In
1894, George du Maurier published Trilby, which included the figure
of Svengali the mesmerist.Much of
the criticism of the text focuses on Svengali--as Jewish, as psychotherapist,
and as precursor to Dracula.George
du Maurier's novel was written at the height of the period in which sexology
became the dominant discourse about sex and sexuality in the Victorian
period.This period produced figures
such as Charcot, who is noted in Stoker's Dracula for having proven
the hypnosis that du Maurier's plot depends on, and also, significantly
for du Maurier's text, Max Nordau.Nordau
theorized about the aesthetics of degeneration in his study Degeneration,
a text influential at during the fin-de-siècle.In
this paper, I intend to examine hypnosis and its relation to the disciplining
of the female body in relation to nineteenth-century instruction manuals
on how to sing, as Svengali is introduced in the novels as a teacher of
music.Connected to this idea, I'd
like to examine how the figure of Svengali hypnotizes not only Trilby,
but also the readers of the novel, similar in many ways to how Dracula
hypnotizes his readership as well (both within the context of Stoker's
novel and the readers of Stoker's novel).Furthermore,
I intend to examine the notions of decadence, "il bel canto", and opera
at the turn of the century, a curious combination of concepts that would
serve as a precursor to Freudian castration anxiety.Concomitant
with this, I'd like to examine the three Englishmen in Trilby as
inverts and opera queens, a term utilized by Wayne Koestenbaum to describe
gay men who find pleasure in listening to the diva sing.Lastly,
I'd like to examine how degeneration theory finds itself encoded in the
racial economy of the text in interesting ways through the figures of Little
Billee and Svengali, both Jews.
Hypnosis
figures in both Dracula and Trilby as a mode of disciplining
women's bodies, emptying them out of any form of agency and replacing it
with that of a man's: Dracula's senses but Van Helsing's will in the former,
Svengali's desires in the latter.Svengali's
hypnotizing Trilby leads directly to her death at the end of the novel;
however, his hypnosis is also productive, as it produces a voice the world
more beautiful than the world has seen before.Early
in the novel, Du Maurier establishes that Trilby's singing is appalling:
From
that capacious mouth and through that high-bridged bony nose there rolled
a volume of breathy sound, not loud, but so immense that it seemed to come
from all around, to be reverberated from every surface of the studio.She
followed more or less the shape of the tune, going up when it rose and
down when it fell, but with such immense intervals between the notes as
were never dreamed of in any mortal melody.It
was as though she could never once have deviated into tune, never once
have hit upon a true note, even by a fluke--in fact, as though she were
absolutely tone-deaf, and without ear, although she stuck to the time correctly
enough.(18-19)
Here,
Trilby not only sings off-tune, but the narrator is clear to indicate that
Trilby is utterly incapable of uttering a "true note".Hers
is a perversion of the song--"following…the shape of the tune" but out
of tune--and this perversion, it is implied, may very well be inherent
to Trilby.Later, however, when Trilby
reappears as La Svengali, things have changed considerably.Her
singing not only has improved, but brings down the house in Paris and Vienna:
"Trilby the tone-deaf, who couldn't sing one single note in tune!Trilby,
who couldn't tell a C from an F" (210) appears on stage much changed.Du
Maurier describes her voice as
so
immense in its softness, richness, freshness, that it seemed to be pouring
itself out from all around; its intonation absolutely, mathematically pure;
one felt it to be not only faultless, but infallible; and the seduction,
the novelty of it, the strangely sympathetic quality!How
can one describe the quality of a peach or a nectarine to those who have
only known apples?(210-211)
Her
voice is so potent that it reduces Little Billee to tears, "Little Billee,
who hadn't shed a tear for five long years" (212)!While
I intend to come back to Little Billee's tearful reaction as the sign of
the opera queen, it also shows the potency of Trilby's newfound voice.
A
good portion of Trilby focuses on how Svengali teaches music, in
particular how he teaches women to sing, which I would like to examine
in the light of voice manuals produced in the nineteenth century.Svengali's
first
pupil
was (or rather had been) the mysterious Honorine, of whose conquest he
was much given to boast, hinting that she was une jeune femme du monde.This
was not the case.Mademoiselle Honorine
Cahen (better known in the Quartier Latin as Mimi la Salope) was a dirty,
draggy little dolly-mop of a Jewess, a model for the figure--a very humble
person indeed, socially.(43)
Like
Svengali, Honorine is Jewish, and never ascends to the levels Trilby manages
under Svengali's hypnotic control.His
method of teaching Mimi la Salope is considerably different than the method
he utilizes to train Trilby.Unlike
Trilby, Honorine has "an exquisite ear" although "no real music intelligence--no
intelligence of any kind except about sous and centimes", a statement that
reinforces the stereotype about Jews and their knowledge of money (44).Her
voice, unlike Trilby's, "was just a light native warble, a throstle's pipe,
all in the head and nose and throat (a voice he didn't understand,
for once), a thing of mere youth and health and bloom and high spirits--like
her beauty, such as it was--beauté du diable, beauté damnée"
(45).Describing the process of her
training, du Maurier writes that
She
did her very best, and practised all she could in this new way, and sang
herself hoarse: she scarcely ate or slept for practising.He
grew harsh and impatient and coldly severe, and of course, she loved him
all the more; and the more she loved him the more nervous she got and the
worse she sang.Her voice cracked;
her ear became demoralized; her attempts to vocalize grew almost as distressing
as Trilby's.(45-46)
Honorine's
training at the hands of Svengali is a form of abuse, reading almost like
a classic abusive relationship: the more he abuses her, the more she loves
him for it.Very clearly, training
Honorine to sing is a mode of disciplining the woman's body, rendering
Svengali as agent of patriarchal control.Wayne
Koestenbaum discusses the rise of singing manuals in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: "these guidebooks codify and control the voice" he
notes (157).Significantly for Trilby
the novel, Koestenbaum compares sentimental fiction to the voice manual:
"like many literary texts (novels of sentiment, eroticism, suspense), a
voice manual exhorts and shapes the body of its reader" (157).Trilby
the novel would shape, in certain ways, the bodies of its readers through
its various discourses on degeneracy, anti-Semitism, and modes of disciplining
the woman's body.
Svengali's
training of Trilby is significantly different from his training of Honorine.Unlike
Honorine, who actively desires to improve her voice under Svengali's training,
Trilby has no idea she's even being taught.Under
a Foucauldian scheme, this is discipline at its most potent.Foucault
wrote "a body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved"
(136).Trilby undergoes subjection
of the highest order, utterly losing all of her agency but becoming a world-class
singer, ultimately docile but at the same time improved to an incredible,
almost unbelievable, level of ability.Foucault
discusses how discipline transformed European society in a variety of spheres,
including education and medicine.The
comparison of patient and pupil is apt in Trilby, as Svengali hypnotizes
Trilby for medical reasons.Svengali,
the music teacher, uses the same techniques to cure her as he does to train
her.I'd like to add the category
of diva to the categories of patient and pupil as subjects of discipline.Little
Billee asks if Svengali ever tried to teach Trilby to sing, to which she
responds "'Oh, maïe aïe!not
he!Why, he always laughed when I
tried to sing; and so did Marta; and so did Gecko!It
made them roar!I used to sing "Ben
Bolt".They used to make me, just
for fun--and go into fits.I
didn't mind a scrap.I'd had no training,
you know?'" (258).Even after being
La Svengali of continental Europe, Trilby has no recollection that she
can sing, or how she was trained to do so.After
Trilby's death, Gecko tells the three Englishmen how he and Svengali taught
the "quite tone-deaf" Trilby how to sing (296).
'Well,
we both taught her together--for three years--morning, noon, and night--six--eight
hours a day.It used to split me
the heart to see her worked like that!We
took her voice note by note--there was no end to her notes, each more beautiful
than the other--velvet and gold, beautiful flowers, pearls, diamonds, rubies--drops
of dew and honey; peaches, oranges, and lemons!en
veux-tu en voilà--all the perfumes and spices of the Garden
of Eden!Svengali with his little
flexible flageolet, I with my violin--that is how we taught her to make
the sounds--and then how to use them…'(297)
At
least, this is how Gecko characterizes her training at first: hard work,
finally paying off in an incredible voice, compared to flowers, fruits,
gemstones and the story of Genesis.Gecko's
first story about how he and Svengali trained Trilby does not fit even
with the voice culture Koestenbaum describes: "voice manuals address the
aspirant who will never become a singer, and who requires a field guide
to the unobtainable" (157).The
impossibility of Trilby singing virtuoso is established at the beginning
of the novel, and Svengali only succeeds at making Honorine's voice worse
under his tutelage.The three Englishmen
press him harder; however, as they know she seemed to have forgotten how
to sing or that she was even trained.Gecko
admits "'There were two Trilbys…'" and describes how Svengali had
hypnotized Trilby (298).Further,
he describes the process by which they trained the second, hypnotized Trilby:
'Well,
that was the Trilby he taught how to sing--and--and I helped him.God
of heaven forgive me!That Trilby
was just a singing-machine--an organ to play upon--an instrument of music--a
Stradivarius--a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood--a voice, and nothing
more--just the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with--for it takes
two to sing like La Svengali, monsieur--the one who has got the voice,
and the one who knows what to do with it…'(299)
This
Trilby's described not in terms of gems, flowers, and perfumes, but in
mechanical terms.Her body is an
empty vessel for Svengali's domination, rendered utterly docile to his
manipulations.In fact, Trilby is
nothing more than a body in this articulation of her training.Playing
Trilby is no different than playing an instrument.
Daniel
Pick, in his analysis of du Maurier's novel, focuses primarily on Svengali
as monstrous Jew as source of anxiety in the late nineteenth century.There
should be no surprise here, as most of the criticism on Trilby focuses
exclusively on Svengali and his role as Jew.In
a curious sentence, Pick writes that du Maurier "fancies himself indeed
as something of a Havelock Ellis of popular fiction.The
narrative is to be frank and unembarrassed; thus the narrator half-jokingly
dismisses the idea of putting innuendoes and sexual themes into Latin (like
that other sexologist of the period, Krafft-Ebing)" (114).That
du Maurier actively regarded himself as being like Havelock Ellis, author
of Sexual Inversion, strikes me as an interesting biographical detail.Being
the Havelock Ellis of popular fiction would entail more than including
sexual innuendoes unabashedly in his fiction; Ellis' project was the medical
articulation of an inverted identity.Another
significant implication remains uncommented on by Pick: that du Maurier
regards himself as engaging in the medical discourse about sex just as
much as Ellis.Pick also brings in
Freud as scopophilic Jew into his analysis of the novel, stating that "in
many ways, no two writers of the 1890s could be more different than Du
Maurier and Freud; yet in each case we find a striking preoccupation with
questions of vision and the verbal representability of mental states.Both
ask the question: how sure can we be of what we see and what we describe?"Foucault
notes that the medical gaze functions to control bodies and their various
diseases and disorders.Curiously,
Pick does nothing else with sexology, its modes of constructing identity,
its relationship to theories of racial and sexual degeneracy, or its relationship
with hypnosis and hysteria, although the text provides more than ample
material for such an analysis.
Koestenbaum
argues that "like tracts against masturbation, singing manuals dictate
how energy and pleasure should move through the body; they are eager to
legislate conduct and to condemn mistakes; they help me to imagine the
voice box as a sorrowing, peculiar human capability that wants to be free
and paradoxically seeks its liberation in an act of confinement" (157).This
last statement is especially interesting in light of Trilby: Trilby
herself notes that she "wanted to escape from Svengali, who wrote that
he was coming there to fetch me" (256).However,
scarcely a breath later, she states that she "could stand it no longer,
and went to Svengali's" (257), finding her confinement while seeking her
escape from him and her memories of Paris.The
sexological discourses of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, like the
voice manuals, are productive at the same time they function to confine
the body and its pleasures.They
function to construct and direct sexual pleasures, producing new identities
in the process.Identity itself can
and does function multiply to constrict one's possibilities but also as
a source of liberation through the construction of reverse discourses.Svengali,
through the hypnotic control he exerts on Trilby, manages to dictate directly
which ways energy moves through her body, a control he only indirectly
exerts over Honorine earlier in the novel.Svengali,
like the voice manual, control's these women's voices, but also renders
them docile, through one means or another, to his will.In
a Foucauldian manner, this control and docility is productive, as the hypnosis
produces in Trilby an incomparably beautiful voice.
Svengali
hypnotizes Trilby early in the novel in order to cure her neuralgia of
the eyes.Pick, in his analysis,
notes the number of times eyes come up in the course of the novel, implying
that the novel's attention is primarily on vision and seeing.While
I agree largely with Pick on this point, as the power of Svengali's gaze
is the primary plot device of the novel, I would like to examine the scene
of hypnosis a little more closely.After
her hypnosis, the Laird asks Trilby to open her eyes, which she is unable
to do.The very next request made
by Svengali is interesting:"Then
Svengali said, again in German, 'She shall not open her mouth.Ask
her.''Why couldn't you open your
eyes, Miss Trilby?'She strained
to open her mouth and speak, but in vain" (49).Attention
shifts from Trilby's eyes and her inability to return Svengali's gaze to
her mouth.After waking her up and
she declares herself cured, he asks her if she can sing, and then he asks
if he can inspect her mouth:
"…Will
you permit that I shall look into your mouth, matemoiselle?"
She
opened her mouth wide, and he looked into it.
"Himmel!The
roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon; there is room
in it for 'toutes les gloires de la France," and a little to spare!The
entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St Sulpice when the
doors are open for the faithful on All Saints' Day; and not one tooth is
missing--thirty-two British teeth as white as milk and as big as knuckle-bones!and
your little tongue is scooped out like the leaf of a pink peony, and the
bridge of your nose is like the belly of a Stradivarius--what a sounding-board!and
inside your beautiful big chest the lungs are made of leather!and
your breath, it embalms--like the breath of a beautiful white heifer fed
on the buttercups and daisies of the Vaterland!(50-51)
Trilby's
mouth and her throat, in particular, are described by Svengali in precise
detail, compared originally to immense religious structures but, as he
goes on, to musical instruments.Comparing
her to Stradivarius would occur later in the novel, when Gecko reveals
what he and Svengali did to train her to sing.Koestenbaum
notes that "the opera queen's throat is inactive and silent while he listens;
the singer's throat is queen" (156).This
allows us to read Svengali as homosexual, as opera queen: his worship of
Trilby's throat threatens to place him in the position of opera queen,
along with Taffy, Little Billee, and the Laird.However,
along with the lengthy description of Trilby's throat and mouth, du Maurier
included a drawing of Svengali peering into Trilby's open mouth with an
ocular instrument of some sort (not mentioned in the text of the novel)
(Fig. 1).This places Svengali into
a more medical position, as his hypnosis of her to effect a cure for her
neuralgia does.Koestenbaum notes
that "in 1854, singer-teacher Manuel Garcia II (brother to divas Maria
Malibran and Pauline Viardot) invented the laryngoscope…[he] experimented
on himself.Seeking the cause of
his cracked voice, he assembled a contraption, involving a dentist's mirror,
and peered into his throat to see his glottis" (158)."Scientific
vocal methods" also arose with the invention of the laryngoscope (158).Svengali's
ocular instrument may very well be a laryngoscope in the du Maurier drawing,
or it may not be; regardless, he is using a contraption designed to peer
into the back of Trilby's throat and, based on his knowledge as singing
teacher and medical man, he determines that she can sing.Koestenbaum
goes on to discuss the peculiar gender position of the glottis, and that
while it is described alternately as male and female, it is specifically
compared to the vagina.While looking
into Trilby's throat, Svengali is seeing what could be either her voice
or her vagina (Fig. 2).Regardless,
rather than the affection for the throat of the opera queen, Svengali's
gaze is that of the medical practitioner bent on controlling the female
body.
Trilby's
voice is described more than once as "il bel canto", a concept significant
at the fin-de-siècle as representing anxieties over decadence and
degeneration.The narrator notes
that her voice
was
the apotheosis of voice and virtuosity.It
was 'il bel canto' come back to earth after a hundred years--the bel canto
of Vivarelli, let us say, who sang the same song every night to the same
King of Spain for a quarter of a century, and was rewarded with a dukedom,
and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.(213-214)
Svengali
states that "'That is how I teach Gecko; that is how I teach la bedite
Honorine; that is how I teach il bel canto…It
was lost, il bel canto--and I found it in a dream--I, Svengali'" (214)!Svengali's
discovery of the lost bel canto is significant to discourses of degeneration
and decadence.Wayne Koestenbaum
links 'il bel canto' to scientific discourses of music and degeneration,
connecting the fall of the castrato in Italy to the rise of scientific
methodology to train the voice, in a passage I find is worth quoting in
its entirety:
With
the castrato's demise, however, came a vague fear that vocal art was declining.These
fears of decadence were given a name: bel canto.Bel
canto means, literally, beautiful singing; and it also implies a foreboding
that beauty is in decline.
According
to musicologist Philip A. Duey, the term bel canto acquired currency
only after the era it describes had ended.The
phrase itself had been loosely used for centuries, but it found its present,
fixed meaning in the 1860s in Italy, and was taken up by other countries
in the 1880s; these significances only entered dictionaries after 1900.
So
it appears that bel canto (as a discourse of nostalgia and retrospection)
emerged in the late 1860s.Another
term was coined in the 1860s--in 1869, to be exact: "homosexual."Imagine
for a moment that this is not a coincidence, and consider that bel canto
and homosexuality might be parallel.Homosexuality
and bel canto are not the same thing, but they had related contexts:
they came wrapped in languages of control and cure.There
were voice manuals long before bel canto and homosexuality were
conceptualized; but the desire to describe the voice scientifically and
to cure degeneracies of vocal art grew vehement after 1860, and produced
a torrent of advice literature in the 1890s and early 1900s…(158-159)
While
there may not be a direct connection between homosexuality and il bel canto,
there certainly are parallel scientific discourses, utilizing the same
terms, in sexology and in what Koestenbaum terms 'voice culture', and these
discourses, as he accurately puts it, are designed for both cure and control.Quite
literally in the novel, Svengali utilizes the ultimate power of control
over Trilby, his hypnosis, in order to cure her at the beginning of the
novel.
The
comparison of Trilby's bel canto to that of Vivarelli, a Spanish castrato
from a century earlier, place Trilby and, by extension, Svengali into curious
gender identifications.Trilby's
voice is compared directly to that of the castrated male, rather than a
previous female voice.It is as if
she has been possessed by the ghost of Vivarelli and made capable of singing
with his voice.She comes to stand
in for the castrated male, a movement that functions as a precursor to
Freud's castration complex, the fear that the female is really a castrated
male.Freud wrote "the substitutes
for this penis which they feel is missing in women play a part in determining
the form taken by many perversions" (61).In
Trilby,
and the cultural discourse about il bel canto, the woman comes to stand
in the place of a castrated male, but the fear of inadequacy or, worse,
decadence continues to linger.Koestenbaum
comments on this:
Observe
voice culture's affinity with psychoanalysis.Both
systems believe in expressing hidden material, confessing secrets. And
both discourses take castration seriously: voice culture wants to recapture
the castrato's scandalous vocal plenitude, while psychoanalysis imagines
castration as identity's foundation--star player in the psyche's interminable
opera.(159)
Castration,
in Trilby, figures not as identity's foundation, as it does in psychoanalytic
discourses, but as part of the dissolution of identity.Trilby's
identity is subsumed by the spectral identity of Vivarelli as well as Svenagli's.Castration
does, however, figure as the origins of "true voice" in Trilby,
and can be said, in that sense, to be foundational to a form of musical
identity.Svengali subsumes Trilby's
agency through hypnotizing her, making her his uncanny double as La
Svengali, literally the female-gendered Svengali in French, which further
complicates any clear-cut gender identity in the context of the novel.The
consciousness possessing Trilby is not Vivarelli the castrato but Svengali
the hypnotist.In this context,
her body has become an object of exchange, shuttling back and forth between
Vivarelli and Svengali, much in the manner described by Gayle Rubin.
The
fear of decadence and degeneracy is in no way limited to the bel canto.The
figure of Svengali as Jew figures large in the discourse of degeneracy
in its racist, as well as its sexological or "voice culture" modes.However,
these discursive modes are difficult to untangle from one another, as Sander
Gilman has noted in his analysis of Richard Strauss' operatic version of
Oscar Wilde's
Salome.The
Jew and the homosexual are easily equated under these discursive regimes
as being perverts.Gilman comments
that "both groups reveal their criminal perversion to us not only through
their sexual activities, but through their high or breaking voice" (176).When
du Maurier first introduces and describes Svengali, he's described as "of
Jewish aspect" and then later that "his voice was very thin and mean and
harsh, and often broke into a disagreeable falsetto" (11).According
to Koestenbaum, the "falsetto seems profoundly perverse" (164).It
is alternately described as the "sound of mystery, unnaturalness, absence.Isaac
Nathan in 1823 called it the fourth voice (fourth dimension, fourth
sex)" (Koestenbaum 164).Of course,
Nathan's use of the "fourth voice" echoes sexological discourse's construction
of homosexuality as the "third sex".Koestenbaum
further notes that the falsetto has been "associated with degeneracy, detour,
and artifice" (165).While Du Maurier's
description of Svengali's voice as broken codes him as Jewish, his falsetto
reinforces the suggestion of his sexual perversity.
Gilman's
rubric for reading degeneracy, opera, homosexuality, and Jewishness complicates
much of the extant criticism on Trilby, which focuses primarily
on Svengali's Jewishness as the source of fear and prejudice.Sander
Gilman notes, however, that
Not
only are homosexuals perverted, and their advocates, the Jews, perverted,
even their characters are perverted.Perversion
becomes the label that joins all forms of sexual deviance, linking heterosexuality
and homosexuality.For, if Salome
is perverted, her perversion certainly has nothing to do with the representation
of homosexuality on stage, but rather (in a German reading of 1905) with
the representation of a sexual hysteric and the source of her hysteria.(168)
Trilby
operates in a very similar manner.Hypnosis
as a cure for the hysteric woman places Trilby in the same position as
Salome in this passage: du Maurier is representing "a sexual hysteric and
the source of her hysteria" on stage and in his novel.This
movement links Trilby the hysteric with Svengali the Jew, both under the
category of perversion. Trilby collapses the categories of Jew and hysteric,
as her hypnosis links her to Svengali in a unique way.This
collapse, however, would be familiar to du Maurier.Gilman
notes that, according to Charcot, Jews were predisposed to hysteria and
"it was a hysteria that had its source in Jewish sexual selectivity, which
European medicine understood in terms of late nineteenth-century eugenics
as 'inbreeding'.Jews, both male
and female, are hysterics because they indulge in perverted sexuality;
the signs and symptoms are clearly marked on their physiognomy" (169).The
Jew and the hysteric woman are inextricably linked in the context of the
sexological discourses as well as du Maurier's novel.The
Jew, the invert, and the hysteric woman, among others, all exist under
the sign of perversion in the medical discourses of the late nineteenth
century.
There
are other suggestive links between degeneracy, homosexuality, and music
in Trilby, particularly around the figure of Svengali.His
choice to "play the 'Rosemonde' of Schubert" suggests one such link (54).Susan
McClary notes that she "took as more or less established that Schubert
had engaged in same-sex erotic activities", and continues to argue that,
while Schubert may not have engaged in any same-sex sexual activities,
nonetheless "there was something about the sensibility projected in his
music" that suggested it engages in an alternate "gendered subjectivity"
(205).While I don't intend to enter
into the debate over Schubert, or whether du Maurier would have known about
Schubert's sexual activities, nonetheless McClary's claim that there's
a certain "sensibility" about the music that is coded as homosexual renders
Svengali's choice of Schubert--twice in the text--interesting.Similarly,
Philip Brett argues that musicality itself is similar to homosexuality,
and that "these two things are often associated, and not only in the popular
imagination" (11).Furthermore, Brett
has argued that "though it is not proscribed in the same way as homosexuality,
music has often been considered a dangerous substance, an agent of moral
ambiguity always in danger of bestowing deviant status upon its practitioners"
(11). Svengali's musicality
itself provides the threat of deviance and moral ambiguity, just as much
as his Jewish identity does.Music
itself is dangerous to Trilby and to others, providing the threat of moral
decline.
Athena
Vrettos comments that "set in Paris, the plot of Trilby reflects
the late-nineteenth-century fascination with suggestibility, which, in
addition to its central role in theories of hysteria and crowd behavior,
had gained popular attention during the 1890 trial of Gabrielle Bompard,
who claimed to have committed murder while under the hypnotic influence
of her lover" (102).While Trilby's
case is different from Bompard's in that she does not commit any kind of
criminal activity while under the "hypnotic influence" of Svengali, a form
of criminal intent is nonetheless attached to Svengali by the other characters
in the novel as well as the narrator.Both
Bompard's case and du Maurier's Svengali detail an anxiety in the reading
public over the "susceptibility of the average person to hypnotic influence
and the consequent breakdown of moral restraints" (Vrettos 103).I'd
like to take this argument, however, and suggest that Svengali not only
exerts this "hypnotic influence" over Trilby, but also the readers of the
novel, who are "terrorized and titillated by a series of horrific personalities:
Jack the Ripper, Svengali, and Dracula" (Zanger 33).Notably,
two of these three figures are connected, in some way, to hypnosis, although
in Dracula's case, he's not the active agent of hypnotic influence; in
fact, he's a secondary object of it, through Mina Harker.Nina
Auerbach, in her acute analysis of Trilby, places Svengali in a
somewhat different combination of late Victorian figures: Dracula, Van
Helsing, and Sigmund Freud.She wrote
"here, though, Freud as narrator/healer/magus/master is always in control,
as if to galvanize in anticipation the feeble magic of Svengali and Little
Billee, Dracula and Van Helsing" (124).Interestingly,
Auerbach places Little Billee in the same category as Svengali.He,
as much as Svengali, is responsible for the effort to control Trilby's
body, although in a manner different from Svengali's.Part
of the excitement over hypnosis in the text has to do with titillation
over patriarchal control of women.Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick notes that "most exciting of all was the figure of the
proud woman forced to embody the meaning, to enact the will--even as she
knows it is not hers--of a sufficiently focused man" (188).Trilby,
early in the novel, comes across as a strong female character, noted "for
all her boyish high spirits" (Doty 47).Jules
Zanger argues that Herbert Beerbohm Tree's dramatization of Trilby
"was an instant success, in part because of the 'Trilbymania' which the
novel had precipitated, but also because the play spoke directly to rising
popular fears and prejudices" about Jews (33).While
I agree with Zanger that anti-Semitic fears are certainly a part of an
explanation as to why the dramatization was a success (although I'd like
to note that the fears and prejudices that Trilby relies on are not in
any way limited to anti-Semitism), he fails to suggest what caused "Trilbymania"
in the first place.Daniel Pick asks
"Was it the novel's complicity with antisemitism, the charm of its picture
of Bohemia, its fascination with mesmerism, or the mournful and melancholic
rendition of a lost Paris which inspired the passion?"(119).Pick,
like Zanger, ultimately decides that its complicity with anti-Semitism
provides much of the driving force of the novel's popularity.Vrettos
comments that contemporary critics "focused on the reader's potential suggestibility
and the ways in which emotional excess could be encouraged by specific
kinds of narratives" (96).I'd like
to suggest that Svengali and Dracula invite this kind of emotional excess
on the parts of not only the readers, but the critics, who scarcely mention
Little Billee or the three Englishmen in favor of examining Svengali as
sinister Jew, in the tradition of Shylock and Fagin.
Vrettos
comments that du Maurier creates a situation, in the context of his novel,
whereby one is forced "to become a voyeur who participates in Svengali's
scopic manipulations of Trilby by watching her performance from a stance
of aesthetic distance and sexual desire, or to overidentify with the heroine
and become feminized, indeed hypnotized, by her performance into a state
of emotional collapse" (103).Pick,
in his analysis, also comments on the scopic power that Svengali wields
over Trilby in the novel, although without contemplating identification
with Trilby.Vrettos' binary, however,
oversimplifies the case somewhat, as the figures of Little Billee and the
other two Englishmen exist in the novel in both positions.Little
Billee watches Trilby's performance as a voyeur but is also "hypnotized…by
her performance into a state of emotional collapse", reduced to tears.Vrettos
analyzes du Maurier's novel as "it constructs a rigidly set of viewing
options" which are complicated by Alexander Doty's analysis of the three
Englishmen as queer opera queens.Doty
comments that "from the beginning, Little Billee is much less convincing
as Trilby's romantic interest than as the sensitive and easily-moved-to-tears
aesthete who complements Svengali's musical-performer and impresario in
the culturally feminized and homosexualized world of the arts" (47).Little
Billee, through the course of the novel, is far more interested in Trilby's
foot, at first, and then Trilby's voice, later, than in a romantic relationship
with her, except as an afterthought.His
relationship to Taffy had more romantic elements in it than his relationship
to Trilby.There is plenty of textual
evidence for Little Billee as being one of the inverts of the novel, beyond
this. Svengali threatens Little Billee, saying "'Himmel! what's this for
an arm?It's like a girl's'" (77)!He
compares Little Billee to a woman, hinting that his physiology is feminine,
rather than masculine.Also, while
Little Billee "flatter[s] himself that he possessed the philosophical and
scientific mind", he nonetheless holds an "inverted sympathy with the believer"
(34); his scientific knowledge is of the inverted kind, a term used by
the sexologists of the period to mean alternately homosexual and the notion
of a man trapped in a woman's body.His
aestheticism, his relationship to Taffy (who marries Little Billee's sister
after he dies), his feminine physical traits, and his "inverted" ideas
all code Little Billee as homosexual.Doty
suggests that the opera queen is "the gay (or otherwise queer) high-culture
impresario or aficionado who expresses his passions and desires in public
through women's bodies", a phenomenon that Svengali fits quite well in
Trilby
as well as the trois Angliches (46).In
fact, Doty places Svengali as a queer figure as he "mesmerizes both men
and women into becoming accomplished performers" and "has the men perform
duets with him on instruments, while he trains the women to become divas"
(46).There is no textual evidence
for the claim that Svengali hypnotizes both men and women, unless a reader
assumes that Svengali has mesmerized Gecko like he has Trilby.Furthermore,
the duets that Svengali has with Gecko may or may not be read as homoerotic,
although Philip Brett has an evocative article on playing Schubert for
four-hands along these lines.There
is a substantial difference between the duets Svengali plays with Gecko
and the control he exerts over Trilby, however.While
I agree, in general, that Svengali exists under the same sign of "perversion"
as does the homosexual and the hysteric woman, for all the reasons I have
already given, Doty's analysis of Svengali as queer stretches beyond the
text.
The
opera queen, according to Koestenbaum and in Trilby, is devoted
to one, and only one, diva.Koestenbaum
notes that "the opera queen must choose one diva.The
other divas may be admired, enjoyed, even loved.But
only one diva can reign in the opera queen's heart; only one can have the
power to describe a listener's life, as a compass describes a circle" (19).Koestenbaum
gives the power in the relationship to the diva to describe to the opera
queen his life back to him, but Trilby belies this power relationship.While
Trilby's voice moves Little Billee to tears, it is not really Trilby but
Svengali, who uses her as a machine.I'd
like to suggest that the opera queen operates equally to discipline and
control the diva, and in Trilby, La Svengali exists as an object
of exchange between Little Billee and Svengali in a form of rivalry, much
as Sedgwick describes.Sedgwick writes
"the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love', differently as they are experienced,
are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent", which places the intense
rivalry between Little Billee and Svengali in the text as a romantic relationship
(21).The woman exists as a vehicle
to ward off the threat of homosexuality in the homosocial bond between
men.Doty writes "feminized though
it is, the art in Trilby allows little agency for women.Caught
between the artistic vision of a homosexual man and the domestic vision
of a heterosexual man (albeit a nominally heterosexual one here), Trilby
can only respond and react to a man's desires" (47).Ruth
A. Solie, discussing the woman in the opera box in the novels of Henry
James, notes that the box "functions as a glorious jewel-box to set off
its prize" but that "at the same time it is a sort of luxuriously upholstered
trap" (197).This analysis can extend
to the diva on the stage, possibly even more so.The
stage operates to put the diva on display, but, as Trilby shows,
putting her on display is its own trap.The
diva, worshipped by the opera queen, shuttles between two men for their
pleasures in Trilby.She
gives pleasure to Svengali by bringing him worldwide fame for recovering
the bel canto, and gives pleasure to Littlee Billee by being an object
of aesthetic desire.The opera queen's
identification with the diva, contrary to Koestenbaum's analysis, is not
a mode of resistance or liberation for the diva, although it may function
as such for the homosexual aficionado.
Svengali
must be read as being a medical man, as well as a teacher of singing, rather
than being read as being homosexual, as Doty does, or exclusively as threatening
Jew, as much of the rest of the extant criticism does.As
medical man and as pedagogue, Svengali acts in a role that is as patriarchal,
while at the same time, as Jew and as musician, he is written under the
sign of perversion.Du Maurier wrote
"such was Svengali--only to be endured for the sake of his music--always
ready to vex, frighten, bully, or torment anybody or anything smaller and
weaker than himself--from a woman or a child or a mouse or a fly" (77).Although
this statement occurs after he threatens Little Billee, providing more
evidence for Little Billee's feminine nature, it also shows Svengali as
misogynist.He has no interest in
improving Trilby for her own sake, but in order to claim fame for himself.In
fact, he desires that she be places under glass in "the École de
Médecine" (School of Medicine) where her body, but especially the
"bony sounding-board of a nose" and "the roof of [her] big mouth" will
be put on display (92).The figures
of singing instructor, doctor, sexologist, misogynist, and Jew collapse
into the figure of Svengali, which is not surprising given the parallel
trajectories of the discourses of voice culture, sexology, and anti-Semitic
racist eugenics.
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