Victorian Studies

At the climactic crisis in Ian McEwan's recent novel, Saturday (2005), set in the days before the United States declares war on Iraq, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) saves the day. Not a poem generally known for its optimism, let alone for its salvific capacities—"for the world...Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain" (30–34)—"Dover Beach" manages, even so, to tranquilize the savage pathology of a home intruder. This intruder, who is called Baxter, seeks payback for a humiliating confrontation between himself and the protagonist of the novel, Henry Perowne, earlier in the day, when their cars had randomly collided on a London street that had been barricaded to control the historic number of Britons protesting the Anglo-American march to war. Baxter and Perowne confront one another as class opposites: the lower-class tough, whose angry intention is all fists and kicks, and the upper-class professional, all brain, no brawn, and now bloodied, who yet has the last word when he defuses Baxter's embodied aggression into an abstract diagnosis of Huntington's disease. The impending rape is therefore for Baxter much more about regaining his bodily authority than revenging the ding on his car. With a knife at the throat of a wife, and an intent to ravage a daughter, Baxter listens to the naked young woman recite Arnold's masterpiece, is apparently overcome with awe at the human-made beauty of it, and gives up his violent ambition.

McEwan is too shrewd an observer of his contemporary moment to attempt an unironized translation of Miranda taming Caliban; McEwan sees all too well the bad faith at work in the story of the beauty and her beast.¹ If, in his mesmerized admiration of the poem, Baxter is rendered awestruck, he is also rendered a dupe, for he is led to believe that the poem is the daughter's own creation—a ruse [End Page 92] that is equally effective on the eminent neurosurgeon Perowne, who knows the brain but apparently not its culture. After some moments of confusion, he too is arrested by this poem that he thinks his beloved Daisy has penned.

In the thick of these misattributions of authorship, "Dover Beach" nonetheless saves this Saturday in the lives of these characters. Incredible and surely repulsive if proffered merely as a rape prevention technique, as deployed in this way Arnold's poem dramatizes a powerful fantasy, a Victorian fantasy that still entices us. The explicit claims that Arnold himself might wish to make for "Dover Beach" and art more generally—something about art's capacity to humanize the Baxters of our day—just doesn't seem politically correct or even very plausible in a post-9/11 era. Even so, at a moment of acute danger, when terrorists both domestic and foreign amass—"as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (35–37)—"Dover Beach" delivers to this little group the very loveliest version of the Victorian fantasy of liberal agency: "Ah love, let us be true / To one another!" (29–30).

Arnold's poem, of course, is much more than a love poem, for it details his belief in the liberal subject's ability to seek out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy, where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and intentional in relation to themselves and to each other, in spite of the chaotic world without. To what extent McEwan himself indulges in this fantasy of liberalism is difficult to measure, but the author does allow Perowne his own version of "Dover Beach."² Having helped to push the distracted Baxter down a flight of stairs, gravely injuring him, Perowne then volunteers to operate on his damaged brain. By demonstrating his powers of detachment, his...