Neo-Victorian Biofiction and Trauma Poetics in Colm Tóibín’s The Master

Abstract

This essay explores Colm Tóibín’s The Master as a neo-Victorian fictional biography addressing Henry James’s traumatophilic production and persona. The last years have seen a bulk of new novels, biographies and works of critical theory on the writer’s production and persona. Delving into the reasons behind James’s revival at the turn of the millennium, this essay suggests that the phenomenon responds not only to an increasing interest in things Victorian, but is also due to the current reformulation of biography and its interaction with the fictional. The concept of trauma is also at stake and proves particularly useful to understanding the poetics of Tóibín’s novel. The way The Master deals with James relies on a complex relation between his writing, his diseased identity and his problematic cathexis with those around him. As the essay shows, he is inescapably haunted by the vacuum he establishes between his role as aesthete and that of brother, son, platonic lover and/or friend. His is, in sum, the trauma of aesthetic excess.