Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities

Abstract

Victorian Studies and the Two Modernities Amanda Anderson (bio) Why, despite increasing self-reflexivity, internal critique, and instructive defections on the part of other fields, does Victorian studies refuse to abandon the all-too-apparent limitations of its own field designation? Why do we keep the name "Victorian studies"? Doubtless several factors contribute to this state of affairs. There remains a lingering disaffiliation with Romanticism on the question of founding theoretical investments and governing generic emphases, a tension that makes the alternative anodyne designation of "nineteenth century" seem less available, though certainly some have opted or argued for it (see Marcus). And while the term "Victorian" remains anachronistically wedded to the person of the queen, it nonetheless manages to indicate the primacy of history, as well as the notion of a unified era, which allows for an assumable social totality or unified culture. This conceptual chain becomes important in facilitating approaches—Marxist and Foucauldian, for example—that rely on such comprehensive analytical concepts. In its metonymical flexibility with respect to the disciplines of history and literature, moreover, the term "Victorian" performs a certain tacit insistence on literature and history as a privileged interdisciplinary dyad. One might argue that even at its inception, the interdisciplinary commitment of Victorian Studies, announced in the inaugural issue in 1957, tilted toward history as its primary disciplinary partner: Victorian Studies hopes to capture something of the life of that era, to discuss its events and personalities, and to interpret and appraise its achievement. will publish work addressed to all students of the Victorian age. (1: 3) Characterizing the field as devoted to an "era" and an "age" makes history seem its most natural disciplinary interlocutor (or even conscience), and it remains the case that interdisciplinary outreach on [End Page 195] the part of literary critics has seemed easiest with historians. But why, one wonders, would literary scholars of the period from roughly 1830 to 1900 decide that the discipline of history should be their privileged interlocutor or judge? Why not, instead, philosophy, political theory, anthropology, sociology, or psychology? It is this question I want to focus on here, and I am particularly interested in what it would mean to give primacy to political philosophy or political theory as a disciplinary partner for Victorian studies. The increasing significance of liberalism as a topic in Victorian studies, as exemplified by the scholarship of, for example, Lauren Goodlad, Elaine Hadley, David Wayne Thomas, and Irene Tucker, seems to suggest that such a line of inquiry is worth exploring. I also want to say at the outset that I am not trying to erect another privileged interdisciplinary dyad or to discount the productive and various interdisciplinary work currently on offer in Victorian studies reaching across several disciplines including anthropology, psychology, and medicine. My aim is to show a series of theoretical patterns that I think might be profitably displaced by the angle of illumination that political theory can provide. My assumption is that similarly profitable displacements might be prompted by other angles of illumination. To pursue this issue, I want to offer a series of observations about the current condition of the field of Victorian studies, some dimensions of which relate to larger contexts of contemporary literary and cultural studies but interact with Victorianism in a period-specific way. My observations are in dialogue with a number of scholars who have reflected on the field in what I think are useful and provocative ways and will extend some of the issues I addressed in The Powers of Distance (2001). My first premise is that the most influential theoretical forces in the field of Victorian studies over the past twenty years have been cultural studies, New Historicism, postcolonialism, and queer theory. Feminism, which has been a significant factor in the field since even before that time, has interacted productively with several of these paradigms. There is, I will argue, a recurrent pattern in the development of these paradigms. Let me begin with the relation of Victorian studies to cultural studies. It has been claimed that because Raymond Williams comprehends both fields and because he places Victorian writers and topics at the heart of Culture and Society (1958), the two fields...