Intertextual dialogue with Victorian literature in the novels by Sarah Ann Waters as a means of implementing feminist issues

The article presents an analysis of the implementation of the category of intertextuality in the novel «Affinity» (1999) by the British writer Sarah Ann Waters. The aim of the work was to trace how the intertextual dialogue with the Victorian literature contributes to the formation of the feminist issues of the work. It is revealed that the main pretexts when creating a novel for Waters were «Little Dorrit» by Charles John Huffam Dickens, «Aurora Leigh» by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, «The Turn of the Screw» by Henry James, and novels by William Wilkie Collins. «Affinity» has elements of Gothic narrative, a detective, a sensational novel, the Newgate novel, picaresque novel, contributing to the formation of women's issues. The dialogue with Victorianism allows Waters to raise issues of gender inequality in the past and present, the exploitation of women, and the rights of individuals to realise their sexual identity. For Waters, turning to Victorianism is a way to draw attention to issues that, according to the writer, are still topical in British culture, such as sexuality, class and gender.

The Epic Tradition

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

Introduction

WHEN AURORA LEIGH, the eponymous poet-protagonist of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806–61) epic ‘novel in verse,’ discovers that ‘In England, no one lives by verse that lives,’ she moves beyond the rarefied sphere of poetry to secure a regular income by writing for the periodical press (1993: 3.307). Like many Victorian poets, Aurora writes for ‘cyclopedias, magazines, / And weekly papers’ (3.310), undertaking what she considers to be inferior hack work that appeals to the taste of ‘light readers’ (3.319). For Aurora, poetry, as a cerebral and pure form of art, should not be tainted by the vulgar dictates of the commercial marketplace. While Barrett Browning would have acquiesced with the spirit of the value-laden dichotomy that Aurora identifies between writing for art and writing for the market, she nevertheless balanced her own sense of poetry’s elevated artistic value against a pragmatic understanding of the cultural and economic significance of periodicals for the careers of literary authors. Her first publicly published poems appeared in the ...