Gendered Incongruities in the Silenced Voice of Pre-Raphaelite Paintings: A. S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia"

"It is a curious outcome of travel," William Adamson, the natural scientist and male protagonist of "Morpho Eugenia," tells Matilda: that all beliefs come to seem more--more relative, more tenuous. I was much struck by the universal incapacity of Amazon Indians to imagine a community which did not reside on the banks of a vast river. They are not capable of asking. "Do you live near a river?" only "What is your river like?" ... It is like trying to teach a blind man the principles of perspective, which I once attempted. And it led me to wonder what do I not reflect upon, of what important facts am I ignorant in my picture of the world? (135) Set in the nineteenth century, "Morpho Eugenia" challenges our preconceived notions of Victorian England, specifically natural theology, Darwinism, colonialism, social hierarchies, and gender constructs, to name but a few. As in Possession, A. S. Byatt's vision of Victorian society and culture in this work is never static, constantly in flux, one moment shaping our perspective only to deconstruct it, destabilize it, or problematize it the next. William's somewhat postmodern remarks above make a good case in point. We nod in agreement as we are reading them, only to realize that William is unaware of his tendency to universalize even while he is talking about the lack of universal concepts, thus illustrating his ignorance of his "picture of the world" at the very moment he recognizes it. In "Morpho Eugenia," Byatt compels us to wonder about our own picture of the world and to comprehend the importance of seeing our own postmodern world in ever-shifting perspectives in order to realize its incongruities, thus hopefully to avoid getting caught or entangled in conventional patterns of behavior dictated by past and present cultures, most often disguised as universal values. In her postmodern Victorian fiction, Byatt engages her readers in the reconstruction of history and culture, quite often entangling them in sociopolitical contradictions, particularly those governing gender constructs that continue to preoccupy us. Thus her novels respond "to the pressures of the past, the force of historical thinking ... in a way that does not necessarily legitimate conventional historical narratives or conventional ways of thinking about history" (Elam 10-11). In her recent inquiry into historiographic metafiction, On Histories and Stories, Byatt offers yet another reason for her preoccupation with the past: I believe post-modern writers are returning to historical fiction because the idea of writing about the Self is felt to be worked out, or precarious, or because these writers are attracted by the idea that perhaps we have no such thing as an organic discoverable, single Self .... We like historical persons because they are unknowable, only partly available to the imagination, and we find this occluded quality attractive. (31) She later explains, "in my case my sense of my own identity is bound up with the past" (93). In her resurrection of the Victorian past, then, Byatt does not merely reconfigure historical, literary, and artistic figures but also reshapes her readers' subjectivity. Referring to Adamson's perspective at the beginning of the novella, when he attends a ball at the Alabaster mansion, where he has been invited to stay following his shipwreck on his return to England from the Amazons, the narrator describes his double consciousness as his mind wanders from luxurious "civilized" surroundings to primitive wildness: "Nothing he did now seemed to happen without this double vision, of things seen and done otherwise, in another world" (7). Dressed in a suit borrowed from Eugenia's brother, while observing "the shimmering girls" dancing, whirling "past in the candlelight, shell-pink and sky-blue, silver and citron, gauze and tulle," he recalls "a festa on the Rio Manquity, lit by lamps made of half an orange-skin filled with turtle oil. …