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The Coterie as Commodity: Huxley, Lawrence, Rhys, and the Business of Revenge

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even ... More

The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.Less

Open Secrets and Hidden Truths: Wilde and Freud

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly ... More

By the end of the 19th century, the realist novel’s distinctive mode of organizing social, historical, and aesthetic knowledge came under increasing pressure from the roman à clef. Amidst a rapidly expanding, mass-mediated celebrity, this long suppressed genre abruptly emerged from the margins of culture to play a key role in the founding texts of modernism. Using the work of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, this chapter contends that these two figures help initiate the onset of modernism precisely by turning toward the roman à clef, releasing narrative powers they quickly realized were well beyond their control. Unlike most of his predecessors, Freud regularly adopted the conventions of the roman à clef for his case studies, using this device as a way to mask (and sometimes mutilate) the identities of his often affluent patients while exploring the fraught boundary between fact and fiction in their psychic lives. Wilde, too, exploits these same ambiguities throughout his work. Like Freud, he attempts to cultivate and to exploit a central, organizing secret in his work that articulates the provisional identities and social practices hovering imprecisely between history and the novel.Less

Introduction: Fact, Fiction, and Pleasure

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

As gateway to the book’s arguments, this chapter broadly explores the shadowy history of the roman à clef and its intersection with the collection of narrative innovations we now call modernism. ... More

As gateway to the book’s arguments, this chapter broadly explores the shadowy history of the roman à clef and its intersection with the collection of narrative innovations we now call modernism. Because the roman à clef depends upon an unstable mixture of fact and fiction, it presents a unique set of critical, aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological challenges. This has often led readers and scholars to dismiss it as mere ephemera, but this chapter argues that modernist writers drew on its unstable structures in order to launch their own thoroughgoing critique of literary realism. Understanding modernism thus requires us to take the roman à clef seriously and this chapter develops a pragmatic, social theory of genre criticism to locate it squarely within a larger history of narrative. Doing so, however, reveals that the roman à clef has an uncanny agency of its own and thus cannot be easily constrained either by the authors who invoke it or the critics who attempt to understand its complex workings.Less

True Fictions and False Histories: The Secret Rise of the Roman à Clef

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

A history of the roman à clef’s slow rise and abrupt decline, this chapter explores its invention in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it at once contested and facilitated the emergent novel’s claim ... More

A history of the roman à clef’s slow rise and abrupt decline, this chapter explores its invention in the 17th and 18th centuries, where it at once contested and facilitated the emergent novel’s claim to moral authority and aesthetic autonomy. Both narrative forms developed unique yet interrelated strategies for negotiating the expanding divide between history and fiction. The novel’s eventual rise, in fact, came to depend precisely on its ability to suppress and eventually supplant the far more disruptive—and innovative—energies of the roman à clef. This chapter first explores the ways in which the two genres became intertwined with one another in texts like Moll Flanders and Clarissa. It then traces the subtle ways in the novel eventually managed to incorporate elements of its shadowy double, which was, in turn, roundly denigrated as inartistic and insipid. The earlier genre did not disappear entirely, however, but continued to stalk the novel in works like Dickens’s Bleak House and Disraeli’s Coningsby. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the anarchic and innovative potential of the roman à clef, a genre whose energies had only been temporarily constrained rather than fully controlled.Less

The Novel at the Bar: Joyce, Lewis, and Libel

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes ... More

This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes of God. Both drew heavily on their own lives—as well as those of nearly everyone they knew—to launch a deliberate critique of the moral, aesthetic, and legal divide between fact and fiction. This forms, in fact, a fundamental aspect of their high modernist aesthetics. The interpenetration of world and text in their major works, however, also led both men into often grave legal trouble, putting their books in limbo and, in Lewis’s case, leading to a seemingly endless string of crippling lawsuits. Far from purely extraliterary events, these legal entanglements are instead an organizing component of the works themselves: the core element of a largely forgotten modernism structured around social, aesthetic, and legal contests between fiction and reality. Forged and circulated in this complex field of force, this chapter examines the ways these experimental texts not only exploit the ambiguities of libel law but are themselves inevitably constrained by its potent ability to adjudicate fact and thereby define the limits of fiction.Less

Libel: Policing the Laws of Fiction

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by ... More

Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by plaintiffs entirely unknown to them. This chapter surveys the surprisingly rich yet almost entirely unexplored intersection between literature and libel in the period by providing a broad overview of key cases and legal decisions. As writers increasingly experimented with the roman à clef, judges, juries, and eventually legislators in Great Britain struggled to maintain a clear legal conception of fiction—and the consequences were broad and far-reaching. Publishers demanded sometimes vast changes to manuscripts and the inherent conservatism of libel law became, in the words of one commentator, a “terror to authorship.” Following the particularly far-reaching case of E. Hulton & Co. v. Jones in 1909, the novel itself seemed to teeter on the edge of illegality as the courts proved almost incapable of meeting both the legal and aesthetic challenged posed by the roman à clef’s ability to broach the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a short digest of key acts and legal decisions in Britain and Ireland.Less

Histories of Rebellion: From 1688 to 1793

Patrick Parrinder

in Nation & Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day

History has been used in different novels during the late 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. A connection between romance and history is explored in the chapter. Several writers ... More

History has been used in different novels during the late 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. A connection between romance and history is explored in the chapter. Several writers recommend that history romance be written in a natural way in the same way that history itself employs. Roman à clef, a way of narrating a ‘secret’ history through fiction, also became a popular literary form during this time. Other instances where fictions could be disguised to avoid censorship are examined in the chapter. Samuel Richardson's Virtue and Rebellion and several works of Tobias Smollet are all reviewed in the chapter to decipher their connection to the political events that happened.Less

The Problem of Collusion: Manley's The New Atalantis

Toni Bowers

in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760

Delarivier Manley's fictional narratives dramatize and valorize new‐tory principles in their deployment of seduction topoi. The New Atalantis (1709), Manley's most famous roman à clef and the ... More

Delarivier Manley's fictional narratives dramatize and valorize new‐tory principles in their deployment of seduction topoi. The New Atalantis (1709), Manley's most famous roman à clef and the centerpiece of this chapter, uses ad hominem satire to attack individual Whig partisans and general whig principles, and does so through a series of scenes representing relations of “collusive resistance” within “force or fraud.” Close readings of key interpolated seduction tales from Atalantis demonstrate the importance of the seventeenth‐century topoi inherited by (and transformed in) eighteenth‐century seduction stories to new‐tory self‐justifications. In Manley's work in particular, these inherited topoi also contribute directly to the construction of a viable Tory partisan identity in the first decades of the eighteenth century.Less

Old Friends

in Byron in Geneva: That Summer of 1816

Coppet's tripartite division could accommodate members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, the visiting English, the local intellectuals of a liberal cast, and some princes, dukes, and titled ... More

Coppet's tripartite division could accommodate members of Madame de Staël's immediate family, the visiting English, the local intellectuals of a liberal cast, and some princes, dukes, and titled dignitaries from continental Europe. Part of de Staël's small family group was Jean Rocca, who was rumoured to be her lover despite being much younger than her. In truth, Rocca and de Staël had been secretly married in 1811. Born in 1766 and widowed in 1802, de Staël was known for falling for handsome young men who could match her intellectually. One such man was Benjamin Constant, who wrote a novel entitled Adolphe to describe his early experience of trying to break up with de Staël. Whereas Adolphe is a modified roman à clef, another novel, Glenarvon, is a glaring example of the genre and one which cannot be considered a masterpiece. Glenarvon was Caroline Lamb's fictionalised account of her affair with Lord Byron.Less

Very Serious Books: The Circulation and Censorship of The Well of Loneliness and Sleeveless Errand

Chris Forster

in Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less ... More

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.Less

Alive and kicking: H. G. Wells

Jerome Boyd Maunsell

in Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography

This chapter begins with an account of H. G. Wells’s extremely autobiographical tendencies in his fiction, and discomfort with these elements. The World of William Clissold (1926), a late novel very ... More

This chapter begins with an account of H. G. Wells’s extremely autobiographical tendencies in his fiction, and discomfort with these elements. The World of William Clissold (1926), a late novel very close to “an” autobiography, is discussed early on. The chapter then examines Wells’s thoughts about the genre of biography, before moving on to his “formal” autobiographies: the two-volume Experiment in Autobiography (1934), and his posthumous autobiography H. G. Wells in Love (1984). The implicatory nature of autobiography and its impact on others is discussed, as well as the revision of autobiography, as Wells rewrote his life in official and more explicit, secret posthumous versions. The biographical circumstances around the writing of all three volumes, beginning in the spring of 1932, are explored in detail. Wells’s portrayals of Conrad, Ford, and James are also studied, as are his satirical “picshuas,” his notions of character, and his relations with women.Less