Authenticity, Authority and the Author: the Sugared Voice of the Neo-Victorian Prostitute in The Crimson Petal and the White

Abstract

The genre of neo-Victorianism — contemporary novels set in the nineteenth century with a distinctive metafictional element to their portrayal of the historical as literature — relies upon a variety of textual and narratological motifs and tricks in order to play at convincing its readers of the authenticity and authority surrounding the fiction they are reading.¹ Such encounters between fabrication and fiction and the factual performativity implied by the assumption of an ‘historical’ voice regularly move towards varying degrees of mimicry, pastiche or ventriloquism, even when grounded in the postmodernism referenced by this opening quotation from Michel Faber. In writing about the Victorians, the contemporary novelist frequently seeks to present writing like the Victorians. There is an ambivalence here concerning both the mission and the method. One of the most frequently cited neo-Victorian novels that provides this kind of knowing assumption of ventriloquism is A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning Possession: a Romance (1990). In that novel, Byatt generates pastiche texts for her fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.

Post-Modernism encouraged me to assert my freedom to do whatever I pleased. I was The Author; I was in charge. The reader must be reminded that this story was an artificial construct. Text must be playful, must discard the shackles of bogus mimesis, must define itself against the pointless inhibitions of the 19^th century bourgeois novel.

— Michel Faber, ‘Eccentricity and Authenticity: Fact into Fiction’ (2003: 102)