Murder in Mile End

Amy Levy, Jewishness, and the City

Bibliographic Data

ID12412003
AuthorsAlex Goody (0000-0002-4750-4324, Oxford Brookes University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume34
Issue2
Pages461-479
Publication date2006-08-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueVictorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1060150306051278
OpenAlexW1967098808
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited19

The work of Amy Levy, as a Jewish, feminist, lesbian writer at the fin de siècle , coincides with what Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst describe as a “crucial moment in the formation and transformation of [the] object[s] of study” of “cultural and social historians, urban theorists, literary critics, post-colonial critics, feminist writers, and gay and lesbian theorists” (xiv). The concern of this article, rather than co-opting Levy into a particular critical framework, is to explore her presentation of subjectivity in the urban landscape, particularly in the poems of the posthumously published A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889). In these poems and elsewhere the city instigates a disturbing unsettling of binaries and identifications which suggests the possibility of writing (of) divergent or subversive identities, what Cynthia Scheinberg terms Levy's “minority” voices ( Women's Poetry 191). The irregular, unregulated urban space undermines the closure of heterosexual, national narratives and provides a cartography for Levy's exploration of “the intersection between various minority positions and cultural discourses which construct and judge ‘others’” ( ibid .). In the first two sections of A London Plane-Tree Levy moves towards a complex elaboration of impermanently located self-knowledge that develops beyond the sexual and racial identifications of her earlier work in which she draws on more traditional and intelligible knowledges. Thus, the biblical and classical themes of “Xantippe” or “Magdalen” and the stable persona of the dramatic monologue are increasingly replaced by a lyric voice that occupies an unstable, modern, urban world. With her interest in the poet James Thomson (B. V.) and her 1883 essay on him, Levy can be seen to be identifying with an emergent late-nineteenth-century urban poetic that greatly influences the first section of A London Plane-Tree . But it is not simply that Levy “discloses how the metropolitan world of high culture was increasingly infiltrated by...feminists, sexual dissidents, Jewish people, and freethinkers” (Bristow 80). The city of A London Plane-Tree and the intersections, interchanges, and subversions it enables make it impossible to maintain the divisions of self and other, object and subject. It is through the space of the city that Levy is enabled to write the specificity of her own unauthorized, ambiguous, “minor” voice

Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Epistemology · Lesbian · Literary criticism · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Sociology · Subjectivity · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy

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