80
LESLIE FIEDLER
Quite obviously, the "penny-dreadful" did not operate to change
the visible world, as did, for instance, the revolutionary pamphlets
and
books
of Marx and Engels. Instead it changed hearts and minds,
altered both the self-consciousness of the workers and the conscious–
ness of them among the bourgeoisie. Thinking of something like this,
George Bernard Shaw was once moved to remark that Dickens'
Little DMrit
was a more revolutionary book than Marx's
Das Kapital.
And surely, even more directly and crudely than Dickens, Sue and
Reynolds and Lippard used their kind of fiction to demythologize the
upper classes and to mythologize the lower ones, to expose and de–
bunk aristocratic life and to sentimentalize and glorify the life of the
humble.
Precisely because it was addressed not to the reason but the sen–
sibilities of its readers, this fiction could not afford to be merely
didactic or tendentious. It aimed above all at telling stories of breath–
less suspense, creating vivid images of horror and lust, thus rousing
passion and releasing it, over and over in a series of orgasmic ex–
plosions. The development of this sort of fiction is not linear in the
mode of conventional plotting; it is up and down, from
peak
to
valley, tumescence to detumescence and back.
"Excitement" rather than "instruction and delight" is the end
sought by the writers of the Popular Literature of the 1840's; and
in quest of it, they exploited, with the virtuosity of old pros, two
basic human responses: to sex and aggression. Theirs was, that is to
say, a kind of fiction thoroughly sadomasochistic and at least demi–
pornographic, though always in terms more political than domestic,
more public than private. The brothel and the gallows were their
preferred scene-areas where commerce and sex, law and violence
oddly consorted. And this concern with public issues constitutes a bid
for respectability though of a special sort.
Such pious and sadomasochistic subpornography must, therefore,
be seen as occupying an unsuspected middle ground between that pre–
empted by the novels intended for the "proper Victorians" and that
exploited by those writers whom Stephen Marcus has called the
"other Victorians." Unlike the pure Porn provided by the latter,
political demi-porn contains no crudely explicit language, no forbid–
den words, no actual descriptions of the sexual encounter, only a
constant teasing of the imagination, a constant invitation to finish
for one's self scenes which fade out in a swoon and discreet silence.
