Title: A Paradise Rubric: Introduction to The Bird of Paradise

Author: Sara Berger

In: The Bird of Paradise

Publication details: S. N. Brown and Co., 1896, Dunedin

Part of: Nineteenth-Century Novels Collection

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IV. Domestic Melodrama

To describe a book as a romance, in this period, was to define it much less narrowly than we would now, using the same term. In her article “Romance and the Romance Novel,” Fiona Robertson describes its scope:

The novel in [the period following the French Revolution] often seems a schizophrenic form, generically unstable but also both innovative and exploratory... Works declaring themselves in subtitles to be romances include many we now call “Gothic”... They also include many which explore the meeting points of history and fiction... “Romance” in these subtitles clearly indicates the dominance of fiction or invention over something regarded as “real”.

Robertson, 2004¹

It is telling that Robertson implicitly overlaps the romance and the novel, because Sir Walter Scott, considered by Victorians to be the progenitor and master of the romance form, clearly distinguished them. As Robertson reports, 'Scott defines romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns on marvellous and uncommon interests”, presenting it in opposition to the novel, “a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.”'² Presented with this distinction, it is easy to classify The Bird of Paradise. Yet Dutton has made the counter-intuitive choice.

As can be seen from Scott's definition, the novel was the more realistic of these two competing forms. The novel was more likely to engage social problems directly, even stridently. It emerged in the this period as the grittier form; but the romance, with its quests and marriages, had softer edges, and a more conservative view of gender relations. Specifically, Robertson suggests that the romance, as the Victorians knew it, emerged as a response to the French Revolution, and the problem of chivalry³. That Dutton appreciated these overtones can be seen by the poem he chooses as an epigram for his book: Shelley's 'Revolt against Islam', a poem written in direct reaction to the French Revolution. It had many aims, but specifically sought to evoke 'a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society...'⁴ Note, too, Robertson's comment that '“Romance” in these subtitles clearly indicates the dominance of fiction or invention over something regarded as “real”.' Dutton did not intend to recreate reality, but to represent it according to more comfortable ideals.

As for 'innovative and exploratory', few commentators claim that the early novels of New Zealand and Australia met that standard. It is therefore simple to classify The Bird of Paradise within a set of conventional forms. We know that this book is a romance because it has a happy ending; we know that it is a melodrama because the happy ending involves the wicked but repentant ex-wife dying by lightning after a tearful reconciliation with her ex-husband over their dead child's grave. (It is tempting to label this a revenge fantasy in which Eugene/William gets to keep the moral high ground.)

It is also tempting to suggest that the melodramatic content of The Bird of Paradise is in fact stranger than fiction, because some of its most sensational events are based on journalistic report. For example, the episode in which Lillie Delaine, poisoned with tainted beer, goes temporarily mad, seems to derive from Nellie's testimony: '“I don't know. I was out of my mind at Malvern.”... “Was anything given to you which caused you to go out of your mind?”'⁵ But the trial accounts are another type of story, in which there are many reasons to edit or evade; where sources other than truth may have been the inspiration. As Dutton himself says, denying the evidence of another servant girl, '”She must have dreamt it – read it in some twopenny halfpenny novel.”'⁶

Regarding such novels, there is a particularly useful genre within which The Bird of Paradise can be analysed: the Victorian domestic melodrama, whose social function is described in a 1981 article by Martha Vicinus: ⁷

Domestic melodrama was the working out in popular culture of the conflict between the family and its values and the economic and social assault of industrialization... The home was the setting for passion, sacrifice, suffering, and sympathy... Within the home the powerless struggled for recognition, for their values over those of the wider world.

Vicinus, 1981.⁸

Of the typical protagonist of such a work, Vicinus writes, 'We identify with his goodness and his powerlessness.'⁹ In the melodrama, these two characteristics are not merely associated, but identical. Eugene, the supposed head of the household, is cast as the struggling figure whose weakness and moral strength are opposite sides of the same coin. He is the model of restraint, or passivity, who comes to remonstrate with himself very late in his relationship with his wife that he should have done more to control her. He loses the divorce case in part because he cannot bring himself to bring charges against his wife's character. Conversely, Marvel's power is entirely negative: her money makes her selfish and shallow, and her strong will and self-interest allow her to tell shameless lies.

Melodrama, says Vicinus, appeals to 'those who feel that their lives are without order and that events they cannot control can destroy or save them.'¹⁰; and of the melodramatic hero, 'The faults lie not in him but in society, which must change.'¹¹ Following the divorce trial, Eugene goes to South Africa. There he is entirely beloved and praised: 'The best verdict of the batch of worthies and wiseacres in the jury-box was the fruition of his life in South Africa, where every man thought the best of him...'¹² Here a changed society vindicates an unchanging, unresisting hero; the meek inherits the earth.

The faultlessness of Eugene is worked out in a different way regarding the question of alcohol. Dutton's own level of inebriety was a key point in his trial; judging from hostile testimony, he was rarely seen sober, and even his own counsel says, 'Oh, we admit that he was often drunk. We don't deny it.'¹³ Nor does Dutton's novel – entirely. He seems to use several different textual strategies to explain or excuse this particular charge, worked out in separate characters in The Bird of Paradise.

The central character, Eugene, as befits his mild and unreproachable nature, is not a heavy drinker. During the last few months of the novel before the divorce, he is reported to drink beer; this possibly coincides with a similar period in Dutton's life, when he seems to have been drunk frequently, suffering from “worry”. But the charges of drunkenness which Marvel brings against Eugene in the fictional trial are entirely exaggerated, as is their interpretation; 'It was the funniest way of reckoning up a habit I ever heard,' says Eugene's lawyer.¹⁴

Meanwhile, Marmaduke Payne, a friend of Eugene's from his university days, is described as his perfect counterpart:

There was but one respect in which these two opposite characters merged into one another; in which for a short period... they ran a parallel course... the one at that point of divergence to exhaust itself in that one particular similarity, the other to pursue its way alone till Fate herself had cut its throat. This it is that will haul down your flying pennons, Eugene Whitworth; this it is Marmaduke Payne, that will hurl you into an early, a watery, and an ignominious grave.¹⁵

Marmaduke, the scapegoat, drowns at a shallow beach, after a long period as a hopeless sot.

A third drinker escapes much more easily. Brosie, Eugene's brother – quite possibly based on the brother, Robert Dutton, who gives evidence at the trial – reaches the nadir of inebriation, but towards the end of the book, with relatively little comment, he recovers and is restored to respectable society. It is this character's sufferings which inspire an address from the author:

The habit of excessive drinking is not so much a vice as it is a misfortune – an incompatibility between the virtues of alcohol and certain qualities and conditions of the brain. The finer the brain the greater the incompatibility... Oh be merciful my brother whose virtue sits serene only in the absence of temptation... scorn not yonder bedraggled victim whom you pass every morning on your own triumphant march to business while you make broad your own phylacteries. In the great battle he is but a prisoner in the camp of a truculent enemy, and the day may come when he may exchange places with you...¹⁶

During this period, the traditional view of drunkenness as a sin to be punished was being contested by a theory that drunkenness was a disease (curable or incurable) to be treated.¹⁷ The sympathetic rhetoric of both of these positions can be seen in this address, as can Dutton's strategies to distance himself from the inexcusable behaviour of which a jury has convicted him: Eugene, Marmaduke, and Brosie respectively illustrate, I never, it wasn't me and it wasn't really ever that bad.