Compare Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Anthony Hecht's "the Dover Bitch"

Dover Beach & Dover Bitch

Anthony Hecht's “The Dover Bitch" is probably the best-known modernist adaptation of a Victorian poem, moreover, of a poem, "Dover Beach," that is as representative as any other short text of what we mean by the term "Victorian." Consequently, I sometimes open my undergraduate Victorian survey with a contrast of the two works to convey an initial, ballpark sense of what one means by "Victorianism" and "High Modernism" on the other. The difference I emphasize is primarily the epistemological shift I would like to spell out (Booth & Wayne, Pp.56).

The history of "Dover Beach" criticism has of course thrown up very different kinds of readings--biographical, phenomenology, psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, etc.--depending upon the signifying context (in E. D. Hirsch's sense of "significance"). "Matthew Arnold's" point--fidelity in love as a redoubt against the chaos of the darkling plain--has never been in serious question. (I put quotation marks around the name "Matthew Arnold"--as around the "Anthony Hecht" to come--to indicate my acceptance of the current notion that the author's name is a convenient and conventional marking for a body of texts rather than for a readily accessible biographical consciousness.). At any rate, whatever the signifying context, the moral identity of "Matthew Arnold" and the poem's speaker and the moral thrust of the poem's Arnold an "criticism of life" has not, it seems, been a matter of much critical debate (although Norman Holland's account of "Dover Beach" in The Dynamics of Literary Response might be advanced exception to prove the rule). That is our interpretive community has converged upon a meaning for the poem that has not changed much with the years (Gombrich, Pp.76).

To the extent that this is so, our agreed-upon reading of certainty in love as the poem's central emphasis is in touch with our reader construction of a pre-Paterian. High Victorian certainty (and Pater is the swing figure in the matter)--a certainty that, whatever the difficulties of accurate perception, one can finally "see" with a certain degree of disinterestedness and clarity. Even within the context of "Dover Beach's" murky darkling plain, the Arnoldian mind thus seems to have a capacity for cognitive fidelity to the "real." As one of Paul De Man's "allegories of reading," the speaker's belief in the possibility of emotional fidelity is thus a figure for epistemological legibility, though that Arnoldian point perhaps made more explicit in "The Buried Life," where the eyes of the beloved provide the speaker with a mirror within which he can "read clear" ultimate meanings (1.81).

I would thus venture a highly debatable historical construct that bothers me less when I try it out on an undergraduate class than when I have the temerity to advance it before an audience of Victorian specialists at the MLA. Namely, that with all their hedging about and skepticism and "Disappearance-of-God" anxiety, the major Victorian poets--Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (not to mention Hopkins)--imply a confidence (or at least a faint trust in the ...