“Come brother Opie!”

Joe Bray, “‘Come brother Opie!’: Amelia Opie and the Courtroom” (pp. 137–162) This essay examines how Amelia Opie’s lifelong fascination with the human drama of the courtroom is reflected in her fiction, specifically in her tales that revolve around trial scenes. Focusing on three examples in particular, “Henry Woodville” (1818), “The Robber” (1806), and “The Mysterious Stranger” (1813), it argues that Opie’s fictional courtrooms encourage an emotional engagement on the part of both characters and narrators, which in turn can be extended to that of the reader. In the case of “The Mysterious Stranger,” a character is on figurative trial throughout, with both narrator and reader frequently in the dark as to her motives. As a result, judgment is both hazardous and uncertain. Through a sympathetic representation of the passions and vicissitudes experienced by all those in the courtroom context, whether real or metaphorical, Opie’s fiction develops a model of readerly participation that adds a new, affective dimension to traditional accounts of the relationship between early-nineteenth-century literature and the law.

Environmental Desire in: The Mill on the Floss

Jayne Hildebrand, “Environmental Desire in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss” (pp. 192–222) This essay argues that George Eliot’s expansive use of landscape description in The Mill on the Floss (1860) represents an engagement with the emerging concept of a biological “medium” or “environment” in the nineteenth-century sciences. In the 1850s, scientific writers including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and G. H. Lewes redefined biological life as dependent on an abstraction called a “medium” or “environment”—a term that united all the objects, substances, and forces in an organism’s physical surroundings into a singular entity. Eliot in The Mill on the Floss draws out the ecological potential of this new biological concept by imbuing the described backgrounds of her novel with a lyrical affect I call “environmental desire,” a diffuse longing for ambient contact with one’s formative medium that offers an ethical alternative to the possessive and object-driven forms of desire that drive the plot of a traditional Bildungsroman. Maggie Tulliver’s marriage plot is structured by a tension between environmental desire and possessive desire, in which her erotic desire for Stephen Guest competes with a more diffuse environmental desire that attaches to the novel’s described backgrounds. Ultimately, the new environment concept enables Eliot to reconceive the Bildungsroman’s usual opposition between self and world as a relationship of nourishment and dependency rather than struggle, and invites a reconsideration of the ecological role of description in the Bildungsroman genre.

“Spoofing Celebrities”

Nicoletta Caputo, “‘Spoofing Celebrities’: Shakespearean Parodies of Edmund Kean” (pp. 163–191) The Romantic age, and theater in particular, figure large in celebrity studies. Edmund Kean was the most celebrated actor and the preeminent Shakespearean interpreter of the time. Kean, however, was also straightforwardly notorious. Exceedingly exhibitionist and extravagant in his personal life, he reveled in scandal. His signature stage role was Richard III, and when, in January 1825, the actor became the target of ferocious parody in the press in consequence of a trial for criminal conversation, this and other Shakespearean roles that he had successfully interpreted over the years were suddenly used to attack him. The essay examines the verbal and visual parodies of Kean based on Shakespeare that were produced for the occasion, focusing on the multilevel appropriation (or misappropriation) of the Bard in the affair.

Miss Marjoribanks’s Pronouns; or, the General, the Particular, and the Novel

Erik Gray, “Miss Marjoribanks’s Pronouns; or, the General, the Particular, and the Novel” (pp. 223–252) The novel as a genre is always concerned with questions of the general and the particular: it details the particulars of everyday lives as representatives of general truths and characteristics. Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866) not only reflects on this familiar binary but also reveals how easily the distinction between its two terms collapses. The tendency of the heroine, Lucilla Marjoribanks, to refer to all men as “They” illustrates this phenomenon. She uses the pronoun, with no antecedent, to refer either to a particular group of men or to men in general; her doing so both demeans men, by grouping them into an indiscriminate mass, and exalts them, by treating them as so significant as to need no introduction. By the same token, Lucilla’s various suitors are at the same time generalized—they appear as nearly interchangeable functions of the marriage plot—and particularized, since marriage itself involves a form of “particular” (Oliphant’s word) attention. And in the election plot that dominates the final volume of the novel, Lucilla’s chosen candidate, Mr. Ashburton, is singled out precisely for being so typical. Miss Marjoribanks thus demonstrates how the very building blocks of narrative, like those of language, effectively confound the distinction between general and particular. In its elucidation of this tendency of the novel genre, and of art in general, lies the genius and importance of Oliphant’s novel.