Teaching “Victorian” Literature: A Reflection

Teaching "Victorian" Literature: A Reflection Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) If someone had asked me ten years ago whether I had fully taken on board insights about race and empire in my teaching of nineteenth-century literature, I would have said yes. That would have been both honest and untrue. I taught every text with attention to its imperial investments, its mentions of the larger imperial world, and its often unspoken dependence on imperial goods and the global imperial market. And yet. I think I thought of race and empire as one of several foundational issues. It was only in doing more work on the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during which slavery and race were more nakedly at the centre of philosophical discourse, and then in reading Sylvia Wynter, that I began to attend to race as a colonial and imperial construct, as not a but the foundational problem of enlightenment culture, its economies and modes of thought—a way of dividing the human world that reorganized everything ruthlessly in its path. And still, although this informed my teaching, it didn't reorganize it at the foundation. In reading Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong's "Undisciplining Victorian Studies" and nodding along at many moments, it was this relatively unsurprising sentence that prompted an epiphanic shift: "we are not advocating for an accumulative project that would leave the boundaries of VS untouched and intact. . . . [W]e move to undiscipline—radically rethink and even unmake—VS itself." [End Page 43] It suddenly struck me that this, precisely, was my problem. In fact, I had unconsciously thought of the impact of these insights, yes, as transformative but still fundamentally as additions to an existing structure. When I first began teaching courses that included such titles as Women's Literature or Literature by Authors of Colour in the United States, I remember a well-meaning senior colleague telling me that he was relieved that he didn't have to squeeze a woman's novel into his course on the American dream, because that was now taken care of by the curricular reform that required students to take one such course. It occurred to me that perhaps I was replicating this same error. It doesn't help that many of us are teaching within curricula designed during a period in which literature was delineated by nation and period, often in institutions with shared course numbers and descriptions that contribute to limiting the ways we think across these quite artificial divides. Nineteenth-century authors published (or were published or pirated) all over the world, in English and in translation, and in turn read across various languages and borders. (See, for example, Undisciplining Victorian Studies lesson plans on East Asia [Lesson Plans], the inclusion of which demonstrates these transcultural readings/references.) Yet for years, we taught British literature as though Britain (or maybe even just London) was its own planet, utterly isolated except for occasional spats with the US about the ownership of T.S. Eliot or Henry James. It so happened that I was teaching a relatively new course (for me) after the retirement of a colleague, a course on Victorian literature (excluding the novel), and so had occasion (and some freedom) to challenge myself. Here is the official catalogue description: ENL 3251 Victorian Literature: Selections from Tennyson, Browning, C. Bronte, Wilde, G.M. Hopkins and Arnold. Examines the beliefs and paradoxes of Victorian culture through the poetry, fiction, drama, visual arts and critical theory of representative figures. Investigates the social and cultural assumptions which underlie the artists' approaches to their themes as well as the themes themselves. Refer to department website. The last sentence is obviously doing a lot of work here, as is the one prior. I wanted the course to put the literature in a more global context, to foreground issues of race and empire, and to give space to other voices—something I am working on doing more of. (I would like to note here that the site One More Voice [onemorevoice.org] is profoundly helpful in getting a sense of the variety of voices out there, even though often these are not literary texts per...

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