ‘extended’. Concrete metaphors of ‘bulwarks’ and ‘barriers’ are switched out for more abstract ‘connections’, ‘bonds’ and ‘associations’. Scott considers from an insider’s perspective how the Scots body-corporate morally – rather than materially – benefits its members, particularly those who might find themselves at a socio-economic disadvantage. Because members of the corporation see themselves as representatives of larger units, they are more personally involved in a larger range of moral events. This is explored when Scott depicts Jeanie Deans struggling, self-consciously, with her part in the Deans family corporation. The narrator states even-handedly that Scots’ ‘intimacy’ with each other has positive as well as negative effects: the self-interest and self-importance of the body-corporate can have self-improving effects on individuals, encouraging them to value their good qualities more highly, and to imagine more far-reaching consequences for their misdeeds. Being self-involved may be morally suspect in itself, but it has the effect of making the individual more deeply involved overall, increasing their total investment in the qualities they value, and raising the importance of the education and guardianship that members might extend to each other. These bonds, Scott suggests, are strongest within families, and most intense where the family lacks shared assets of more material worth:
It is well known, that much, both of what is good and bad in the Scottish national character, arises out of the intimacy of their family connections. ‘To be come of honest folk,’ that is, of people who have borne a fair and unstained reputation, is an advantage as highly prized among the lower Scotch, as the emphatic counterpart, ‘to be of a good family,’ is valued among their gentry. The worth and respectability of one member of a peasant’s family is always accounted by themselves and others, not only a matter of honest pride, but a guarantee for the good conduct of the whole. On the contrary, such a melancholy stain as was now flung on one of the children of Deans, extended its disgrace to all connected with him, and Jeanie felt herself lowered at once, in her own eyes, and in those of her lover. It was in vain that she repressed this feeling, as far subordinate and too selfish to be mingled with her sorrow for her sister’s calamity. Nature prevailed; and while she shed tears for her sister’s distress and danger, there mingled with them bitter drops of grief for her own degradation.130
By illustrating the principle of Scots intimacy with Jeanie’s tears, shed for herself as well as her sister, Scott disarms the body-corporate that bristles with masculine energy and military fortification in Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s imagery. By exemplifying the Scots corporation in a powerless and impoverished family, Scott distances the concept from nepotism and ill-gotten upward mobility, cleansing words such as ‘prized’, ‘valued’, ‘accounted’ and ‘guarantee’ of pecuniary associations.
When Jeanie encounters the Duke of Argyll later in the novel, Scott suggests that Scots intimacy can also connect the most disadvantaged families with the highest ranking, thus lending the body-corporate an ideal of nobility. Again, an insider’s perspective is required to appreciate that from exclusivity and meanness to non-Scots, the body-corporate derives its strengths of inclusivity and generosity:
Perhaps one ought to be actually a Scotchman to conceive how ardently, under all distinctions of rank and situation, they feel their mutual connexion with each other as natives of the same country. There are, I believe, more associations common to the inhabitants of a rude and wild, than of a well cultivated and fertile country; their ancestors have more seldom changed their place of residence; their mutual recollections of remarkable objects are more accurate; the high and the low are more interested in each other’s welfare; the feelings of kindred and relationship are more widely extended, and, in a word, the bonds of patriotic affection, always honourable even when a little too exclusively strained, have more influence on men’s feelings and actions.131
Scots intimacy is romanticised, here, as an effect of a static society that retains historic identifications of people and place. The corporation seems to preserve the ghost of an ancient ‘honour’ that was not merely a code of behaviour, but an intense and authentic sensitive response to perceived wrongs. Scott invites English readers to reconceive the Scots body-corporate as an ancient kinship natural to all peoples, lost to civilization – not a self-defensive construction peculiar to the Scots.
The Heart of Mid-Lothian addresses the moral problem of the body-corporate most directly, and counters Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s arguments most explicitly, in the scene where the Scottish landlady of an English inn presses Jeanie to accept her assistance. Here, Scott acknowledges the hostility towards the ‘prejudice’, ‘narrowness’ and ‘partiality’ of the Scots body-corporate. Once more, he asks the reader to shift their perspective: rather than judge the Scottish character against an ideal of universal beneficence, they might understand the corporation as an honour system enabling individuals to deploy their finite resources in targeted, effective ways. The landlady’s ability to feel personally involved in the interests of a countrywoman she has never met before is not merely a ‘feeling’ or ‘sentiment’, however. Her honour consists both in her acceptance of the national ‘guarantee’ for Jeanie’s character, and in her belief that Jeanie sees her in the same way. Mutually assured, each woman owes to the other the good conduct for which their common national character stands surety:
[T]he eagerness with which Scottish people meet, communicate, and, to the extent of their power, assist each other, although it is often objected to us, as a prejudice and narrowness of sentiment, seems, on the contrary, to arise from a most justifiable and honourable feeling of patriotism, combined with a conviction, which, if undeserved, would long since have been confuted by experience, that the habits and principles of the nation are a sort of guarantee for the character of the individual. At any rate, if the extensive influence of this national partiality be considered as an additional tie, binding man to man […] we think it must be found to exceed, as an active and efficient motive to generosity, that more impartial and wider principle of general benevolence, which we have sometimes seen pleaded as an excuse for assisting no individual whatever.132
Hazlitt’s essay uses the phrase ‘bond and surety’, a synonymising that sharpens the words’ financial associations, in describing Scots’ ‘double existence’ of national and individual character. Scots’ reliance on each other for material advantage, for ‘getting on in the world’, presents outsiders with a debt-based economy of characters: commodities are continually dissolving into promissory notes, and notes into commodities; every asset is mortgaged, collateral for another enterprise. Scottish characters seem, like paper money, infinitely interchangeable and possessing no intrinsic value. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, on the other hand, Scott’s repeated use of the word ‘guarantee’ (as well as ‘bonds’ and ‘binding’) describes a national network of Scots honourably and mutually indebted, such that individual characters secure credit for themselves by advancing it to others. The system enables even the members of society with fewest material advantages to incur debts of assistance and repay them in another form. Because it is impractical to try to assist everyone in an entirely disinterested and impartial way, ‘general benevolence’ is of less market value than an honour system where different benefits are more readily exchanged and nebulous sympathies made ‘efficient’. Thanks to a collective feat of imagination, tangible benefits convert easily to intangible ones, and vice versa. The Scottish economy of national character is, as The Heart of Mid-Lothian presents it, a virtuous cycle of the intrinsic value of individuals adding to the extrinsic value of the national character which is invested back into individuals. Hazlitt admits, ‘I do not know how it may be among themselves’. The body-corporate that presents outsiders with the effect of a self-constructed ‘national caricature’, Scott claims, will necessarily seem more exclusive, prejudiced and political – not just a character but an identity – the more that its solidarity, maintained by mutual self-interest, is strong and effective.
In Rob Roy and The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the ‘national caricature’ effect emerges from the strength and activity of a self-interested and self-identifying Scots body-corporate engaging in a virtuous cycle of giving and receiving. Scots’ supposed propensity to help each other is imagined as a debt-based economy facilitated by the abstraction of national character. In Ivanhoe, on the other hand, Scott’s description of a Jewish self-caricature – though it contains a measure of sympathy in its emphasis on the history of hated and oppression of Jews by ‘Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton’133 – presents financial instruments for exchange of foreign currencies both as an adaptive response to persecution and as a mechanism for exacerbating detestable national peculiarities. Jews, Scott claims, are a self-made caricature emerging from a vicious cycle, where channelling the moral defect of materialism into survival tactics exacerbates an obsession with money:
In spite of […] a special court of taxations, called the Jews’ Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange—an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another.
The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed as it were to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited; and the immense wealth they usually acquired in commerce, while it frequently placed them in danger, was at other times used to extend their influence and to secure them a certain degree of protection. On these terms they lived, and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful, suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in evading the dangers to which they were exposed.134
This first introduction of the ‘Isaac of York’ character, though it emphasises the hatred directed at Isaac, also assumes the reader’s agreement about physical and ethical peculiarities of a Jewish ‘national character’. The narrator shifts from complimenting Isaac on his individual physiognomy, to claiming that his face was inevitably read as a signifier of ugliness:
His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose, and piercing black eyes, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which, during these dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable.
Scott’s sympathetic framing of Isaac’s appearance at Cedric’s court – ‘an outcast in the present society, like his people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place’ – sits alongside the strong insinuation that Jews are complicit in anti-Semitism: that they did not have the moral character to withstand unjust persecution, and thus are responsible for a national character that provokes a now righteous persecution.135
While Scott makes the beauty of Isaac’s physiognomy a contrast with anti-Semitic hatred of Jewish faces, he still locates elements of ‘national caricature’ in Isaac’s body. He gives the evasiveness and passiveness of the ‘national character’ a physical dimension, following the logic used by Wollstonecraft in her argument that Dissenters were physically diminished by the tactics to which they habitually resorted and by self-imposed limits, ‘shap[ing] their persons as well as their minds in the mould of prim littleness’.136 Isaac of York is first pictured ‘advanc[ing] with fear and hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility’, through which practice he has permanently altered his stature: ‘a tall, thin old man, who, however, had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height’.137 An explained caricature not completely unlike Hazlitt’s Scotsman ‘armed at all points against impugners’ and Rashleigh’s Scotsman fortified against philanthropy, Scott’s characterisation of Isaac claims that the Jew’s offensiveness arises from the amplification of moral failings by his own defensive tactics. The narrative acknowledges the Jew’s vulnerability among racist opportunists, reasoning that Isaac’s ‘doubts [about Ivanhoe, disguised as a pilgrim] might have been indeed pardoned; for, except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such as unintermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period’.138 Isaac seeks the safety of Sheffield, a town with a substantial Jewish community where he can ‘“harbour with [his] kinsman Zareth, and find some means of travelling forth with safety”’.139 He directs Ivanhoe to Leicester, where his ‘kinsman’ Kirjath Jairam will lend the knight gear for the tournament. Having promised Ivanhoe credit to secure a horse and armour, Isaac does not withdraw his offer in spite of the knight’s warning that he may not be able to repay the debt – but ‘[t]he Jew twisted himself in his saddle, like a man in a fit of the cholic’, a physical convulsion that betrays self-interest so chronic that it distorts the body.140 Ivanhoe smiles on him with amusement and contempt. The Jewish national character is demeaned by prejudice – but that character then really is diminished, Scott claims, with Isaac physically diminished by his own fearfulness. Scott implies that an upright posture of bravery and dignity would have allowed the Jews to adopt a better national character. Key passages in Ivanhoe thus intellectualise, through historical explanations, the early nineteenth-century suspicions about ‘wandering commercial Jews’ also expressed in Scott’s personal writings.141 In this ‘historically explained caricature’, Jews are supposedly complicit in the diminishing and deforming of character to fit the outlet granted to it.
Complicity is a factor in Jewish national caricature also in Edgeworth’s relatively sympathetic Harrington (1817). After her correspondence with an American reader, Rachel Mordecai, Edgeworth wrote a novel focused on Jewish characters and with a plot revolving around a fictional history painting titled The Dentition of the Jew. One of the characters purchases and destroys this painting, to prevent its being purchased by an engraver and thus ‘“seen and sold in every print-shop in London”’.142 The painting depicts the much-chronicled story of King John’s torture of a Jewish merchant, named Abraham of Bristol in some accounts. In 1210, John extorted money from England’s wealthier Jewish families by imprisoning important male family members and demanding massive ransoms. Abraham was held in Bristol Castle, where torturers removed one of his molars on each of the seven days that he refused to pay the ten thousand marks King John demanded. In Harrington, Montenero wants to destroy The Dentition because it causes painful disgust to those who see it. Glimpsing the framed painting in Montenero’s hands, the protagonist is ‘struck […] with such associated feelings of horror’ that he physically recoils from the image, shouting ‘“I cannot bear it! I cannot bear that picture!”’ Montenero suggests that the painting made Harrington feel ‘“sick”’.143 When Montenero tears it up and burns the pieces, he explains that he would destroy, if he could, “‘every record of cruelty and intolerance”’: The Dentition is one such record ‘“that can keep alive feelings of hatred and vengeance between Jews and Christians!”’144 Harrington ironically refers to the painting’s destruction as an ‘auto-da-fé’. Edgeworth thus shows a Jewish character taking responsibility for repairing Jewish–Christian relations by attempting to erase the most sadistic acts of anti-Semitism from the historical record.
While Edgeworth’s depictions of a Jewish family differ greatly from Scott’s in Invahoe, in this respect they are singing from the same hymn sheet: Montenero represents Scott’s ideal Jew, who would take a particular kind of active role in rapprochement – not only forgiving Christians’ cruelty, but attempting to remove the need for forgiveness by preventing Jews’ and Christians’ knowledge of it. My view of the novel’s ideal of Jewish heroism is supported by the fact that Montenero destroys a painting inspired by historical chronicles, rather than speaking against textual caricatures of Jews of the kind that occur in Harrington’s reading material:
And here I must observe, that not only in the old story books, where the Jews are sure to be wicked as the bad fairies, or bad genii, or allegorical personifications of the devils, and the vices in the old emblems, mysteries, moralities, &c.; but in almost every work of fiction, I found them represented as hateful beings; nay, even in modern tales of very late years, since I have come to man’s estate, I have met with books by authors professing candour and toleration—books written expressly for the rising generation, called, if I mistake not, Moral Tales for Young People; and even in these, wherever the Jews are introduced, I find that they are invariably represented as beings of a mean, avaricious, unprincipled, treacherous character. Even the peculiarities of their persons, the errors of their foreign dialect and pronunciation, were mimicked and caricatured, as if to render them objects of perpetual derision and detestation.
Edgeworth is clearly reflecting on the ways in which her own fiction participates in the caricaturing of Jews, and acknowledging that ‘the indisputable authority of printed books’ enables such caricatures to reinforce readers’ anti-Semitism.145 However, like Scott in Ivanhoe two years later, Edgeworth also insists on Jews proving themselves undeserving of persecution by minimising the impact it has on them and by re-forming their character as though the violence never took place. Scott, too, refers to the dentition of Abraham of Bristol in Ivanhoe, where the formulation of the character’s name ‘Isaac of York’ is the first allusion to the historical narrative. In Ivanhoe, Abraham of Bristol is used to illustrate both the extreme cruelty of the Jews’ oppressors and the extremity of the Jewish self-caricature. Abraham’s capacity to withstand torture and tolerate mutilation seems to prove, for Scott, the depth of his avarice:
It is a well-known story of King John, that he confined a wealthy Jew in one of the royal castles, and daily caused one of his teeth to be torn out, until, when the jaw of the unhappy Israelite was half disfurnished, he consented to pay a large sum, which it was the tyrant’s object to extort from him. The little ready money which was in the country was chiefly in possession of this persecuted people, and the nobility hesitated not to follow the example of their sovereign, in writing it from them by every species of oppression, and even personal torture. Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realize in a country naturally so wealthy as England.146
The implication is that only a man obsessed with money would lose teeth rather than pay a ransom. Scott’s assumption here – that his British readers would be willing to accept Abraham’s dentition as a story illustrating Jewish just as much as English greed – perhaps sheds light on the fact that the characters in Harrington perceive Edgeworth’s fictive painting The Dentition of the Jew as both a record of anti-Semitic persecution and a derogatory caricature of ‘the Jewish character’, because it seems to represent materialism extreme enough to justify anti-Semitism. Whereas Edgeworth proposes that the painting be destroyed, the history effaced and the vicious cycle of national caricature broken, Scott makes his history of the Jews indispensable to explaining what Jews are ‘really like’. Harrington speculates on a world where the historical caricature of Jewish materialism and ‘passive courage’ is perceptible as rotten, sickening.
This chapter has explored how Scott’s admiring concept of historical ‘caricature’ was beset, in practice, by readers’ objections to compendious realism’s non-protagonist characters as artificial, incredible and temporary. Characters such as Caleb Balderstone and Piercie Shafton, Scott realised, might fail to convince a broad and multi-generational readership that historical ‘caricatures’ – characterisations identifying absurdity and peculiarity in historically specific manners, mental processes and ways of life – were key to his novels’ varied and highly textured realism. On the other hand, the characters whose bodies can be compared with graphic caricatures – such as Edward Mauley, Rob MacGregor and Geoffrey Hudson – afford a ‘deep peculiarity’ intersecting romance and actual reference. The Magnum Opus editions work hard to substantiate all these characters with historical sources, giving a sense of such potential ‘caricatures’ – peculiar to the point of implausibility – as especially vulnerable to time passing and literary tastes changing, despite all the apparatus that a critical edition can provide. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, when Scott gives a historical explanation for the ‘national caricature’ of the Scots body-corporate, he imagines Scots being able to share highly peculiarised realities: ‘mutual recollections of remarkable objects are more accurate’ between them. In this imagining of histories intimately shared by living Scottish people – a minutely textured and folkloric knowledge of things past – there is a natural and vernacular precursor to his own compendious, historical and romantic realism. In novels for a broad readership, however, historical ‘caricature’ carries within it the nightmare of a tapestry rotting before the author’s eyes: this is the many-coloured fabric of knowledge and assumptions about historical reality that his readers share with him and with each other, disintegrating at an accelerated rate. Other realisms might deteriorate more slowly. Austen’s realism has been able to make relatively strong claims to literary immortality, first because it prides itself on the author’s complete knowledge of a limited time and place, and second because it retains a readership whose understanding of that moment has been shored up by adaptations and cultural heritage.
For Scott’s compendiously historical novels, however, as readers’ knowledge (including their assumptions and prejudices) about the novelist’s subjects becomes vaguer, realism becomes less assured. The scope of readers’ caricature talk contracts, with characters’ peculiarities generally less subject to detailed debate and instead dismissed as unintelligible, extraneous or offensive. Through the historically explained caricatures in Scott’s romances, we can experience an acute, even exaggerated, anxiety about the contingency of literary realisms: they might seem to forecast the fragility and obsolescence of all realisms, as they present us with an extreme case of realism’s betrayal by readers who know differently.
The disproportioned and distorted bodies in Mary Shelley’s horror writing have a legacy from the ‘flesh-caricatures’ of eighteenth-century writing descriptive of the body, where social critique and moral counsel often give way to materialist, detail-oriented fascination with the physical ‘caricaturing’ of the human body in vulnerable transitional states. From Thomas Browne’s Letter to a Friend (1690) to J. P. Malcolm’s Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing (1813): in the century before Frankenstein, the troppo caricato meaning of caricatúra lends itself to lurid descriptions that not only speak on the subject of ‘deformity’ but offer grotesque representations of bodies partitioned into proportions and contrasts. Shelley and Scott use ‘flesh-caricature’ tropes as occasions for a ‘horrid realism’ of descriptive and narrative techniques that work to disrupt political and moral allegories of monstrosity. In Frankenstein (1818) and in Shelley’s short story ‘Transformation’ (1831), horrid realism’s literalising and fragmenting effects reify and ‘de-characterise’ deviant bodies into collections of material facts. This strain of horror writing dismantles character’s place in formal realism, eliciting pseudo-sensory revulsion by continually drawing legible ‘character’ into tension with the mixed particulars of the material body. In horror writing’s legacy from Romantic caricature talk, representation becomes flesh: caricature is made real, ‘character’ put in quotation marks.
I begin by countering the argument that in Frankenstein’s descriptions of the creature’s ‘disproportion’, Shelley’s vocabulary is non-technical, and the narrators’ accounts unreliable. Highlighting the understanding of corporeal disproportion and distortion in the Shelleys’ editorial decisions, I argue that Frankenstein describes the creature’s body consistently and reiteratively, making his physical being static and factual, rather than an impression that alters depending on the viewer, or according to changes in moral or psychological ‘character’. Examining the ways in which Shelley’s concept of disproportion carries over to her story ‘Transformation’, I show how both narratives open the potential of a formal realism for horror writing through the ‘gigantic dwarf’, an aesthetic type associated with a compulsive rhythm of looking and not looking. Repeatedly presented as a disturbing combination of divergent physical characteristics and aesthetic effects, gigantic/dwarfish bodies are chronically partitioned and detailed, providing opportunities for a ‘horrid realism’ prosaically concerned with material bodies. I analyse the tropes and techniques Shelley uses to represent physical disproportion as grotesque in Frankenstein and ‘Transformation’, making comparisons with Scott’s grotesques in The Black Dwarf, Rob Roy, The Pirate and The Talisman. Exploring how these de-characterisation techniques continually destabilise critical readings that abstract the body into an ‘image’ or signifier, I address how horrid realism exists alongside idealising physiognomic portraiture and the mind-body equation in Shelley’s novels, close-reading key passages in Frankenstein and indicating variants in the novel’s textual history that establish the grotesque body as an exception to physiognomic analysis.
In the last section of the chapter, I point out some concrete links between Shelley’s flesh-caricatures and their non-fiction precedents, collating passages about the physical disproportioning of growing and dying bodies in texts such as John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education (1728), Rousseau’s Émile (1762) and William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769), as well as Browne’s description of the Hippocratic face and Malcolm’s theory of flesh-caricatures. To conclude Chapter 6, I suggest that the horrid realism developed through the depiction of ‘gigantic dwarfs’ in fiction – influentially by Scott, Hugo and Dickens as well as Shelley – can be seen to provide techniques, tropes and vocabulary for a tradition of flesh-caricatures in the ‘body horror’ subgenre.
Gigantic Dwarfs: Shelley’s Vocabulary of Disproportion
It has been argued that Frankenstein’s descriptions of the creature’s body do not use the term ‘deformity’ consistently, nor in accordance with Burke’s attempt at a technical definition of deformity. Denise Gigante’s focus on ugliness in Frankenstein, where ugliness ‘precedes and predetermines […] monstrosity’, finds a gap where conceptions of ugliness might fit in eighteenth-century aesthetics, arguing that Shelley’s monster represents an ‘aesthetic impossibility: the positive manifestation of ugliness’.1 This analysis separates ugliness from a particular conception of deformity, which refers to a disproportioned form. Thus, the monster, Gigante argues, is not actually ‘deformed’, quoting Burke’s precept that ‘[t]hough ugliness be the opposite of beauty, it is not the opposite to proportion’:2
Certainly, the Creature is not ‘opposite to proportion’. […] As Burke explains, it is not ugliness but ‘deformity’ that is opposed to proportion: ‘deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the compleat, common form’ (E, 102; emphasis in the original). One must keep in mind that Burke is working from an aesthetic tradition that he feels has been unsystematic in its use of terms and inexact in mapping the terrain of the non-beautiful. Even the Creature refers to the ‘deformity of [his] figure,’ despite the fact that, although large, he is not technically deformed’ (F, 142). When he sees himself in a transparent pool for the first time, he laments, ‘the fatal effects of this miserable deformity’ (F, 142). Yet, as his creator seems to know better than himself, deformity is a distinct category not to be confused […] with the ugly.3
This argument refers to Victor’s description, on the night of the creature’s animation, of how he constructed the creature ‘in proportion’.4 Since Gigante’s compelling distinction between the monster’s deformity and his ugliness, scholarship on Shelley’s fiction seems not to have re-examined the key point that the creature is well-proportioned, excepting Essaka Joshua’s mentioning that ‘[p]roportionality is an important element in the description of the creature, though the accounts of it [in the novel] are inconsistent’.5 Looking at descriptions of the creature in the 1818 Frankenstein, alongside the Shelleys’ manuscript revisions and the treatment of a physically grotesque character in ‘Transformation’, I will argue that the creature is technically deformed and consistently described as such. In this chapter, I am interested in the creature’s disproportion because of the fundamental role it might play in readings of the novel, not as a political, social or moral allegory, but as a literary pioneer in the development of a ‘horrid realism’ whose descriptions and narrative techniques insist on the body as a material fact that defies abstraction.
The creature is identified most positively with proportion in Victor’s narration of the candlelit scene where he animates the creature and it takes its first breaths. We are told, indeed, that ‘[h]is limbs were in proportion’ – but these five words, excerpted from the scene, and dislocated from the following scene of Victor’s dream, give an incomplete description of the creature’s general shape. It is necessary to re-examine some of the most quoted passages in the novel, starting with the moment of animation:
[I]t breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes.
Four points stand out here, with regard to the creature’s proportions. First, that Shelley’s paragraph contextualises the past tense of the limbs being ‘in proportion’ with Victor’s pluperfect statements ‘I had endeavoured’ and ‘had selected’. When the phrase ‘his limbs were in proportion’ is quoted out of context, the past tense appears to belong in the first layer of the third-person past-tense narration, and to take on a continuous aspect: in other words, it seems that the creature was continuously well proportioned, before and after animation. In the text, however, the words are sandwiched between two pluperfect statements, imparting the sense of the limbs having been in proportion. After Victor’s exclamation – ‘Great God!’ – we return to the first layer of the narrative’s past tense, describing how the creature looks post-animation. My interpretation is that this passage ascribes the creature’s proportion to his pre-animation state and to an earlier phase of Victor’s process (perhaps even before the limbs were actually joined together).
The second point is that the creature’s proportions are associated with Victor’s attempted and unsuccessful process of forming – ‘endeavoured to form’ – not ascribed to a final, accomplished form; with the work of choosing – grouped with the features ‘I had selected’ and with the creature’s multiple limbs rather than with the assembled whole of his body. Earlier in the novel, proportions are included in Victor’s plan – ‘I resolved […] to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large’ – and so associated explicitly with the first stages, of the months spent ‘successfully collecting and arranging my materials’ (35–6). The third point is that the narration reiterates several times the distorting effect of animation on the creature’s arms and legs. The moment when ‘a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’ is echoed in the following scene, where Victor wakes from a nightmare with ‘every limb convulsed’ (39). Then the pluperfect returns: ‘I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived’ (40). Once the creature’s body is made capable – its muscularity tense and its joints flexible – the ideal of proportion is unachievable. This could be interpreted as Victor’s failure, when selecting pieces of the appropriate dimensions, to account for the impact of mobility and plasticity on the entire figure’s final proportions. We might imagine the creature’s limbs (or segments of his limbs) as disproportioned not because they are the wrong length but because some segments of his body, like the ‘shrivelled’ and readily ‘wrinkled’ skin on his face (39, 119, 138), have failed to fatten over ‘the work of muscles and arteries beneath’ (39). Fourth, when Victor’s ‘Beautiful!—Great God!’ signals a switch from before to after, from a selection of beautiful features and proportioned limbs to a body whose different parts generate an effect of ‘horrid contrast’, Shelley introduces the idea of mismatch and disparity into her descriptions of the creature’s physique. After Victor’s stated intention to create a being ‘proportionably large’, the creature is never again depicted as gigantic yet well proportioned.
Quite the opposite. Walton’s last letter describes the creature as ‘gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions’ (186–87), and Victor sees ‘the distorted proportions of a well-known form’ (176), aligning with the animation scene’s representation of the creature’s proportions as a failed project. While the word ‘deformity’ occasionally refers generally to the creature’s form, when linked with more precise descriptions of the body it occurs with the words ‘shape’ and ‘figure’, suggesting a disproportioned outline. This association of the creature’s deformity with his shape is reinforced in Shelley’s draft notebooks of 1816–17, where Percy’s revisions add the words ‘shape’, ‘distorted’ and ‘proportions’, and in one case attribute deformity to the creature’s ‘aspect’. This word, ‘aspect’, suggests a general ‘look’ or ‘appearance’, such that Percy’s phrase ‘deformity of its aspect’ can also be consistent with a more technical definition, as in Burke, of a deformed body as internally disproportioned: the creature’s ‘aspect’ is its general ‘shape’. Mary’s original draft reads:
A flash of lightning illumined the object, and discovered to me its gigantic stature, deformity more hideous than belongs to humanity instantly informed me who it was.6
Percy adds a semi-colon that syntactically nudges the creature’s ‘deformity’ away from its stature and towards the new word ‘aspect’. He also adds the phrase ‘human shape’, amplifying Mary’s original suggestion that there is something bestial or demonic about him, which exceeds the ugliness possible in a human, living or dead. Misshapenness, more than gigantic stature, is what disallows the creature’s humanity. Edited by Percy, the passage reads:
A flash of lightning illumined the object and discovered to me its gigantic stature; and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me who it was. Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child.
In the first published edition, this last sentence is moved later in the paragraph, but retained. The 1818 text also commits to ‘shape’, repeating the word in an addition to the first sentence:
A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life.
Percy again adds the word ‘shape’ in another scene where the creature’s body is illuminated, and also suggests the word ‘distorted’, a pairing that most explicitly aligns the creature’s technical ‘deformity’ with disproportion. In the notebook draft, Mary writes:
When suddenly the broard [sic] disk of the moon arose and shone fully upon the daemon who fled.7
With Percy’s edits, this becomes:
Suddenly the broard [sic] disk of the moon arose and shone fully upon his ghastly & distorted shape.
Anne K. Mellor has suggested that ‘Percy Shelley on several occasions actually distorted the meaning of the text’ 8 – here we see Percy actually adding the word ‘distorted’ to Mary’s description of the creature.
The textual history of Frankenstein should not, however, credit Percy’s revisions with introducing the novel’s emphasis on the creature’s proportions or its insistence on a technical definition of ‘deformity’ as disproportion or misshapenness. The key words and phrases in Mary’s original descriptions of the creature’s body, as just discussed, assume an educated reader’s technical understanding of ‘deformity’, also assumed by Burke in his Enquiry. For example, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – which Mary had been rereading – Gulliver’s meticulous accounting of new worlds continually distinguishes size from proportion, and ugly imperfections from ‘actual’ deformity. In Brobdingnag and Lilliput, extraordinarily large and small things are nevertheless ‘all in proportion’, ‘all in the same proportion’, ‘of proportionable Magnitude’, ‘of a size proportionable’, ‘a proportionable quantity’, ‘an exact proportion’, and so on. When Gulliver describes a Brobdingnagian nurse, he is careful to differentiate the ugliness of a magnified human being from grotesque disproportion, ‘lest the Reader might think those vast Creatures were actually deformed’.9 While it is generally true that Percy ‘tended to see the creature as more monstrous and less human than did Mary’,10 the chain of revisions between Mary’s notebooks and the 1818 text show wife and husband collaborating on descriptions of the creature’s ‘actual deformity’. This is clearest in the textual history of the novel’s final pages. In the scene where Victor spies the creature crossing the ice in a sledge, Mary’s original draft reads:
I strained my sight to view what it could be & uttered wild cry of extacy [sic] when I distinguished a sledge dogs & a hideous form moving away11
Percy alters this, substituting for the vaguer word ‘hideous’ a phrase corresponding with words – ‘shape’, ‘proportion’, ‘deformity’ – used earlier in the novel to describe the creature’s physique more technically. As well as adding the word ‘distorted’ for the second time, he refers to the creature’s ‘proportions’, a word not used since the account of Victor’s plans for the creature’s size. The draft becomes:
I strained my sight to discover what it could be & uttered a wild cry of extacy [sic] when I distinguished a sledge dogs & the distorted proportions of a wellknown [sic] form within.
Continuing her notebook draft, in the scene of Walton’s encounter with the creature, Mary reiterates the word ‘distorted’ (which now appears in the text for the third time) and re-uses the formula of distinguishing the extraordinary size of gigantism from the disproportion of technical deformity. The creature is huge yet deformed:
Over him hung a form – which I cannot find words to describe, gigantic in stature – yet uncouth & distorted.12
In the fair copy, Mary further tweaks Walton’s phrase, adding the word ‘proportions’ suggested by Percy for Victor’s earlier remark about the creature’s ‘distorted proportions’:
Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe gigantic in stature, yet uncouth & distorted in its proportions.13
The 1818 text contains three further references to the creature’s deformity in relation to his proportions, two of which use the word ‘figure’ as a synonym for ‘shape’. The creature hopes that learning language will ‘enable me to make [the cottagers] overlook the deformity of my figure; for with this also the contrast perpetually presented to my eyes had made me acquainted’ (90); and he acknowledges that he possesses ‘a figure hideously deformed’ (96). The phrase ‘this miserable deformity’ (90), used when the creature recounts seeing himself reflected in a pool, and coming soon after the phrase ‘deformity of my figure’, incorporates the Burkean definition of deformity as ‘an unusual figure’ and ‘the want of common proportions’.14 The creature then recalls, ‘From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion’ (97), corroborating the implication that Victor’s statement ‘[h]is limbs were in proportion’ does not refer to the creature’s body once assembled and animated, and affirming the consistency of the many descriptions of his body as deformed in the sense of being disproportioned.
While there is no record of whether these phrases were in Mary’s original draft or were Percy’s edits adopted by Mary in later versions – the draft notebooks for these chapters do not survive – their account of the creature’s deformity as a matter of shape, figure and proportion is consistent with the definition of deformity agreed and reiterated by the Shelleys in the textual evolution discussed previously. Changes suggested by Percy, and agreed and re-applied by Mary in later drafts, create a consistent picture of the creature as being deformed, in Burke’s technical sense of the word, because he is distorted in his proportions.
Shelley goes on to link the term ‘deformity’ consistently with misshapenness and disproportion in ‘Transformation’, a short story written in 1830 for the 1831 issue of the literary gift annual The Keepsake, around the time that she was preparing the third revised edition of Frankenstein. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature is a disproportioned giant, the object of horror in ‘Transformation’ is a disproportioned dwarf. Shelley’s descriptions of the dwarf’s body participate in the ‘gigantic dwarf’ of nineteenth-century literature, a grotesque type that Scott influentially adapted to the realist novel – first in The Black Dwarf (1816), then in The Pirate (1822) and The Talisman (1825), and to a lesser extent in Peveril of the Peak (1823) and Rob Roy (1818). A keen reader of Scott, and influenced by him in her historical romance of The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Shelley had the opportunity to notice the emphasis on disproportion in Scott’s evocative descriptions of characters strongly associated with folklore and the supernatural, and to contribute to a new novelistic tradition of visualising these characters. In the next section of the chapter, which focuses on the descriptive techniques of the ‘horrid realism’ used in nineteenth-century literature to present disproportioned bodies as grotesque, I will look in more detail at the language and imagery that Shelley and Scott use in characterising ‘gigantic’ and ‘dwarfish’ bodies. Here, I define the aesthetic type of the ‘gigantic dwarf’, whose physical disproportion is grotesqued as a chimerical combination of gigantic with dwarfish features, and where the author imagines the disturbing co-existence of the beautiful, the sublime, the ugly and/or the ludicrous. I show how authors’ efforts to describe this aesthetic type generate a particular way of seeing, one that repeatedly drains the power of reason and sympathy, and which creates the conditions for the obsessive, objectifying focus of horrid realism. Shelley and Scott fantasise the gigantic/dwarfish being, with its disruptions to scale and proportion, as a test object for a realist mode that is concerned with the repetitive subdivision and detailing of material objects, and conscious of these descriptive techniques as horror writing.
Human gigantism and dwarfism were important cases in eighteenth-century aesthetics for thinking about perceptions of size, scale and proportion. In his inscription for The Bench (1758), Hogarth takes ‘a Giant or a Dwarf’ as a metaphor for the outré in art. Whereas a ‘caricature’, for Hogarth, is an inadvertently and comically simplistic drawing of the human form, resembling ‘the early scrawlings of a child’, a figure outré is an artistic distortion that still represents the human body accurately: outré ‘signifies […] the exaggerated outlines of a figure, all the parts of which may be in other respects, a perfect and true picture of nature. A Giant or a Dwarf may be called a common man Outré’. (The phrase ‘or a Dwarf’ is added in superscript, an afterthought, suggesting the bias towards gigantism in our concepts of exaggeration.) Hogarth does not distinguish the aesthetic effects of the giant versus the dwarf, or discuss the internal proportions of these figures: being extraordinarily small or extraordinarily large is enough for either the giant or the dwarf to serve as an illustration of the outré. Theorising the distinct aesthetic effects of giants and dwarfs, however, Burke’s Enquiry (1757) separates the extraordinarily large from the extraordinarily small figure, and makes room for the type of the ‘gigantic dwarf’, which combines smallness of stature with gigantism of feature. Gigantism is sublime, smallness more or less neutral – but a combination of the two creates an effect of deformity that repulses and discomfits rather than terrify the viewer.
The gigantic dwarf illustrates both Burke’s definition of deformity as disproportion (82) and his association of beauty with ‘gradual variation’ and ‘no sudden protuberance through the whole’ (93–4). In delineating his ideal dwarf – extraordinarily small yet well proportioned – Burke may have had in mind particular court dwarfs such as Nicholas Ferry (1741–64) and Józef Boruwłaski (1739–1837), who was said by contemporaries to be ‘perfectly straight, upright, well formed and proportioned’.15 These curious miniatures of humanity, according to Burke, are outnumbered by dwarfs whose body parts are not proportionately small:
Littleness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of beauty. The humming bird both in shape and colouring yields to none of the winged species, of which it is the least; and perhaps his beauty is enhanced by its smallness. But there are animals, which when they are extremely small are rarely (if ever) beautiful. There is a dwarfish size of men and women, which is almost constantly so gross and massive in comparison of their height, that they present us with a very disagreeable image. But should a man be found not above two or three feet high, supposing such a person to have all the parts of his body of a delicacy suitable to such a size, and otherwise endued with the common qualities of other beautiful bodies, I am pretty well convinced that a person of such stature might be considered as beautiful; might be the object of love; might give us very pleasing ideas on viewing him.
Nineteenth-century fiction featuring dwarf characters devotes considerable space to visualising disproportion and explaining its aesthetic effect on an imagined viewer. In Peveril of the Peak, Scott’s fictionalisation of Jeffrey Hudson (1619–82), the court dwarf of Queen Henrietta Maria, includes a detailed description that searches through the dwarf’s physical features for potential sources of beauty, ugliness and the grotesque. Scott fixes on disproportion as the factor that dehumanises the character, supposedly undermining the attractiveness of his face and making him an object of wonder and ridicule:
Geoffrey Hudson […] although a dwarf of the least possible size, had nothing positively ugly in his countenance, or actually distorted in his limbs. His head, hands, and feet were indeed large, and disproportioned to the height of his body, and his body itself much thicker than was consistent with symmetry, but in a degree which was rather ludicrous than disagreeable to look upon. His countenance, in particular, had he been a little taller, would have been accounted, in youth, handsome, and now, in age, striking and expressive; it was but the uncommon disproportion betwixt the head and the trunk which made the features seem whimsical and bizarre—an effect which was considerably increased by dwarf’s moustaches, which it was his pleasure to wear so large, that they almost twisted back amongst, and mingled with, his grizzled hair.16
Geoffrey is one of Burke’s gigantic dwarfs, ‘gross and massive in comparison of their height’. Asymmetry and disproportion prevent him from being taken seriously, either in valour or in virility: he inspires neither love nor fear. In Burke’s Enquiry, it is implied that the disproportioned dwarf’s gigantism of feature does not share the sublimity of gigantism of stature. ‘It is impossible’, claims Burke, ‘to suppose a giant the object of love. When we let our imaginations loose in romance, the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and every thing horrid and abominable’ (126).
The creature in Frankenstein, originally designed to be ‘proportionately large’, is doubly impossible to love: a figure that combines distortion and disproportion with terrifying stature and strength. In ‘Transformation’, the immensely powerful dwarf necromancer is similarly suspended between ugliness and sublimity. The body associated with both dwarfism and gigantism – a gigantic dwarf, or a dwarfish giant – emerges as a special aesthetic type, exceeding the human form outré. It possesses elements of ugliness and deformity alongside elements of beauty and/or sublimity, which destabilise but do not eclipse each other. The defining characteristic of the gigantic dwarf is the confounding of aesthetic categories by a body not in scale with its size.
The aesthetic type of the gigantic dwarf is applied many times over in Scott’s descriptions of grotesque characters. The first is the fictionalisation of David Ritchie, who is portrayed on his first appearance in The Black Dwarf as an object ‘nearly as broad as long, or rather of a spherical shape, which could only be occasioned by some strange personal deformity’ (21). A few pages later, this description is filled out with the disproportion of specific features: a head ‘of immense size’, a body ‘thick and square’, arms ‘long and brawny’, and legs ‘so very short as to be hidden by the dress which he wore’ (29). Scott explicitly assigns the Black Dwarf to the gigantic dwarf category, summarising the aesthetic impression of his size and disproportion: ‘It seemed as if nature had originally intended the separate parts of his body to be the members of a giant, but had afterward capriciously assigned them to the person of a dwarf, so ill did the length of his arms and the iron strength of his frame correspond with the shortness of his stature’ (29). (Dickens uses a similar formula in The Old Curiosity Shop, describing Quilp as ‘so low in stature as to be quite a dwarf, though his head and face were large enough for the body of a giant’.17) In Rob Roy, Scott elaborates the anecdote about Rob’s being able to tie his garters without stooping into a detailed account of how his body evocatively combines the dwarfish with the gigantic:
Two points in his person interfered with the rules of symmetry—his shoulders were so broad in proportion to his height, as, notwithstanding the lean and lathy appearance of his frame, gave him something the air of being too square in respect to his stature; and his arms, though round, sinewy, and strong, were so very long as to be rather a deformity.18
The disproportioned ‘squareness’ of the dwarfish body is remarked in several of Scott’s characterisations, from the Black Dwarf being ‘thick and square’, to Trolld and Nick Strumpfer in The Pirate – respectively a ‘square and mis-shaped bulk’ and ‘a square-made dwarf’19 – to Rob Roy’s ‘air of being too square’, like the marauding Picts known for ‘the length of their arms, and the squareness of their shoulders’ (187). Long arms are another recurring feature: as well as Rob’s arms and the Black Dwarf’s, we have the ‘long, skinny arm’ of the court dwarf in The Talisman. Overlong arms are particularly marked as a non-human attribute, associated with goblins in Rob Roy and with apes in The Black Dwarf, where Sir Edward Mauley describes his body as ‘more odious, by bearing that distorted resemblance to humanity which we observe in the animal tribes that are more hateful to man because they seem his caricature’ (104). Shelley, in ‘Transformation’, assigns the dwarf necromancer ‘two long lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws’ (28). The disproportion of the gigantic dwarf confronts the viewer simultaneously with an animal’s form becoming uncomfortably close to human and a human’s form becoming uncomfortably close to animal. Resemblance, not difference, is the source of disgust. In the Frankenstein notebooks of 1816–17, the creature muses that ‘God in pity made man beautiful & alluring – I am more hateful to the sight than the bitter apples of Hell to the taste.’20 At some point in the revision process this sentence was altered to focus on the creature’s relation to an ideal human form, so that the 1818 text reads: ‘God in pity made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance’ (105). Echoing Sir Edward Mauley’s self-loathing in The Black Dwarf, the creature accuses Frankenstein of caricaturing corporeal humanity. Disproportion carries the gigantic/dwarfish body beyond the merely ugly and into an ugly uncanny, alike yet not alike.
The gigantic/dwarfish body generates a particular rhythm of seeing, where the body is pulled close by description then suppressed from view repeatedly throughout the text. In the narrative, a strong compulsion to look away allows characters to escape the most intense reaction of disgust and hatred – but they are then compelled in some way to look again, in a cycle of revulsion and fascination. There is a compressed version of this cycle in ‘Transformation’, where Guido sees ‘a misshapen dwarf, with squinting eyes, distorted features, and body deformed, till it became a horror to behold’ (27–8). Detailed examination of the dwarf’s separate features gives way to revulsion, the desire not to look and not to touch. Persuaded by the necromancer’s sublime power, however, the ambitious young cavalier overcomes one compulsion with another – ‘[a]we, curiosity, a clinging fascination, drew me towards him’ (28) – and Guido makes further observations on the dwarf’s physical features and ‘contortions’ (29). In an echo of Victor repulsing his creature’s physical touch (F 79), Guido rejects the dwarf’s physical advances – ‘he held out his hand; I could not touch it’ – but then closes the distance again: ‘I drew near him’ (29). When Guido is himself transformed into the dwarf’s body – ‘a shape of horror’ (31) – he suppresses the sight, ‘turn[ing] my face to the sun, that I might not see my shadow’ (32). Victor’s first rejection of the creature, rushing from his laboratory ‘[u]nable to endure the aspect of the being I had created’ (F 39), similarly begins a pattern of seeing the creature, then banishing the sight of him, then seeing him again. Individual characters’ interactions with the creature in the narrative create, through repetition, the reader’s rhythmic experience of fascinated seeing that is continually interrupted by moments of suppression and abjection. Passages of detailed description, analysing the aesthetic effects of the body’s various attributes, are swiftly followed by suppression or removal, sometimes accompanied by emphatic not-looking: ‘Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance’ (40), ‘almost too horrible for human eyes’ (76), ‘“Begone! relieve me from the sight of your detested form’ (79), ‘contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold’ (119), ‘I shut my eyes involuntarily’ (187). The tension between looking and not looking at the creature is acted out with violence when the creature forces William Frankenstein to look at him: ‘I seized on the boy as he passed, and drew him towards me. As soon as he beheld my form, he placed his hands before his eyes, and uttered a shrill scream: I drew his hand forcibly from his face’ (117). In another scene, Victor’s narration spells out the fact that the aesthetic effect of the creature’s physical appearance overpowers sympathy and moral reasoning, making him impossible to love even in the mildest sense of pity: ‘I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred. I tried to stifle these sensations’ (121). Real horror freezes the mental faculties along with the blood, counteracting the essentially imaginative work of compassion, as in Radcliffe’s meditation on the difference between sublime, expansive terror and earthly, prosaic horror: ‘“They must be men of very cold imaginations,” said W——, “with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.”’21
Shelley’s cynicism about the possibility of loving a disgusting ‘mass’ in this scene contrasts with the episode in Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796) where the heroine cuddles the body of her dead baby even as it rots: ‘It soon became a mass of putridity, and to every eye was a loathsome and disgusting Object; To every eye, but a Mother’s. […] I endeavoured to retrace its features through the livid corruption, with which they were over-spread’ (412–13). There is no such suggestion, in Frankenstein, that parents might possess superhuman powers of loving, or that deformity and distortion might be overlooked. Some readings of the novel point to the framing of Victor’s narrative within Walton’s, and the creature’s narrative within Victor’s, to argue that descriptions of the creature’s body are unreliable: that Walton sees the creature through Victor’s eyes, for example. There is no inconsistency or change in the creature’s body throughout the novel; he has the same effect on everyone who sees him, even an inexperienced child, and the only hope of breaking the cycle lies in De Lacey’s blindness. The pragmatic solution would be to find or make blind companions for the creature, as Victor Hugo arranges for the facially disfigured Gwynplaine in L’Homme qui rit (1869). That this does not occur to Victor Frankenstein might be rationalised by the idea that, having once seen the creature, it is impossible to imagine not seeing him.
In ‘Transformation’, horrid realism is a representation technique used within a romantic tale, a narrative in which the bond between self and body is tenuous, magical: Guido and the dwarf exchange bodies, and re-exchange them when their blood mingles in a duel. In Frankenstein, the realism of the creature’s body extends beyond descriptive technique, to the narrative and to our sense of the novel as a ‘world’ or a ‘reality’. Shelley’s novel insists on the prosaic materiality of the creature’s body, consistently described and universally hated. Forbidden the transformative power of imagination, the creature’s body is caught in a realism that extends through the novel’s narrative structure to its existential propositions: ‘I was in reality the monster that I am’ (90).
The Prosaic Grotesque: Against Critical Readings of Frankenstein
The grotesquing of disproportioned bodies serves, for Shelley and for Scott, as a site of innovation for a realist mode conscious of its potential for horror writing. Techniques and tropes developed from this horrid realism have become more universally deployed in modern realist fiction, across the genres of crime, thriller, fantasy and science fiction as well as in works conceived and marketed as horror fiction. While these tropes and techniques can be, and are, applied to the description of any object – landscapes, food, human-made objects – and to descriptions of the ordinary human body, they are most strongly associated with the extreme grotesques of the ‘body horror’ subgenre, and in other fictive works with localised moments of body horror, highly visually realised.
In Scott’s fiction, horrid realism is localised to the description of dwarf characters and associated very specifically with hostility to the kinds of non-normative bodies that Scott’s grotesques are intended to represent. In Frankenstein, the tropes and techniques of horrid realism are deployed more often and more generally, though still primarily in association with the creature’s body, such that they constitute a sustained mode of representation – granular, vivid and prosaic – alongside the modes of narration and description that otherwise dominate the text. Romanticising, idealising, psychologising, moralising and reasoning: these modes offer frameworks through which the creature’s body can emerge as something other than itself: a symbol, an example, a moral. As George Levine observes, Frankenstein ‘exercises its appeal in part because it fails to explain so much. The narrative has a plausibility of images, and the images themselves, not really reflective of a world divinely ordered and intelligible or susceptible to the mind, lend themselves to proliferating and unrestricted interpretations, and can be assimilated to almost any powerful mythology’.22 Accordingly, as Joshua points out, ‘[m]uch of the commentary on monstrosity in Frankenstein centres on the idea that [physical] monstrosity is in some sense a projection of something else’.23
Here, pulling comparisons from Scott’s horrid realist descriptions of dwarf characters, and from Shelley’s story ‘Transformation’, I argue that Frankenstein’s moments of ‘body horror’ use a distinctive set of tropes and techniques that work to literalise the monstrous body; and which, being reiterated throughout the text, continually puzzle, interrupt and destabilise critical readings of the novel.
Horrid realism is repetitive because it describes the grotesque body every time it appears in the narrative, suggesting that the reader, like Victor Frankenstein, should never lose sight of the character’s ugliness and inhumanity for too long. Rather than being described when they are first introduced and then referred to simply as ‘the monster’ or ‘the dwarf’ in subsequent scenes, such characters are continually re-visualised, often using the same words repeated from previous descriptions. In horror realisms, writers regularly take the opportunity to provoke a shudder, a moment of disgust and hatred that interrupts any more coherent thoughts and sympathetic feelings that the reader might be developing about the character. Frankenstein not only carries out that strategy, but also thematises it by having the creature literally read Victor’s ‘minutest’ written description of his body. Earlier I discussed the consistency of descriptions of the creature’s body in Frankenstein, with the Shelleys’ revisions to the text repeating, with variations and elaborations, words and ideas from Victor’s original description. Midway through the novel, the reader is asked to imagine reading a fuller and more detailed account of that first experience, when the creature reads Victor’s journal: ‘the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors, and rendered mine ineffaceable. I sickened as I read’ (105).
This language might be interpreted as implausibly similar to the language that different characters (Victor, Walton, the creature) use to describe the creature’s body, and/or as a sign of Victor’s and Walton’s unreliability as narrators; it might be seen as bad writing on Shelley’s part. It is the language of horror writing: I attribute its consistency to a realism that uses repetition to maintain the visual impact of the horror object. The conventionality of horror writing’s ‘flesh-caricatures’ is especially obvious in Scott’s writing, with its many dwarf characters. In extended and brief descriptions that grotesque dwarfs’ bodies, Scott uses the same words again and again. ‘Misshapen’ occurs five times in The Black Dwarf, six times in Pirate, once in Talisman, and twice in the Magnum Introduction to Dwarf – as well as ‘unshapely’, ‘ill-shaped’ and ‘shapeless’ in Pirate. ‘Discordant’ is used in Dwarf, Pirate and Talisman, as well as ‘dissonant’, ‘loud’ and ‘shrill’, which is used four times in Dwarf, three times in Talisman, once in Peveril and once more in the Magnum Dwarf: for example, the ‘harsh and dissonant sounds of the dwarf’s enunciation’ in Peveril.24 Dwarf characters are described as having dark ‘shaggy’ hair or ‘beetle-brows’ overhanging deep-set and dark yet brilliant eyes in Dwarf, Kenilworth, Pirate and Talisman. In Talisman and Peveril, dwarfs have ‘shrivelled’ features. Dwarf characters are likened to animals, including primates (Dwarf, Peveril), a bulldog and a reptile (Pirate) and a toad (Talisman). The phrase ‘wretched abortion of nature’ occurs in Peveril, and ‘abortion-seeming’ in Talisman. As in Frankenstein, variants of the words ‘disproportion’, ‘distortion’ and ‘deformity’ – as well as ‘absurdity’, ‘extravagance’, ‘peculiarity’, ‘ugliness’, ‘bizarre’, ‘fantastic’ etc. – appear in numerous descriptions of dwarf characters, and in other characters’ dialogue about the dwarfs. This descriptive mode, generally characterised by reiteration, consistency and repetition to the point of conventionalising, reifies the grotesque body as a horror object.
Pressuring critical readings of the creature, horrid realism insists on the impact of what is ‘really there’, in spite of what the being might think or feel, in spite of what else it might represent. After reading Victor’s journal, the creature asks a question that no character in the novel ever answers: ‘My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean?’ (104). Every possible critical reading of the creature’s body – what his person ‘really means’ and how it fits in the world as it is ‘really like’ – struggles with horrid realism’s ‘really there’, a continually renewed representation of pure, meaningless horror.
Clarity is one of the more conspicuous tropes in horrid realist descriptions of grotesque bodies, aligning them with the fear of the known rather than the terror of darkness. Monsters are lit up so that they can be seen, either because a character is deliberately illuminating them (by lamplight or candlelight) or because horrid realism requires the character’s body to be vividly re-described even when the plot would require only a statement that another character sees and recognises them. In Talisman, for example, Sir Kenneth first sees the court dwarfs by lamplight, and when he reencounters one of them, ‘there stepped from the shadow into the moonlight, like an actor entering upon the stage, a stunted, decrepit creature, whom, by his fantastic dress and deformity, he recognized, even at a distance’.25 There are several such instances in Frankenstein, starting with ‘the glimmer of the half-extinguished light’ (38) and the ‘dim and yellow light of the moon’ (39) that are sufficient to discern the creature’s appearance at close range. On the next meeting with the creature, ‘[a] flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me’ (56). Later, Victor sees the creature’s face, again at close range, ‘by the light of the moon’ (138) and ‘the pale yellow light of the moon’ (166); and when the creature escapes him in Geneva, ‘the broad disk of the moon arose, and shone full upon his ghastly and distorted shape’ (172). The titular character of The Black Dwarf is first seen by the ‘doubtful and occasional light’ of the moon and mistaken for a ghost (20), but not revealed as a gigantic dwarf until a daylight scene, where his physical appearance is described fully (29).
Scott’s and Shelley’s grotesque characters thus violate one of Burke’s key criteria for the sublime, obscurity. Whereas supernatural beings are seen imperfectly, monstrous humans are seen in unmysterious detail. In The Pirate, Norna recounts seeing the ‘indistinct form’ of Trolld, a demon dwarf featuring in a saga ‘through the dim light which the upper aperture admitted’; contrastingly, every physical feature of Norna’s servant, the dwarf Nick Strumpfer, is described, including his exact height in feet and inches.26 Burke reasons that terror and apprehension rely not just on literal darkness but on uncertain visualisation more generally. He considers ‘ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas’ (48), and praises Milton’s description of Death for its ‘significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring’ (49). Rather than being misshapen, Death has no certain form: ‘If shape it might be called that shape had none / Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb; / Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, / For each seemed either.’ In contrast, the gigantic/dwarfish beings of Scott’s and Shelley’s horror writing – grotesquely opposed to both the sublime and the beautiful – are sized and shaped in every limb and feature. Their deformity, paradoxically, gives them more certain forms than the other characters.
In these clear views of the grotesque body, ‘distinctly pictured forth’ to produce ‘positive horror’ rather than imaginative suspense,27 horrid realism divides its objects into parts (limbs, hands, heads, torsos, mouths) and details (colours, textures, measurements). Shelley and Scott both seem to reflect on the relative precision of physical description in the horror realism they are developing, in Frankenstein when the creature ‘sickens’ at the ‘minutest description’ of his body in Victor’s journal (105), and in The Talisman when the court dwarfs, ordered by Queen Berengaria to make an attack on Sir Kenneth’s ‘nerves’ by displaying their bodies to him, repeatedly illuminate themselves with lamps. Rather than holding his lamp in a fixed position, Nectabanus moves it to display each part of his body in turn. This deliberate attempt to horrify Sir Kenneth dramatises horrid realism’s technique of partitioning the grotesque body into features and details, which are gradually revealed through extended descriptions:
So soon as he had stepped from the aperture through which he arose, he stood still, and, as if to show himself more distinctly, moved the lamp which he held slowly over his face and person, successively illuminating his wild and fantastic features, and his misshapen but nervous limbs. Though disproportioned in person, the dwarf was not so distorted as to argue any want of strength or activity.28
The slow movement of the dwarf’s lamp, and his gradual ascent from the chapel’s subterranean vault, dramatise the descriptive technique that is used in the scene, of focusing on the grotesque body piece by piece. First we hear the dwarf’s ‘shrill whistle’, then see ‘a long, skinny arm’ rising from the aperture, then ‘a large head, a cap fantastically adorned’. The performance is repeated by the dwarf’s wife:
[I]t was a female form, much resembling the first in shape and proportions, which slowly emerged from the floor. Her dress was also of red samite, fantastically cut and flounced, as if she had been dressed for some exhibition of mimes or jugglers; and with the same minuteness which her predecessor had exhibited, she passed the lamp over her face and person, which seemed to rival the male’s in ugliness.29
As well as being detailed and repetitious, the exhibition highlights two features that form horrid contrasts – first, the dwarfs’ elaborate clothing, ‘the richness of which rendered [their] ugliness more conspicuous’; second, their eyes, which have an element of beauty. Like the ‘luxuriances’ of Victor’s creature – ‘his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness’ (F 39) – the dwarfs’ eyes are represented as visually appealing, yet submerged in ugliness:
But with all this unfavourable exterior, there was one trait in the features of both which argued alertness and intelligence in the most uncommon degree. This arose from the brilliancy of their eyes, which, deep-set beneath black and shaggy brows, gleamed with a lustre which, like that in the eye of a toad, seemed to make some amends for the extreme ugliness of countenance and person.
A single trait – shining hair, shining eyes – might promise the viewer some relief from the other parts of the grotesque body.
This suggestion is undercut, however, by the dwarfs’ next action. They successively illuminate their bodies’ features once more, ‘so as to allow him distinctly […] to observe’ the feature that might offset or diminish the unpleasant impact of the rest:
[P]lacing themselves side by side, directly opposite to Sir Kenneth, they again slowly shifted the lights which they held, so as to allow him distinctly to survey features which were not rendered more agreeable by being brought nearer, and to observe the extreme quickness and keenness with which their black and glittering eyes flashed back the light of the lamps.30
Masters of horrid realism, the dwarfs draw closer to Sir Kenneth and use light to enhance the feature with the best claim to beauty – or perhaps sublimity, given the eyes’ rapid and potentially threatening movements. This fragment of ‘lustre’ actually heightens the horror-impact of the whole. Unable to appreciate the dwarfs’ eyes or the creature’s teeth in isolation from the grotesque body’s succession of parts, the viewer experiences the jarring of aesthetic dissonance. It is not pleasurable to see a fragment of beauty joined to ugliness, supposedly. Scott could have borrowed this idea from Frankenstein’s first description of the creature’s body, a description that spells out its own deliberate aesthetic incoherence: a ‘horrid contrast’ of gleaming black hair and white teeth – presenting a high contrast of dark and light – with ‘watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set’ – presenting a lack of contrast (39). Scott’s earlier portrait of the Black Dwarf does not use aesthetic dissonance in this way, describing how Elshie’s ‘eye-brows, shaggy and prominent, overhung a pair of small, dark, piercing eyes, set far back in their sockets, that rolled with a portentous wildness, indicative of partial insanity’ (29), making the eyes coherent with the rest of the portrait rather than exploring, as in Frankenstein and Talisman, how a fragment of beauty or sublimity might create ambivalence in the viewer.
These techniques and tropes of horrid realism – repetition, clarity, partition, minute details and aesthetic dissonance – are obsessed with specifics, taking the post-classical preference for particularity to the extreme. Ian Watt points to Shaftesbury and Kames as advocates for the two opposing schools of thought, the former on the side of the general and universal in art and literature, the latter for particularity.31 Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709) expresses the opinion that artists and writers should take impressions of general forms rather than trying to copy real, singular objects accurately in every detail:
Now the Variety of Nature is such, as to distinguish every thing she forms, by a peculiar original Character; which, if strictly observed, will make the Subject appear unlike to anything extant in the World besides. But this Effect the good Poet and Painter seek industriously to prevent. They hate Minuteness, and are afraid of Singularity.32
Kames, on the other hand, claims that ‘abstract or general terms have no good effect in any composition for amusement; because it is only of particular objects that images can be formed’.33 In their descriptions of grotesque bodies, Shelley and Scott experiment with details so ‘strictly observed’ that they could attract the now well-established criticisms of realist horror: ‘gratuitous’, ‘sensational’, ‘in bad taste’, ‘leaving nothing to the imagination’. The dwarf Nick Strumpfer is not simply ‘mute’ or ‘silent’; instead Scott describes how ‘in the immense cavity of his mouth, there only remained the small shrivelled remnant of a tongue, capable, perhaps of assisting him in swallowing his food, but unequal to the formation of articulate sounds’.34 Rather than a poetic prompting of the reader’s ability to think and feel without visualising every detail, horrid realism offers a prosaic anatomy of sights, sounds and physiological sensations, from the bruises on the dead Frankensteins’ necks (F 52, 166) to the unseen movement of fluid around Victor’s body, ‘the blood trickling in [his] veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs’ (165). When Victor exclaims, ‘Oh! With what a burning gush did hope revisit my heart!’ and describes the ‘burning drops’ of his ‘warm tears’ (176), the association with body heat and liquid movement associates the abstract ‘hope’ with the heart as a physical organ. This kind of physiological drama has become so commonplace in literary realisms that it is easy to overlook its importance in Shelley’s writing: as well as an artefact of the nineteenth-century popularisation of vivisectional interest in the body’s vascular system, it is remarkable as a writing technique.
In Elizabeth’s death scene, instead of suggesting enough that the reader could form a mental concept of the tragedy – without needing to visualise it – Shelley tells ‘every thing’. Victor quickly moves on from abstract and general terms such as ‘destruction’ and ‘lifeless’. Not stopping at telling us that Elizabeth was dead, he describes the appearance of the dead body, its parts and qualities, the location of the body and the position of the limbs: he sees ‘her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair’; he sees ‘her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung’ and ‘thrown across the bed’ (165). The reader is not allowed the freedom of abstractly contemplating Elizabeth’s death, or idealising her body as a peacefully reclining form – we are shown, instead, how the body ‘really’ looks in death. When Victor runs back to the body, the people of the inn have repositioned it to give the comforting illusion that Elizabeth is resting. Again, Shelley specifies the arrangement of the limbs; and rather than suggesting that Elizabeth’s face has been concealed, she makes the reader visualise a particular object covering it. It is also worth noting Shelley’s choice to have Victor actually embrace Elizabeth, in a completed action. Rather than using suggestive and relatively indeterminate phrases such as ‘rushed to embrace her’ or ‘rushed to her’, Shelley provides a more highly visualised and detailed picture of a man holding a corpse closely enough to feel the slack muscles and cold skin in multiple limbs of the dead body:
She had been moved from the posture in which I had first beheld her, and now, as she lay, her head upon her arm and a handkerchief thrown across her face and neck, I might have supposed her asleep. I rushed towards her and embraced her with ardour, but the deadly languor and coldness of the limbs told me that what I now held in my arms had ceased to be the Elizabeth whom I had loved and cherished. The murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp was on her neck.
The unnamed and unlovable ‘what’ that Victor finds in Elizabeth’s bed is characterised by prosaic details, creating an impression of a thing heavy with separable parts that recalls his destruction of the half-made female monster. There, the abstract phrase ‘destroy the creature’ is coupled with an account of Victor physically shaking and dismembering a fully objectified ‘thing’: ‘trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged’ (139). In the following pages, Shelley follows through on the practical consequences of Victor’s act: he has to re-enter the room, clean his tools, pick up the separated flesh and dispose of it (142). He puts the ‘scattered’ and ‘mangled’ pieces in a basket, loads it with stones, and drops it into the sea, where it sinks with a ‘gurgling sound’ (142–43). This is the ‘what if’ of realist horror and crime fiction, following through on its premise with prosaic detail.
Such exactness might be readily associated, by readers, with actual experience of situations and observation of objects described in the work, as opposed to the ‘invention’ and ‘design’ of imagination. The gruesome details in Shelley’s and Scott’s portraits of grotesque bodies, either congenitally deformed or distorted in death, prioritise the close-up detail in a way that recalls the popular (and spurious) anecdote about the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II and the painter Gentile Bellini. In Burke’s telling, the sultan’s ‘exact knowledge’ of the physical appearance of dead bodies and severed body parts suggests his advice to the painter:
A fine piece of a decollated head of St. John the Baptist was shewn to a Turkish emperor; he praised many things, but he observed one defect; he observed that the skin did not shrink from the wounded part of the neck. The sultan on this occasion, though his observation was very just, discovered no more natural Taste than the painter who executed this piece, or than a thousand European connoisseurs who probably never would have made the same observation. His Turkish majesty had indeed been well acquainted with that terrible spectacle, which the others could only have represented in their imagination.
Burke leaves out the second half of the anecdote, where the sultan has a slave beheaded so that Bellini can observe the shrinking skin for himself. The important thing, for Burke, is that aesthetic judgement of the painting as a representation of John the Baptist and the story of his beheading does not require evaluation of the painting as a representation of a severed head. Horrid realism admits (or pretends) that the author has intimate knowledge of the body’s flesh and its injuries, and calls on readers to recognise the material details of dead, diseased and wounded bodies, knowable through such common experiences as childbirth, stillbirth, miscarriage, surgery and wounds from accidents or deliberate violence. Horrid realism does not negate the body’s claim to signify and symbolise, but it does pressure those meanings, continually and often repetitiously, with an excess of material detail; with a prosaic this-then-that of what is physically happening and how bodies and body parts move in relation to each other; with the body’s thingness as most emphatically revealed by deformity, injury and death.
The short story ‘Transformation’ has a compressed version of the tension between the grotesque body’s literalism and critical readings in which deformity serves as an image or projection of something else. Shelley begins with an epigraph from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, framing Guido’s narrative as a confession, and explicitly associating the tale’s ‘horrors’ with his ‘excess of fiendly pride’ (18). The story concludes with Guido speculating that the dwarf necromancer was ‘a good rather than an evil spirit, sent by my guardian angel, to show me the folly and misery of pride’, satisfied that he has learned his ‘lesson’ (39). This pat conclusion, where the story provides its own moral, retrospectively casts the necromancer’s gigantic/dwarfish body as an incarnation of the handsome young knight’s moral decrepitude. The dwarf addresses him in words echoing lines from Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ – ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, / So haggard and so woe-begone? […] And this is why I sojourn here, / Alone and palely loitering’ – ‘Something does please me in your well-proportioned body and handsome face, though you do look a little woe-begone […] And now […] tell me why, young and gallant as you seem, you wander thus alone and downcast on this wild sea-shore’ (29). A hedonist who has wasted his family’s fortune, exchanging land for fine clothes, and who destroys his relationships and his reputation by attempting to abduct a young woman, Guido has betrayed the ideals of chivalry – and when he exchanges bodies with the dwarf, tempted by the prospect of returning to the city rich and powerful, he loses the external appearance of gentility and valour.
However, the story’s attempted moral and its romantic literary antecedents are at odds with the literalism of the narrative. First, the shipwrecked dwarf has a history and an individualist motive: far from being a good or evil ‘spirit’ concerned with Guido’s soul, he is a necromancer with his own agenda, tricking the knight into giving up his ‘comely face and well-made limbs’ to achieve his own goals, not to teach or punish Guido (30). The knight’s fate is incidental to what the dwarf wants. Second, Shelley fully literalises the dwarf’s body by demonstrating the practical consequences of Guido being grotesquely disproportioned. He has difficulty walking with ‘distorted limbs […] so ill adapted for a straight-forward movement’ (33); and like Frankenstein’s creature, he attempts to hide his ugliness, worried that ‘mere boys would […] stone me to death as I passed’ (33). Third, the means of reclaiming Guido’s body, the mingling of ‘warm life-blood’ in a simultaneous murder-suicide, is incoherent with moral allegory. By attempting to strangle the necromancer before stabbing him – ‘I threw myself on him […] I felt only my enemy, whose throat I grasped, and my dagger’s hilt’ – the dwarf-shaped Guido re-enacts an incident that happened when he was eleven years old, an attack on an older cousin who proposed marriage to Guido’s eight-year-old friend Juliet: ‘I threw myself on him—I strove to draw his sword—I clung to his neck with the ferocious resolve to strangle him’ (20, 37). Shelley’s description of the ‘death-blow’ is detailed and relatively prosaic: ‘We fell together, rolling over each other, and the tide of blood that flowed from the gaping wound of each mingled on the grass’ (37). It is dwarf-Guido’s quick thinking and physical effort that save him. Rather than reforming his character in order to shed the dwarf’s deformed limbs, Guido learns his lesson after getting his body back, in the process of healing under Juliet’s care: ‘the work of my bodily cure and mental reform went on together’ (38). Guido’s encounter with the dwarf is only indirectly the cause of his reform, which actually results from the material fact of a near-fatal wound and the resulting physical weakness. With Guido rendered harmless and forced to convalesce in a domestic setting, Juliet’s father has the opportunity to ‘s[i]t beside’ him and convey ‘such wisdom as might win friends to repentance’ (38). In comparison with Frankenstein, ‘Transformation’, explicitly framed by the epigraph and Guido’s talk of a ‘guardian angel’, might seem to be a relatively straightforward allegory where the grotesque body substitutes for moral deformity. Nevertheless, I argue, ‘Transformation’ revisits the techniques of Frankenstein’s horrid realism to present horrors for their own sake. The literalism of the gigantic/dwarfish body, and the incoherence between the prosaic narrative and Guido’s ‘lesson’, tend to destabilise the story’s ‘moral’ into an attempt, after-the-fact, to spiritualise bodies into souls.
In Frankenstein, the horrid realism used primarily to describe grotesque bodies exists alongside a romantic adaptation of physiognomic discourse to evoke the idealism of the Frankenstein family and the De Lacey family. The idealising language of these physiognomic portraits makes a contrast with Shelley’s descriptions of grotesque bodies, not because the latter use demonising language, but because their horrid realism excludes physiognomic analysis. It is only late in the novel that the wrinkles in the creature’s skin begin to settle into signs of his passions. Otherwise, the creature’s body is unreadable, like the dead bodies of Elizabeth and of Victor’s mother, infested by ‘grave-worms crawling in the folds’ of her shroud in Victor’s dream (39). The creature’s overall appearance often strikes Victor as demonic, certainly – but the details of his distinctive body exceed moral physiognomy’s links between corporeal ugliness and moral evil. With the creature’s skin, hair, eyes and disproportioned limbs consistent throughout the novel, the only physical characteristic explicitly linked with moral corruption is his facial expression. When Percy altered one of Victor’s remarks on the creature’s face to suggest that his physical appearance might not accurately reflect his moral or psychological self – ‘his countenance appeared to express the utmost extent of malice and barbarity’ – Mary reinstated her original phrase.35 The 1818 text accepts Percy’s elevation of ‘face’ to ‘countenance’, but rejects the pivotal change from ‘expressed’ to ‘appeared to express’, instead unequivocally stating that ‘his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery’ (139). On the other hand, we are never told that the creature’s mummy-like skin means anything about his character.
This is a significant exception to the portrayals of ideal and ordinary non-ideal bodies across Shelley’s novels, where she is adamant that body and mind are mutually constituted. Descriptions of the creature’s facial expressions, later in Frankenstein, do fit with Shelley’s physiognomic mode of description where physical details reliably convey what someone is thinking and feeling. In her later novels, Shelley uses the wrinkles in the human face as an index of violent and physically convulsive emotions.36 A physiognomic system is applied xenophobically in Lodore (1835), where the passionate Neapolitan Clarinda has a face ‘too pantomimely expressive […] not to impress disagreeably one accustomed to the composure of the English’, and in a moment of jealous rage her beauty is ‘vanished, changed, melted away and awfully transformed into actual ugliness’.37 Falkner (1837) has an extended physiognomic description of the protagonist’s face, his forehead ‘high and expansive, though somewhat distorted by various lines that spoke more of passion than of thought […] his mouth, rather too large in its proportions, yet grew into beauty when he smiled’.38 The static aspects of the creature’s grotesque, misshapen body are not readable like Falkner’s ‘somewhat distorted’ forehead and his mouth ‘rather too large in its proportions’ (my emphases). Only once the creature begins to experience other people’s reactions to him, and to react violently, does his face become subject to the physiognomy applied to the other characters. In this, Frankenstein’s creature conforms to two key ideas in Bacon’s ‘Of Deformity’ theory, applied by Scott to the Black Dwarf and Geoffrey Hudson: that ‘deformed persons’ are inclined to misanthropy and driven to avenge the contempt they experience from others; and that deformity should thus be considered ‘not as a sign, which is more deceivable, but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect’.39 The creature’s original and consistent deformity is the literal ‘cause’ of his later wrongdoing – neither a retrospective nor predictive ‘sign’ of it.
While the horrors of the creature’s body exceed physiognomic analysis, the physiognomic portraits in Frankenstein do help to secure the literalism of that grotesque body, in one respect. For Shelley, the body is neither an arbitrary signifier of character, nor an unreliable image that might conceal or misrepresent character; rather, there is an essential relationship between the two. She does not apply that interpretive framework in depicting the static aspects of the creature’s body; outwith these localised deployments of horrid realism, however, she insists that body and mind share a single form. The unreadability of the creature’s body exists in a fictional universe where bodies are people. The 1831 edition of Frankenstein adds a scene where Caroline Frankenstein retrieves Elizabeth from the family of Italian peasants who adopted her. Idealising physiognomic portraiture contrasts Elizabeth with the peasant children:
She appeared of a different stock. The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin and very fair. Her hair was the brightest living gold, and despite the poverty of her clothing, seemed to set a crown of distinction on her head. Her brow was clear and ample, her blue eyes cloudless, and the lips and moulding of her face so expressive of sensibility and sweetness that none could behold her without looking on her as of a distinct species, a being heaven-sent, and bearing a celestial stamp in all her features.40
We might tie Shelley’s evident credulity about physiognomic principles to Frankenstein’s fascination with the ‘what’ of a horrific, unmeaning body. I suggest that Shelley’s mind-body equation – to which she makes the creature’s static deformity an exception – supports horrid realism’s literalisation of the creature, obstructing interpretations of the novel that understand the creature’s body as a symbol, or as a deviation from a socially constructed norm, and/or as an ‘image’ or ‘stereotype’.
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder see the creature’s narrative as ‘an allegorical moment in literary history where those constructed as physically deviant assail those who would create them in that image’, and Paul Youngquist argues that the creature takes ‘vengeance on the bodies that the norm so invisibly advantages’.41 Lee Sterrenburg interprets Shelley’s narrative as an allegory of political ‘monstering’: written in ‘a postrevolutionary era when collective political movements no longer appear viable’, the novel ‘asks what it is like to be labelled, defined, and even physically distorted by a political stereotype’.42 We can imagine Shelley’s sympathy with her parents’ experience of being targeted by anti-jacobin discourse.
Alternatively, we can read the creature’s body as symbolic of political ‘deformity’, looking to the variety of monstrosity imagery in Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s writings, as well as in Burke’s Reflections and Paine’s Rights of Man.43 Such readings of Frankenstein resonate with the political satirical prints of the 1790s, not because the novel was directly influenced by them, but because Gillray and the Cruikshanks were participating in a common stream of spectral and monstrous imagery, some of which originated in literary and classical texts,44 as well as textual sources such as Burke’s Reflections, Barruel’s Mémoires and the Austrian ambassador Count von Starhemberg’s satirical pamphlet on Bonaparte, Le Grand Homme, printed by the Anti-Jacobin in 1801. Gillray’s print German-Nonchalence, or the Vexation of little-Boney (1803), for example, depicts an undersized Bonaparte consumed with Rumpelstiltskin-like rage on the steps of the Palais de Tuileries as the ambassador speeds past in a carriage. Thereafter dwarfism, often coupled with disproportion, became common in the British satirical prints’ depictions of Napoleon. Taken out of context, some of my observations about gigantic/dwarfish bodies might be subordinated to theories that the body of Frankenstein’s creature contains an allegory of republicanism as political monstrosity, or that aspects of the creature’s body encode Shelley’s anxiety about the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. I am interested here in the ways that such perceptive readings of the creature’s body as a constructed, symbolic or specious ‘monstrosity’ – valid readings essential to our understanding of Frankenstein’s unrestricted complexity and powerful legacy – stumble across Frankenstein’s bodies: both the essentialism of Shelley’s mind-body equation, and the literalism of the prosaic grotesque body.
Straight Clothes and Mortal Faces: Non-fiction Precedents for Horror’s Flesh-Caricatures
Frankenstein broke new ground for modern ‘genre fiction’ with a distinctive realist mode for representing a familiar premise – the Promethean creation of a human being – and the consequent events as though they were physical facts open to minute observation. Scholarship on Frankenstein has examined the scientific texts and theories influential on the novel’s representation of Victor animating his creature with an electrical ‘spark of being’ (38); vivisections and experimental surgeries, perhaps including John Hunter’s auto-transplants of the 1760s, would also have made Frankenstein’s premise seem more plausible to Shelley’s first readers. In the last section of this chapter, I look at several non-fiction precedents for Victor’s construction of a disproportioned, distorted and discoloured body, quoting from texts that created ‘flesh-caricatures’ as objects of lurid description between 1690 and 1818. Literature about the medical care of infants and the education of children popularised concepts of the human body’s plasticity, explaining how the body could be literally ‘caricatured’ through constant physical pressure. Parents and caregivers were advised that the physical convulsions caused by strong emotions could, with repetition, distort children’s faces. General reference works as well as specialised medical texts conveyed Hippocrates’s famously graphic description of diverse symptoms seen to distort the face of a person close to death. Thus grounded in medical and advice literature whose images are presented to readers as facts, the flesh-caricature cannot be safely bracketed as an extraordinary ‘freak’ or exiled to the realm of the fantastic. Frankenstein’s descriptions of distorted bodies and faces, I argue, would have activated nineteenth-century readers’ awareness of swaddled, convulsed and moribund bodies as prosaic horror.
Up to the eighteenth century, it was common practice in Britain, as elsewhere in Western Europe, to bind new-born children tightly in ‘swaddling cloths’ and ‘stay bands’, primarily with the intention of making the limbs grow straight. Physicians began to caution that swaddling actually caused physical deformities when done improperly, and that it prevented infants from exercising their limbs – but opinion was slow to change. John Locke, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), was one of the first publicly to advocate abandoning the practice altogether. Locke refers to ‘straight clothes’, grouping swaddling cloths with the highly structured and constrictive undergarments that in Britain were commonly worn by children as well as adults, and at all levels of society, to shape the upper body’s proportions and posture: bodices, stays, jumps and (by the end of the eighteenth century, following French fashion) quilted waistcoats without bones, corsets. Cosmetological foundation garments, Locke warns, causes respiratory problems by compressing the chest, and by restricting blood circulation, make a person misshapen and disproportioned. Presenting his reader with the exotic image of ‘a pair of China shoes’, Locke seeks to defamiliarise the foundation garments then known in Britain as ‘bodies’:
Narrow breasts, short and stinking breath, ill lungs, and crookedness, are natural and almost constant effects of hard bodice, and clothes that pinch. That way of making slender wastes, and fine shapes, serves but the more effectually to spoil them. Nor can there indeed but be disproportion in the parts, when the nourishment prepared in the several offices of the body cannot be distributed as nature designs. And therefore what wonder is it, if, it being laid where it can, on some part not so braced, it often makes a shoulder or hip higher or bigger than its just proportion? ’Tis generally known, that the women of China […] by bracing and binding them hard from their infancy, have very little feet. I saw lately a pair of China shoes, which I was told were for a grown woman: they were so exceedingly disproportion’d to the feet of one of the same age among us, that they would scarce have been big enough for one of our little girls. Besides this, ’tis observed, that their women are also very little, and short-liv’d; whereas the men are of the ordinary stature of other men, and live to a proportionable age. These defects in the female sex in that country, are by some imputed to the unreasonable binding of their feet, whereby the free circulation of the blood is hinder’d, and the growth and health of the whole body suffers. And how often do we see, that some small part of the foot being injur’d by a wrench or blow, the whole leg or thigh thereby lose their strength and nourishment, and dwindle away? How much greater inconveniences may we expect, when the thorax, wherein is placed the heart and seat of life, is unnaturally compress’d, and hindr’d from its due expansion?45
Over the eighteenth century, and influenced by Locke’s and Rousseau’s criticism of swaddling bands and foundation garments, physicians begin to express the idea that the bracing and binding of growing bodies is inevitably harmful. William Cadogan, in his Essay upon Nursing (1748), not only rejects swaddling cloths but recommends loose clothing – ‘a little Flannel Waistcoat without Sleeves, made to fit the Body’ – and no stockings or shoes until the child is three years old. Like Locke, Cadogan reasons that circulation, ‘restrained by the Compression of any one Part, must produce unnatural Swellings in some other; especially as the Fibres of Infants are so easily distended’ – hence ‘the many Distortions and Deformities we meet with every where’.46
Later in the eighteenth century, the horrid specifics of straight clothes’ impact on growing bodies continue to fascinate writers in philosophical and political arguments where physical monstrosity serves to make a point about something else. In Émile, while the British mania for swaddling clothes and foundation garments illustrates Rousseau’s argument that ‘human nature’ is distorted by ‘irrational’ customs and institutions, Rousseau is fascinated, in the first place, with the material facts of neonatal swaddling, and how the practice constricts the body to the point of moribundity:
A new-born infant requires to be at liberty to move and stretch its limbs, to shake off that numbness in which, moulded together in a heap, they have remained so long. They are stretched out, it is true, but they are prevented from moving: Even the head itself is rendered immoveable by stay-bands: So that one would imagine the nurses were afraid the poor creature should have the appearance of being alive. […] More compressed, more confined, and less at ease in his swaddling-cloaths than its mother’s womb, I see not what it has gained by its birth.
Since, Rousseau observes, ‘to live is not merely to breathe; it is to act, to make a proper use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, and of all those parts of the human frame which contribute to the consciousness of our existence’, swaddling imposes a kind of living death. He compares the child ‘bound up in swaddling-cloaths’ to a dead man ‘nailed down in his coffin’ (19). By immobilising the infant, the caregiver frustrates its physical efforts, congests its physiological processes, dampens its sensations and generally limits its corporeal experiences. Rousseau moves on to discuss the lasting physical deformities that result from swaddling and straight clothes:
This state of inaction, and constraint, in which the limbs of infants are confined, cannot fail to prevent the free circulation of the blood […]. In countries where no such extravagant precautions are taken, the people are tall, robust, and well-proportioned: […] those where infants are thus treated, swarm with hunch-backed, crooked-legged, lame, rickety, and deformed persons of every kind.47
As he points out, in some countries, swaddling does not end with infancy: adults wear fashionable clothing that is supposed to improve the body’s shape and posture, but which might actually deform their bodies. English women, says Rousseau, are notorious in Europe for their ‘Gothic fetters […] numerous ligatures, which check the circulation, and confine the different limbs’.48 By the mid-eighteenth century, it was recognised that women typically wore more compressing foundation garments, with Cadogan noting that ‘[w]omen […] suffer more in this Particular than the men’;49 and later in the century, Wollstonecraft, picking up Locke’s reference to Chinese foot-binding customs, laments that ‘[t]o preserve personal beauty, woman’s glory! the limbs and faculties are cramped with worse than Chinese bands’ (Vindication 41).
Thus, in the Romantic period, foundation garments could readily be seen by intellectuals and the well-read as an outdated practice of ‘abortive’ cosmetology with horrific effects.50 Godwin’s claim that a government ‘fettered’ by individual interests and failings produces a society ‘distorted in every joint, abortive and monstrous’ might seem to mix metaphors about chains and childbirth, presenting the reader with vague imagery and abstracted ‘distortion’ and ‘monstrosity’.51 But for readers familiar with Locke’s and Rousseau’s graphic passages of body horror about straight clothes, such language would have evoked the straight-laced body. Breathing but not living, it is immobilised by bands, bones and laces, reshaped by the blockage of vital fluid.
In terms of practical advice to parents and caregivers, one of the most authoritative voices on the physical care of children in the mid- to late eighteenth century was the Scottish physician William Buchan. His book Domestic Medicine (1769) was in its seventeenth edition by 1800, and was followed by a sequel focused on childcare, Advice to Mothers (1804). Echoing Locke and Cadogan on the plasticity of the body, Buchan describes the infant as ‘a bundle of soft pipes, replenished with fluids in constant motion’. 52 Whereas Rousseau imagines the womb as a confined space, Buchan instructs his reader that the womb actually protects the developing body from ‘unequal pressure’ by ‘surround[ing] the foetus every where with fluids’ (9). Swaddling does the opposite:
Even the bones of an infant are so soft and cartilaginous, that they readily yield to the slightest pressure, and easily take on a bad shape, which can never after be remedied. Hence it is, that so many people appear with high shoulders, crooked spines and flat breasts, who were born with as good a shape as others, but had the misfortune to be squeezed into monsters by the application of stays and bandages.
Pressure, by obstructing the circulation, prevents the equal distribution of nourishment to the different parts of the body, by which means the growth becomes unequal. One part of the body grows too large, while another remains too small, and thus in time the whole frame becomes disproportioned and misshapen.
According to Buchan, swaddling clothes also cause dangerous fevers (by making the infant too hot), respiratory diseases (by constricting the lungs), and convulsions (by piercing the child with pins used to secure the cloths). Buchan describes a horrific instance of pins ‘found sticking above half an inch into the body of a child after it had died of convulsion-fits’ (11). Whereas in Domestic Medicine, Buchan blames infant deformity on midwives, accusing them of promoting swaddling as a valuable professional skill (8), it is no coincidence that Advice to Mothers plays on maternal anxiety by blaming female parents for a remarkable ‘ninety-nine’ per cent of ‘all cases of dwarfishness and deformity’.53 Buchan claims that the majority of women in London are ‘of a diminutive stature’ and ‘distorted either in body or limbs’, deformed by ‘the tightness of their dress […] and the artificial moulding or pretended improvement of their shape when young’ (262–63): women, themselves especially deformed, must be kept from passing on that deformity to the next generation.
It was also thought that children could become disproportioned when mothers sustained physical injuries or undertook certain physical activities. The Quaker-educated engraver James Peller Malcolm, in his Historical Sketch of the Art of Caricaturing, supposes that Quakers are ‘well-made people’ because Quaker women avoid ‘mixing in the usual amusements of the world’ and escape ‘those accidents which would cause caricatured lineaments in their offspring’ by interfering with the infant’s physical formation:
Nature […] being interrupted, makes a forehood too high or too low […]. The causes of the interruptions alluded to cannot be inquired into at present: they more properly belong to the Surgeon; but they may safely, in most cases, be attributed to the want of due care and circumspection in the mothers of those persons whose features or limbs are thus distorted.54
Sexual intercourse is one of the ‘interruptions’ Malcolm alludes to. Buchan’s Advice to Mothers, addressed to a general audience, refers delicately to mothers’ ‘folly and misconduct’ causing physical deformity.55 This idea is discussed more explicitly in medical texts: Walter Harris’s A Full View of All the Diseases Incident to Children (1742) correlates rickets – a disease that distorts the bones of the legs – with the mother’s having ‘indulg[ed] herself in Indolence while with child’ or ‘an intemperate use of Venery, during the Time of Pregnancy’.56 As David Turner has shown, eighteenth-century prescriptive writing about child-rearing was generally ‘saturated with notions of parental guilt and blame, which began even before conception itself’.57 The notion of Victor as parent to a deformed child, an ‘abortion’, can be made coherent with Ellen Moers’s reading of the novel as ‘a birth myth’ representing ‘the trauma of afterbirth’ through ‘the motif of revulsion against newborn life’,58 or with Anne K. Mellor’s argument that ‘Frankenstein is a book about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman.’59 My analysis of Frankenstein’s horrid realism, as the set of tropes and techniques whereby Shelley presents grotesque bodies, offers a somewhat different interpretation: that in minutely exploring the prosaic ramifications of creating an exceptionally deformed being, Shelley re-purposes language, imagery and ideas from the ‘flesh-caricatures’ of influential prescriptive texts that imagine swaddling and straight clothes distorting and deadening the human body.
Shelley’s descriptions of the creature’s face, grimacing and wrinkled, suggest another commonly held idea about the physical deforming of children by parents and caregivers, that faces were permanently distorted by facial contortions in excited emotional states. As Malcolm puts it, by failing to subdue children’s emotions, ‘parents and guardians are too frequently Caricaturists’. More interesting, however, is the way that the creature’s face – his original features as well as his impassioned grimaces later in the novel – might be physiologically associated with the dead or dying body. Echoing Rousseau’s notion of the swaddled child as suspended between life and death, Malcolm describes the body of a child exhausted by unchecked anger: ‘the blood stagnating, the eyes flare, and the face becomes black, the body convulsed—and this is the caricature of Vexation’.60 Lifeless, distorted and discoloured: the child flesh-caricatured by emotions recalls Browne’s metaphorical association of caricature portraiture with the Hippocratic face. As described in the Prognosticon or Book of Prognostics, the dying face was supposed to appear misshapen by concavities, as well as discoloured: ‘hollow eyes, the temples collapse, the ears cold and contracted, the lobes inverted, the skin about the forehead hard, tense, and dry, with the whole face of a palish green, black, livid, or leaden hue’.61 It is to the prognosis of the Hippocratic face that Shakespeare refers in Mistress Quickly’s account of Falstaff’s face on his deathbed: ‘his nose was as sharp as a pen’ (Henry V act 2, scene 3). Browne elaborates on Hippocrates’s description with an analogy to the graphic caricature portrait, emphasising changes in the body’s proportions, as well as the shape and colour of the face, as presages of death:
Some are so curious as to observe the depth of the Throat-pit, how the proportion varieth of the Small of the Legs unto the Calf, or the compass of the Neck unto the Circumference of the Head: but all these, with many more, were so drowned in a mortal Visage and last Face of Hippocrates, that a weak Physiognomist might say at first eye, This was a face of Earth, and that Morta had set her Hard-Seal upon his Temples, easily perceiving what Caricatura Draughts Death makes upon pined faces.62
In physical descriptions of the creature and of Elizabeth’s dead body, Shelley’s horrid realism substitutes the speaking faces of moral physiognomy with the diverse, incoherent details of mortal physiognomy, whose only meaning is death. While the creature has ‘yellow skin’, some of Shelley’s readers, noticing the creature’s ‘straight black lips’, would have associated his appearance with the Hippocratic face (F 39), partly explaining Thomas Cooke’s choice of green or blue face paint when he played the creature onstage in the 1820s. The symptoms of the ‘facies Hippocratica’ or ‘Hippocratic countenance’ – also referred to as the ‘moribund’ or ‘cadaverous face’ – were common knowledge and were described in several general reference works, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as specialised medical dictionaries, which usually transcribed a translation of the relevant passage in the Prognostics. Bartholomew Parr’s London Medical Dictionary (1809), for example, describes a ‘countenance pale, greenish, or dark’.63 Shelley’s descriptions of the creature’s ‘clouded eyes’ F (154) refer to another of Hippocrates’s prognostics of death, the cornea’s loss of transparency: Moffat’s 1788 translation describes eyes ‘of a nasty, dry, dull appearance’.64 Overall, Shelley draws on numerous aspects of the facies Hippocratica by detailing the grotesque mortal face as an incoherent combination of still-beautiful features (hair, teeth), a distorted expression, unnatural and contrasting colours, and skin that is dry in texture and stretched over bone.
Victor and Walton both remark that the creature appears mummified, Frankenstein claiming that ‘[a] mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch’ (F 40) and Walton noticing hands ‘in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy’ (187). Might this reference to mummies, wrapped in layers of linen to preserve the body’s shape and upright posture, have recalled the distorting pressure of straight clothes? Noticing how Victor ‘collected bones from charnel houses’ (36) – presumably bones from which flesh has already rotted – and that the creature’s ‘yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath’ (39), might readers have visualised skin pulled tight like swaddling bands? In Shelley’s horrid realism, the prosaic horrors of straight clothes, physical convulsions and the Hippocratic face form a mesh of incoherent details that literalise the grotesque body into a flesh-caricature, continually pulling on the critical readings that would abstract it. Repetitively using highly visualised moments of fear and disgust, Shelley’s techniques of horrid realism – and the horror realisms that followed – baffle the reader or viewer’s ability to imagine the body as other than what it materially is.
In Shelley’s fiction, as in Scott’s, tropes and techniques of horrid realism are localised to descriptions of grotesquely distorted bodies. But whereas Scott’s gigantic dwarfs – David Ritchie, Rob Roy MacGregor, Jeffrey Hudson and other court dwarfs – are historicised and subordinated to the novels’ compendious realism, Shelley centres the grotesque body and its de-characterising power such that Frankenstein and ‘Transformation’ pioneer horror writing as a distinct genre. Shelley’s creature and Scott’s dwarfs, followed by Dickens’s Quilp and Hugo’s Quasimodo, provided key concepts, tropes and techniques for a horror tradition of disproportioned and partitioned characters. The narrator of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), for example, describes Moreau’s creations as ‘grotesque caricatures of humanity’ and ‘horrible caricatures of my Maker’s image’, echoing phrases from The Black Dwarf and Frankenstein; and in addition to graphic descriptions that partition the monsters into divergent features, Wells uses the words ‘disproportion’, ‘misshapen’ and ‘distorted’: the same shorthand Shelley and Scott use for their depictions of grotesque bodies.65 Frankenstein’s combination of horrid realism with a speculative narrative made another major contribution to the subject matter of ‘body horror’ fiction: the idea of flesh-caricatures being literally manufactured through human creativity, skill and perversity. ‘Manufactured monster’ narratives ground their premises in ‘real’ or historical precedents, sometimes fictionalised or sensationalised. The premise of L’Homme qui Rit (1869) is the fictional history of a nomadic society – the ‘Comprachicos’ – who make a living from buying and kidnapping children whom they physically deform and display for entertainment. Inspired by the Chinese practices of foot-binding and of miniaturised penjing (or penzai) trees, Hugo invents the practice of ‘croissance en bouteille’, whereby a growing infant is stunted and deformed by being confined, day and night, to a vase. ‘C’est commode’, the narrator comments sarcastically, ‘on peut d’avance se commander son nain de la forme qu’on veut’.66 Dr Moreau, in a one-sided dialogue with the novel’s protagonist, gives a long list of precedents for the novel’s flesh-caricaturing, including John Hunter’s cock-spur experiments and ‘those mediaeval practitioners who made dwarfs and beggar-cripples, show-monsters […]. Victor Hugo gives an account of them’.67 In twentieth-century body horror, flesh-caricatures can be explained by the redistribution of atoms (such as in George Langelaan’s mystery-horror story ‘The Fly’, first published in Playboy in 1957) or the manipulation of DNA (such as in David Cronenburg’s 1986 film interpretation of Langelaan’s premise).
This strain of body horror follows Frankenstein in its convention of revealing the methods of flesh-caricaturing, explained and described prosaically rather than presented as an unsystematised magic. The first of many horror realisms in narrative fiction, Shelley’s horrid realism assembles distinctive tropes and techniques in an effort to visualise grotesque bodies and flesh-caricatures, rather than leave the reader to imagine them (or not). In these bold moments of representing fictional characters’ bodies more prosaically and literally, caricature is made flesh and ‘character’ is put in quotation marks. Whereas comic, compendious and historical realisms are understood, in the Romantic period, to elicit pseudo-sensory and parasocial pleasure through particularised and varied characters, Shelley’s ‘horrid realism’ models a formal realism that elicits pseudo-sensory revulsion in ways new to novelistic fiction, through flesh-caricature’s de-characterisation of the human.
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