In recent years, the methodologies, objects, and ideological underpinnings of Victorian studies have been radically questioned in what has been called the field’s undisciplining turn. But, perhaps paradoxically, the designation Victorian seems, if anything, to have become more firmly entrenched. Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy Wong’s influential manifesto “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” led and titled a special issue of Victorian Studies featuring exhortations from Ryan Fong to “unsettle the Victorian,” Nasser Mufti to “hate Victorian Studies properly” (“Hating”), and Anjuli Raza Kolb to engage seriously the “paravictorian.” Elsewhere, Jessie Reeder has called for a “multilingual Victorian transatlanticism,” Tim Watson to “decolonize Victorian studies” (603), and Priya Joshi to “globalize Victorian studies” (“Globalizing”). The field has produced special issues like Victorian Literature in the Age of #MeToo, web projects like Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, and, slightly earlier, initiatives like the V21 Collective. Exceptions notwithstanding, it is striking that this radical and transformative body of scholarship has been so clearly marked by a turn back to the term Victorian.

This turn is the more surprising, perhaps, because it comes on the heels of a period where the momentum seemed headed in the opposite direction. In the first decade-plus of the twenty-first century, great emphasis was placed on the word Victorian’s “all-too-apparent limitations” (Anderson 195) and “unmistakeabl[y] nationalist overtone” (Flint 230); leading scholars concluded that “Victorian studies is not a helpful term” (Armstrong 514). Market forces, with their incentive toward broader, more flexible subspecializations, seemed to accelerate the shift to categories like the long nineteenth century. A few recent publications—foremost among them Sukanya Banerjee, Fong, and Helena Michie’s “Widening the Nineteenth Century” and Joshi’s “Globalizing Victorian Studies”—have provided powerful defenses of the term Victorian. But overall, the word’s continued prominence in the undisciplining turn reflects less a debate won than an argument abandoned. Among the titles of papers presented at the 2023 North American Victorian Studies Association annual conference, for example, the designation Victorian appeared no fewer than sixty times, while nineteenth-century appeared only twice. My purpose in this article is not to revive the debate between these two terms, which, like so many terminological disputes, boils down to a hearty “it depends.” Rather, I examine the current function and implications of Victorian within scholarly discourse, where the term has provided an institutional container for a range of materials whose intrinsic relation should be questioned.

This article argues for the usefulness of a narrow Victorian within transnational, anticolonial nineteenth-century scholarship through a reading of the 1886–88 Ghanaian novel Marita; or, The Folly of Love, the earliest known (nonsettler) African novel in English and a text that might appear to be ripe for a global Victorian approach. I begin by examining the use of Victorian in today’s scholarly field, arguing that it has come to serve primarily institutional, rather than interpretive, functions. Then, I provide a reading illustrating the limitations of interpreting Marita as a Victorian text. The novel, a polemical defense of customary “country marriage” (without church involvement and compatible with polygyny) against the Marriage Ordinance of 1884, is a complex, ideologically challenging work: politically evasive, misogynistic, referentially dense, textually and narratively knotty. It is not yet widely read by scholars of the nineteenth century, although it should be. But the question of how nineteenth-centuryists might read this work has multiple possible answers, answers that illuminate the stakes of the subdisciplinary framings under consideration.

Dipesh Chakrabarty has long since shown that only when European thought is “provincialized”—divested of its status as presumptive universal—can it be rightly understood as a nonprivileged agent within an irreducibly plural modernity. Marita is a novel centrally engaged in “documenting how [European culture] has been made to look obvious far beyond the ground where it originated” (43). As such, to read the work as Victorian obscures its reliance on a contrastive relationship to what it considers a Victorian literary tradition to produce its meaning. At the same time, understanding this contrast relies on our retention of the Victorian as a legible countercategory. Like all periodizations, Victorian is a retroactive formation; although critics have applied the term to literature since the 1870s, the scholarly field’s mid-twentieth-century emergence is inextricable from both Stracheyan modernism (with its strawman Victorian antimodel) and Leavisite nostalgia (with its fantasized organicism) and involved designedly misleading domestications and whitewashings of historical realities.Footnote ¹ Nevertheless, I argue not only that the Victorian indexes a real phenomenon—however constructed and discursive—but also that it is a concept that a really global nineteenth-century studies cannot do without. Literary tradition involves a presumptive field of textual reference (authorial and readerly, conscious and unconscious). And a text like Marita foregrounds the problematic of the demarcation, construction, and disestablishment of such traditions. To Victorianize the novel would be to overwrite this problematic, yet neither can we do without the Victorian entirely: Marita’s intervention relies on a concept of the category as a portable but limited cultural field.

I am calling, then, for a scholarly provincialization of the Victorian. A provincialized Victorian studies is one that takes seriously the range of nineteenth-century literary traditions, within and beyond the anglophone. Doing this requires engaging the Victorian tradition as more than a bureaucratic fiction encompassing a vast array of nineteenth-century texts. Marita deliberately distinguishes cultural Victorianism from British imperial power; to read the novel solely in (anti)colonial terms strips it of its literary qualities and elides a core element of its argument. The novel’s relation to the Victorian is a challenging interpretive question. But if Marita pushes back against the Victorian, understanding it requires a thick theory of what exactly is being pushed back against; if the novel is instead operating in parallel to the Victorian, we need a concept of this difference that takes seriously the traditions being distinguished. We must rethink the Victorian, not as a period, form, or method, but as a corpus and field of reference, stripped of pretentions to universality. As a literary tradition.

In the wake of decades of contestation, Victorian studies soldiers on as a kind of area studies without a clear area, a periodization without a stable period. Victorian has always been a loose academic designation, despite the precise time span of the reign from which the term derives.Footnote ² Even among scholars of nineteenth-century Britain, where Victorian has served as an ostensibly neutral periodization, the term has been enduringly contentious, criticized as arbitrary, valorizing, parochial, or nationalistic. And the more nineteenth-century scholarship decenters England, let alone Queen Victoria, the less obviously appropriate the word has seemed. Beyond the field, difficulties multiply. For Americanists, the term is often a cultural rather than chronological signifier, indexing Eurocentric traditionalism, prudishness, or repression as variously associated with a white, northeastern, Protestant bourgeoisie. For comparativists, the term can seem like a tactical dodge by English departments that ignores and conceals the structural transnationalism of cultural forms like the realist novel, while distorting literary history by undervaluing movements like naturalism or aestheticism that were not centered in Britain or the anglophone. And for postcolonialists, the word’s primary referent is empire: Victorian denotes, in the nineteenth century, a discredited assimilationist ideal and, in the twenty-first, a set of disciplinary protocols rooted in a Eurocentric canon and method. Unsurprisingly, then, defenses of the term have called for a geographic and temporal broadening of the category.

As such, in recent decades, the scope of Victorianist scholarship has expanded dramatically, “relocat[ed] both across the globe and beyond the time frame determined by royal rule” (Joshi, “Globalizing” 20). But this expansion involves dangers of its own. Maggie Tonkin, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys, and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa have linked the field’s “radical expansion” to “the expansionist dynamic of the Victorian period itself” (3, 2); for Pablo Mukherjee, it is precisely this expansionism that defines the Victorian as such. The problem these scholars identify is that any global Victorian framework risks reinscribing the worst of the category’s associated logics, colonizing related but hitherto distinct areas of scholarly inquiry. Recent justifications of the term have therefore demanded not just expansion but reconceptualization. “As Victorianists,” write Banerjee, Fong, and Michie,

An “assemblage” can work as a “lever” only in a dialectical sense; the term’s existing “resonance” is what enables its redefinition through a kinetic interplay between what Victorian has meant and what it might come to mean. This interplay is also the element that makes the term an effective heuristic of “how far, or how much, we can widen”—an area of inquiry too “wide” would lack the friction that validates the assemblage as nonarbitrary.

Joshi is even more direct about the metonymic (re)organization of the category: “Recognizing the cultural traffic spawned around the globe by Victorian ideology and policies,” she writes, “‘Victorian’ resembles a migratory practice with far more lasting global impact than other[s]” (“Globalizing” 20), including a diverse array of “indigenous Victorianisms” (21). Joshi is, in a sense, calling for scholars to allow the term another migration. She refigures Victorian as “a term whose real use lies in indexing a set of preoccupations rather than confining those preoccupations to history and geography” so that “other circuits and relations, long-obscured in the centre-dominated model, become evident” (21). Again, it is the term’s bad, old sense—“the cultural traffic spawned around the globe” by the British Empire—that enables a later decentering. A different term could not adequately “index” these “other circuits and relations,” because the term’s genealogical implications are precisely what enable Joshi to discard genealogical explanation in favor of “affiliation” (22), a “relationship that has developed and gets reproduced because it addresses preoccupations and practices of the moment” (22) without reducing these “affinities” (a term borrowed from Wai Chee Dimock) to an artificial constellation (qtd. in 22). Both Joshi’s and Banerjee, Fong, and Michie’s pieces—which, I reemphasize, are somewhat exceptional in theorizing their use of the term at all—wager that a “wider,” more capacious use of Victorian can serve to bring forward the global interconnections of nineteenth-century life.

An instructive contrast to these arguments is provided by Josephine McDonagh’s 2021 Literature in a Time of Migration. McDonagh emphasizes questions of British identity, and her book features chapters on writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot, but the word Victorian barely appears. For example, the term is absent in a chapter about John Galt’s work for the Canada Land Company in the Scottish Canadian community of Guelph, which was colonized by Scottish Highlander migrants, some of whom came directly from a failed migration scheme in Venezuela. The chapter’s complex narrative of imperial history, nineteenth-century transnationalism, and British literature could undoubtedly have been productively theorized through Joshi’s conception of the Victorian as migratory practice. Instead, McDonagh circumvents the Victorian frame altogether and, by doing so, emphasizes not just the structural interconnections behind the story she tells but also the distinctions that they entail: a Canadian history that is not Victorian history, a Scottish literature that is not Victorian literature, and a history of colonization that is not (just) a history of colonialism. Where Joshi reads the Victorian as a “contact zone” (“Globalizing” 39), McDonagh resituates it as just one of the contacts being encountered.

Each of these approaches has significant affordances, but they provoke necessarily divergent questions, assumptions, and relations. That the scope of scholarship is “wide” or global does not make its methods substitutable, and just because something can be read as Victorian does not mean that any given reading is an exercise in Victorian studies. Indeed, the field’s long history of interdisciplinarity has, to some extent, obscured the artificiality of its collection of objects. The rhetoric of conquest in nineteenth-century New Zealand newspapers, the metrical analysis of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, and the history of medicine in Jamaica can all be productively interpreted through the lens of the Victorian, and can all be linked in surprising and generative ways. But a field framework that simply presupposes those interconnections does so at the cost of other frames and at the cost of equally important topical, historical, and methodological cleavages. This is, in some sense, an obvious point. But it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the unifying referent of Victorian scholarship has become, increasingly, simply us: the Victorianists.

The range and diversity of self-proclaimed Victorianist scholarship published in recent years speaks to the success of the field’s turn to a longer and “wider” periodization. But why are there so many avowed Victorianists to begin with? If we are encountering a “New Victorian Studies,” it involves a distinct element of new wine in old wineskins. The interpretive usefulness of an expansive Victorian for some projects is undeniable. But would anyone argue, if the word were not already in the names of so many conferences, journals, departmental drop-down menus, that just as many of us would continue to use it? How many scholars work beyond the field’s traditional boundaries but still want to present within the MLA forum Victorian and Early-20th-Century English or at the North American Victorian Studies Association, or publish in journals like Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, and so forth? And how do those institutional incentives shape the scholarly end product?

A related feature of the global Victorian turn is its continual centering of the anglophone. Critiques of the anglophone frame are nothing new, even within Victorianist scholarship. But despite excellent, influential work arguing for translingual and translation-based approaches to the nineteenth century, the market imperatives against spending time and energy on non-output-generating language learning are enormous. In this context, it is not a coincidence that, as Reeder has argued, “while English glossocentrism haunts transatlantic studies in all disciplines, Victorianists have done some of the least work to correct it” (173). One frequent function of the Victorian lens is to provide a (usually unstated) rationale for focusing on English-language materials; thus, Sharon Marcus’s conclusion that “comparison does require us to jettison the term Victorian” (683). As such, Reeder’s exhortation to “be cautious not to center the ‘Victorian’” is not only a political imperative but also a practical one (188). The three terms in “multilingual Victorian transatlanticism” are not compounding, and although Reeder shows their mutual resistance to be intellectually productive, she follows Marcus inasmuch as she recognizes that a more multilingual transatlanticism is perforce a less Victorian one.

Another feature of global Victorian scholarship, despite its anglophone focus, is the underrepresentation of the United States. Global turns in Romanticist and eighteenth-century scholarship have placed increased attention on America, but despite the growth of transatlantic Victorian scholarship in recent decades (particularly among poetry scholars), the United States, when it is theorized as part of Victorian studies at all, is still mostly understood as a special topic.Footnote ³ In specifically global Victorian frameworks, the United States remains an area of “almost complete neglect” (Marcus 682). The impulse to focus on subjects less widely analyzed within American academia is understandable, indeed salutary, but it is worth defamiliarizing the extent to which even uber-canonical, globally influential writers like Edgar Allan Poe are commonly elided by supposedly global frameworks. Is there any doubt that this is connected to professional incentives? to the fact that many of us have nineteenth-century Americanist colleagues? If the term Victorian can serve as something like a coded exemption of the American, how might that distort theorizations of the former category?

I do not mean this as a condemnation—all scholarship, all writing, is shaped by social, institutional, and generic contexts, and Victorianists certainly need not categorically become, of all things, Americanists too. My point is simply that even greatly expanded versions of the Victorian have boundaries defined in part by logistics, not just ideas. And the more referentially ambiguous a field designator becomes, the larger the role institutional factors play in its definition. The constitutive object of Victorian studies has increasingly shifted from a set of cultural objects to a body of scholarship. And I worry that this shift risks a self-undermining cathexis to institutional norms, calcifying as method contingent practices developed around a particular cultural context.

One of the central elements of the undisciplining turn is its insistence on engagement with scholars across fields. Chatterjee, Christoff, and Wong write:

My question, and I ask this in earnest: What do Victorian studies scholars bring to this interdisciplinary table? The answer is not our methods—close reading, interdisciplinary historicism, psychoanalysis, and so on—because they are equally embedded in the other fields from which many of us are working to learn. And our subject matter expertise, to the extent that we still share one, is at the heart of what these collaborations intend to destabilize. I would wager that most readers of this article know Jane Eyre well, but the idea that this could be a unifying rationale is precisely what the field has been collectively moving to reject. The interdisciplinary roots of Victorian studies do not counteract the fact that its interdisciplinary structure was designed to analyze an object that we now tend to question or outright dismiss.

One unspoken but widespread answer to this question is simply our perceived institutional authority. Claudia Nelson’s 2007 suggestion that Victorian studies will become a kind of host field serving “to generate new” interdisciplinary fields (42) relies on forms of institutional stability that no longer pertain. The comparatively vast array of Victorian scholarly venues, the cultural capital of British literature, and the residual presence of senior faculty members on foredoomed tenure lines help maintain the illusion of the nineteenth century as central to literary studies broadly. But this sense of the position of the Victorianist is, at minimum, anachronistic, and, particularly when taken up by white scholars like myself, risks a deeply Victorian (in the pejorative sense), indeed colonial, implication of noblesse oblige—an implication especially preposterous in a context where it is so often the enrollments of colleagues in African American, postcolonial, and ethnic studies keeping our departments afloat.

I do not believe, however, that Victorian studies has nothing to offer beyond this phantasm of institutional prestige. Instead, I would like to suggest the potential utility of a turn back toward an older framework: reading the nineteenth century through the interplay of a global network of literary traditions. How might we imagine Victorian fiction as a specific, historically situated literary tradition, thematizing and circulating within an expansive but limited cultural context? I propose that this version of Victorian—narrow rather than “wide,” transnational without a presumption of being global—might itself help us undiscipline; by centering objects over methods, we might loosen the self-regarding perpetuation of discipline itself.

This is not to dismiss frameworks like the global Victorian, which I have used myself. What I want to reject is, first, the presupposition that scholarship on the nineteenth century is inherently scholarship on the Victorian and, second, the presupposition that scholarship (or good scholarship) on the Victorian is inherently global or transnational in nature. It is unsurprising that, in the wake of decades of much-needed canon critique and explosion, scholars like Isobel Armstrong, Kate Flint, and Marcus argued against the term Victorian not just for its cultural and imperial baggage but for its increasing arbitrariness, both overly capacious and needlessly limiting. Nor is it surprising that, as transnationalism, race, and presentism have become increasingly salient, some of these same attributes—entanglement with empire, indeterminate boundaries, contradictory connotations—could instead emerge as useful. Literary studies is still in the process of internalizing critiques of the anglophone and of world literature made by Aamir Mufti, Emily Apter, Jacob Edmond, Jessica Valdez, and others, but one important lesson from their work is that the “global” is not a neutral category. Different works hold different relationships to the global; being written within an interconnected world is not enough to render one book as much a piece of world literature as another. Moreover, such categories often tell us more about the fields of reference being postulated than about the textual objects themselves. The same principle applies to the Victorian.

Any number of cases might be instructive in considering the practical implications of such a suggestion. Why is the American Henry James granted unimpeachable status as a Victorian novelist within genealogies of the English novel, but a contemporary like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remains unintegrated into standard narratives of Victorian poetry, despite his massive influence and self-conscious participation in that tradition? Where is Uncle Tom’s Cabin, likely the best-selling novel ever in Britain at its time (Gohdes 29), in dominant narratives of the Victorian novel? When George Eliot uses epigraphs from Walt Whitman, is she participating in the global anglophone? We might equally turn to the inconsistent uptake of nineteenth-century texts from the British Empire. What does it mean to place a novelist like George Moore, an Irishman with primarily French influences, within or outside the Victorian? How might the increasing prevalence of the Bengali poet Toru Dutt in Victorian scholarship, anthologies, and syllabi affect scholars’ sense of her status within Indian literature, or of her francophone corpus? Is her relative canonization attributable to what the Indian literary historian Madhukar Krishna Naik identifies as her participation in “the Romantic-Victorian tradition” (143)? Where, indeed, is Ghalib—a far more major poet in his time and an equally global writer, but one who wrote in Urdu and Persian and whose sphere of literary influence was centered on Asia—in Victorianist narratives of the “wide” nineteenth century? Aijaz Ahmad, discussing Ghalib’s anglophone reception, tellingly asserts: “If he wasn’t already a Victorian Romanticist, he had to be made into one” (xx).

The connected dilemmas of the American and the anglophone shape the disciplinary questions at stake here, but they are also, arguably, special cases. I take as my primary example, then, a novel written in English and within the territory of the British Empire: Marita; or, The Folly of Love. Serialized under the pseudonym “A. Native,” whose identity remains uncertain, Marita was published in the Ghanaian newspapers the Western Echo and the Gold Coast Echo between 1886 and 1888. Its narrative concerns an elite Gold Coast bureaucrat, Mr. Quaibu, who is persuaded to enter a church marriage with his Methodist wife, Miss Wissah, only to see the quality of his married life rapidly deteriorate. On some levels, Marita seems like an ideal candidate for the global Victorian treatment. If, as Joshi proposes, Victorian indexes “a set of preoccupations” (“Globalizing” 21), the core concerns that Marita raises—theories and critiques of colonial governance, cultural and narrative conceptions of gender, practices of serialization and print culture, the roles of nonconformist denominations and missionary practices in cultural construction—would seem to be a perfect fit. Its most central issue, marriage, is of course a Victorian(ist) obsession.

The choice of the novel form itself, which the Western Echo’s founder, the journalist and activist James Hutton Brew, described (apparently accurately) as “the first attempt of the kind in that line by a native” (qtd. in Marita 34), internationalizes and Victorianizes the text. So do allusions to Lord Byron, John Milton, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, and Homer, alongside other classical and biblical texts, which announce the novel as cosmopolitan and culturally fluent, attributes shared by its most positively marked characters. The wise skeptic Bonsoe Penin, for example, “had the advantage of the best English education; besides being a good Latin, Greek and Hebrew scholar,” and “Mr Quaibu, the hero of this tale … also had the advantage of English education, moved in the highest society, both European and native, and at the time that this tale was commenced he was filling a post which was worth to him several hundred pounds sterling a year” (43). Significant too is the choice of English as the language of composition. The Western Echo’s contributors and readership consisted almost entirely of an elite class whose culture consumption was suffused with “Victorian reading matter” (Newell, Literary Culture 53), such as Dickens, John Ruskin, and William Makepeace Thackeray; Marita rejects and derides certain forms of bourgeois anglophilism, but it also lays claim—albeit with caveats—to this cultural heritage.

This circumspect approach works to counter what J. E. Casely Hayford (who some consider a leading candidate for the novel’s authorship) would later dismiss as “the cry of the ‘educated native peril’ [which] is raised, as if forsooth, the ‘native’ ceases to be a ‘native’ the moment he is educated” (89).Footnote ⁴ Marita resists this cry in both form and plot. The text’s authorial pseudonym, “A. Native,” stakes a claim to cultural representativeness and the status of spokesman, insisting on the compatibility of European form and education with “native” status. This insistence is corroborated through characters like the highly educated Quaibu, whose “features were not different from any of his countrymen’s—real type of a negro” (43). On the contrary, the less educated characters, like the misguided Wesleyan minister Mr. Pritzia, who “was deficient in education and could barely read and write and with difficulty speak the English language” (53), are the ones who demand precise compliance with Victorian sexual mores, instead of respecting the particular needs of West African culture.

All well and good for a global Victorian treatment; Marita might be brought productively into conversation with a more familiar set of nineteenth-century fictions about marriage, complicating and expanding received ideas and debates on the topic through its noncanonical, West African perspective. Such an approach, however, quickly encounters the problem of Marita’s extensive rhetoric of developmentalism. “Whilst it has taken more than a thousand years to make the white men what they are now,” Quaibu states, “we, on our side cannot count even one hundred; so you will easily perceive that their ways so far as the present is concerned are not our ways, neither does that which suit them necessarily suit us. When I speak of church marriages I mean as they concern us in this country” (74). Later, he tells the “European minister” Mr. Powers that church marriage is inappropriate “amongst a people just emerging from the shade of barbarism” (46, 79), whereas Powers finds that his counterarguments are so unsuccessful that “he might as well try to convince” Quaibu, in a telling colloquialism, “that black was white” (77). In these formulations, the author echoes a familiar talking point of West African Methodists: “Christianity should not be made a means by which the harmless customs of a people should be ruthlessly snatched away from them, dashed upon the ground and hopelessly destroyed. It should come in like the gentle potter making the best of the clay at his disposal” (Gold Coast Methodist Times qtd. in Marita 12). So when, late in the novel, an interpolated tale of the married misbehavior of an English “termagant” is resolved through social pressure, we read that this “show[s] the difference between the white virago and the black scold,” namely, the “wholesome checks to or upon her natural wicked propensities” of a “highly civilized society” (115). Is this rhetoric a reflection of the so-called colonial cringe? Is it a personal limitation of an author who, according to Stephanie Newell, was most probably himself part of the colonial apparatus as either a district commissioner or a customs inspector (Introduction 24)? a matter of what Chakrabarty calls “the raging Medusa of cultural relativism” (83)?

One thing is clear: Marita overtly resists conscription into a transnational “conversation” by insisting explicitly and repeatedly on a purely local application. Even within the Gold Coast context, Helen Yitah and Kari Dako have noted that Quaibu is careful to focus his efforts on changing the behavior of individuals and to aim his direct critique at local Methodists, not white missionaries or colonial administrators. Nor should the novel’s orientation be reduced to a matter of political expediency. Marita was published, after all, in the Western Echo and Gold Coast Echo, both of which were locally owned and staffed newspapers “providing Africans with the means of generating counter-positions to the policies of the colonial state” (Newell, Introduction 21). Part of the “Brew Press” (so called for their founder, Brew), these papers provided vital apprenticeships for a number of individuals who would become key figures in nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements, including Casely Hayford, S. R. B. Attoh Ahuma, and John Mensah Sarbah, and staged activist debates around abolition and other issues in real time (see Odijie). This publication context demands we treat Marita’s avowed nonportability as genuine and self-aware. The novel’s readership would have been a fairly small, highly politicized community of multilingual African cosmopolites, operating in what Newell has called a “paracolonial” textual milieu (Literary Culture 44). Unlike rough contemporaries such as Africanus Horton, whose antiracist writings in political philosophy specifically contested elements of European imperial thought in an international literary sphere, or Joseph Jeffrey Walters, whose 1891 activist novel Guanya Pau was intended explicitly as a fundraising call to American Episcopal churchwomen, Marita’s author writes for a presumptively African audience.

Marita’s original circulation context does not itself preclude a “wide” or global Victorian scholarly approach, which after all is primarily a matter of critical framework. The problem is that, for the author’s audience, it is precisely the idea that a transnational nineteenth-century culture should comprise a global Victorianism that the novel critiques. The models of marriage that Marita targets, Kristin Mann notes, are specifically “Victorian rather than explicitly Christian” (43). The novel is quite direct about this, and the Christian Quaibu repeatedly points to the absence of marriage mechanisms in the Bible itself. Therefore, it is treated as a matter of culture, not of religion or political regime, when Quaibu is persuaded to go forward with a church marriage and quickly finds his worst fears confirmed. With neither the mutual ability to separate nor the husband’s to marry elsewhere, Quaibu’s wife becomes entitled and shrewish, whereas (as readers are told of the distinct but analogous case of one Mrs. Littlemonie), “if she had been married according to the native rites and ceremony, where the man and woman have indisputable right to part in such cases, as she loved her husband, so she would have curbed in her natural inclinations and evil habits, and they would have been happy together” (Marita 117). Neither Christianity nor British rule is the problem in this marriage. The problem is Victorian culture.

This is underscored in a strange and heavily ironized scene in which Quaibu tries to explain that the church marriage that Wissah is demanding of him is really a matter of cultural forms, not of spiritual duty. Having conceded to speaking with a Wesleyan minister about the question, Quaibu reports back to his wife that the minister pitched church marriage to him by offering “a superb ring which was said was a present from Her Majesty the Queen to her beloved subject, Wissah, of whom she had heard a great deal, and the knighthood to her subject, even your beloved husband, on condition that we perform a certain meritorious deed” (71). In other words, social respectability—to “be considered by all classes of men as a respectable member of society” (71)—rather than spiritual salvation is the foregrounded purpose of the marriage. He goes on, somewhat bitterly, to explain, “You may ask, how is it that the Queen of England has to do with marriages generally? Know that she is the head of the Protestant faith” (71)—a problematic assertion within a nonconformist Wesleyan community, of which the Queen was not, after all, the head. When Wissah replies that “I do not fully comprehend the part Her Majesty has to do in the matter. I do not think that you do understand yourself” (72), then, she is only wrong in her reading of her husband’s tone. Marita portrays Quaibu as being in society but not of it, and he earns, but refuses to seek, the kind of social respectability he has been promised by the novel’s hypocritical Methodists. In this scene, Quaibu insists on the Victorian as a cultural category, a set of norms that can be readily distinguished from either the English language or fact of empire. He insists, in other words, on what Faith Smith calls “non-Victorian [textual] imaginaries” that reveal “how Victorianness deflects, retreats from, or asserts itself in the face of this multiplicity” (95). Marita both describes and constructs a boundary between “imaginaries,” thereby proposing a limit, in Banerjee, Fong, and Michie’s terms, on “how far, or how much” the Victorian can be “widened.”

Within this framework, Marita’s invocations of European literature appear less as credentialing allusions and more as winking metatextual overlays that allow for a multilevel structure of encoded discourse. From today’s historical distance, it is difficult to know how closely the events and characters of Marita might have mirrored possible real-world counterparts, but several features of the novel indicate the narrative assumption that its audience was capable of reading into various elements of the text. The authorial pseudonym is the first such element. Newell suggests that “it is possible that the newspaper-reading public of Cape Coast was so limited … that readers knew an author’s identity without needing to ask or be told” (Introduction 26). Such a possibility is supported by the narratorial tone in the prolegomena’s declaration that “I crave the forgiveness of the Fantee reader for using such expressions about them. If he knew the writer he would at once know that he could not have a better well-wisher, a greater lover of that race, than the writer is” (42). Certainly, the novel often assumes that the reader does know what is “really” being talked about. For example, its fictitious place-names punningly refer to real Gold Coast towns; some of these can still be readily identified—Newell notes that “Dobblesie stands for Cape Coast (‘double C’), while Gangacre may be identified as Accra (people by the Ga[)]” (Marita 69n)—while others are now inscrutable or identifiable only through context clues. Such in-jokes likely proliferate within the novel in ways difficult or impossible to reconstruct, as when we are told that one Mr. Allen might “not rather have his Junins Miminda as a wife” (106). No translation or language has been identified for the italicized phrase, but both its satirical tone and its presumed legibility are apparent. Similarly, a few paragraphs later, the exclamation “Queer boddom!” (108), words clearly borrowed from Scots, appears. Newell suggests that the phrase, which literally indicates “odd bottom,” is used to mean “deeply strange,” but notes that it does not appear in any known dictionary (Marita 108n). Perhaps it is a lost piece of slang or an in-joke for a coterie readership; in any case, this kind of moment should be understood as the tip of an iceberg of cultural referentiality. Marita’s author is a satirist, and his satire is intimately bound up with time and place.

Attention to this satirical mode foregrounds Marita’s heteroglossia. The ethnographic jargon of cultural developmentalism becomes, in this generic context, more complexly multivalent. Indeed, huge swaths of the novel operate analogously, through a double-voiced performance that foregrounds its own varidirectionality. Significantly, this operation often takes the form of racialized code switching. Thus Quaibu, when he finds himself debating with a “local preacher of high pretensions” named Mr. Prembroke (141), employs an almost comical high-Wesleyan diction quite unlike his speech elsewhere: “‘I see by the jowering looks of the skies,’ began Quaibu somewhat diffidently, ‘that I have not an easy task to perform in order to bring my leaky vessel to the friendly haven’” (143). Quaibu can slip in and out of missionary discourse as easily as his author does with ethnographic discourse, but, in both cases, their participation is sharply ironized by the discourse’s own structures of exclusion. Quaibu’s debate with Prembroke occurs before an audience of several “respectable native gentlem[e]n” (141); his use of Wesleyan diction is therefore a performance with two audiences, prototypical Bakhtinian language “with a sidewards glance” (Bakhtin 61). Marita’s readers are even further aware of the joke than the gentlemen, both because the readers are implicitly Quaibu’s intellectual equals and because they have the advantage of having read the previous thirteen installments and so understand Quaibu’s real views (and more typical modes of speech).

Scenes like this one make clear that Quaibu’s participation in a given social discourse cannot be understood as a personal or textual endorsement. So when, for instance, Marita’s narrator asks “what can poor, ignorant, and semibarbarous creatures like us do?” (115), it is vital to keep in mind that, although the question is rhetorically addressing a culturally external arbiter, it is practically addressing an audience included in his “us.” As such, these moments are not just winking, in the sense that the audience is supposed to know that he does not “really mean it,” but satirical in their co-optation of external discourses precisely to signal an audience outside those discourses. The novel’s various allusions and citations to European literature therefore appear less an effort to credential the author for a hypothetical international readership than a double-voiced mimicry of the West Coast’s so-called Black Englishmen, anglophilic elites who were often criticized by the Brew Press. What “part” indeed, Marita asks, does “Her Majesty ha[ve] to do in the matter?” (72).

This strategy of double voicing functions largely in terms of community formation, defining Marita’s readers through their ability to distinguish its discursive levels of encoded communication. In fact, a major reason that Wissah is seduced by the promoters of church marriage, and subsequently drifts apart from Quaibu, is her inability to operate across discursive and cultural registers: “Mrs Quaibu could not very well move in the society which her husband naturally kept, since English was the only language used… . Positioned as she was, inexperienced as to civilized society, and uneducated so as to find out the right way herself, by reading the bible or other good books, she entirely depended on what she was told or instructed by members of her society” (91–92). The passage puns heavily on “society,” which is used in somewhat different ways in its three appearances here. All instances are ironized by reference to the capital-S Society that has so influenced her: “‘Joining the Society’ means,” the narrator explains elsewhere, “with the christians of the Wesleyan body, to become a class member” (53). Thus too, when the educated Reverend Langley defends the religious hypocrite Mr. Elsmore by asking, “Is the man not a class leader and a local preacher too? One who is trusted by all of us?” (99), his mistake is rooted in a faulty identification of “all of us,” a failure to read the multifarious nature of his discursive and social community. So when Langley offers to speak to Wissah on her husband’s behalf, Quaibu responds to this suggestion with an acid directness: “‘No thank you,’ replied Mr Quaibu, laying emphasis on the word you. ‘She is my wife, and it is to me alone that she owes obedience” (102). Quaibu, whom we have already noted “moved in the highest society, both European and native” (43), is celebrated for his sociocultural mobility—and it is this mobility that allows him to effectively place himself within a familial or social order in ways unavailable to either Wissah or Langley.

Quaibu’s ability to distinguish, evaluate, and move among and between cultural settings mirrors the novel’s larger theoretical engagement with literary tradition. West African intellectuals in Brew Press circles, Kwaku Larbi Korang explains, “were self-conscious about their being formative contributors to, or heirs drawing on and conscientiously replenishing, an interregional formation of continental and transatlantic Pan-African activist thought and endeavor” (6). It is in this context that we should read the narrator’s satirical declaration in the prolegomena that “the Fantees, however low they may be thought of from a civil, moral, intellectual and religious point of view by the civilized world, are nevertheless shrewd in their way, proud in their manners, and excessively imitative in their nature” (41). This is simultaneously a searing parody of European ethnographic language and a defense of cultural autonomy. But although the accusation of “imitativeness” marks the contradictions of European prejudice (“proud in their manners” and “excessively imitative”?), the author also lays out a program for Marita as intentionally differentiated from the literary forms it might be accused of imitating.

In his 1911 Pan-Africanist novel Ethiopia Unbound, Casely Hayford argues that every “nation” must

Casely Hayford’s proposition here is instructive, whether or not he is the writer behind “A. Native.” Writers like Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi were engaged in an “educated elite’s nationalist literary project to ‘invent a tradition’ for the Gold Coast” (Newell, Literary Culture 157), an effort that aimed, according to the editor of the Gold Coast Methodist, Attoh Ahuma, “to create something out of nothing, as it were … to execute that which never existed before” (7). In a postcolonial studies context, this dynamic is familiar; indeed, scholars of African American literature, women’s literature, or any number of early national literatures will readily recognize the differential logics at play. The relationship between hybridity in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense and in Homi Bhabha’s, for example, is well established, as are the patterns of generic adaptation and recontextualization I have described. What I want to underscore is rather that, first, attending seriously to these elements of Marita requires a subordination of the question of the Victorian in whatever form and that, second, as the Ghanaian context accentuates (and as the nineteenth-century British context, with its accumulated cultural authority, may disguise), a given literary field is fundamentally constituted by relationships among literary objects and between those objects and their readers, far more than by facts of geography, periodization, or scholarship.

To that end, it is worth reading Marita forward into the context of twentieth-century Ghanaian literature. Newell argues in Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana that early Ghanaian anglophone literature was structured around the formal question of “How to Play the Game of Life,” and Marita is clearly legible through this lens. And many of its key thematic concerns—the adverse effects of the Marriage Ordinance, the folly of Eurocentric social mimicry, the hypocrisy of Christianizers—also appear prominently in key works like Ethiopia Unbound and Sekyi’s 1918 novella The Anglo-Fanti. Footnote ⁵ I do not attempt to prove a direct intertextual influence on subsequent writers, although given the scale of the Ghanaian literary scene, it is quite likely that these writers would have encountered Marita. Rather, I am suggesting that Marita’s formal and conceptual interventions become visible through the further unfolding of a literary tradition at whose beginning it stood—and that these same features are potentially obscured by a Victorian interpretive frame.

Consider Sekyi’s 1915 play The Blinkards, an influential satire on African anglomania and yet another text involving an extensive defense of customary marriage, which is made partly through the counterexample of a socially ambitious wife, Mrs. Borɔfosεm, foolishly imposing English-style customs on men who really know better. The echoes of Marita are extensive and fairly direct: the novel’s query as to what “the Queen of England has to do with marriages generally,” for instance, recurs in the play as a wise old fisherman’s question, “Awar so fa Aban ho?” (“What has marriage to do with the Government?”; 132–33), and the old-school Nana Katawerwa disrupts a church wedding staged by the anglophilic “Cosmopolitan Club” to declare, “Sε hom so rohwehwε abɔ bra ma hom eehu ano a, mma hom nntsen baguado-fεw do mmfa hom yernom nnkɔ Asɔrdan mu” (“If you, too, wish to lead a happy married life, be not swayed by outward appearances to conduct your wives into churches, otherwise your married lives will be miserable”; 120–21).

In addition to these thematic touchstones, The Blinkards’s experimental multilingualism situates the novel within a literary tradition alongside a text like Marita. The play enacts the linguistic and cultural tensions between English and Fante through an unusual multilingual structure, in which characters switch back and forth between the two languages depending on addressee, topic, and the social signal they want to produce. Georgia Nasseh has deftly linked the play’s “diglossic” bilingualism with its employment of multiple “englishes,” showing that Sekyi theorizes multilingualism as a mode of interlanguage, rather than a form of hybridity (137). It is worth reading this insight back into the multilingualism of the Brew Press, where, per Gareth Griffiths, “colonial and indigenous languages … evolved in tandem” rather than “in competition as mediums of written expression” (35). Sekyi both mobilizes and questions this compatibilist premise. Like Marita, The Blinkards uses Scots as an emblem of “internal” linguistic difference (the play’s epigraph is taken from Robert Burns) and relies on a working assumption that both characters and audiences will be able to distinguish multiple interpretive registers being offered simultaneously through socially encoded speech. This builds to the play’s final scene, wherein a chastened Mrs. Borɔfosεm declares, in English, that “I will remember, in future, to speak Fanti to Fantis” (157). Such a takeaway, for Sekyi, is a statement not just about linguistic difference but also about sociocultural expectation and literary tradition.

The formal relationships between Marita and writers like Casely Hayford and Sekyi are clearly legible within canonical frameworks of postcolonial literary analysis (nationalism/hybridity, liminality/borderline, and so forth). They map well onto what Joshi calls “narrative indigenization,” whereby “readers and then writers transmut[e] an imported and alien form into local needs that inspired and sustained them across many decades” (In Another Country xviii). But it is important to recognize how such a reading implicitly or explicitly relies on a more particularized concept of Victorian culture as that “imported and alien form.” When Meenakshi Mukherjee regrets that the “British Victorian novel [was] perhaps the least suitable for the Indian mind in the nineteenth century” (17) or Chantal Zabus details the effort of postindependence Ghanaian novelists to shed a “residual Victorianism” (99), they are not merely invoking a casual vocabulary substantively compatible with expansive versions of the global Victorian; they are writing from the presumption that literary traditions constitute themselves differentially. The very elements of Marita that track forward are the ways it resists and, especially, sidesteps the Victorian as a set of cultural and literary norms. For Simon Gikandi, the establishment of literary tradition requires the interruption of “institutions of exegesis and education … to establish [new] terms by which African literature was produced, circulated, and interpreted” (5). To read Marita with a “wide” version of the Victorian in mind obscures how the novel relies on a narrow Victorian to define these institutions in need of interruption.

Marita is not, in any narrow sense, a Victorian novel. Yet a narrow sense of the term is required to make clear why its “wide” sense would preclude the understanding of important elements of the novel’s project. The problem with categorizing Marita as Victorian is not taxonomical; it is that doing so muddies the ways the text interacts with, and pushes back against, literary and cultural Victorianism. The novel presumes, and works to constitute, literary tradition as a sociohistorical fact defined by readerly and writerly possibilities of internal reference, generic hybridization, and some version of what Kamau Brathwaite calls “nation language” (266). This article is by no means calling for a return to the structuring presumption of national literary tradition (a presumption that is not at all Brathwaite’s), but to instead consider seriously the culturally complex, semiautonomous constellations of reference, influence, and readership that have long enabled mutually engaged but discrete literary cultures beyond the boundaries of political nationhood. Because a novel like Marita is, already and self-consciously, negotiating the category Victorian in its own efforts to delineate literary tradition, understanding its program requires a substantive, even a disciplined, concept of the Victorian as tradition. One answer to the question of what the field of Victorian studies brings to the cross-disciplinary table is expertise and familiarity with this tradition.

Jeanne-Marie Jackson has characterized a Ghanaian intellectual tradition of “decolonial literary comparativism” that “cultivates an engagement between Fante intellectuals and their Western (as well as other global) counterparts that is truly lateral in nature, owing to a careful trade-off [between] historical circumstance and the disembedded conceptual currency of philosophical argument” (49). This balancing act, so apparent in the work of Casely Hayford or Sekyi (and traceable forward to postcolonial texts like Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1977 Our Sister Killjoy), is evident in Marita, but becomes visible only when one takes seriously the ways the novel is “strategically self-delimiting or exclusive of the West” (Jackson 35). But appreciating the nineteenth-century roots of a Ghanaian literary tradition in this way also requires understanding its construction and definition in relation to those “Western (as well as other global) counterparts.” A “wide” Victorian, in such a context, produces a structural asymmetry that, as Chakrabarty suggests, functionally aligns the European with the universal. “Decolonial comparativism” instead requires accounting for a comparably self-constituting and culturally coherent Victorian literary tradition.

The category of literary tradition has become increasingly passé in recent decades, not least because of its real implication in nationalist and white supremacist politics. This shift seems only to be ratified by a more practical one, in which literary history itself is becoming more and more subordinated within the twenty-first-century English department. Yet literature is profoundly, even definitionally, nonsubstitutable; it exists within social and intellectual cultures, and its meaning is constructed in relation to a literary field. The wholesale abandonment of the term Victorian would risk depicting literary history as far more ideologically and institutionally neutral than it was, or else falling back onto a more strictly national conception of literary tradition than current understandings of transnationalism (or literary autonomy) should permit. What is clear, though, is that an overbroad, presumptive, or generalized concept of the global Victorian is not consistent with the kinds of readings put forward by Jackson, Joshi, Newell, and others or with the reading I have put forward here; such a concept both flattens the range of relationships between significant nineteenth-century literary texts and the Victorian, global or otherwise, and risks foreclosing literary tradition per se as an interpretive rubric.

A provincialized Victorian studies requires Victorianism not be defined simply by time period, language, geography, or method; such definitions are often appropriative and actually render the category toothless by displacing any substantive implications of deeming something Victorian. Joshi’s topical or Ahmad’s formal conceptions are more productive because they allow texts, authors, and readers to move in and out of Victorianism in interpretively meaningful ways. But I would further suggest that we might understand the Victorian literary tradition, straightforwardly enough, as a particular and bounded, albeit porous, constellation of texts. A corpus model of literary tradition, as Newell’s work illustrates, need not rely on static or qualitative conceptions of canon. Instead, it can focalize readerly and critical attention through networks of textual referentiality and engagement. And it can do so in ways that, despite any universalizing pretenses, clarify the cultural particularity of its corpus.

Literary works, as Casely Hayford and Sekyi emphasize, build meaning through the horizons of intertextuality they construct, which extend temporally to readers, critics, and subsequent authors. Thus, Brathwaite specifies the need for an alternative to the “Romantic/Victorian cultural tradition which still operates among and on us, despite the ‘colonial’ breakthrough already achieved” (72), differentiating the bogey of valorized imperial culture from a broader, distinct need to reconfigure the literary field of reference. A novel like, say, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), written in and about South Africa, might still primarily be read through the rubric of the Victorian because the core literary intertexts of its production and reception—John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, and so forth—constellate it as such (though assuredly not only as such). A text like Marita, however, resists such a classification, not because reading it through a lens of Victorianism cannot be productive, but because its immanent critique relies on an authorial and readerly distinction from the Victorian. The task of undisciplining, as it were, requires us to recognize and center such projects of distinction. We cannot provincialize England by universalizing Victorian studies. We must provincialize the Victorian.