Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 by Margaret HomansReview by: Lisa K. HamiltonNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Mar., 2000), pp. 541-546Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2903018 .

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to engage them seriously, and the result is a hodgepodge of sugges- tive ideas rather than a coherent presentation of antebellum patterns of self-identity.

SusAN K. HARRIS Pennsylvania State University

MARGARET HOMANS, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, i837-i876. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xxxviii + 283. $44 cloth; $i8 paper.

Several recent studies of Queen Victoria at- tempt to rescue her from the status of quaint historical curiosity and to reposition her as a central figure in the cultural and political life of the nineteenth century in a way that would resemble Queen Elizabeth's iconic status in historical accounts of the Elizabethan era. Elizabeth's ghost haunts any account of Victoria, however, since England's other great queen often seems a more vital and self-aware presence and a potent political force, both in her own writings and in others' accounts of her. But Margaret Homans's Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, I 83 7-I 876 assembles a comprehensive account of the impact of the figure of Queen Victoria on the era that bore her name.

Adrienne Munich, in her recent Queen Victoria's Secrets (1996), declares: "rather than engage in a further effort to uncover a real Vic- toria, [Queen Victoria's Secrets] examines malicious as well as pious dis- tortions, cultural fantasies as well as literature, painting, memoirs, and letters to explore some of the ways in which Victorian culture accom- modated ideas of Victoria to represent its self-interested moment" (Queen Victoria's Secrets [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996], p. 2). Like Munich, Homans believes that Queen Victoria performed "cul- tural work" for her age, and although she analyzes many of the same primary materials as Munich does, in Royal Representations Homans adopts a different approach from Munich's compendium of Victoria's cultural legacies. Through an analysis of Queen Victoria's "represen- tational agency," Homans considers the constructed nature of Queen Victoria's role as queen and the impact of her unique style of monar- chy on nineteenth-century English culture.

Homans's choice of "performativity" as the conceptual approach that will enliven the discussion of Victoria and explain her impact on nineteenth-century culture is a curious one. David Cannadine, in his discussion of "the invention of tradition" and the British monarchy of

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the early to mid nineteenth century, notes the limited public expo- sure of "this dowdy and unpopular crown" (ranging from George III to the mid-reign Victoria) ("The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition,' c. 1820-1977," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983], p. I Io). Cannadine analyzes the rather appalling material conditions under which nineteenth-century ceremonials occurred, quantifies the lim- ited number of channels through which information about the royal family was distributed to the public, and chronicles the general pub- lic's indifference to royal spectacle. He writes that "under these cir- cumstances, great royal ceremonies were not so much shared, cor- porate events as remote, inaccessible group rites, performed for the benefit of the few rather than the edification of the many" (p. i I 1). Performance requires an audience, and Victoria's audience, by Canna- dine's account, was a negligible one. Moreover, Homans's extension of the concept of "performance" from the theater of royal spectacle (meager as it apparently was) to the private space of the home-a move borrowed from postmodern theories of the performative self- is equally unconvincing. If few of her subjects were watching Victoria in public, then fewer still could have been interested in (or, indeed, could have known about) her "performance" of her private domestic arrangements.

The uniqueness of the Victorian period, Homans argues, is largely due to the unique way in which Victoria chose to be queen. Homans thinks that while Victoria fulfilled the public duties historically ex- pected of a queen, the particular way in which she did so had "enor- mous consequences" (p. xxxi). Following the broad outlines of Nancy Armstrong's argument that the nineteenth-century bourgeois woman was the first truly "modern" individual, Homans attributes to Victoria the apparently conscious production of herself as a domestic woman, a wife and widow, and a new model of the modern British monarchy. Victoria's "performance" of bourgeois subjectivity modeled a middle- class identity for her subjects, and her domestic arrangements were influential not only for those subjects but for the entire political structure as well. In her representation of domestic femininity, Victo- ria's performance of the roles of wife and widow accompanied the transformation of the British monarchy into a symbolic figurehead- a key mid-Victorian transition from "power" to "influence." There is a problem with imposing a postmodern model of the self onto a mid- nineteenth-century woman, however-instead of a subject shaped by her historical position of woman and queen, Victoria is presented as an uncannily self-aware individual whose every move appears to have

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been a consciously produced effect. None ofethe private documents with which Homans presents the reader support this reading of a hy- perconscious Victoria.

In tracing the evolution of Victoria's representational powers, Ho- mans credits "being, seeming, and appearing as forms of monarchic 'doing"' (p. xxxiv), and she attempts "to explore the variability of [Victoria's] agency and of its representations across her career and across the varying media and forums in which she so publicly lived" (p. xxxv). Homans acknowledges, somewhat self-negatingly, that the "peculiarities" of Victoria's agency include "moments when she did things that both followed and broke the laws she stood for ... [and] moments when her actions appear both overdetermined and origi- nal" (p. xxxv). What Homans means by "agency" encompasses both Victoria's own acts and the acts or representations of others, both au- thorized and unauthorized by the queen. Homans's attempt to trace Victoria's agency throughout culture takes the reader on a tour of what she argues are some of the constitutive elements of 'Victorian- ness." Defining "agency" as broad cultural power, then, allows Ho- mans to find queens everywhere, present even when absent. But the origins and constitution of this concept of "agency" seem fuzzy when agency is both everywhere and nowhere, both masking power and re- vealing it.

Homans perceives a series of Queen Victorias, each of whom performed and embodied a different model of queenship; there is no essential 'Victoria," but rather there is a queen who acts out the role of the adoring and submissive wife, replaced by the reclusive widow who shrank from public appearances and substituted her writing for her physical presence. The presence and absence of Victoria on the public stage is reflected in cultural production that, first, represents her domestic and marital bliss in a series of paintings and photographs (and in its echoes in the Barrett-Browning courtship) and, second, represents her absence by replacing her with a multitude of fantasy "queens" in such literary works as Miss Majoribanks, "Of Queen's Gar- dens," and Through the Looking- Glass.

Homans shifts her focus from the impact of Victoria's public per- formance of domesticity to the more oblique representations of her widowed state in the 1 86os in order to argue that "there is an inverse and complementary relation between ... Britain's slow movement to- ward direct or 'descriptive' representation of constituencies in Parlia- ment and. .. Victoria's sudden change from immediate and personal self-presentation to more indirect and displaced forms of represen- tation" (p. loo). Victoria's refusal of public representation is read as having profound political consequences; for example, "when Victoria

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appeared in Parliament in 1866, dramatically performing her re- luctance to perform by sitting silent and crownless while the Lord Chancellor read the Queen's Speech, she forced the 'efficient' part of government to express or represent itself" (p. 1 io). The nature of Victoria's influence in this instance is her unmasking of the "real" sources of power-it is no longer located in the monarchy but in the democratic institution of Parliament. Homans concludes that Victo- ria's representation of herself as an absent monarch operated in tan- dem with the electoral reforms enacted by the 1867 Reform Bill to shape a new kind of representative government.

In considering "the representation of absence as presence and of concealment as power" (p. i oo), Homans reads Walter Bagehot's 1867 tract The English Constitution, about the representational structure of the British government, as providing a sophisticated account of mon- archy's performative aspects. Bagehot's theories of the monarchy pro- vide perhaps the most striking support for Homans's ideas about the self-conscious aspects of Victoria's style of governing; monarchy, ac- cording to Bagehot, is a "disguise" that masks the routine business of government, since it shifts the attention from Downing Street to Buck- ingham Palace, from dreary parliamentary activities to the pageant of the royal family (p. 107). Bagehot's cynical analysis of the diversion- ary function of the monarchy, Homans argues, was an interpretation of its role not shared by Victoria, although Homans asserts that the queen was aware of her place in the spectacle. Yet Victoria was also the monarch whose refusal to perform stripped away the theatrical aspects of queenship and unmasked the true rulers of England.

The queen's authority was reproduced as authorship in her books The Early Years of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort (I1867) and Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (i 868). Homans notes that the tendency of reviewers to refer to both volumes as "The Queen's Books" signals the hunger of her populace for its monarch during her widowed seclusion, and that during her absence they found the books an acceptable substitute. Catherine Gallagher's arguments about the relationship between literary and political forms of repre- sentation, Homans claims, are called into question by the effect of "The Queen's Books" on the process of enfranchisement: "they may have both opposed democracy-by attempting in an Arnoldian way to replace it with literary representation-and encouraged it, by ceding the public space of self-misrepresentation to others" (pp. 1 16-17; see Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, i83.2-i867 [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985]). Victoria wrote the two books in order to memorialize her dearly departed Albert, but their insistence on private mourning also

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effectively enabled her own vanishing: they "replace" and "empha- size" her absence from the public sphere. The queen's literary perfor- mance of her grief while in withdrawal from official duties and in the shadow of the i 867 Reform Bill marks the transformative moment of her monarchy, however, for when she reemerges as queen, "her ap- pearing now serves only to show [the people] how multitudinous, and how powerful, they themselves really are" (p. 156). David Cannadine acknowledges that while Victoria's elaborate mourning period for Al- bert drew public criticism, the British public's skeptical approach to Victoria's monarchy from the start (as well as to those monarchs that preceded her) constituted "a statement against absolutism, a proud expression of the energies and values of a free people" ("Meaning of Ritual," p. 1I13). Uncovering this historical context of the public's response to Victoria and her unpopular predecessors weakens Ho- mans's account of her impact on political reform.

The chapter "Queen Victoria's Memorial Arts" catalogs the con- tinued memorialization of Albert, the Royal Albert Hall being one of the most prominent tributes to him. The cult of death and memory that Victoria raised to a high art becomes, in Alfred Lord Tennyson's hands, the poem Idylls of the King. Tennyson, Victoria's poet laureate and a "professional mourner" (p. 179), shared his sovereign's fascina- tion with the dead beloved-in Tennyson's case Arthur Hallam. Vic- toria found comfort in In Memoriam (even to the point of annotating it extensively in a sort of collaborative attempt at representing grief) and commissioned the poet to compose some lines for a memorial statue of her mother. Homans suggests that Tennyson, by revealing the masochistic tendencies of extreme grief, sometimes said more about the state of mourning than the queen herself wished to say. The read- ing of Tennyson's poem as part of an effort to "memorialize, monu- mentalize, and allegorize" Prince Albert substitutes Arthur for Albert and situates this "king" in an elaborate meditation on absence that Homans perceives was ultimately a diminishment of Albert.

In 1874 and 1875 the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron produced a series of photographic illustrations for Idylls that, Homans contends, "memorialize Albert by illustrating the poem that was dedi- cated to his memory" and that "comment critically on other memo- rial works of art" (p. 203). Cameron's photographs provide an ironic commentary on gender in art and the transformation of a person into an allegorical figure. They also protest the routine use of female fig- ures as allegorical subjects by representing "Albert" as a feminized fig- ure who looks noticeably uncomfortable in the role of "Arthur." The process of transforming Albert into allegory, begun by Tennyson with Victoria's approval, is critiqued by Cameron's photographs through

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an approach that exposes "the vacuity as well as the obliterating force of Victoria's high-serious allegories" (p. 224) by registering the sub- ject's resistance to such a memorial.

Homans's epilogue considers Victoria's reflexive tendency to grieve as it extends to other people and incidents, most notablyJohn Brown-in the third and final "Queen's Book" Victoria's accom- plished grieving is refocused on the death of her loyal Highland at- tendant. Homans reads this act of mourning for a Scotsman as natu- ralizing imperial deeds "as acts of human sympathy" (p. 244), thus masking imperial ambitions with sentimentality. This analysis extends Homans's thesis that Victoria was a canny politician whose most im- portant contribution to nineteenth-century Britain was her implicit acknowledgment of her subjects' desire for a monarch, present or ab- sent, to perform the royal duties, even at a time of creeping democ- racy and even in a private moment of grief.

Whether Victoria fully and consciously understood her role as such is open to question. Her letters and diaries lack the personal and political acuity of Elizabeth's, and, sadly, she simply cannot be made to seem all that interesting. The attempt to impart an active role to Victoria in the shaping of the age cannot surmount her own resolute- ness not to be a part of it. Victoria absented herself from the political and cultural stage during the first half of her reign (despite her liter- ary forays); and Homans's attempt to imagine her as a vital center of the period, through a transformation of private into public and pas- sivity into activity, requires a few too many theoretical contortions and historical finesses. But the contribution of Royal Representations to Vic- torian studies is found in its comprehensive scope, its elegant read- ings of the literature and works of art in which Victoria's grief is end- lessly refracted, and its still-provocative contention that the carefully managed representation of Queen Victoria's family life and widow- hood was a subtle and intelligent form of governance by distraction.

LISA K. HAMILTON Santa Monica, California

RICHARD W. SCHOCH, Shakespeare s Victo- rian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv + 208. $54.95.

"It is requir'd you do awake your faith"- Paulina's exhortation to Leontes in Act V of The Winter's Tale-is ad-

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