Output details

The Pleasures of Men

This novel endeavours to bring the epistemological questions of post modernism to the historical novel. There were two technical and imaginative research questions in this novel, firstly an aim to show in fiction the insecurity and financial crisis of the early Victorian period, long from the confidence of the later Victorian period. Secondly, to examine the interdependence between fiction and representation, acts and creative versions of these acts. An act of serious crime invariably becomes a focus for differing versions and representations, projections and debates and it was Williams’ aim to engage with these formal and experimental variations through the narrative. Rather than using the omnipotent narrator or locating the novel in one point of view, Williams aimed to create a multi-voiced historical novel and thus to expand and destabilise notions of what the historical novel can do, through the device of the first-person narrator who is herself writing in different voices. Based on extensive research into early nineteenth century diaries and letters, the text plays with the narrative forms and sites of imaginative intensity of early Victorian fiction, from servants’ diaries to the voices of the murderous, balls to street theatre. It means to interrogate the idea that a first person narrator has to write only in their own voice. The very act of narrative is ventriloquism; in this novel, the narrator assumes various voices in a quest to find the truth, but these narratives threaten to overwhelm her very self. Thus The Pleasures of Men asks the question: does using fiction get us closer to the truth? If not, what is the alternative? The book uses narrative experimentation to make a relationship between particularity and the large shapes and problems of history and its representation, morality and the value of intellectual enquiry.