Simon Joyce. The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007. ISBN 13: 978-0-8214-1761-4. Price: US$49.95.

In The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, Simon Joyce seeks to advance recent arguments about the complex relationship of modernity or postmodernity to the nineteenth century by examining a series of historical moments in which the Victorian past was and is being theorized. He argues that “we never really encounter ‘the Victorians’ themselves” but merely their mediated mirror image, subject to “inevitable distortion,” that often fails to displace “commonsense assumptions” about the Victorians and, indeed, “may even paradoxically help consolidate them” (4-5). Nevertheless, Joyce traces three efforts at unsettling these popular notions of Victorian values—a “confidently triumphalist imperialism,” a separation of public and private spheres, a “repressive sexual morality,” and the emergence of bourgeois ideology: first, the “laborious work of opposition” that approaches ideological critique; second, the effort to recuperate the voices of those excluded from “our received notions” and the “dominant records” of the Victorians; third, the effort to stress aspects of nineteenth-century society or culture that “most closely resemble our own” (5-6). Yet the first of these projects posits merely an anti-Victorianism, Joyce maintains; the second “presumes a normative definition” that leaves the official view of the Victorian “uninterrogated” and against which otherness may itself be constituted as a non-normative condition; the third produces “some immediate benefits,” enabling the viewer to glimpse “multiple narratives” under the surface of our notions of the Victorian (7). Joyce positions himself against, in particular, the argument of John Kucich’s and my collection of essays, Victorian Afterlife (2000), in which we argue that postmodernism takes the Victorian as a primary—and overdetermined—origin because late-century valuing of cultural emergence and rupture produces multiple and overlapping stories of the Victorians’ influence on the present and of historical transition. Joyce maintains that this concept fetishizes emergence, merely “defers the troubled question of definition,” and produces a logic that surreptitiously affirms the setting up of binaries (7). He prefers to view the Victorian past not as a moment of origin or emergence, however contradictory and multiply determined, but to see the present as a moment in which the Victorian past is constituted as a “condensation of contrary tendencies and oppositions” that “harden[s]” in the twentieth century into “doxological assumptions and attitudes” that sustain various arguments about Victorian political and cultural values, arguments that position themselves as “for or against a partial image of the whole” and so constitute each other in a “form of dialectical spiral” (7). Despite the purchase this notion provides post-Victorian critics (about which I’ll speak later), Joyce here imagines, even if merely implicitly, that from his millennial perspective, some version of “the whole” may be pictured, as though his own view were not, like the others that address this historical problematic, limited, partial, or subject to the inevitable distortions of retrospection. Joyce’s chapters describe various twentieth-century moments in which writers, visual cultural practitioners, politicians, and historians confront the Victorian past to either denigrate or idealize their nineteenth-century forebears (and predecessors who also privileged the Victorians) so as to advance their own political agendas. Thus Joyce describes the Bloomsbury Group’s ambivalent and contradictory evaluation of the Victorians as only apparently a wholehearted revolt that, he maintains, is nevertheless still tied to many of Victorianism’s “core elements,” including class privilege (19). He demonstrates Evelyn Waugh’s and E. M. Forster’s nostalgia for the Victorian past yet notes that each novelist nevertheless “stage[s] self-reflexive discussions of the benefits and dangers of nostalgia” (41). In a chapter on heritage aesthetics, he positions Merchant Ivory films and BBC classic serials (Waugh and Forster, once again) against an emergent and progressive Victorian anti-realist art photography and a post-Victorian metacinematic heritage …