The Celebration of Scandal

Bernstein explores the representation of the city in Victorian fiction—from the scandal of its slums, through the sublime of its fashionable society, to a darker urban sublime. The Celebration of Scandal analyzes the urban fiction of both well-known novelists (Dickens, Gissing, James, and Meredith) and more marginal writers (Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton) in terms of their representations of the city, both the scandalous and the sublime. It also includes a discussion of the dandy novels of Catherine Gore, whose parodies of high life are virtually unknown to modern readers. Bernstein explores the scandals lying at the heart of the representation of the city in Victorian fiction. Social scandals—slums that belie the myths of urban progress, for instance—are only intensified by methods of representation that overturn mimetic conventions. But if one pole of this study is the scandal, then its opposite is the sublime. Bernstein examines the parodic mode of the dandy and moves to the serious urban sublime that records urban experience in its ambiguity, its narcissism, its negativity, and its strength. Bernstein then discusses fictional and nonfictional urban sketches that present many of the problems facing urban artists in their encounters with the city. She stakes out new territory, blending the work of major critics of Victorian literature (Steven Marcus, Hillis Miller, etc.), lesser-known nineteenth-century urban texts, and a substantial dosage of Continental materials, ranging from the crucial work of Baudelaire and his great expositor, Walter Benjamin, to theorists such as Freud, Bakhtin, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan.