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English Cosmopolitanism and/as Nationalism: The Great Exhibition, the Mid-Victorian Divorce Law Reform, and Brontë's Villette

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Vlasta Vranjes
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , April 2008 , pp. 324 - 347
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2008

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References

1 Brontë, Charlotte, Villette, ed. Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten (Oxford, 2002), 263Google Scholar; all further page-number references to quotations from this work will appear parenthetically in the text.

2 As many scholars have noted, “the family life … distinguished England in the eyes of contemporary Britons from less orderly and less moral societies” (Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 [Princeton, NJ, 1989], 5).

3 Davis, John R., The Great Exhibition (Phoenix Mill, 1999), 185Google Scholar. For an in-depth discussion of how the spectacle of the Great Exhibition influenced the themes and imagery in Villette, see Glen, Heather, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (New York, 2002), chaps. 7–8Google Scholar.

4 Historians and literary critics have examined extensively the domestic (in both senses of the word) danger that Catholic conversions, confessions, and convents represented. The two most recent studies are Griffin, Susan M., Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar; and Peschier, Diana, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Brontë (Basingstoke, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 5.

6 Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), 46Google Scholar. I am also indebted to theorists who challenge the simple opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism and see the latter as capable of accommodating multiple, sometimes even antagonistic, positions. See, e.g., Robbins, Bruce, “Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, 1998), 1–19Google Scholar; and Pheng Cheah, “Introduction, Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today,” ibid., 20–41.

7 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 20.

8 Ibid., 41.

9 Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I should note that the “purer,” nonnationalist version of cosmopolitanism I am describing here has serious limitations: it is discriminatory in being fundamentally European.

10 Anderson, Amanda, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 21Google Scholar; and Walkowitz, Judith R., “The ‘Vision of Salome’: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 338CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 36.

12 See, e.g., Clark-Beatie, Rosemary, “Fables of Rebellion: Anti-Catholicism and the Structure of Villette,” ELH: English Literary History 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 821–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein, Susan David, Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 41–72Google Scholar; Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction; and Peschier, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses. Especially relevant are the historical research and analysis of Heather Glen, who reads Villette's mock anti-Romanism together with its critique of the bourgeois ideals that the Great Exhibition enshrined (Glen, Charlotte Brontë).

13 Buzard focuses primarily on the ethnographic work of the nineteenth-century novel and on its narrative attempts to contain the potentially self-destructive imperial Britishness. His detection of an “outlandish nationalism” in Brontë is noteworthy, but he limits her potentially cosmopolitan openness only to cultural Frenchness. By focusing on the woman's position in marriage and in divorce laws, I read Brontë's investment in a creation of an alternative Englishness or Britishness in a different light. The similar conclusions to which Buzard and I do occasionally come (even though I read his book too late to influence the argument I present here) only confirm the complexity of Brontë's vision. See Buzard, James, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton, NJ, 2005Google Scholar). Cannon Schmitt explores the relationship between the gothic novel, gender, and Englishness and argues that the English become an alien nation through incorporation of the threatening other. Schmitt's conclusions are rooted in binary oppositions this essay attempts to dismantle. See Schmitt, Cannon, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The legal historians on whom I draw most closely are Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895; and Holcombe, Lee, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto, 1983)Google Scholar. See also Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the gendering of nations and nationalisms, see, e.g., the very influential collection of essays Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Parker, Andrew, Russo, Mary, Summer, Doris, and Yaeger, Patricia (New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

15 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 47.

16 For opposition and exclusion, see Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992)Google Scholar; for the Protestant tendency toward universality and inclusion, see Claydon, Tony and McBride, Ian, “The Trials of the Chosen Peoples: Recent Interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain and Ireland,” in Protestantism and National Identity, ed. Claydon, Tony and McBride, Ian (Cambridge, 1998), 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies of British imperialism that examine the relationship between Englishness and Britishness, see Gikandi, Simon, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; Baucom, Ian, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Goodlad, Lauren M. E., Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, 2003), 23–24Google Scholar; Fontana, Bianca, “Whigs and Liberals: The Edinburgh Review and the ‘Liberal Movement’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought and Practice, ed. Bellamy, Richard (London, 1989), 42Google Scholar.

18 For more on the role that nationalism and cosmopolitanism played in the Great Exhibition's ideology, see Auerbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, 1999), 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Davis, The Great Exhibition, 4.

19 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851: Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, 3 vols. (London, 1851), 1:5.

20 Cole, Henry, “Lecture XII. Second Series. December 1, 1852. On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851,” in Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole, K. C. B., Accounted for in His Deeds, Speeches and Writings, ed. A. S. and Henrietta Cole, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 2:233–34Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 234 (emphasis in original).

22 Ibid.

23 Marcuse, Herbert, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941; repr., Amherst, MA, 1999), 159Google Scholar.

24 I have coined the term “cosmopolitanism as nationalism” to denote a mid-Victorian form of mostly political and cultural cosmopolitanism and nationalism that I detect in Cole's work and in the legal writings. I have done so to avoid the many theoretical assumptions that a more commonly used term, such as “cosmopolitan nationalism,” would create.

25 I borrow (and slightly alter) the term “progressivist universalism” from Jennifer Pitts. She defines it as “the universalist vision [which] informed the imperial liberalism that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century [and according to which] Europe stood at the pinnacle of a universal history, a vantage point that was thought to grant Europeans the knowledge and moral authority necessary to impose progress on less advanced societies” (Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 21).

26 Nairn, Tom, The Break-up of Britain (London, 1977), 78Google Scholar.

27 Cole, “On the International Results of the Exhibition of 1851,” 251.

28 Ibid.

29 Even The Times's usage of “cosmopolite” carries imperialist connotations: it reverses the traditional understanding of the term as “one who regards or treats the whole world as his country” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://dictionary.oed.com/). For more on the Great Exhibition's imperial character, see Purbrick, Louise, “Introduction,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Purbrick, Louise (Manchester, 2001), 1–25Google Scholar; and Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India and the Crystal Palace,” ibid., 146–78.

30 Norman, Edward, “Church and State since 1800,” in A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the Present, ed. Gilley, Sheridan and Sheils, W. J. (Oxford, 1994), 277–78Google Scholar.

31 The Ecclesiastical Titles Act banned the new Catholic bishops from using the names of their sees. It was repealed in 1871.

32 First Report of the Commissioners Appointed by Her Majesty to Enquire into the Law of Divorce, and More Particularly into the Mode of Obtaining Divorces À Vinculo Matrimonii (London, 1853), 77.

33 Ibid., 78.

34 Mill, untitled essay, in Hayek, F. A., John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (Chicago, 1951), 64Google Scholar.

35 Report of the Commissioners … into the Law of Divorce, 15.

36 Norton, Caroline, Caroline Norton's Defense: English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1982), 143Google Scholar; and the Hon. Mrs. Norton, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth's Marriage and Divorce Bill (London, 1855), 23. For an account of Norton's life and legal struggle, see Holcombe, Wives and Property, 50–57; for her literary and cultural significance, see Poovey, Uneven Developments, 51–88.

37 Norton, Caroline Norton's Defense, 163.

38 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 77.

39 The opponents of the reform could not always agree on how the often-contradictory biblical passages on adultery should be interpreted and, consequently, on the extent to which divorce should be prohibited, but they all invariably accepted the key aspects of cosmopolitanism as nationalism.

40 When speaking of “true,” reformist liberalism here, I have in mind both Robert Peel's loose definition of liberalism as a vague desire to change the status quo and Foucault's intuition that liberalism is “a form of systematic and focused criticism of the practice of government” (Fontana, “Whigs and Liberals,” 52, 54).

41 Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 142 (1856), col. 423.

42 Ibid., vol. 147 (1857), cols. 389, 854.

43 Ibid., col. 854.

44 Ibid., col. 744.

45 Ibid., vol. 145 (1857), col. 529.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., cols. 494, 495.

48 Ibid., col. 530.

49 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “savour,” http://dictionary.oed.com/.

50 Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., vol. 145 (1857), col. 823.

51 Ibid., vol. 143 (1856), col. 242.

52 Ibid., vol. 142 (1856), col. 417; and vol. 144 (1857), col. 1659.

53 Ibid., vol. 142 (1856), col. 1973.

54 Ibid., vol. 143 (1856), col. 242.

55 See Peschier, Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses, chap. 4.

56 Glen, Charlotte Brontë, 206.

57 Anderson, The Powers of Distance, 51.

58 Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 161.

59 The unlocatability and transportability also align Labassecour, as well as the character of Dr. John, with English imperialism. Many critics have commented on these alignments. Cannon Schmitt reads “colony” (i.e., Guadeloupe) as a third term that disturbs the binary opposition between England and Labassecour (Schmitt, Alien Nation, 89). James Buzard comments on the Catholic Church's “aggressive transnationalism” and self-universalization and finds their parallels in the British imperial project. “The John Graham Bretton and Polly Home subplot,” he suggests, “takes up and reworks the challenge of British imperial identity formation” (Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 55, 268–69). For very different arguments about Lucy as a colonizing figure, see Clark-Beatie, “Fables of Rebellion”; and Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London, 1996), 35–52.

60 Anne Mozley, unsigned review of Villette, by Charlotte Bronte, Christian Remembrancer 25 (April 1853): 442; quoted in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London, 1974), 207.

61 Shutleworth, Sally, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge, 1996), 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Universalists refused to believe that sinners would be punished in the afterlife. In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, Brontë protests the resignation of her favorite theologian, universalist F. D. Maurice: “Who that seriously anticipates an Eternity of Torment for half his race—can keep sane?” (Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell, 17 December 1853, in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, with a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends, ed. Margaret Smith, 3 vols. [Oxford, 1995–2004], 3:215). In another letter to Gaskell, Brontë talks about her future husband's attitude toward her religious “latitudinarianism” and adds, “I know that when once married I shall often have to hold my tongue on topics which heretofore have rarely failed to set that unruly member in tolerably facile motion. But I will not be a bigot—My heart will always turn to the good of every sect and class” (Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell, 26 April 1854, ibid., 3:252 [emphasis in original]).

63 See Glen, Charlotte Brontë, 208–9.

64 Sir Patrick Geddes's observations on the nature of progress and on the role of comparison at international exhibitions are quite telling. Looking at “the results of the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876” as an illustration of “the advantages claimed for industrial exhibitions,” he notes, “Comparison, we are told, is needed for progress, and to show the effects of position, climate, race, institutions. An industrial exhibition tells each nation (especially the host) its deficiencies and errors” (Geddes, Industrial Exhibitions and Modern Progress [Edinburgh, 1887], 10).

65 Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 272.