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Unhappy Consciousness: Recognition and Reification in Victorian Fiction

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Unhappy Consciousness: Recognition and Reification in Victorian Fiction Unhappy Consciousness: Recognition and Reification in Victorian Fiction Ben Parker Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2013 Ben Parker All rights reserved ABSTRACT Unhappy Consciousness: Recognition and Reification in Victorian Fiction Ben Parker Unhappy Consciousness is a study of recognition scenes in the Victorian novel and their relation to Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Victorian recognition scenes often show a hero’s self- discovery as a retrospective identification with things. When, for example, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer learns the truth about her marriage: “She saw, in the crude light of that revelation... the dry staring fact that she had been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and iron.” The retrospective discovery of identity in Victorian novels is often figured as a catastrophic falling-apart of a stable self that is also an economic object or instrument: a bank check, a debt, a forgery, an inheritance, or an accumulated principal. Recognition scenes cannot be considered in the light of a timeless “master plot” or the classical poetics of Aristotelian anagnorisis, but need to be interpreted in terms of historical forms of social misrecognition (such as Marx’s analysis of fetishism). Unhappy Consciousness contends that, if we are going to talk about nineteenth century things, we will have to take into account the novelistic misrecognition of the self, insofar as the heroes misrecognize themselves in forms of commodity fetishism. The thing is so often the subject herself insofar as “barred,” dispersed among retrospective or delayed object identifications. I respond to the historical contextualization in Victorian cultural studies of “commodity culture,” insisting that the economic structure of the commodity is not only a topic for realist notation, but makes up the inner logic of the novel form. Unhappy Consciousness urges a return to questions of novel theory which were perhaps set aside during New Historicism, arguing for a particularly novelistic mode of “objectification” (the form of the hero’s activity) seen in interaction with the historical mode of objectification found in the capitalist value-form. I advance this argument through studies of several canonical Victorian works. Chapter One looks at the tension in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit between the ideological closure attained in the “family romance” plot of buried wills and restored parents, and the dead-end of interpretation and retrospection found in the plot of financial crisis and stock swindles. Chapter Two argues that, in Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, the tautological nature of interest rate is not confined to the urban financial plot but is displaced and affectively diffused over the provincial mystery plot. Chapter Three is a study of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I read the detective as an exaggerated portrait of the subjective effects of capitalist alienation, a monad whose only intervention in the world is to link predictive results with opaque processes, to “produce” recognition scenes (the solutions to each case) as a salable commodity. He is a machine for retrospection who has no personal past. In Chapter Four, I read Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady as a critique of the fetishizing of autonomous consciousness, using Marx’s definition of fetishism as the misrecognition of a social form as the content of a thing. Isabel’s mistake is to misconstrue the structure of the male gaze that constitutes her “freedom” as the inherent property of her individuality—until it is unmasked as a trap. As so often in the Victorian novel, fetishism is a mode of self-knowledge.! Table of Contents Acknowledgments… ii Introduction... 1 1. Recognition or Reification?: Capitalist Crisis and Subjectivity in Little Dorrit… 34 2. Tautology and Displacement in The Last Chronicle of Barset… 66 3. Locked Rooms: Empiricism and Form in Sherlock Holmes… 109 4. Unhappy Consciousness… 147 Conclusion… 196 Works Cited… 205 i Acknowledgments I owe the following people something better than attaching their names to the work now in front of you, but it is all I have, and without their support and criticism, writing it would simply not have been possible. Nicholas Dames treated these ideas with dignity when they were barely even thoughts. There is no greater spur to serious work than being taken seriously, and what is principled and ambitious here grew up in the space of that respect. Bruce Robbins and James Eli Adams always knew better than I what was vital and what was chimerical about this research. Edward Mendelson was an invaluable compass. David Miller!s questions and engagement at the very outset were Circe-like in pointing out where lay the cliffs and Sirens in my thinking. Amanda Claybaugh!s advice on a very early form of this material was prescient and I have tried to live up to it. My thanks to the Nineteenth Century Colloquium at Columbia University for the space to share these ideas in various shapes and sizes. Erik Gray, Sharon Marcus, and Anahid Nersessian all provided useful feedback on a version of Chapter Four. To my friends: you have been my courage to get through this. The tenor of Christine Smallwood!s own thinking has been ever before me. In this roll call, she deserves a somewhat more epic part, along the lines of Agamemnon in Homer!s catalog of ships. Jeanette Samyn and Anjuli Raza Kolb always understood what were my real concerns here. Yumi Lee, Anna Clark, Zachary Samalin, Andy Liu, and Spencer Bastedo all read portions of the work at rough and non-user-friendly stages. ii The writing of this dissertation has also been a stretch of life, in which Golnar Nikpour, Meg McDermott, Anne Diebel, and Piper Marshall all were vital and human players. My father has, I believe, read every page of this dissertation. But not a word of this would have been written without the unfailing encouragement of my mother. iii “Like one who dreams he is being harmed, And even as he dreams, wishes it may be a dream, So that he longs for what is, as if it were not...” —Dante, Inferno XXX iv Introduction The concept of reification originates in the writings of Karl Marx, but to see what it entails, I want to look not into the pages of Capital, but to the recognition scene in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Just prior to narrating the discovery of his benefactor’s identity—and the attendant dashing of his most cherished self-deceptions—Pip anticipates: I pass on, unhindered, to the event that had impended over me for longer yet... In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof, the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labor, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the ceiling fell. So in my case; all the work, near and afar, that tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.1 The recognition scene that follows discloses to Pip: an unlooked-for intimacy with another person—the convict Abel Magwitch, his benefactor and “second father”; the vanity of his aspirations in love; and his shameful, willful blindness to the meanings of the past. Hardly anything touching on Pip’s inner being is not overturned by Magwitch’s arrival: “All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle for every breath I drew.”2 And yet this knowledge, which penetrates to the core of Pip’s self, is described in terms of an impersonal, in fact a mechanical process: a matter of ropes and pulleys and stones. The “Eastern story” tells of enormous distances (“miles of hollow”) through which an inexorable, rigged 1 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 297. 2 Ibid., 303. 1 apparatus slams down the massive fact of the stone slab. The emotional and interpersonal knowledge to come is rendered as an external, objective inevitability, removed from any subjectivity, interpretation, or engagement with others. And where is Pip amidst so much hauling and quarrying? He is nowhere to be found in this picture, until finally the slab drops and obliterates him. But the recognition scene that is being described in this fable—Magwitch’s revelation—tells a different story, that Pip cannot be separated from the long ramifications of the past or taken out of the picture. He is, so to speak, dispersed or buried all along the way. When he sees, in the person of the weather-beaten and grimy sheep-farmer, the hitherto-concealed source of his own income and genteel position, he also sees himself as a thing, produced and bought behind his back. Magwitch, oblivious to Pip’s horrified reaction, exults in Pip as a particularly valuable commodity: “If I ain’t a gentleman, nor yet ain’t got no learning, I’m the owner of such.
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