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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783083350 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2014 |
| Series: | Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 252 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
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William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856-1890
By Ingrid Hanson
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2013 Ingrid HansonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-323-8
CHAPTER 1
THE EARLY ROMANCES AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE TOUCH OF VIOLENCE
In 1856, the year following the publication of Alexander Bain's influential volume of psychophysiology, The Senses and the Intellect, Alfred Tennyson's controversial poem of war, excess and madness, Maud, and Charles Kingsley's historically transposed tale of valiant Elizabethan battle, Westward Ho!, as the much-criticized Crimean War limped to its equivocal end, the young William Morris published his first short stories. They appeared in the shortlived Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, which Morris wrote and edited with his university friends that year. All but one of the eight dreamlike, fragmented tales are set in the heroic medieval past and are concerned with battle, courage, and a search for identity, expressed through the actions and reactions of the individual body.
In the March issue of the magazine was an unsigned article by fellow Oxford student, Richard Watson Dixon, defending the Crimean War and deploring the government's decision to pursue peace negotiations with Russia:
To be summoned to lay down our arms, just at the time when we were becoming habituated to their use, and had nerved ourselves for a long and obstinate struggle; just at the time, moreover, when the tide of success seemed about to set steadily towards us, is in itself a baffling and irritating thing, sufficient to produce lassitude and disgust.
Dixon laments that 'a war so splendidly begun' should be abandoned at this stage. It would be better, he argues, to see through the defeat of Russia and the overthrow of its influence across Europe than to leave the war apparently unfinished, 'the cause of freedom only half-asserted'. The evils of tyranny and oppression could – and should – be overcome by a just and 'gallant' war courageously carried through to completion, which means, in this account, the absolute defeat of the enemy. Yet Dixon goes beyond the use of lofty words or abstract ideals about the politics of war and hints at its fundamental connection with both character and body. The concept of becoming 'habituated' to the use of arms bears traces of the Aristotelian and Thomist idea of habitus, the development of character through repeated choices for good or evil. At the same time it adumbrates a more direct relationship between the action of bearing arms and the nervous reactions of the body itself, resonating with the emerging discourse of Victorian psychology concerning the relationship between body and mind, action, habit and will. Bain's newly published work of psychology stresses the continuity of body and mind, the centrality of the nervous system as a means of communication between them, and the importance of 'muscular and nervous action' in 'confirming a physical habit' and 'forming an intellectual aggregate'; William Carpenter's Principles of Mental Physiology, published in the same year, devotes a whole chapter to the development of 'Intellectual and Moral character' through the habitual actions and thoughts. Doing, knowing and being in the world are intrinsically linked here.
Dixon suggests that withdrawal from war leads to 'lassitude', and 'disgust', words with unavoidably corporeal and sensory implications, carrying the suggestion of a failure of bodily health, energy or pleasure. Bearing arms or ceasing to bear them is not simply a matter of martial obedience or political expedience, he suggests, but rather is able to effect change in the somatic reactions not only of the soldier but also of the society that supports him: this protest is made in the voice of a collective, vicarious 'we' who must 'lay down our arms'. The body and its actions are the locus of meaning here. It is this intimate corporeal understanding of both individual and communal being and identity through the violence of combat that Morris explores in his short stories. While the clarity and moral certainty of Dixon's impassioned defence of war as political strategy for the good of Europe is blurred and revised through the romantic medievalist prism of the stories, its commitment to an idealistic but materially grounded notion of the courageous and necessary work of bearing arms as a means of social renewal and personal transformation underlies their every oneiric twist and turn.
These early romances have received little critical attention, either at the time of their publication or subsequently. Both E. P. Thompson and Fiona MacCarthy make only the briefest of mentions of the stories, linking them to the biographical details of Morris's life. Carole Silver and Amanda Hodgson both consider the short stories in relation to the forms and traditions of romance. Hodgson concentrates on Morris's use of the past, observing that he 'wishes to demonstrate that the realities behind medieval romance were harsh and brutal'. She offers a perceptive discussion of the significance of judgement and revenge in 'The Hollow Land' but stops short of considering the specific uses of violence in any of the stories. Silver pays particular attention to Morris's sources and discusses literary, visual and mythic symbolism in the tales. She notes Morris's focus on violence and death, and gestures towards a central difficulty with his presentation of them: that 'often, his preoccupation with mutilation and decay becomes excessive'. Yet it is this very excess, a deliberate and disturbing extravagance of active violence, that gives meaning to the battles of the stories.
More than this, these romances celebrate the haptic and kinaesthetic development of self and identity through battle, challenging ideas of knowing or being that focus on the purely abstract or even the chromatic or visual, important though these are in the stories. My emphasis on Morris's absorption in and celebration of battle offers an alternative view to the recent brief consideration of the early stories in Eleonora Sasso's Freudian analysis of Morris's violence. Sasso argues that in these romances, 'lust for killing, hatred and destruction is somehow reduced by intense love for family and damozels.' It is my argument, on the contrary, that love is not reduced by, but rather expressed through various kinds of battle. The stories are, for the most part, as Morris's biographer Mackail observes, set in a world of 'pure romance'; historical realities do not apparently impinge upon these often inexplicable fairytale worlds. Their preoccupation with telling tales of deeds in relation to battle recalls the heroic sagas and chivalric romances whose influence is specifically acknowledged in epigraphs, quotations or direct references, while the emphasis on perception reflects a more subjective consciousness.
Yet their representations of just and unjust battle and their focus on courage and cowardice, leadership and honour, draw at least some of their power from the contemporary context of the Crimean War. They are, after all, stories written during that unsuccessful but well reported and publicly discussed war, for which Morris's close friend Edward Burne-Jones proposed joining up in 1855. Not only the war itself but also other writings on it feature repeatedly in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, from Dixon's opinion pieces early in the year to the review, in the December issue, of Sydney Dobell's 1856 volume England in Time of War. The romances' preoccupation with the geography and corporeality of violence, then, suggests an engagement, however displaced, with contemporary ideas of duty, war, conquest and social change. They are exploratory tales in which the various effects and manifestations of violence shape the lives and relationships of individuals, communities and the lands they live in. The lacerations of skin and flesh produced by violence open doorways to new kinds of perception and new, tactile understandings of the world, just as, in 'Golden Wings', the young Lionel's slaying of the unknown knight at his door opens a new understanding of his own identity and a new path into the world for him ('Golden Wings', 293).
The violence of battle is central to Morris's stories as a means of altering both reality and perception. The relationship between subject and object, self and the world is re-examined through the practice of violence; in the process the meaning of violence and the nature of human relations are redefined. Violence is not secondary or incidental, but physically detailed and essential. Like the knights of the Morte Darthur, which Morris read and reread in his university years and later, his characters come to an understanding of themselves and the world through the actions of their bodies in combat: as Jill Mann observes, 'the knight realizes himself and his destiny, the nature and events that chance has willed to him, in the long succession of physical engagements with his fellows'. This emphasis on chance, so central to combat, runs alongside the emerging ideas of individual will and choice developed through physical action and habit that are important not only to Morris's developing thinking but also to wider social, religious and political concerns that converged in contemporary psychological discourses such as Bain's, as Rick Rylance points out. Yet the tales turn away from the exploration of cause and effect on which such discourses rely, to portray instead the irrational relations between self and others forged through the physical contingencies of violence. The battles of his stories involve hands-on, close-up physical contact; in portraying them, Morris turns his back on the political complexities of his own age and its compromises in war to embrace the apparently simpler, blunter and more direct interactions of medieval times and tales.
Nonetheless his stance betrays its Victorian origins. His stories, like the writings of Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson and Kingsley, form part of what Edward Burne-Jones called 'this most godly crusade against falsehood, doubt, and wretched fashion, against hypocrisy and mammon, and lack of earnestness'. Like Morris's and Burne-Jones's earlier, abandoned plans to found a monastic Brotherhood, this is a crusade that subscribes to an idealized vision of knightly manhood. Morris's contribution to the crusade offers certain kinds of violence as an antidote to others, bearers of falsehood and doubt, hypocrisy and mammon; it does not engage with individual or social alternatives to violence as a means of transformation. Neither the pacific economic values of mid-Victorian capitalism nor the anti-sacramentalism of the low church theology of Morris's childhood have any place in a world where meaning is expressed and honour gained through prowess in battle. The shedding of blood is physically brutal and immanently meaningful in these stories. Morris has no literary truck with the idealistic Free Trade pacifism of William Cobden, John Bright and the Peace Society, vocally opposed to the Crimean War; neither does he engage with the pragmatics of war. Instead, the temporally distanced chivalric combat in these narratives offers a different kind of touch from the Midas touch of greed that Carlyle identifies as characteristic of their times; the world of dreams and tales which frames the battles offers an alternative to the spiritual enchantment of money that Carlyle describes; and the heroic values of courage, love and truth stand in contrast to the 'bourgeoisdom and philistinism' that Morris later identified as characteristic of the world of his youth.
In his exploration of violence Morris wrestles with and reconceives both the Christian myth of redemption through blood and suffering and the medievalist representations of his contemporaries, with which he was deeply familiar. The stories' depiction of violence is more stylized, fragmented and gothically disorientating than the physically powerful, morally sanctioned and orderly violence evident in Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857), and more intensely detailed than the allegorically pure violence of La Motte Fouqué's romantic tale, Sintram, a favourite with Morris and his university friends as a source text for Charlotte M. Yonge's 1853 tale of spiritualized knighthood, The Heir of Redclyffe. They offer the madness of violence as a state of transformation, going beyond the lyrical, if equivocal, aestheticization of violence in Tennyson's Maud (1855), favourably reviewed by William Fulford in the March edition of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. The tales both acknowledge and question the Catholic idealization of knighthood as a code of behaviour outlined in Kenelm Digby's The Broad Stone of Honour (1822), a book which Georgiana Burne-Jones observed that her husband still liked to read in later life, because 'his youth lay enclosed' in it, despite his recognition that it was a 'sillyish' book. They interrogate issues of love and power in relation to violence, but avoid the misogynistic gender implications inherent in Ruskin's later explication of the role of women in causing war. Medievalism is the context of the stories and forms the grounds of their approach to violence. Yet their ambiguities also reflect many of the anxieties of Morris's own age in relation to war and violence.
That these anxieties are manifold is evident in the debate in mainstream periodicals in the mid-1850s over the tension between industrial capitalism, free trade and bourgeois moneymaking on the one hand and the necessity for war and its benefits for the nation on the other. Amid much public discussion about the Crimean War, an article by the poet W. E. Aytoun in Blackwood's in March 1854 hails the commitment to war with Russia as evidence of national character. It demonstrates, he writes, that 'we have not degenerated during the long period of peace which we have enjoyed. It shows that [...] the love of Mammon has not so occupied our souls as to render us insensible to the part which we are bound to take, as the freest and most advanced community in Europe'. The identification of war with spiritual and physical health as well as with the more abstract idea of freedom is one that carries through into Dixon's article and Morris's stories. A more ambiguous and pragmatic narrative about the relationship between war and national identity runs through William Howard Russell's trenchant journalistic accounts of the Crimean War, published in the Times, which critique the conduct and organization of the war on the ground.23 Beyond the immediate context of the war, concerns about the meanings and uses of violence and combat for individuals surface in the mid-century public discourse of civilization, which suggests the need for middle-class men to leave behind or suppress the impulse to violence; but they are also present in literary depictions of personal, historical and communal battle in which national character, manliness and identity are called into question, defined or affirmed by battle.
Although, as John Peck argues, specific images of contemporary war are limited in the major novels of the mid-nineteenth century, discussions about the meaning and place of violence in its various forms nonetheless permeate the fiction and poetry of the period. War or combat and its meanings are present to readers in the 1840s and '50s not only in the realist novels of Kingsley, William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell that Peck discusses, but also in the broader tradition of historical adventure and romance writing that informs Morris's work and on which he draws in his preoccupation with the generative effects of extreme, disorientating, physical violence, unusual in prose and poetry alike at this period. Peck, noting the disturbing brutality of W. E. Henley's poetry later in the century, suggests that 'in the Crimean War, there is a far more traditional emphasis on heroism' in poetic engagements with the violence of battle. He highlights Morris's 1858 Defence of Guenevere poems and Tennyson's 1855 Maud as exceptions to this tradition.
Yet recent rereadings of Crimean War poetry suggest that there may be more complex engagements with the heroism of war than has often been recognised, in poems such as those in Alexander Smith and Sydney Dobell's polyvocal Sonnets on the War (1855), which, as Stefanie Markovits notes, create 'confusion – even bewilderment' by their 'refractive diversity'. Even such apparently patriotic and unproblematic poems as Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (1854) may reveal more ambivalence about war than has often been recognized, as Trudi Tate and Matthew Bevis have convincingly argued. Morris's stories turn away from the idea of heroism and its complicated relationship to patriotism to focus instead on the excesses of battle and war, much as Peck suggests Maud does, as a response to 'social alienation'. However, while Maud verbally recreates the disordered internal life and the psychological effects of both war and social alienation, Morris's stories, like his 1858 Defence of Guenevere poems, focus on the physical disorder and relational resolutions afforded by violence. The form of these stories, gothic, fragmented, haunted as they are, suggests both their own extreme alienation from their time, and their investment in fragmentation and dislocation as a way of understanding the world.
Even as contemporary representations of war, both literary and journalistic, engaged with ideas of violence as battle heroism or patriotic duty, its role in an increasingly liberal society became more and more marginal. The meaning, social implications, and legitimate parameters of violence came under political and cultural scrutiny over the course of the nineteenth century as war receded further from the shores of Britain. At the same time, a cultural preoccupation with the medieval past led to representations of knightly violence that equated knightly chivalry with Victorian gentlemanliness, although not always as explicitly as Tennyson does in his poetic description of King Arthur as a 'selfless man and stainless gentleman'. Morris's disorientating tales engage obliquely with the nuanced debates of his day but refuse to rationalize, mitigate or spiritualize acts of combat. Instead they insist on the intimate, one-to-one touch of violence and its effects on the body. Violence is not subsumed into a morally linear narrative, but confronted in its somatic immediacy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856-1890 by Ingrid Hanson. Copyright © 2013 Ingrid Hanson. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Warriors Waiting for the Word; Chapter One: The Early Romances and the Transformative Touch of Violence; Chapter Two: Knightly Women and the Imagination of Battle in ‘The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems ‘; Chapter Three: ‘Sigurd the Volsung’ and the Parameters of Manliness; Chapter Four: Crossing the River of Violence: The Germanic Antiwars and the Uncivilized Uses of Work and Play; Chapter Five: ‘All for the Cause’: Fellowship, Sacrifice and Fruitful War; Afterword: ‘Hopeful Strife and Blameless Peace’; Notes; Bibliography; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
‘Specialists will value Hanson’s astute, compelling close readings of transformative yet conflicted myths of violence in William Morris’s poetry and prose; students of war, politics, gender and historiography in Victorian literature and culture will relish the challenging questions raised by this wide-ranging, richly contextualised and ethically conscious study.’ —Samantha Matthews, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Bristol